Previously On View: Friday, May 19, 2017 to Sunday, November 19, 2017
Pushing the boundaries of materials, making, and form, 43 recently acquired design objects are installed in the museum’s Process Galleries, along with documentation of the designers’ creative process. The working sketches, prototypes, and videos featured in the exhibition elucidate the making of these objects and demonstrate how technology such as 3-D printing enables the fabrication of impossibly...
Previously On View: Friday, September 30, 2016 to Sunday, September 24, 2017
An installation in the museum’s Process Lab, Citizen Design invites visitors to engage, empathize, and help envision a better America. Inspired by the Gray Area project, a Philadelphia-based community engagement initiative featured in the exhibition By the People: Designing a Better America (which ran from September 30, 2016 to February 26, 2017), Citizen Design encourages civic dialogue at...
Previously On View: Friday, April 7, 2017 to Sunday, August 20, 2017
“A multisensory blockbuster of a show…” —Associated Press The first major museum exhibition to focus on American taste during the creative explosion of the 1920s, The Jazz Age is a multi-media experience of more than 400 examples of interior design, industrial design, decorative art, jewelry, fashion, and architecture, as well as related music and film. Giving...
Previously On View: Friday, February 3, 2017 to Sunday, September 24, 2017
A Depression-era, monumental batik mural entitled The World of Radio is the focus of this exhibition of iconic radios, radio design drawings, and photographs from the early twentieth century through the present day. Designed by Arthur Gordon Smith, the mural celebrates the career of Jessica Dragonette, one of radio’s most popular personalities of the 1930s. On view for the...
Previously On View: Wednesday, September 7, 2016 to Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and its groundbreaking creative technologies will represent the United States at the first London Design Biennale. The Biennale will take place in the heart of London at Somerset House, a center for the arts and culture. More than 35 countries from six continents will present new installations and commissioned works on the theme of Utopia ...
Previously On View: Friday, September 30, 2016 to Sunday, February 26, 2017
An exhibition of 60 collaborative designs from throughout the United States and across borders, By the People challenges the country’s persistent social and economic inequality. Curator of Socially Responsible Design Cynthia E. Smith conducted over two years of field research—traveling to shrinking post-industrial cities, sprawling metro regions, struggling rural towns, areas impacted by natural and...
Previously On View: Friday, September 23, 2016 to Sunday, April 23, 2017
Offering creative, alternative approaches to confronting textile waste, Scraps: Fashion, Textiles, and Creative Reuse presents the work of three designers who put sustainability at the heart of the design process: Luisa Cevese, founder of Riedzioni in Milan; Christina Kim, founder of dosa, inc., in Los Angeles; and Reiko Sudo, managing director at NUNO in Tokyo....
Previously On View: Friday, June 10, 2016 to Monday, January 16, 2017
Fragile Beasts features nearly 70 rarely seen ornament prints and drawings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that are part of Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library. Within the confines of ornamental designs, artists turned elements from nature into otherworldly beings. Creatures, fearsome or playful, graceful or rigid, take their place...
View exhibitions prior to 2015 on the collection site
