The German artist Joseph Beuys, who died 35 years ago at age 64, would have turned 100 this May. An influential theorist, Beuys was driven by the guiding principle “Every person is an artist”—but by that he meant that every human being has a need to be creative. At the Dusseldorf Academy, his colleagues thought of him as an agitator, and looked upon his radical political ideas warily. It is less known that his liberal politics were infused with spirituality. Early on in his career, Beuys studied Eurasia, and often experimented with shamanic practices. This exhibition focuses on Beuys’s connection with shamanism, and presents his work alongside the ethnological objects that entranced him. —E.C.