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Frederic Church in Jamaica centers on the artist’s rarely exhibited sketches from his 1865 travels, presented within their historical context. The works document Jamaica’s plant life and landscapes in detailed observational studies.
Occupying the entire first floor of the museum’s Carnegie Mansion, Design Across Time expands public access to Cooper Hewitt’s collection and includes significant works newly brought out of storage. Through objects spanning time, geography, and discipline—including graphic design, product design, fashion, textiles, furniture, wallcoverings, digital design, and architecture—this exhibition highlights the breadth of the national design collection. Design Across Time organizes the museum’s vast collection around thematic clusters to explore some of the many approaches designers use in their creative process. Designers Play and Tweak to experiment and iterate ideas. They Repeat elements to reinforce messages; Transform materials into sustainable solutions; Show Off craftsmanship to create objects of beauty; or Simplify complex shapes and information.
Made in America brings together more than 70 large-format photographs captured by Christopher Payne over a decade-long photographic journey to learn more about the craft of both industrial and artisanal making in the United States. His images celebrate the combination of human skill and mechanical precision that transform raw materials into objects as diverse as pencils, semiconductors, pianos, and rockets.
Part of Design Across Time, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s The Substitute is an immersive video and sound installation that digitally resurrects the extinct male Northern white rhino using artificial intelligence and state-of-the-art visual effects.
Olga de Amaral: Weaving the Infinite is the most wide-ranging investigation to date into the art of Colombian fiber artist Olga de Amaral (b. 1932). The exhibition explores how Amaral’s practice transcended boundaries between art, craft, and design. Spanning more than six decades, Weaving the Infinite traces her continual experimentation with material, scale, and technique, from early textiles produced while studying at Cranbrook Academy of Art to the ambitious, large-scale fiber works of subsequent decades. It also examines the functional textiles and design practice of Telas Amaral, the studio she co-founded with her husband, Jim Amaral, in 1960. Active until 2007, Telas Amaral produced an extensive body of textiles, furnishings, and fashion that will be brought together and presented publicly for the first time.
