This French sidewall, produced ca. 1845, was block-printed in grisaille tones on a light gray background. Vignettes of daily life in a country village ride magic carpet-like atop grassy meadows. The vignettes are framed by the foliage and trunks of large trees, and two columns each feature alternating pairs of vertically repeating scenes. The left-hand...
Full remarks from Smithsonian leadership and New York City government officials at the grand-reopening of the Cooper Hewitt museum on December 12th, 2014.
Do you wonder why this early eighteenth-century silk dress is labeled a “child’s dress” and not a “girl’s dress”? You may be surprised to learn that both young girls and boys wore dresses at this time, a practice that actually continued into the first decades of the twentieth century. Before the sixteenth century, European men...
In this Soviet poster designed by Dmitri Moor, cartoonish figures trek across a dark landscape transformed by war. Along the lower border, Moor substitutes bloody bayonets for blades of grass, implying that Soviet land is hostile to these travelers, all of whom are enemies of the Bolshevik cause. The poster satirizes Soviet adversaries in both...
Trophées de Chasse is screen-printed on vinyl and features a repeating, overlapping pattern of mounted deer antlers printed over a dark background of tribal-inspired stripes. And it was available with a matching frieze to top off the wall. When I first saw this wallpaper, I had to laugh. Not because it’s silly (maybe it is?)...
After a full inside-out renovation, our doors are finally open! Here’s some snippets from opening day to whet your appetite.
Rush Hour 2 is part of a series “Traces of Light,” a collaboration with her filmmaker/director husband, Bo Hovgaard that captures big cities at night. Hovgaard’s video camera is unfocused as he captures the light in Shanghai from driving cars and advertising signs. Sorensen selects individual images from the video and translates photographic pixels into...
The purchase in 1995 of the château de Wideville outside of Paris by the Italian couturier Valentino Garavani, evokes an ironic mixture of art history and the contemporary obsession with fashion and fashionistas. What has become the latest destination for a fashion shoot and a fashion museum was once an elegant country villa built by...
With the days growing longer and colder, reminders of summer are always welcome. The whimsical design of the J.B. Schmetterling lamp designed by Ingo Maurer and Axel Schmid, with its realistic-looking insects and butterflies, brings nature to an indoor environment. Produced in 2011, the J.B. Schmetterling lamp is a limited edition art piece. The lamp...
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design, will open the renovated and restored Carnegie Mansion, Friday, Dec. 12. When the transformed museum opens on New York’s Museum Mile, it will offer 60 percent more exhibition space to showcase one of the most diverse...
Lenore Tawney was a transformative figure in the fiber arts movement, but she studied sculpture before turning to weaving, and moved seamlessly between the two. The improvisational nature of her weaving rejected the grid imposed by the loom, emphasizing the individual trajectory of each thread. Vitae showcases one of her major technical innovations: the “open...
The Solar Wall is featured in Tools: Extending Our Reach, on view from 12.12.2014 to 5.25.2015. Video display of the Sun’s surface from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO); Satellite launch date: February 11, 2010. Courtesy of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
This sidewall paper in the art nouveau style is printed in imitation of a tapestry or woven textile as seen in the pixelated-like borders of the motifs. This is part of a matched set which would include a coordinated wide frieze and ceiling paper, a trend which began around 1900 and remained popular until about...
When Coherent Communications System Corporation decided to create this conference phone their goal was to accommodate the needs of conference calls by incorporating all the necessary telephone elements and electronics into a single, sophisticated speaker/microphone housing. For ease of use and efficiency, the engineers wanted to position the speaker in such a way that the...
Junichi Arai was born in Kiryu, the center of traditional Japanese silk weaving, and was trained in his family’s mill. He went on to become one of the most innovative textile artists of our time. Over the past fifty years he has won dozens of patents for his work in fiber chemistry, metallic fibers and...
