Rethinking Home at the Cooper Hewitt
One crisp November night at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, a joyful Lenape round dance hummed to a crescendo as the sun set over the museum’s garden. Guests at the opening night of Making Home—the design triennial co-curated by Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Christina L. De León, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson—joined in, growing this circle and adding outside voices to the harmony of Lenape leaders. This gesture towards community was one small piece of a gorgeous, thoughtful exhibition that disassembled as much as it constructed, presenting works as human as they are rigorous and scholarly.
Making Home includes 25 projects, involving over 200 people, that present questions and ideas about what home means, how homes are made, and what homes can do. The Cooper Hewitt is the only Smithsonian museum dedicated to design, with past exhibitions ranging from fashion, architecture, textiles, and furniture—any tool that touches human life. Their program is wide ranging, yet this is the first exhibition that has approached design from such an untraditional point of view. “I think it’s important to acknowledge curatorial work as coming from a place of subjectivity, because it’s a way to talk about bias in culture and contemporary design,” says Cunnningham Cameron.
You can’t help but wonder what Andrew Carnegie—the richest man in the world during his lifetime whose home now serves as the Cooper Hewitt's only location—would think of the use his former home is now put to. When architecture firm Babb, Cook & Willard broke ground on the mansion in 1899, the Upper East Side was relatively desolate as far as residences went—especially for the industrial magnates that made up Carnegie’s peers. Carnegie’s foresight allowed for a graciously apportioned manse with 64 rooms alongside a sumptuous garden that would withstand the starts and fits of New York’s growth.
An Acknowledgement of What Came Before
A few steps back inside from that garden, feathered Lenape capes conceived by Joe Baker, co-founder of the Lenape Center, hang from the ceiling of what was once the Carnegie’s reception room. The capes were made in conjunction with young members of his community as a teaching tool—as valuable in their construction as they are in their final form.
“It was while thinking about the type of representation we wanted in the show as well as the history of the mansion, and the land the mansion sits on, when we reached out to the Lenape center,” says De León. “We wanted the Lenape to do a blessing—a round dance is about friendship, community, and bringing people together—to help us open the show.” European colonizers referenced the original feathered capes in their 16th and 17th century writings. Baker’s work is a reimagining, like the entirety of the exhibition. “When you think about home in a more expansive way, as something that is beyond domestic or personal experience, you begin to understand all of the different factors that contribute to contemporary experience,” says Cunningham Cameron. “That is the point behind bringing together all these different perspectives.”
Home and Memory
To the left of the Carnegie’s reception room with its Lenape capes, sits one of the most visually arresting installations in the triennial. An off-kilter replication of opera singer Davóne Tines's childhood living room serves as a metaphor for the peripatetic lifestyle demanded of performing artists. The room-sized sculpture was designed with fine artist Hugh Hayden, whose practice cannibalizes racial tropes and spits them out as quippy, stunning inside jokes. Tine’s grandfather and grandmother performed with him on the tilted stage the night the exhibition opened, bouncing as they sang and played the piano, rechristening a room that would’ve played host to the Carnegie’s unintegrated dinner parties. The installation “Living Room: Orlean, VA” successfully communicates how central design is to human life and self-creation, and how furniture and its arrangement serve as a vital layer for our earliest childhood memories.
The light in the Carnegie’s adjoining breakfast room shines down on a collaborative installation between designers Nicole Crowder and Hadiya Williams, who have excavated what they perceive as the central elements of traditional African American family life. Their installation suggests that our first understanding of community comes at the dinner table — a message that resonated not only with museum visitors, but with Wilkinson too: “The dining table had an emotional relevance to my childhood and upbringing,” she says. “As an adult I have cultivated a practice around the dining table that has less to do with food and more to do with just being around the table together in conversation and fellowship.” In a decidedly un-museum-like move, visitors are invited to sit on armchairs that serve as part of the installation.
Earth as Home
At this end of the ground floor, in the conservatory where the Carnegie’s might have stargazed or installed a winter garden, sounds of the everglades and recountings from preservation advocates Daniel Tommie of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Dinizulu Gene Tinnie, and Dr. Wallis Tinnie, fill visitor’s ears. The lilting voices you hear through headphones as you gaze at the New York sky make for an intimate, urgent reminder of the climate crisis. The recordings remind us that mother earth is our first home, not our houses.
Race in the Home
On the other side of the building the largest installation of the exhibition sits: the Black Artists + Designers Guild’s “Underground Library”. In Carnegie’s own library, Malene Barnett, Leyden Lewis, Penny Francis, Nina Cooke John, and Jomo Tariku offered visual gestures to encourage a “FUBU” sharing of records, information, memory and also, poignantly, the room serves as a place for rest and reflection.
Visitors have the pleasure of passing textile works by living legend, artist, educator, and member of the Chicago Black Arts Movement, Robert Earl Paige as they ascend the Carnegie’s grand staircase. Paige is responsible for popularizing a Pan-African aesthetic as early as the 1960s, designing textile lines for Sears in the 1970s that would sell out (examples are still nearly impossible to acquire).
On the second floor visitors encounter an installation addressing how museums have historically failed as containers and homes for African, Asian, and Indigenous cultures. “Unruly Subjects” questions who really has the chops and sensitivity to work with symbols of Puerto Rican heritage that have so far been archived and presented by non-Latin curators from the United States. “We made this huge list of what home can be when we first started this show,” says De León, “This show has pushed that definition for me—I had never thought about institutions as homes before now.”
Puerto Rican themselves, Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, were perfectly situated culturally and professionally as Smithsonian Artist Research fellows, to dig into the Teodoro Vidal Collection of Puerto Rican History at the National Museum of American History, sharing their findings with visitors. Objects and fragments of information from these archives offer glimpses into the original homes of the Puerto Rican cultural artifacts we usually view in glass vitrines with insufficient or incorrect context. Theater designer Carlos Soto, a Nuyorican in his own right, designed a tongue-in-cheek display for these works, riffing on the precise aspects of museum storage facilities that rid art and artifacts of their emotional and cultural relevance.
Body as a Home
Nearby Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s “Is a Biobank a Home?” asks visitors to investigate what is done with their own biological material, by recreating a small postage stamp of the biobanks that store our DNA, frozen eggs, tissue, and blood. “I love that Heather’s installation is a question,” says Wilkinson. “She meets the visitors where they are.” How much of a home can our bodies be when the state owns them?
Appropriation in the Home
Elsewhere on this floor the multidisciplinary art collective CFGNY populated the mansions “Teak Room” which has its own unique decorative arts history. It was the private library of Andrew Carnegie, designed and decorated by interior designer and landscape painter Lockwood de Forest in 1902. De Forest’s material and millwork choices, in this room and in the many other interior design projects he undertook in New York at this time, borrowed culturally meaningful elements from Indian buildings—tombs, temples, homes—flattening the multiplicity of Southeast Asian craft, religion, and culture into empty decoration. De Forest was a friend of Frederic Church, who did the same thing with Arabic script in his house Olana in upstate New York. CFGNY answered the anonymization of Asian design by doing the same thing to de Forest’s work, collaging his landscapes into Frankensteined paintings and covering the walls of the room in semi-sheer packaging plastic. Centered in this room—which is the only extant example of de Forest's interior design work—artifacts made by unidentified, likely Asian makers in the Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection, are mounted in a vaguely human form. A move that recalls Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Museum” installation in 1992.
Identity at Home
Tobacco leaves show up in Curry J. Hackett’s installation: an homage to his family’s multi-generational farm in Virginia, serving as a fragrant buffer between the Carnegie’s former bedrooms. Beside it writers Felix Burrichter and Michael Bullock's film “Dream Homes” plays on a loop, exploring the homes and lives of three queer communities in rural and suburban America. “The Dream Homes film comments on how co-living and co-organized communities can be a safe space, especially for one of the most at risk groups in the United States, trans teens,” says Cunningham Cameron.
Members of the Lupinewood Collective featured in the film drove from their crumbling historic estate in Massachusetts to attend the opening. Sweetly hovering in the corner of Andrew Carnegie’s former bedroom, they watched as their own intimate domestic rituals played for the instruction and succor of visitors in a room where an early titan of industry, as far in every way from their lives as possible, retired every night.
Making Home is that rare thing—an exhibition that takes you wholly by surprise. Of the 25 site specific works commissioned for the triennial, each one pushes you to think as much as feel. Every medium you might expect is on display—culpture, textile works, video—plus many you would never think to see in an institutional context. “I thought it was very important that people came in and didn’t leave just thinking about design as a teapot or chair, but started thinking of the design of systems and that a museum of design can tell us stories about those things as well,” says Wilksinson. In its ability to push us out of the present and into the future—thinking not just of what design does, but how it does it— Making Home is a rousing success. And for it to prove successful in this way, while planted firmly in such a heavily historic environment, shows us that context can be an opportunity in many more ways than one. Open through Summer 2025.
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