Author: Susan Brown

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Image features: Dress-weight plain weave cotton fabric printed in blue on a white ground. The overall pattern layout is an even horizontal stripe. In each band a suburban street is depicted, with houses in three different styles of architecture, one very modern. The pattern appears in positive (blue on white) and negative (white on blue) to form the stripe effect. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Suburban Living
This charming cotton dress fabric was anonymously donated and remains anonymous itself, as there are no designer or manufacturer markings in the selvedges. It was probably intended for the home-sewing market, for which many so-called “conversational” prints were produced and made into women’s full, gathered shirts or men’s casual shirts. This piece satirizes the postwar...
Image features: Off-white blanket with five rectangles of geometric pattern: Four corners are gray diamonds on an off-white ground surrounded by concentric squares of brown, gray and peach. Center is brown, peach and tan zigzags bands with border of gray and peach concentric squares. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Return to Classic Designs
This single saddle blanket features five rectangles, each filled with the zigzag and diamond patterns the Navajo adapted so successfully from the Mexican serape. While in the 1870s and 80s these motifs were paired with exuberant use of color, by the 1880s some traders, such as J.L. Hubbell and C.N. Cotton, began to push for...
Image features: Length of printed cotton with nubbed, "bark cloth" texture. Irregular shapes in dark plum, olive green, tans, rusty red, pink, gray, and white, each containing a seashell or piece of coral. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Shell Chest
Witold Gordon was a Polish-born artist perhaps best known for his illustrations of regional architecture and typography, which were shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the exhibition “American Scene” in 1941. New York’s idiosyncratic storefronts were the inspiration for a series of New Yorker covers in the 1940s. Shell Chest was Gordon’s...
Grid of red and pink color swatches
Careers in Color: Crayola
As research for the exhibition Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color (May 11, 2018–January 13, 2019), the curators interviewed color specialists working in diverse industries and fields, from fashion forecasting to early childhood education. For our Careers in Color blog series, we asked these specialists to tell us about their work and how their love of color...
Woven blanket with bands of graduated colors.
Cross-Disciplinary Color
To celebrate the opening of Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color (May 11, 2018-January 13, 2019), Object of the Day this month will feature colorful objects from the exhibition. Raw Color, the Eindhoven-based studio of Christoph Brach and Daniera ter Haar, explores the materiality of color through research and experiments that cross disciplines. In 2012, Raw...
Grid-based pattern in brilliant colors of gold, red, blue, teal, and magenta.
Building on Color
To celebrate the opening of Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color (May 11, 2018-January 13, 2019), Object of the Day this month will feature colorful objects from the exhibition. This post was originally published on February 1, 2017. New York-based textile design firm Designtex collaborated with Harriet Wallace-Jones and Emma Sewell of the British textile studio...
Image features a pair of neon green and black Nike Flyknit running shoes. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
High Voltage
To celebrate the opening of Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color (May 11, 2018-January 13, 2019), Object of the Day this month will feature colorful objects from the exhibition. Nike’s high performance running shoe, Flyknit Racer, uses advanced knitting technology and only the most essential materials to create an ultra-light racing shoe. Nike’s design team precisely...
Printed velvet fabric with large bulls-eye circles in a gradation of turquoise shades.
Color Vision
To celebrate the opening of Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color (May 11, 2018-January 13, 2019), Object of the Day this month will feature colorful objects from the exhibition. Verner Panton believed that color played a greater role than form in design. Fascinated by color theory and the physics of light throughout his life, he published...
Large-scale woven hanging with translucent circles of light.
Bright Lights, Big City
To celebrate the opening of Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color (May 11, 2018-January 13, 2019), Object of the Day this month will feature colorful objects from the exhibition. This post was originally published on December 12, 2014. Grethe Sørenson’s digitally woven hanging Rush Hour 2/ Shanghai is part of her Traces of Light series, created...