Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Time is running out to experience “An Atlas of Es Devlin” before it closes on Sunday, August 11th! ⏱️ British artist and designer Es Devlin is globally renowned for work that transforms audiences. She has charted a course from kinetic stage designs to installations at major institutions. Her sculptures for Olympic Ceremonies, NFL Super Bowl halftime shows, and stadium tours the world’s most famous musicians frame narratives that feel personal at a monumental scale. Click here to plan your visit: https://s.si.edu/3xeOSTM __ All photos by Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution

“Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial” opens November 2, 2024. Featuring 25 site-specific, newly commissioned installations, the exhibition explores design’s role in shaping the physical and emotional realities of home across the United States, US Territories, and Tribal Nations. The exhibition is the seventh offering in the museum’s Design Triennial series, which was established in 2000 to address the most urgent topics of the time through the lens of design. The participants are: –After Oceanic Built Environments Lab and Leong Leong –Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE) –La Vaughn Belle –Black Artists + Designers Guild –Lori A. Brown, Trish Cafferky, and Dr. Yashica Robinson –CFGNY –Mona Chalabi and SITU Research –Nicole Crowder and Hadiya Williams –Designing Justice + Designing Spaces –Heather Dewey-Hagborg –East Jordan Middle & High Schools –Curry J. Hackett, Wayside Studio –Hugh Hayden, Davóne Tines, and Zack Winokur –Hord Coplan Macht –Terrol Dew Johnson and Aranda\Lasch –Liam Lee and Tommy Mishima –Lenape Center with Joe Baker –Joiri Minaya –Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, and Carlos Soto –Robert Earl Paige –PIN–UP –Ronald Rael –William Scott –Amie Siegel –Renée Stout Tap the link below to learn more.

“You have to like objects, because you’re here with them all day.” 🏺 What is the role of a registrar in the acquisition process? Antonia Moser, one of Cooper Hewitt’s registrars, delves into this question at the museum’s off-site storage facility, where many of our 215,000+ collection objects live. Over 150 recently acquired objects are currently on view in our latest exhibition “Acquired! Shaping the National Design Collection,” including objects that represent the museum’s collecting legacy, as well as works brought into the collection since 2017. 🔗 Tap the link below to watch the full video, and be sure to stop by the museum to experience “Acquired! Shaping the National Design Collection” before it closes on August 25th.

Henry Dreyfuss's team collected thousands of symbols for the "Symbol Sourcebook." What might a "Symbol Sourcebook," crowdsourced in 2024 with your submissions, look like? Read more on the Cooper Hewitt blog.

📺 Weekend Watching: Matilda McQuaid, Cooper Hewitt’s acting director of curatorial, discusses how museum’s acquisition process shapes our collection to better reflect current issues and design's evolving role in daily interactions. Over 150 recently acquired objects are currently on view in our latest exhibition "Acquired! Shaping the National Design Collection,” including objects that represent the museum's collecting legacy, as well as works brought into the collection since 2017.

New on the Cooper Hewitt blog 📝: A selection of pop art wallpaper by or inspired by LGBTQIA+ artists and designers from Cooper Hewitt’s collection Click below to read more! #SmithsonianPride

We’re counting down the days until Museum Mile Festival 2024! ✨ Join Cooper Hewitt and our neighbors from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. for free admission, activities, and dozens of amazing exhibitions. At Cooper Hewitt, don’t miss: –“An Atlas of Es Devlin,” the first monographic museum exhibition dedicated to British artist and stage designer Es Devlin, who is renowned for work that transforms audiences. –“Acquired! Shaping the National Design Collection” highlights how Cooper Hewitt acquires new work to shape the collection to better reflect current issues and design’s evolving role in daily interactions. –“Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols” examines the fascinating histories behind many of the symbols that instruct, protect, entertain, empower, and connect people. Click here for more info: https://s.si.edu/3z0bDRH. See you there! 👋 __ Carnegie Mansion embellishments, designed by Jean-Michel Folon, Christopher Clapp, Raymond Loewy, Vera Maxwell, and Hugo DeMarco.

A favored hangout among the early 1980s East Village art scene, the Fun Gallery became home to some of the New York City’s most notable artists, including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf. This poster, designed by Haring in anticipation of his gallery debut in February 1983, exemplifies the artist’s unique ability to turn two-color line drawings into complex, visually cacophonous imagery. Here, interconnected human figures compete with zig-zags and spirals for the viewer’s attention, but the effect is nonetheless captivating. 🌀 Read more about Haring’s work: https://s.si.edu/4e8MioN #SmithsonianPride

Best known today for his graphic design, Dan Friedman was also an educator and writer who tirelessly explored and experimented in many other design disciplines. By the early 1980s, increasingly disillusioned with design in the service of commerce, and feeling that modernism had been coopted by corporate interests, Friedman experienced an ideological and creative shift. He devoted less time to commercial design and began spending more time with artists and designers in the galleries and clubs of New York’s downtown scene, counting emerging artists such as Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat among his friends and collaborators. The size of a small side table, Friedman’s “U.S.A.” table (pictured here) is a functional piece of furniture presented as a provocative and whimsical sculptural object: its flat top a miniaturized depiction of the continental United States, with that geography’s irregular contours transitioning into the table’s vertical sides, suggestive of the striations in a cliff wall. In 1994, a year before his death from complications from AIDS, Friedman authored the book “Dan Friedman: Radical Modernist,” offering his observations and philosophy on many aspects of design, along with twelve principals for generations of designers, including “Live and work with passion and responsibility; have a sense of humor and fantasy.” Click the link to read more about Friedman: https://s.si.edu/3mVpq2C #SmithsonianPride __ U.S.A. Table, 1993; Designed by Dan Friedman; Manufactured by NEOTU (Paris, France); Molded plastic

📚 Weekend Reading—In conjunction with our current exhibition "Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols," designer and researcher Sue Perks offers an expansive look into the Henry Dreyfuss Archive held at Cooper Hewitt. Read about the original 1972 exhibition, held to to celebrate and promote the publishing of Dreyfuss's "Symbol Sourcebook."