Author: Matthew Kennedy

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Image features a wallpaper panel showing yearbook portraits of teenage boys displayed in decorative oval frames surrounded by flowers on a bright rainbow-colored ground printed in fluorescent ink and black rayon flock. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Framing The Bullies
In celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride Month, June Object of the Week posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection.  Bright-faced youths peer back at you from a vibrant web of floral foliage. But this wallpaper, titled Bullies, strikes a scornful tone. Multi-disciplinary artist Virgil Marti sourced the portraits seen in the wallpaper from his...
Image features a ceramic vase with a slender neck and bulbous base. The neck is smooth and gilded. The base has a prickly, fur-like texture and is light pink. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Surreal Provocateurs
In celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride Month, June Object of the Week posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection.  Nature has a way of informing us—however we engage, we learn from its resilient processes. Nature also has a way of amusing, perplexing and delighting us with its complex and idiosyncratic forms. This edifying and...
Two streamlined red chairs against a white background.
Hero to Zero: A History of Plastics
Design scholar Penny Sparke traces the history of plastic since the nineteenth century and through modern design of the twentieth century—and notes how the material became one of the largest challenges facing the world's environment today.
Image features a small flat pin in the form of a woman's high-heeled shoe covered in red glitter. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Friends of Dorothy
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. Bricks were thrown. Not yellow bricks, of the variety that Dorothy and her friends eased on down. But bricks. And garbage cans. And coins. And bottles. And rocks. All of this debris was airborne because it...
Image features a rectangular textile with a pattern in brown, rose, and blush. Against a rose background, a series of photographs are silkscreened overlapping each other and at an array of angles. The photographs are of children and street scenes in Cambodia. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Photographic Assemblage
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. Clark Robertson moved to New York City, from Texas, in the late 1970s to establish a design and printing business, at which he started producing printed textiles for fashion and interior design use. A design titled...
Image features a faun reclining in the grass, seen from behind. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Canticle of Pan
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and designs in the collection. In a 1916 profile published in Vanity Fair, Paul Thévenaz was described as a painter and a dancer. The article also identified the Swiss-born double threat as the cult leader of a movement called Rhythmician, an...
Image features a sepia-tinted photograph of a woman in a long gown standing before a mirrored wall in an elaborate room, a gilded and upholstered side chair to her left and armchair to her right. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Living Factory of Chic
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. A woman of nearly seventy-five, dressed in a voluminous white gown with contrasting shawl, gazes over a well-appointed interior in a photograph by a thirty-five-year-old aesthete. The woman is Elsie de Wolfe, the interior is of...
Image features poster showing a blue condom in clear packaging on a white background, above the message, "Put on your thinking cap." Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Smarter, Not Harder
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. In the wake of the AIDS epidemic that arose in the 1980s, greatly impacting the gay community, numerous healthcare organizations sprang up to take charge in the care and support of individuals infected by and living...
Image features two white, stylized female figures and one black, stylized male figure on purple ground, with horizontally printed black and white sans-serif text. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Teetering Trio in a Pastel Void
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. Today’s blog post was originally published on May 22nd, 2016. Alvin Lustig designed numerous book covers for New Directions Publishing over the course of his prolific career, including several for Tennessee Williams’s plays. Lustig’s modernist designs,...