Month: May 2019

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This poster for the exhibition “Impressions/Expressions: Black American Graphics” bears the title at top, with credit information below. A brightly colored image draws the eye at the center of the poster, a lithograph by the artist Margo Humphrey. A border of purple, red, and orange surrounds an abstracted scene, with a bright blue sky. A large yellow tiger, sketchily drawn, bears its teeth at the bottom of the frame, while a pair of figures float above, in embrace. Surrounding these figures, chili peppers, bananas, moons, and stars seem to rain from above,
First Impressions/Expressions Count
In October of 1979, an exhibition entitled Impressions/Expressions: Black American Graphics opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The show, associated with the second annual “Survival of the Black Artist” Fine Arts Festival, later traveled to Howard University—alma mater of the exhibition’s 26 year-old curator, Richard J. Powell.[1] The first survey of its kind, Impressions/Expressions...
Image features tablet computer prototype in the form of a dark gray trapezoidal housing containing a rectangular screen; function buttons along the edges of the housing, and a separate pen-like gray stylus with red top. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Functional Prototype for a Touchscreen Tablet Computer
This week’s posts feature case studies from Cooper Hewitt’s Digital Collections Management Project, a conservation survey of born-digital and hybrid objects in the permanent collection. The two-year project was coordinated by an in-house team of conservators, curators, and registrar, and was conducted by digital conservation specialist Cass Fino-Radin and his team at Small Data Industries....
Image features an IPad data visualization representing a user's music library: at top left, a sun (artists), top right a planet (album), lower left a moon (song), and at lower right a constellation (filter); below these is a row of various celestial bodies. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Planetary, Cooper Hewitt’s First iOS App
This week’s posts feature case studies from Cooper Hewitt’s Digital Collections Management Project, a conservation survey of born-digital and hybrid objects in the permanent collection. The two-year project was coordinated by an in-house team of conservators, curators, and registrar, and was conducted by digital conservation specialist Cass Fino-Radin and his team at Small Data Industries....
Image features laptop computer in a low, black rectangular housing, hinged at top center to open, clamshell-style, revealing a screen and keyboard. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Milestone of Early Laptop Computer Development
The GRiD Compass laptop was an innovation due to its clamshell case. A media conservator discusses how to assess and maintain the digital elements within.
Image of Curator Christina de Leon and Rebeca Mendez, sitting on stage at Cooper Hewitt
FEATHERED BY DESIGN: AN EVENING WITH REBECA MÉNDEZ
A conversation with designer and artist Rebeca Ménde
Image features white 3D-printed construction toy kit connectors of various shapes and sizes. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Preserving 3D Data and 3D Prints
This week’s posts feature case studies from Cooper Hewitt’s Digital Collections Management Project, a conservation survey of born-digital and hybrid objects in the permanent collection. The two-year project was coordinated by an in-house team of conservators, curators, and registrar, and was conducted by digital conservation specialist Cass Fino-Radin and his team at Small Data Industries....
Image features square black form, hinged at the top and opened to reveal an LDC screen showing a black and white drawing of an office with clock and in and out boxes on the wall, a file cabinet, and a desktop in the foreground having a telephone, rolodex, letter, pad, and calendar. A row of icons for different functions is below the desk. A short antenna is attached on right side of the lid, near the hinge. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Predecessor of Today’s Smartphones
This week’s posts feature case studies from Cooper Hewitt’s Digital Collections Management Project, a conservation survey of born-digital and hybrid objects in the permanent collection. The two-year project was coordinated by an in-house team of conservators, curators, and registrar, and was conducted by digital conservation specialist Cass Fino-Radin and his team at Small Data Industries....
Image features three clear glass drinking glasses in graduated sizes, each one in the form of a cylinder with a curved base on a low square foot. Please scroll down to read the blog post about these objects.
Modern Glassware
During the height of the Great Depression, Libbey Glass Company, a commercial glass manufacturer based in Toledo, Ohio, released several new lines of stemware including this Knickerbocker set. The 1933 Libbey Glass catalog heralded this introduction of products as a “New Era of Glass” and promoted these objects as “the highest point that has yet...
Image features a length of cotton fabric with rows of walnuts in irregular gray to brown multitones arranged in a grid on a black ground. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Innovating Printing
In his seminal 1976 book The Dyer’s Art, Jack Lenor Larsen wrote: “Without doubt one of the most successful combinations of innovation, craft and commerce in recent times has emanated from the various Tillett print studios.” From the 1950s through the 1970s, the husband-and-wife team of Doris Doctorow (D.D.) and Leslie Tillett designed and printed...
Image features a paper printed with cherry blossoms for use in fusuma, the sliding panels in Japanese homes. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this paper.
Falling Through Time
Lithe and resplendent, a maze of branches weaves its way across the composition of this lightly colored fusuma paper. In Japan, fusuma are sliding panels that can serve as walls or doors inside the home. Scattered along each bough are a multitude of delicately rendered flowers whose petals invite the eye to linger on their...
Image features tow black and white photographs of expositions at the Grand Palais. On the left: hot air balloons and early airplanes. On the right, lighting and airplanes. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
I Wish I Had Been There!!
This post was originally published on April 1, 2013. Between 1909 and 1948, the Grand Palais near the Champs-Elysées in Paris featured  remarkable decorative interiors which housed automotive, aeronautical and many other types of trade shows. For the buildings and other structures of the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931, decorative lighting helped create a unity...
Image features three artists at work in a large studio space.
Men at Work
In the rear of a large atelier of the French Academy in Rome, three students (called pensionnaires) are at work. One, by the window, labors over a drawing; a second stands near a bas-relief, and a third, seated, bends over a work in progress. The remainder of the space is filled with studio equipment: canvases,...
Image features wall mirror with simple rectangular frame with incised line and thumb indention-type decoration; uprights concave at top; top decorated with swags and stylized flowers. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object
Brandt in Bloom
This post was originally published on December 12, 2015. The French designer Edgar Brandt spurred a revival of interest in interior furnishings made of iron in the 1920s. His participation in the 1925 Paris Exposition won him great praise. Brandt’s ironwork was admired throughout the fair; he designed the gates of the front entrance, his...
Image features: Mantle decorated with series of broad and narrow horizontal bands in reds, pale tan, cream, pale yellow, blues, silver. A broad band across the middle is made up of ten narrow bands, with adjacent rectangles containing Inca geometric patterns and some adapted Tiahuanaco eye forms, separated throughout and edged top and bottom with variety of guard stripes. Above and below this broad central band are slightly narrower pink bands, edged top and bottom with small stepped scallops and filled with close-set mermaids and bird, fish, animal and floral motives, seemingly scattered, but actually set symmetrically on either side of two central vases set one above the other in each band and filled with flowers and fruit. Two narrow bands with attendant varied guard stripes border the mantle at top and bottom; the inner red band is similar to the bands in the center of the mantle; the outer cream-grounded band contains a series of bird, fish, and floral motives symmetrically spaced on either side of the central axis of the mantle; pink guard stripes terminate the mantle at top and bottom. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Andean Women’s Mantle
This post was originally published on December 20th, 2012. This beautiful cloth is a woman’s shoulder mantle, called a lliclla in the Quechua language of the Inca Empire, and was made during the colonial period of Peru. A perfect blend of the cross-cultural elements of the 16th- and 17th-century era of global trade, the Chinese...
Image features a decorative panel with a stag, hounds, and putti. Please scroll to read the blog post about this object.
An Illusion of the Hunt
Seated atop a seemingly wooden structure, we see a beige cherub playing a spiral hunting horn. Following his gaze downward we see, locked in frenzied combat, a large stag and a horde of hunting dogs who contort their bodies in an attempt to complete their violent action. On their right and left are two more...