Making Home / Pride Edit
In observance of LGBTQIA+ Pride Month, Cooper Hewitt offers an illustrated and annotated list of projects drawn from the exhibition and publication Making Home that address queer themes or are by queer creators. Through words, photography, and installations, a spectrum of voices consider the meaning of home, often related to queer or otherwise marginalized identities. The works are presented here on a scale from the intimate to the societal: “Inner Home” reflects perspectives on personal and home life, while “Outer Home” embraces community as well as social, institutional, and societal critique. All contribute to a vast and diverse understanding of “home.”
Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial [exhibition] is presented in collaboration with Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, on view at Cooper Hewitt through August 10, 2025.
Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century [book] is published by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum with the MIT Press, 2025.
A digital exhibition of the same name, with additional and expanded content, accompanies these projects.
Inner Home
“Our visual lexicon of queer and trans liberation usually focuses on what happens outside, in the clubs and bars and streets. . . . But what if politics and visibility could be not only what happens out in the world, but also what happens inside, at home?”
—Leah DeVun, “Acting Out at Home”
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Leah DeVun, “Acting Out at Home” [book]
DeVun’s photographs chronicle the daily existence of her partner—a trans man—and her son. She asserts, “Queer and trans kids can survive; they can grow to adulthood; they can create families and have kids of their own, if they want to.”
Everyday Realities, 2023; © Leah DeVun
Mr. Fix-It, 2023; © Leah DeVun
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Hugh Hayden, Davóne Tines, Zack Winokur, “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia” [exhibition & book]
As a performer, Tines travels nearly 300 days a year. His idea of home lies in his grandparents’ living room: “The living room, toward the bottom of the list of spaces most commonly inhabited in the sprawling twelve-room house, became my personal sanctuary, laboratory, therapy chamber, and private reckoning place. . . . The room also exists in memory: a magic box filled with hundreds of my core musical experiences. My origin story. Where did the music being?” Tines collaborated with sculptor Hugh Hayden and director Zack Winokur to evoke the living room as a performance space.
Hugh Hayden, Davóne Tines, Zack Winokur, Installation of “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia” in Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution
Experience more from the installation and Tine’s essay.
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Roxane Gay, “Intentional, Home” [book]
Gay reflects—”as a somewhat single Black lesbian”—on her time living in Lafayette, Indiana, as a faculty member at Purdue University that ultimately drove her to an exodus to Los Angeles, California, where she found a chosen, more intentional feeling of home.
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Michael Bullock and Journey Streams, “Multiplicity of Home” [book]
In parallel essays, Bullock and Streams detail coming out stories occurring decades apart and in very different eras—from pre-internet isolation to seeking true community in geographic isolation.
Outer Home
“And I think we have an opportunity to create safe spaces for people. We can utilize our unique position as a museum to be welcoming to different groups. The Alice Austen House is a nationally designated site of LGBTQ history. But because we’re not a Pride center, we’re able to work with students and bring them to the site without outing them, creating this amazing space to celebrate identity.”
—Victoria Munro, executive director of the Alice Austen House, “The Power of Place”
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PIN—UP, “Dream Homes” [exhibition]
The film Dream Homes, featured in the exhibition, chronicles three contemporary LGBTQIA+ communal living structures across the nation, exploring daily life in these rural and suburban sanctuaries. A weaving on display reads: “Home is where we are allowed to dream.”
PIN-UP, Installation of “Dream Homes” in Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution
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Jarrett Earnest, “Affairs of Plain Living” [book]
Earnest, curator and art critic who often focuses on queer narratives, delves into the history of Foxfire, a publication he frequently purchased for his father as a gift. The publication (1966–2004) was a product of the students of Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School in rural Georgia and fostered a trans-generational exchange of communal knowledge, heritage, and identity in Appalachia.
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Sean Connelly and Dominic Leong, “Hālau Kūkulu Hawaiʻi: A Home That Builds Multitudes” [book & exhibition]
“The saying ‘he ‘ōpū hālau,’ a house-like stomach, remembers a vision of home as a place of sustenance, a gut-brain, a body, a place of knowledge, an ancestor, a network, a constellation, a place of innovation and excellence.” This project, organized by architect Leong and queer artist Connelly, brings together the expertise of culture bearers and traditional hale builders with architects, artists, and engineers at the Kūkulukumuhana camp in the storied Waipiʻo Valley on the island of Hawaiʻi, to develop prototypes by sharing knowledge with one another. Their approach demonstrates the value of engaging in collaborative building using Native knowledge systems as a means of supporting cultural, ecological, and political recovery across Pae ‘Āina Hawai‘i (the Hawaiian Islands) and the Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) resurgence.
After Oceanic Built Environments Lab and Leong Leong Architecture, Installation of “Hālau Kūkulu Hawaiʻi: A Home That Builds Multitudes” in Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution
Experience more about the installation and Connelly and Leong’s essay.
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David Hartt, Brent Leggs, Victoria Munro, Caroline O’Connell, and Gretchen Sorin, “The Power of Place: Revisiting Historic Sites, Historic Houses, and House Museums” [book]
In this conversation about the role and power of historic houses, Victoria Munro represents the Alice Austen House, a nationally designated site of LGBTQ history. Austen was a photographer and prominent community member on Staten Island, New York, where she lived for decades with her partner, Gertrude Tate. Munro addresses her interpretation of the House as the space of these women, revising the revisionist history previously taught by the institution that led to decades of erasure. She notes, “It can be an emotional experience, particularly for the queer community, who understand that [Austen’s] story has been suppressed.”
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CFGNY, “Contrast Form Gestalt” [exhibition]
Multidisciplinary collective CFGNY critiques the practice of anonymizing Asian design—making it “vaguely Asian”—in Western art by obscuring and selectively revealing details of Cooper Hewitt’s 19th-century Teak Room, inspired by Indian art and architecture. At the center is a group of unattributed objects from Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection, each originating from a region of the world that informed the room’s decoration.
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Siddhartha V. Shah, “Disorienting the Orient: Reinvention and Retribution in Lockwood de Forest’s Teak Room” [book]
Shah ruminates on CFGNY’s above installation and places it in the art historical context of excessive wealth and aesthetic globalism of the late 19th century.
The Carnegie Family Library (Teak Room), 1938; Collection of the Museum of the City of New York
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Allan Punzalan Isaac, “Homeward: At Home Becoming Alien” [book]
Within the context of the Filipino diaspora, Isaac discusses the work of queer artist Leeroy New whose photography series Aliens of Manila (2014–present) stylizes Filipino migrants as otherworldly beings, though through mundane objects and in everyday settings. Isaac writes, “The fantastical worlds New invites us into do not depict other planetary spaces but rather our own neighborhoods. . . . Labor’s traces come to surface as this ethereal yet strangely familiar world.”
Leeroy New, Aliens Grocery, from Aliens of Manila series, 2014–present; © Leeroy New
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Matthew J. Kennedy is the Publications Associate at Cooper Hewitt. He additionally serves as History & Collections Chair of Smithsonian Pride Alliance, an LGBTQIA+ employee resource group within the Smithsonian.
