Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Henry Dreyfuss's team collected thousands of symbols for the "Symbol Sourcebook." What might a "Symbol Sourcebook," crowdsourced in 2024 with your submissions, look like? Read more on the Cooper Hewitt blog.

📺 Weekend Watching: Matilda McQuaid, Cooper Hewitt’s acting director of curatorial, discusses how museum’s acquisition process shapes our collection to better reflect current issues and design's evolving role in daily interactions. Over 150 recently acquired objects are currently on view in our latest exhibition "Acquired! Shaping the National Design Collection,” including objects that represent the museum's collecting legacy, as well as works brought into the collection since 2017.

New on the Cooper Hewitt blog 📝: A selection of pop art wallpaper by or inspired by LGBTQIA+ artists and designers from Cooper Hewitt’s collection Click below to read more! #SmithsonianPride

We’re counting down the days until Museum Mile Festival 2024! ✨ Join Cooper Hewitt and our neighbors from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. for free admission, activities, and dozens of amazing exhibitions. At Cooper Hewitt, don’t miss: –“An Atlas of Es Devlin,” the first monographic museum exhibition dedicated to British artist and stage designer Es Devlin, who is renowned for work that transforms audiences. –“Acquired! Shaping the National Design Collection” highlights how Cooper Hewitt acquires new work to shape the collection to better reflect current issues and design’s evolving role in daily interactions. –“Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols” examines the fascinating histories behind many of the symbols that instruct, protect, entertain, empower, and connect people. Click here for more info: https://s.si.edu/3z0bDRH. See you there! 👋 __ Carnegie Mansion embellishments, designed by Jean-Michel Folon, Christopher Clapp, Raymond Loewy, Vera Maxwell, and Hugo DeMarco.

A favored hangout among the early 1980s East Village art scene, the Fun Gallery became home to some of the New York City’s most notable artists, including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf. This poster, designed by Haring in anticipation of his gallery debut in February 1983, exemplifies the artist’s unique ability to turn two-color line drawings into complex, visually cacophonous imagery. Here, interconnected human figures compete with zig-zags and spirals for the viewer’s attention, but the effect is nonetheless captivating. 🌀 Read more about Haring’s work: https://s.si.edu/4e8MioN #SmithsonianPride

Best known today for his graphic design, Dan Friedman was also an educator and writer who tirelessly explored and experimented in many other design disciplines. By the early 1980s, increasingly disillusioned with design in the service of commerce, and feeling that modernism had been coopted by corporate interests, Friedman experienced an ideological and creative shift. He devoted less time to commercial design and began spending more time with artists and designers in the galleries and clubs of New York’s downtown scene, counting emerging artists such as Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat among his friends and collaborators. The size of a small side table, Friedman’s “U.S.A.” table (pictured here) is a functional piece of furniture presented as a provocative and whimsical sculptural object: its flat top a miniaturized depiction of the continental United States, with that geography’s irregular contours transitioning into the table’s vertical sides, suggestive of the striations in a cliff wall. In 1994, a year before his death from complications from AIDS, Friedman authored the book “Dan Friedman: Radical Modernist,” offering his observations and philosophy on many aspects of design, along with twelve principals for generations of designers, including “Live and work with passion and responsibility; have a sense of humor and fantasy.” Click the link to read more about Friedman: https://s.si.edu/3mVpq2C #SmithsonianPride __ U.S.A. Table, 1993; Designed by Dan Friedman; Manufactured by NEOTU (Paris, France); Molded plastic

📚 Weekend Reading—In conjunction with our current exhibition "Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols," designer and researcher Sue Perks offers an expansive look into the Henry Dreyfuss Archive held at Cooper Hewitt. Read about the original 1972 exhibition, held to to celebrate and promote the publishing of Dreyfuss's "Symbol Sourcebook."

What are ornament prints and how did Cooper Hewitt come to own the premier collection of such works in the United States?

Cooper Hewitt is on the hunt for a Director of Curatorial! This role will lead the museum’s curatorial departments, define the curatorial vision and creative direction of content, and oversee the institution’s acquisition process, among other duties. Working alongside our director and other senior management, the Director of Curatorial will assist in the development of overall policy and direction for the museum. Does this sound like you? Click the link below for more information.

In conjunction with our current exhibition "Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols," designer and researcher Sue Perks offers an expansive look into the Henry Dreyfuss Archive held at Cooper Hewitt. The archive contains detailed documentation on Dreyfuss’s "Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols," which serves as the basis for the exhibition. Read more about the "Symbol Sourcebook" on the Cooper Hewitt blog.