At Cooper Hewitt on the Upper East Side, NYC: Design Across Time Spans 125 Objects and 30 Centuries

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 installation uses the entire first floor of the Carnegie Mansion and presents 125 works. It runs through October 22, 2028, and objects will rotate during that time.

The museum has collected design since 1897. Its national collection now holds more than 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 display includes pieces newly brought out of storage, recent acquisitions shown publicly for the first time, and canonical works of American and global design.

Rather than following a timeline, the show is organized in six thematic clusters that reflect how designers work. The museum's page names several of them: Play and Tweak, Repeat, Transform, Show off and Simplify. The objects range from an Egyptian lotus-shaped cup of about 1100 BCE to Toots Zynsky's glass vessel Aurifero II, made in 2023.

Highlighted works include a Japanese Noh theater costume of about 1800, the JVC Videosphere portable television from 1970, Hitomi Hosono's very large porcelain Nazuna vase from 2016, Greta von Nessen's Anywhere lamp, Sheila Bridges's Harlem Toile de Jouy wallcovering and David Jonathan Ross's Bungee typeface. Several Japan-related objects make this an easy entry point for Japanese-speaking visitors.

JA Projects designed the exhibition, with graphic design by Pacific. A central gallery anchors the opening group of objects, and two long vitrines cut across the first-floor rooms. A graphic system of object silhouettes ties the sequence together. Designers and experts offer commentary in the Bloomberg Connects guide, available online or in the free app. Large-print labels and image descriptions are provided.