Past Exhibitions | Smithsonian Institution

Looking Forward/Looking Back: Recent Acquisitions in 20th and 21st Century Design

Follow the shifts in the museum's collecting across a range of mediums, revealing how the museum has augmented and expanded its contemporary holdings during the last century,

August 17, 2007 – October 14, 2007

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Design for the Other 90%

Focus on the growing need to create affordable, sustainable means for survival for the 90% of the world's population who lack the means to purchase even the most basic goods.

May 4, 2007 – September 23, 2007

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006

Visit an ongoing exhibition program that seeks out and presents the most innovative American designs covering various fields, including product design, architecture, furniture, film, graphics, new technologies, animation, science, medicine, and fashion.

December 8, 2006 – July 29, 2007

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Made to Scale: Staircase Masterpieces: The Eugene and Clare Thaw Gift

View staircase models from the Eugene and Clare Thaw collection, with the majority from 19th-century France.

October 13, 2006 – June 3, 2007

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005

Explore the physical forms, rituals of use, and social meanings of eating utensils through the museum's permanent collection of cutlery produced in Europe and the U.S. from 1500 to the present.

May 5, 2006 – October 29, 2006

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Frederic Church, Winslow Homer and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape

Witness the promotion of tourism in 19th-century America through the "constructed" pastoral landscape, explored through the museum's extraordinary collections of oil studies, drawings, watercolors, and photographs.

May 19, 2006 – October 22, 2006

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Yinka Shonibare Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection

Visit an exhibition, curated by Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, that explores modes of transportation, from the 16th to the 20th centuries, as both a means of economic advancement and as a leisure time activity.

October 7, 2005 – September 24, 2006

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Solos: Matali Crasset

See how the French designer Matali Crasset uses a variety of media to explore living spaces by transforming them into areas of experimentation and mobility.

May 19, 2006 – September 24, 2006

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Solos: New Design from Israel

See the first exhibition of contemporary Israeli design in the United States featuring approximately 25 works, including prototypes, experimental objects, and production pieces by 19 designers who live and work in Israel.

January 27, 2006 – April 16, 2006

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Fashion in Colors

Explore color as a design element in the context of over 300 years of Western fashion.

December 9, 2005 – March 26, 2006

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Excavating Design: 18th-Century Drawings and Prints from the Permanent Collection

View a selection of 18th-century European drawings and prints of ancient Rome from the museum's expansive collection features works by such artists as Giovanni Panini, Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

November 4, 2005 – January 8, 2006

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance

Visit the first exhibition devoted to the subject of technical textiles, featuring highly engineered materials designed for ultimate performance.

April 8, 2005 – October 30, 2005

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Hella Jongerius Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection

Discover a select group of samplers from the museum's collection of over 1,000 samplers from Great Britain, Europe and the Americas.

March 4, 2005 – September 4, 2005

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

East and West: Trading Designs: The Decorative Arts of China, Japan, Europe, and the United States in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Explore the intersecting influence of Eastern and Western cultures in the decorative arts of the 18th and 19th centuries.

December 17, 2004 – March 13, 2005

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Design Is Not Art: Functional Objects from Donald Judd to Rachel Whiteread

Understand the relationship between art and design with functional 3-D design objects by some of the most influential Minimalist and post-Minimalist artists of the 20th century,

September 10, 2004 – February 27, 2005

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living

See works by Josef and Anni Albers designed for the modern domestic interior, dating from the 1920s through the 1950s.

October 1, 2004 – February 27, 2005

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Faster, Cheaper, Newer, More: Revolutions of 1848

See objects that illuminate the rich history of design during a period of rapid political, technological, and social changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

June 4, 2004 – January 30, 2005

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Artists' Designed Wallpapers

See twelve wallcoverings from the museum's permanent collection, designed by leading 20th-century artists.

August 13, 2004 – November 14, 2004

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Solos: FutureShack

See a possible solution to low-cost, mobile housing for individuals displaced by man-made and natural disasters in FutureShack -- a prototype constructed from a recycled shipping container and outfitted with a minimum of industrial materials.

May 14, 2004 – October 10, 2004

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Shock of the Old: Christopher Dresser

Visit the first, full-scale museum retrospective of the works of 19th-century pioneer industrial designer Christopher Dresser, featuring over 300 of his major works.

March 5, 2004 – July 25, 2004

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Treasures from the Collection: The Nancy and Edwin Marks Collection Gallery

Visit an exhibition featuring 70 objects juxtaposed across four the principal collecting departments of the museum.

October 16, 2003 – May 2, 2004

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

National Design Triennial: Inside Design Now

Observe the work of emerging designers operating at the most innovative and provocative levels in design today.

April 22, 2003 – January 25, 2004

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Solos: SmartWrap

Visit a new series that will feature international and contemporary works in the fields of design and architecture, beginning with SmartWrap, a 16-foot-square by 24-foot-high walk-in pavilion designed by the Philadelphia architecture firm Kieran Timberlake Associates.

August 5, 2003 – October 10, 2003

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

New Hotels for Global Nomads

Enjoy an exhibition that highlights a current generation of hotels that meet tourists' demands for entertainment and business travelers' needs for offices on the road.

October 29, 2002 – March 2, 2003

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Michelangelo Unveiled

See the recently discovered, unsigned black chalk drawing by Michelangelo depicting a candelabrum, believed to have been commissioned by the Medici family as part of the funerary chapel in Florence, Italy, which was never built.

October 29, 2002 – November 3, 2002

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum