Sandy Chilewich has popularized and boosted the reputation of extruded yarn manufacture, specifically in vinyl, which used to be reserved for more industrial applications. She took advantage of a fairly simple mechanical process involving relatively few steps to make much of the woven vinyl products that are part of her eponymous line. The extrusion process...

To celebrate the opening of Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color, Object of the Day this month will feature colorful objects from the exhibition. This post was originally published September 4, 2012. America, 1957. Eisenhower was the President. Elvis was “the King.” And Ford Motor Company introduced its new 1957 automobiles, a “new kind...

This woven bookmark with President Theodore Roosevelt was made for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, an international exposition celebrating the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. The exposition also was known informally as the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 and was held from April 30th to December 1st. The bookmark was manufactured by the Anderson Brothers...

Designer Suzanne Tick has shown that design can be functional, sustainable, innovative, and aesthetically pleasing. For example, in a recent video made on the occasion of Earth Day, Tick wove interesting colorful textiles using foil balloons recovered from the beach, as well as wire hangers discarded by the dry cleaners. In creating this hanging lamp,...

In 1978, Cooper Hewitt received a gift of twenty-two jacquard woven souvenir portrait ribbons from Lisa Taylor, the museum’s director at the time. The series was produced by the Warner Woven Label Company, Inc. of Paterson, New Jersey, which every year made a single souvenir ribbon based on a famous master portrait painting in Western...

The Vermelha chair is an iconic piece, originally conceived and prototyped in 1993 for a gallery show in São Paulo along with several other pieces. The construction of the chair is very time-intensive, as it is handmade from a huge length of rope wrapped and woven to create the chair’s structure. Though the piece is...

Fernando and Humberto explain their TransPlastic series as a fictional story wherein, in a world made of plastic, synthetic matter eventually becomes fertile ground for transgenic creations in which nature grows from and eventually overpowers plastic. The Trans… chair, the final piece in the Campanas’ TransPlastic collection, was designed especially for Cooper-Hewitt and is featured...