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...
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...
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. Kennebec is a fun, playful wallpaper pattern that would hang unobtrusively on the wall, adding a bit of color and texture to the room. The design is rustic in nature, given that it has the appearance...
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,...
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. This post has been excerpted and adapted from “Celebrating Pride Month with Paper Engineers,” originally published on Unbound, the blog of Smithsonian Libraries. The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library includes more than 2,000 pop-up and movable books dating from the sixteenth century to the present day—one of...
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. Infinity is a pattern of dots that scale from small to large back to small, printed in two columns across the width. When seen from a distance the design is slightly reminiscent of crocodile hide. I...
The LGBTQIA+ Pride flag, often referred to as the rainbow flag, symbolizes the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community. The design was originally conceived in 1978 by artist and activist Gilbert Baker (American, 1951–2017) and fabricated with Baker’s friends and fellow artists at the Gay Community Center in San Francisco, California. Directly inspired by...
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. This post originally appeared on June 15, 2015. Founded in 1992, the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) staged public demonstrations or “actions” to raise the visibility of women in art, culture, and society. The organization was founded in response to the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill congressional hearings, which riveted...
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. This gilded metal ring bears the motif of one of pop art’s most recognizable artworks. Modeled after Robert Indiana’s LOVE graphics and sculptures, the ring represents an element of popular design that reveals the relationship between...
