Image: Museum of Arts and Design, New York
The Museum of Arts and Design is presenting Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley, a survey of works by twin artists Nikolai and Simon Haas that runs through Aug. 16, 2026. The exhibition places the duo’s creatures, furniture, ceramics, and installations in an immersive setting built around what the museum describes as “exuberant, uncanny worlds,” offering New York audiences a broad view of a practice grounded in material experimentation and handcraft.
The show arrives at MAD as the museum emphasizes the Haas Brothers’ cross-disciplinary approach, which combines meticulous making with newer technologies. The artists, who are largely self-taught, work across scales from small ceramic sculpture to human-sized environments, a range that has helped make their practice especially visible in contemporary design and art circles. By bringing together these different forms, the exhibition underscores a growing interest in work that moves freely between art object, design, and installation.
According to the museum, the exhibition organizes the brothers’ imagery into dynamic vignettes that set their “fantastic creatures” within otherworldly realms. The presentation highlights surreal, animistic, and zoomorphic forms, while also pointing to the role of humor and irreverence in their work. MAD describes the result as an ecosystem of imagined flora and fauna—hybrids of the artists’ world and our own—that is “strangely familiar but never seen before.”
Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and curated by Laura Mott, Chief Curator, with support from Katy Kim, Curatorial Fellow. At MAD, the exhibition extends a project with clear relevance for audiences interested in the intersections of craft, contemporary sculpture, and experimental design, particularly at a moment when museums are increasingly foregrounding practices that resist easy categorization.
The exhibition also sits within MAD’s broader mission as an institution devoted to the relationship between art, craft, and design. The museum’s framing of the Haas Brothers’ work aligns with that focus: the show is not presented simply as a display of singular artworks, but as an environment that invites visitors into a constructed world. That emphasis on immersion reflects the growing importance of installation-based viewing experiences across museums, where narrative, atmosphere, and material detail can shape interpretation as much as individual objects.
Public programming around the exhibition includes a workshop titled Whimsical Puppet Creatures on July 16, a Virtual Verbal Description Tour on July 22, and a family workshop in Mandarin, Meet the Monsters!, on Aug. 1. The museum lists the exhibition at its Jerome and Simona Chazen Building at 2 Columbus Circle in New York. With its mix of craft, spectacle, and sculpture, the show adds to a wider museum conversation about how contemporary artists build invented worlds that still speak to present-day ideas of identity, emotion, and material culture.
