At Cooper Hewitt on the Upper East Side, NYC: "Design Across Time" Opens the Permanent Collection

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum on the Upper East Side has opened its permanent collection galleries with "Design Across Time: Exploring the Smithsonian's Design Collection." The show fills the first floor of the Carnegie Mansion with 125 works from the museum's holdings It is a multi-year installation running through October 22, 2028, with objects rotating in and out along the way. Cooper Hewitt has collected design since its founding in 1897 The national collection now exceeds 215,000 objects across six continents and thirty centuries, covering product design, architecture, graphic design, fashion and textiles, wallcoverings, and digital and interaction design The presentation includes significant works brought out of storage, recent acquisitions on public view for the first time, and canonical pieces of American and global design history. Rather than following a timeline, the galleries group objects by the approaches designers take: Play and Tweak, Repeat, Transform, Show off and Simplify, among others An ancient Egyptian lotus-shaped cup from around 1100 BCE sits in the same story as Toots Zynsky's glass vessel Aurifero II, made in 2023. The Victor Company of Japan's helmet-shaped Videosphere portable television is also on view. The installation was designed by JA Projects, with graphic design by Pacific, and organized by curators led by Matilda McQuaid Visitors can use the Bloomberg Connects guide online or in its free app for comments from designers and experts Large-print labels and image descriptions are available On November 10, design writer Dung Ngo gives a talk on modernist flatware.