Traveling Exhibitions
Cooper Hewitt exhibitions regularly travel across the country and the world.
Nature—Cooper hewitt
design triennial
Designers are striving to transform our relationship with the natural world. With access to deeper scientific knowledge and technology, they are radically rethinking design collaborations and resources. Their approach marks a growing symbiotic relationship with nature that expresses a hopeful and nurturing partnership.
Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, co-organized by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Cube design museum in Kerkrade, Netherlands, features 62 projects from 2016 and later of architecture, urbanism, product design, landscape design, fashion, visual communication, and materials research. They illustrate how designers are collaborating with scientists, engineers, environmentalists, academics and other stakeholders to find inventive and promising solutions to the environmental and social challenges confronting humanity today.
The exhibition is organized into seven sections, which describe designers’ strategies in working with nature. Understand focuses on how designers mediate scientific knowledge to enhance humanity’s understanding of nature. Simulate offers advances in scientific understanding and technology that enable designers to simulate nature. Salvage explores how humans’ impact on the planet is galvanizing designers to reclaim and repurpose raw materials. In Facilitate, designers embrace nature’s dynamic forces to promote biological growth in architecture and products. Augment features projects that harness nature’s capabilities to enhance objects, buildings and the human body. In Remediate designers present works that attempt to slow, stop and reverse the damaging impacts of humanity’s footprint on the planet. And finally, projects in Narture seek a broader realignment with the planet and challenge us to respect nature rather than
dismiss it.
Tour Schedule:
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
May 10, 2019 – January 20, 2020
Availability: as of February 2020, for slots of 4 months
Space requirements: 8000ft2 | 743m²
Design with the 90%
Presenting innovative, low-cost design responses to the needs and input of underserved communities around the world, Design with the 90% extends a series of exhibitions organized by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum dedicated to socially responsible design. Over the last decade, these groundbreaking exhibitions have sparked a global dialogue around design’s significant role in addressing critical 21st-century challenges.
The first exhibition of the series, Design for the Other 90%, explored workable design solutions for counteracting the consequences of extreme poverty. Its next iteration, Design with the Other 90%: CITIES, addressed the complexities of rapid unprecedented urbanization. By the People: Designing a Better America showcased innovative and inclusive design responses to the impact of poverty in the United States. The projects chosen for Design with the 90% highlight how design is improving access to life’s essentials—clean water, health care, education, and shelter—as well as increasing economic opportunities and strengthening communities.
Tour Schedule:
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center
September 13, 2018 – August 31, 2019
Availability: as of Fall 2019
Square footage: 2000
Jewelry of IDeas: Gifts from the susan Grant lewin collection
Jewelry of Ideas celebrates a major gift of contemporary jewelry from Susan Grant Lewin to Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. This exhibition features nearly 150 objects by over 100 modern and contemporary jewelry designers from eighteen countries. The exhibition illuminates the radical conceptual and material developments in jewelry design that have transformed the field.
Tour Schedule:
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
November 17, 2017 – May 28, 2018
Availability: as of June 2018, for slots of 4-6 months
Square footage: 1000-2000
access+ability
Access+Ability highlights some of the extraordinary designs developed during the past decade with and by people who span a wide range of physical, cognitive, and sensory abilities. Fueled by demand and advances in research and digital technologies, the proliferation of functional, life-enhancing products is creating greater access in homes, schools and workplaces, and people’s abilities to engage more fully in life. Low-tech designs that assist with daily routines such as bathing and dressing, game-changing digital technology like eye-tracking devices for hands-free communicating and editing, and sensors embedded in clothing that deliver information through haptic vibrations, plus innovations in wheelchairs for the developing world, are augmenting the potential for people to access the world in ways previously unimaginable. Similarly, customized solutions are embracing this new spirit, giving people aesthetic choices in everything from personalized prosthetics, to hearing aids designed like jewelry, to wayfinding apps.
Most of the 72 works in Access+Ability are in production, while some are prototypes that point to future directions in this rapidly advancing realm of design.
Tour Schedule:
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
December 15, 2017 – September 3, 2018
Carnegie Museum of Art
June 1 – September 29, 2019
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
October 19, 2019 – February 9, 2020
Availability: as of March 2020, for slots of 4-6 months
Square footage: 2000
