Women in Design

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Women in Costume Design
Twirl through theater, opera, and film with costume designs from Cooper Hewitt's collection.
Read Time
9 minutes
Posted By
Matthew Kennedy
Date
March 19, 2025
Madeleine Moore-Burrell Documentary: So Good, So Far, 2015
In the mid-1960s, Madeleine Moore-Burrell began her career in industrial design at Henry Dreyfuss’s firm in New York City, where she was the only woman of color on staff. She contributed to the design of important new symbols for major clients including American Airlines, John Deere, Polaroid, and Singer Manufacturing Company. Her symbols for camera...
Post Type
Video
Date
May 4, 2023
Women Making Wallpaper
For Women's History Month, view more than 100 years of women's contributions to wallpaper design.
Read Time
13 minutes
Posted By
Matthew Kennedy
Date
March 31, 2023
A digital collage of seven images of various types of design objects, including posters, a wallpaper, a textile, and salt and pepper shakers. The overall composition is a horizontal rectangle with the various images either abutting or overlapping each other. In the upper left is a textile with pink, orange, and white horizontal, irregular stripes overlaid with inky black illustrations of plants. Superimposed over the textile and at the lower left of the collage is a vertical yellow poster featuring the shocked face of a woman (actress Jenifer Lewis) stylized in shades of blue with dynamic lettering that reads “The Diva Is Dismissed” along with creator credits for a performance and the logo for The Public Theater at the upper right. At top center of the collage is a square blue poster with the confrontational close-up of a human eye; the eye is surrounded by a black circle with white blocky lettering that reads “WAC IS WATCHING / WOMEN TAKE ACTION”. Beneath this is a severely horizontal yellow poster that pictures a naked woman from behind (an image adapted from a Renaissance painting) who wears a guerrilla mask accompanied by the text “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” followed by statistics detailing inequities. At the upper right of the collage is a yellow wallpaper that contains black-and-white, illustrative scenes of Black individuals wearing 18th-century costume and engaging in a variety of both pastoral and modern activities. To the left of this wallpaper is a small gray-scale poster picturing two women in hats and coats sitting on a bench; above and below them is the text “I want to kiss my girlfriend, in public, without fear.” Finally, at the lower right of the collage is a photograph of a salt and pepper shakers, which are entwined and modeled in bulbous forms in white, glossy ceramic.
Women in Design
Discover the cross-disciplinary work of women in design through seven objects.
Read Time
6 minutes
Posted By
Matthew Kennedy
Date
December 20, 2022
Rael-Gálvez Family Blankets
In this video Dr. Estevan Rael-Gálvez reflects on two blankets woven by his great-great-grandmother, Manuelita Cisneros. These objects form part of an immensely important extant group of nineteenth century blankets woven by Diné (Navajo) women who were enslaved by, or worked as servants in Hispanic households in the Southwest region of the United States. Combining...
Post Type
Video
Date
July 1, 2022