about

The Object of the Week blog is written by Cooper Hewitt’s curators, graduate fellows, and contributing researchers and scholars. Posts are published every week and present research on an object from the museum’s collection. With over 210,000 objects spanning thirty centuries of decorative arts and design, Object of the Week explores the material culture of textiles, graphic design, furniture, products, architectural drawings, wallcoverings, and much more.

Image features a rough sketch in black, gray, tan, and blue, showing a long corridor that terminates in a view through a window onto a central stone garden. The view highlights the mirrored surface on the opposite side of the garden, which reflects the colors of the sky and landscape, here suggestive of a colorful sunset. Please scroll down to read the blog about this object.
An Infinite Reflecting Vista
In celebration of  National Design Month, October’s Object of The Week posts honor past National Design Award winners. This post was originally published on November 10, 2016. In the late 1990s, the Tacoma Art Museum (TAM) in Tacoma, Washington announced its plan to relocate from the bank building that it had occupied since 1935 to...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Caitlin Condell
Date
October 26, 2020
Image features: Columns of irregularly spaced stripes, each stripe alternating rectangles of black and white with rectangles of bright orange and pink. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A New Way With Color
In celebration of National Design Month, October’s Object of the Week posts honor past National Design Award winners. In 2011, Knoll won a National Design Award for Corporate and Institutional Achievement. The company, known for fostering many talented international designers over the decades, is represented by more than 170 objects in Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection.  ...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Kimberly Randall
Date
October 19, 2020
Image features a length of wallpaper printed in black on a light gray ground, showing a stylized rendering of a forest with trees represented as strong vertical lines with periodic circular, oval, and conical masses of foliage. The differing scales and overlapping lines create a shallow sense of depth. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Now Entering Lines Forest
In celebration of National Design Month, October’s Object of The Week posts honor past National Design Award winners. This post was originally published on July 9, 2017. This wallpaper by Geoff McFetridge somewhat resembles a circuit board with its minimal rendering of visual elements, but the title, “Lines Forrest,” clearly sets the record straight that...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Gregory Herringshaw
Date
October 12, 2020
Image features a ceramic tea service composed of a hot water pot, sugar bowl, creamer, and cup and saucer. Each simple cylindrical vessel is decorated on one side with a colorful urban scene featuring a Soviet monument or state building in Leningrad. The opposite side of each piece is decorated with a gilded image of a historical site in Leningrad. The pieces are further embellished with classically-inspired gilded ribbons and marshal trophies at the edges, spouts, and loop handles. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this service.
An Early Eva Zeisel Design
In celebration of National Design Month, October’s Object of The Week posts honor past National Design Award winners. A version of this post was published on November 13, 2012. Eva Zeisel, a major figure in twentieth-century industrial design, won the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2005. Although best known for her contributions to mid-century...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Cynthia Trope
Date
October 5, 2020
Image features: Three white-on-white patterned textiles sewn together, each having four selvages. The two outer textiles are patterned with stripes of geometric shapes including a bird. The center is patterned with zigzag bands, one above the other, to form an elongated diamond shape. Head opening is uncut. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this image.
Translucent Cloth
September is New York Textile Month, a citywide celebration of textile creativity. As in past years, the museum is collaborating with the Textile Society of America. A non-profit professional organization of scholars, educators, and artists in the field of textiles, TSA provides an international forum for the exchange and dissemination of information about textiles worldwide....
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Kimberly Randall
Date
September 28, 2020
Image features: Black headcovering made from stretchy mesh fabric. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this image.
A Modest Achievement
September is New York Textile Month, a citywide celebration of textile creativity. As in past years, the museum is collaborating with the Textile Society of America. A non-profit professional organization of scholars, educators, and artists in the field of textiles, TSA provides an international forum for the exchange and dissemination of information about textiles worldwide....
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Kimberly Randall
Date
September 21, 2020
Image features: Large wrapping cloth made from sheets of paper from account ledgers, glued together and stained with persimmon, giving a brownish color except where later patched with lighter colored papers. Writing still evident on sheets. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object
Only Seeing 
September is New York Textile Month, a citywide celebration of textile creativity. As in past years, the museum is collaborating with the Textile Society of America. A non-profit professional organization of scholars, educators, and artists in the field of textiles, TSA provides an international forum for the exchange and dissemination of information about textiles worldwide....
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Kimberly Randall
Date
September 14, 2020
Image features: Samples of yarns dyed by members of the Society, affixed to the backs of admission tickets to the Annual Exhibition of 1908. Recipes for some colors are written below. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Preserving Knowledge, Preserving Color
September is New York Textile Month, a citywide celebration of textile creativity. As in past years, the museum is collaborating with the Textile Society of America. A non-profit professional organization of scholars, educators, and artists in the field of textiles, TSA provides an international forum for the exchange and dissemination of information about textiles worldwide....
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Kimberly Randall
Date
September 7, 2020
Image features a drawing of a young girl sitting on a bentwood caned chair in front of a table holding and sewing a piece of cloth. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Mary Hallock Foote: A Summer on Long Island
Author: Ava Hathaway Hacker By the end of her artistic career, Mary Hallock Foote was one of the most recognized illustrators of life in the American West. Often focusing on images of women and children, her illustrations provided a vision of the West not simply as a rugged frontier but as a place where families...
Read Time
4 minutes
Posted By
Laura Fravel
Date
August 31, 2020
Image features: Printed length in a design of uneven vertical stripes with overlapping small oval leaf or bead shapes in strong reds, orange, blue, mauve and yellow. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this image.
Althea McNish: An Exceptional Talent
As part of the African-Caribbean diaspora of the mid-twentieth century, textile designer Althea McNish had a lasting impact on British design over the course of her career . Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, she studied painting and worked as a cartographer and illustrator for the British government there. [1] In 1951, she and her mother left the island to...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Kimberly Randall
Date
August 24, 2020
Image features a lighting catalogue page showing hanging lamps with large glass shades in various shapes and colors, all on a black background. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Uplighting, Deco Style
A version of this post was originally published on June 2, 2016. Two rare Art Deco period catalogues in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt Design Library include illustrations with accompanying specifications and prices for more than 100 glass lighting fixtures manufactured in about 1930, by Meissner Glasraffinerie of Dresden, Germany. The factory was located...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Stephen Van Dyk
Date
August 17, 2020
Image features a low table consisting of a triangular top on two angled, panel-form legs tapering to small feet, the entire form covered in dark brown patinated copper. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Designed for the Wright Price
Clad in copper, this odd, angular table was designed by the American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. It was part of a suite of furniture and built-in features Wright created in 1956 for Price Tower, a skyscraper the architect built in the small town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma.[1] The building was commissioned by Harold C. Price to...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Devon Zimmerman
Date
August 10, 2020
Image features a rectangular panel of wallpaper showing stylized branches and foliage interspersed with cubist motifs printed in green, black, burgundy, tan, yellow, gray and metallic gold on mottled tan ground. The paper is embossed with very fine horizontal wavy lines. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Charles Burchfield’s Modern Wallpaper
This post was originally published on June 1, 2016. Charles Burchfield is one of the best known American watercolorists of the twentieth century, painting urban street scenes as well as more rural landscapes in a rather sullen fashion. It is less well known that he designed wallpaper, working for the M. H. Birge and Sons...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Gregory Herringshaw
Date
August 3, 2020
Image features: Dense configuration of dark brown lines has overlapping yellow and red lines creating rectangular groupings on a white ground. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Glen Plaid
“One of the most promising newcomers in the highly competitive field of fabric design is a youthful, multi-talented New Yorker, Joel Robinson,” Ebony magazine proclaimed in 1952.[1] Robinson’s printed fabric Ovals had been shown that winter in The Museum of Modern Art’s 1951 Good Design exhibition, making him the first African American to be included...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Susan Brown
Date
July 27, 2020
Image features the cream-colored cover of the 1929 UAM catalog, showing the capital letters UAM in black and cream-white, aligned vertically and horizontally and superimposed on a large red circle. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Modernism Evolving
The UAM Catalogue is one of many period resources in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library that chronicle French Art Deco and the shift into modernism in the twentieth century. The UAM (Union des Artistes Modernes) was founded in May, 1929, by a group of French designers, decorators, and architects, led by Robert Mallet-Stevens, who were...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Elizabeth Broman
Date
July 20, 2020