László Moholy-Nagy—a former master at the Bauhaus, the revolutionary art school closed by the Nazis in 1933—became a founding instructor at Chicago’s Institute of Design, bringing with him the creative experimentation promoted at the Bauhaus. Moholy-Nagy frequently experimented with cameraless photograms, a technique of placing objects directly on sensitized paper and exposing them to light. Rather than precise records of an object’s form, the results were unpredictable and unrepeatable, unrecognizable and abstract.