What goes on in the kitchen late at night? This whimsical print imagines the pantry come to life, as its normally inanimate occupants enjoy a jolly party. Dishes and cutlery dance to a merry tune played by a band of jugs, mops, pots and pans. A suckling pig, a goose, and a cabbage-headed meat-figure lend...
Dunes flow over one another in waves as caravans of people and camels navigate the treacherous terrain of the Sahara. The oscillating lines that the figures stand on are reminiscent of a winding river or the ocean surf. While this composition is relatively simple, its whimsical elements, such as the faces of the camels and...
In 1946, the twenty year old artist Ruth Asawa entered the renowned, experimental Black Mountain College, where she studied for three years under mentors such as Josef Albers, Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller. Born in California to Japanese immigrants, Asawa spent her childhood working on her family’s farm, until 1942, when the entire Asawa family...
Posters are all around us. We see them on the street, in the subway, tacked to bulletin boards in schools and coffee shops, and hanging on the walls of theaters and concert venues. And we see them online, collected or disseminated on social media. But how are posters made? For the next few days, that’s the...
See how stone lithography works in this short video. Deborah Chaney, a professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, demonstrates this technique in the Pratt print shop. This print took about 4 hours total. About this series: Design Dictionary is a new Cooper Hewitt video series that vividly illustrates a wide variety of creative...
Stare into the electric blue shades of this woman’s sunglasses and what do you see? Even if you know what you are looking for, the blue letterforms come together to form coherent words only with sustained visual focus. If you were to advertise a concert that you wanted people to come to, would you make...
Beginning in the late 19th century, the medium of printmaking played an integral role in the creation of modern Mexican art, a tradition that can be traced back to the work of, among others, José Guadalupe Posada. But it was in the post-revolutionary period of the early 20th century that large groups of Mexican artists,...
