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White background with black design. Black and white photograph of jazz musician Roscoe Mitchell occupies lower three-quarters of cover, set in black circle, with black concentric rings emanating outward. Upper one-quarter is white with black, blocky stylized lettering: Sound/ Roscoe/ Mitchell, and Sextet perpendicularly.
Laini Abernathy, Black Graphic Designer
Laini (Sylvia) Abernathy (who died in 2010) was an artist, designer, and activist. Cooper Hewitt is collecting album covers designed by this important designer, who contributed to the Black cultural scene in the late 1960s. Abernathy was part of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in Chicago. BAM, a national movement founded after the assassination of...
Image features an IPad data visualization representing a user's music library: at top left, a sun (artists), top right a planet (album), lower left a moon (song), and at lower right a constellation (filter); below these is a row of various celestial bodies. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Planetary, Cooper Hewitt’s First iOS App
This week’s posts feature case studies from Cooper Hewitt’s Digital Collections Management Project, a conservation survey of born-digital and hybrid objects in the permanent collection. The two-year project was coordinated by an in-house team of conservators, curators, and registrar, and was conducted by digital conservation specialist Cass Fino-Radin and his team at Small Data Industries....
Image features poster with hot pink background, an upcoming musical performance is announced. The singer’s name, Taana Gardner is written in curly red letters across the top, and a black and white portrait of the young singer gazes flirtatiously out at the viewer from within the frame of a red heart, out of which a devil’s tail emerges. She is also surrounded by red hearts of various sizes. Beneath her portrait, the title of her song, “Heartbeat” is printed in a bold, black, shattered typeface. The lower half of the poster provides information on the details of the upcoming show. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Pure Coquette
Although some may claim that disco died a messy media “death” in 1979, in the early ’80s, its “Heartbeat” could still be heard reverberating on radio airwaves and in dance clubs across the United States.[1] Fame first found Taana Gardner in 1978, when she became an overnight sensation after recording the vocals for West End...
Image features a rock concert poster showing a face in profile, surrounded by pink, black, and grey streams of flowing, wavy hair. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Deliberately Disorienting
A pioneering example of psychedelic design, this work was one of the 56 posters that Wes Wilson produced between 1966 and 1968 for the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. The posters were commissioned by the rock concert promoter Bill Graham, who gave Wilson free rein over his designs until disputes about money severed their connection....
Image features a poster depicting a series of mixers and sliders that categorize the albums of David Bowie between a set of extremes. Featuring seven columns for each album released between 1976-84, with "DAVID/ BOWIE" printed in silver ink in custom typography. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Less Ziggy, More Stardust
Today’s blog post was originally published on July 10, 2013. There are many ways to celebrate an anniversary.  To commemorate a decade of working together as the design duo Non-Format, Kjell Ekhorn and Jon Forss did not opt for the traditional gifting of tin, pewter, or aluminum.  Instead, they pooled their creative energies towards a personal...
Image features two people, one laughing, who sit in front of red typewriter. Please scroll down to read the text related to this image.
Behind the Scenes of Bob Greenberg Selects
The founder, chairman, and CEO of R/GA, a worldwide digital advertising agency, product and service innovator, and consultancy. Bob Greenberg is the 16th guest curator in Cooper Hewitt’s Selects series, in which prominent influencers, designers, and artists are invited to mine and interpret the museum’s collection of more than 210,000 objects. The R/GA team made three videos...
Image features a cream colored poster with an orange border and text, in the middle of which is a diagonally oriented black and white photograph of Philip Glass made up of tiny typographical symbols and letters. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Performance Poster for Glass
In 1967, the composer and musician Philip Glass formed the Philip Glass ensemble in New York, a group of seven musicians playing keyboards and woodwinds, amplified through a mixer. Glass previously studied at the University of Chicago, Julliard and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, but found himself frustrated with modern music. This dissatisfaction led him...
Cooper Hewitt Short Stories: Promoting American Art
In last month’s Short Story, we attended the weddings of Hewitt sister Amy Hewitt Green and that of her daughter Eleanor Margaret Green, who became Princess Viggo of Denmark. This month, researcher Josephine Rodgers discusses the introduction of American drawing into Cooper Hewitt’s collection through the work of Robert Frederick Blum. Margery Masinter, Trustee, Cooper...
To Entertain and Delight
This Object of the Day  celebrates one of many treasured objects given by Clare and Eugene V. Thaw to Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.  It is published here in memory of Eugene V. Thaw. Click on this link to read more about the Thaws and their gifts to Cooper Hewitt.  The so-called “grotesque” style of decoration developed...