Throughout March, Object of the Week celebrates Women’s History Month. Each Monday a new post highlights women designers in the collection. Author: Adrienne Meyer This lithograph is one of four in the Cooper Hewitt Design Library depicting scenes from the Brooklyn and Long Island Sanitary Fair of 1864. These images capture some of the spectacle...
In 2005, The New York Times reported that expressionist artist Vincent Malta, age 83, was beginning to achieve success in making a living as an artist.(1) A longtime teacher at the Art Students League of New York whose paintings appeared in galleries from time to time, Malta filled the gaps in his showing career by...
Essay by Julie Sangborn about the changing vision for some of New York City's public libraries.
Japanese vases, Niagara Falls, and the Brooklyn Bridge are unusual companions in this American paper from the mid-1880s. The paper melds the long-popular fashion in the US for papers depicting landscapes with the then-current obsession for “Japonesque” patterning. This obsession had its origins in the importation of Anglo-Japanese papers from England in the 1870s. These...
Murals became a fashionable wall decoration in the mid-twentieth century. Murals differ slightly from scenic wallpapers in that most were designed to cover a single wall, or to separate or highlight a section of a larger wall, where scenic wallpapers were designed to run continuously around a room. Many mural designs could also be continuous...
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn was a hub for ceramic production and home to at least a dozen major firms. The beaches of the East River offered plentiful white sand and underdeveloped land near the shore accommodated the building of large factories. These firms produced a broad...
Design Watch Members enjoyed a special evening with Cooper-Hewitt trustee Richard Meier at the opening of Art in Architecture: Selected Works by Richard Meier in Brooklyn. This exhibition is hosted in Richard Meier’s own architectural project, Richard Meier on Prospect Park. Meier’s collages and sculptures complement his architecture in various, unexpected ways. In contrast to...
Brooklyn-based design duo Felted Signal Processing creates plush, alien-looking synths and sensors that make noise on contact. Sisters Lara and Sarah Grant combine their skills in art, fashion and engineering to perform their outlandish experiments in “electronic textiles.” There’s a whole catalog of stretchy samplers and woolen warblers on their website, fsp.fm. A felted sensor...
SIMS Municipal Recycling Facility in Brooklyn. Image courtesy of Selldorf Architects. Selldorf Architects, located at Manhattan’s Union Square, recently opened their studio to Cooper-Hewitt’s Design Watch Members. The firm has acquired an international reputation for work that is sensitive to context and program, thoughtful in execution and timeless. The firm has worked on public and...
