This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world stretching boundaries with new artists, new audiences and new technology.
If Andrew Carnegie were alive today, he might be amazed at some of the objects occupying what was once his elegant Manhattan mansion: three turkey-feather capes suspended in an entryway like huge, hovering birds; enormous sheaves of dried tobacco on a former dressing room’s walls; a hanging stained-glass collage made up partly of laboratory slides containing human cells; and a wood-and-adobe structure housing mid-1800s detritus like horseshoes, bottles, wallpaper fragments.
These elements inhabit some of the 25 site-specific installations in “Making Home — Smithsonian Design Triennial,” a buildingwide exhibition that will run from Nov. 2 through Aug. 10 in the Carnegie family’s former house, now the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Like the museum’s six previous triennials, “Making Home” aims to capture the discipline’s creative spirit. But it also departs from its predecessors: This is the first time the Cooper Hewitt has given the triennial wider scope by mounting it in partnership with another Smithsonian institution, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. It is also the first triennial in which the show’s curators have commissioned all the works, giving artists and architects funding and a mandate to design whatever they wished.
“We wanted people to come to the triennial and see these things for the first time, to be surprised, to be shocked, to be awed, to be moved,” said Christina L. De León, the Cooper Hewitt’s associate curator of Latino design, during an interview at the museum.