Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics
Previously On View: Friday, December 10, 2021 to Sunday, March 19, 2023

What is design’s role in times of crisis? Communities and individuals come together to aid each other, push for change, and create new spaces, objects, and services. Epidemics—both in the past and in the present—have triggered the discovery of new ways to treat and prevent disease while exposing systemic gaps and failures.

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On a digital screen floats blobs containing an eye, nose, and mouth. A seated person with long brown hair is looking at the screen. The screen is surrounded by a gold frame with long black cords / wires around it.
Face Values: Exploring Artificial Intelligence
Previously On View: Friday, September 20, 2019 to Monday, February 13, 2023

Presented in Cooper Hewitt’s Process Lab, Face Values: Exploring Artificial Intelligence is an immersive installation that explores the pervasive but often hidden role of facial-detection technology in contemporary society. This high-tech, provocative response investigates the human face as a living data source used by governments and businesses to track, measure, and monetize emotions. Using their own...

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Mr. Pergolesi’s Curious Things: Ornament in 18th-Century Britain
Previously On View: Saturday, October 1, 2022 to Sunday, January 29, 2023

Mr. Pergolesi’s Curious Things: Ornament in 18th-Century Britain showcases fanciful drawings and prints by Michel Angelo Pergolesi (died 1801), an Italian-born artist whose professional specialty, in his words, was “the ornaments of the ancients.” In the early 1760s, Pergolesi moved to London, England, where he helped popularize a neoclassical style that employed ornament inspired by...

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Sarah & Eleanor Hewitt: Designing a Modern Museum
Previously On View: Friday, February 4, 2022 to Sunday, October 23, 2022

Sarah & Eleanor Hewitt: Designing a Modern Museum chronicles the colorful lives and contributions of the dynamic sisters and explores how they created The Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration. Through archival photography and documents, personal drawings and correspondence, news clippings and ephemera, the exhibition introduces the sisters as educators, collectors, and philanthropists....

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Foreign Exchange: 18th-Century Design on the Move
Previously On View: Friday, January 28, 2022 to Sunday, September 25, 2022

Drawing from Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection, this exhibition explores the unprecedented circulation of labor, skills, aesthetics, and luxury goods across international borders in the 18th century. It traces the movement of people, ideas, and objects across borders, challenging notions of foreign and domestic, community member and outcast, and national style. The desire for luxury goods...

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Duro Olowu Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection
Previously On View: Friday, March 18, 2022 to Sunday, August 28, 2022

Duro Olowu Selects is the twentieth installment in Cooper Hewitt’s Selects series, which invites designers, writers, and cultural figures to explore and interpret objects in the museum’s collection. This exhibition is curated by Nigerian-British designer Duro Olowu who has received international recognition for his eponymous fashion label, textile designs, and curatorial work, which take inspiration...

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Sophia Crownfield: Drawn from Nature
Previously On View: Friday, February 4, 2022 to Sunday, July 31, 2022

From the 1890s to the 1920s, Sophia Crownfield (American, 1862–1929) designed prints for some of the most prominent silk and wallpaper manufacturers in the United States. Her drawings of flowers range from delicate graphite sketches to vivid color studies, revealing her obvious ease with different types of specimens. Through progressive stages of rework, she developed...

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Underground Modernist: E. McKnight Kauffer
Previously On View: Friday, September 10, 2021 to Sunday, April 10, 2022

Hailed in his lifetime as “the poster king,” E. McKnight Kauffer (American, 1890–1954) believed that the street was an art gallery for the people. While living in England between 1914 and 1940, Kauffer produced radical posters for advertising that introduced modernism to the public. He experimented in provocative ways with line, form, space, and color to promote services and products. ...

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Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects
Previously On View: Thursday, July 1, 2021 to Sunday, February 13, 2022

Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects is the 19th installation in the exhibition series that invites designers, artists, architects, and public figures to explore and interpret Cooper Hewitt’s collection of more than 215,000 objects. Cofounder of the creative collective and cooking advocacy group Ghetto Gastro, Jon Gray works at the intersection of food, culture, and...

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View exhibitions prior to 2015 on the collection site