Cooper Hewitt Marks Nation’s 250th Anniversary with Retelling of History Behind America’s Design Museum

“Design Across Time: Exploring the Smithsonian’s Design Collection” upends conventional narratives of design development as a time-based phenomenon. Instead, it offers six categories of objects themed by the actions designers used to create them. These include “Repeat,” which includes Marjo Penninx’s fabulous Style Stiletto (2011) wax-resist print on cotton plain weave of the titular shoe stomping in eye-popping rows of bright green, in a perfect distillation of iterative power. Stephen Burks’ Roping Stool (2017) illustrates its theme, “Transform,” by converting production waste like rope and upholstery trimmings into vibrant, elegant seating. “The process of making something work is an important part of what we’re showing here,” Nicanor says. “We have a collection that shows the in-between. This is a moment where there’s this idea that we all need to upgrade ourselves to be ‘the best version of ourselves’, but processes are complex and not linear. At the end, there are many facets to us, and how we get there is important.”

Nicanor arrived at the Cooper Hewitt via stints as associate curator of Architecture and Urbanism at the Guggenheim, a curator at the Design, Architecture, and Digital Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the inaugural director of the Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid. Most recently, she was executive director of the Rice Design Alliance in Houston. Which is all to say she brings experience at a diverse series of international institutions to an American one at a moment when the country’s faith in public institutions has been, let’s say, shaken.

But it’s also a moment where the country is telling stories of its 250-year history. “Design Across Time” is the story of America’s Design Museum. “It was the story of two sisters, Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt, who started the museum in 1987 as a collection that was meant to be a laboratory,” she says. “It was meant to be a collection that artisans and makers were able to see and touch and handle, to apply those lessons to their own work.” That history is ongoing, however, as the exhibition brings that legacy into the 21st century with programming including artist lectures and studio visits.

It also attempts to broaden ideas about what a design collection should include. “The origin of the collection is in the decorative arts,” she says. The exhibition’s “Show Off” section includes decorative triumphs like a royal jewel cabinet (1825-26) given to Charles X of France to Francis I of Naples in 1830, which positively overflows with visual appeal accomplished through cutting-edge tech of its time. “We’re also analyzing the big themes of our time now, though,” she says. “What does it mean to collect around the idea of focus?” The answer might be found in studying the objects of the “Simplify” section, like Art Sims’ poster for Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X (1992), in which a huge grey X could be caged in a box, or ensure the box’s structural integrity, depending upon how you view it. “Design has to deal with the big questions,” she says. “If you’re rigid in a museum, it’s the death of it.”

To that end, the Cooper Hewitt will launch an online collections platform later this year, designed by Champions Design with digital strategy, UX, and development by Schema Design. It will offer access to the 215,000 objects or so that didn’t make it into “Design Across Time,” although even the ones on view at the show’s opening will slowly rotate in and out over the next two years. The platform, according to Nicanor, is part of a broadening of who gets to tell the story of American Design, who gets to hear it, and how. “What we collected in the 1800s, and what we collect now, are time capsules that tell what the country decides are important,” she says. “They make a collective memory. The vast resource that is the Smithsonian is the collective memory of the country. And you should have access to your memories.”