Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Take a deep dive into the creative process and extraordinary designs of midcentury designer Alexander Girard (1907-1993). Join designer Todd Oldham and writer Kiera Coffee in a discussion around their new publication, Alexander Girard: Let the Sun In (Phaidon, 2024), with Susan Brown, Associate Curator and Acting Head of Textiles. Brown will highlight Cooper Hewitt’s extensive holdings of Girard textiles and objects, and the ways in which his sensational colors and patterns are still inspiring designers and design lovers today.

Views East Jordan and Traverse City, Michigan Learn how the East Jordan, MI students engaged with community members through culinary and linguistic exchanges. Learn how the East Jordan, MI community answered the question What is home?

East Jordan is a small town in northern Michigan. Over recent decades, the seasonal agricultural industry and other factors have attracted a small but growing group of Spanish speakers from Latin American countries and the southern United States to the area. Angela Barrera, a Spanish teacher at the East Jordan Middle/High School initiated a student-led project, which focused on cultivating connections through culinary and linguistic exchanges. Comida, Conversación, y Comunidad tells the story of a changing community coming together, highlighting themes of home, belonging, and the power of youth collaboration. Learn how the East Jordan, MI community answered the question What is home? Views of the East Jordan, MI community.

East Jordan Middle/High School students, faculty, school leadership and community members answer the question what is home? Learn how the East Jordan, MI students engaged with community members through culinary and linguistic exchanges. Views of the East Jordan, MI community.

Session two of the inaugural Making Home Saturday Series features Chief of the Delaware Tribe of Indians Brad KillsCrow, Maria Nicanor, Director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Kevin Young, Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The session explores the central role that community and organizational leaders play in reflecting a multiplicity of identities and concerns as a means of cultivating belonging and reshaping an understanding of home. The conversation is moderated by architect, designer, and scholar Mabel O. Wilson. The Making Home Saturday Series is a quarterly program that pairs special guests with participants from Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial. The program’s two-part sessions include conversations on exhibition-related themes, including systems, belonging, memory, care, and building, as well as the contemporary concepts of home related to race, class, migration, climate, and technology. SPEAKERS Chief Brad KillsCrow is a member of the Lenape and Lakota Tribes. He was raised in Pawhuska, Oklahoma and attended Bacone College on a basketball scholarship. He joined the US Navy in 1996 and served in the Persian Gulf and then worked in law enforcement from 2002 until 2011 which included the Kaw Tribal Police and the Ponca City Police Departments. Chief KillsCrow is a graduate of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center – BIA Police Academy. For the past seven years, he has been employed by the Tonkawa Tribe of Oklahoma as Director of their Indian Community Development Block Grant (ICDBG) program. As the governing body of the Delaware Tribe, it is the duty of the Chief to provide leadership in maintaining tribal culture and values, providing services to tribal members, and ensuring a viable future through economic development. Maria Nicanor is an architecture and design curator and historian. She is passionate about public access to culture and rethinking the traditional roles of museums by experimenting with new storytelling formats that connect cultural institutions with civic life. Before joining Cooper Hewitt as its director, Nicanor had been the executive director of Rice Design Alliance at the Rice University School of Architecture , director of the Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid, and a curator at the Design, Architecture, and Digital Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Before that, Nicanor had spent most of her career as a curator working on architecture projects and other initiatives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Kevin Young is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. As the nation’s largest museum dedicated to telling the African American story, NMAAHC welcomes millions of visitors annually and engages a national audience through world-class online programming and digital access to its collections, including the recent launch of the Searchable Museum. Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Young previously served as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A professor for two decades, he began his career in museums and archives while serving as curator and Candler Professor at Emory University from 2005 to 2016. Young is the author of sixteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Stones, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award; and Emile and The Field, named one of the best children’s books of 2022 by the New York Times. His nonfiction book Bunk was also longlisted for the National Book Award, a finalist for the National Book Critics Award for criticism, and named on many “best of” lists for 2017. Young is the editor of eleven other volumes, most recently the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Society of American Historians, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. Mabel O. Wilson (Moderator) is a professor of Architecture and chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. With her practice Studio&, she was a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Exhibitions of her work have been at the Venice Architecture Biennale, SFMoMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her books include Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums, and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture. For MoMA, she was co-curator of Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021).

In celebration of the opening of Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial, Cooper Hewitt presents session one of the inaugural Making Home Saturday Series program. Curators Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Christina L. De León, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson introduce the exhibition’s themes, participants, and development, and explore how the exhibition’s diverse contemporary perspectives and approaches to home across the United States, U.S. Territories, and Tribal Nations create a greater understanding of how design impacts this country, its value systems, and landscapes. The conversation is moderated by previous Smithsonian Design Triennial curator Andrea Lipps. The Making Home Saturday Series is a quarterly program that pairs special guests with participants from Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial. The program’s two-part sessions include conversations on exhibition-related themes, including systems, belonging, memory, care, and building, as well as the contemporary concepts of home related to race, class, migration, climate, and technology. SPEAKERS Alexandra Cunningham Cameron is the curator of contemporary design and Hintz Secretarial Scholar at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She has served as the editor in chief of independent arts journal The Miami Rail, the creative director of the Design Miami fairs, and an independent curator, writer, and advisor whose work has spanned public art, collections, educational programs, and exhibitions engaging an expansive roster of international artists, designers, and architects. Focusing on multidisciplinary practices, Cameron has organized major projects with Yona Friedman, Dozie Kanu, Philippe Malouin, Duro Olowu, and the late fashion designer Willi Smith. She has contributed to publications such as the Financial Times, PIN-UP, Cultured, and Topical Cream in addition to numerous journals, books, and monographs. Cameron’s work has been acknowledged with awards from the Association of Art Museum Curators, the Smithsonian, Wallpaper, and Designboom. Portrait photo credit: Jeremy Liebman. Christina L. De León is Associate Curator of Latino Design and the Acting Deputy Director of Curatorial at Cooper Hewitt. Her research focuses on the design and decorative arts of the Americas. De León has held previous positions at the Americas Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Michelle Joan Wilkinson is a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she is expanding the museum’s collections in architecture and design. She co-curated two inaugural NMAAHC exhibitions: A Century in the Making: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture and A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond. In 2018, she served as lead organizer for the museum’s three day symposium, “Shifting the Landscape: Black Architects and Planners, 1968 to Now.” Andrea Lipps (Moderator) is Associate Curator of Contemporary Design and the Founding Head of the Digital Curatorial Department at Cooper Hewitt—the museum’s first new collecting department in more than 125 years. As Head, she leads efforts to collect and care for new media types in the permanent collection and innovates scholarship in the field. Lipps further conceives and organizes ambitious, award-winning exhibitions and publications including, most recently, “An Atlas of Es Devlin” (2023). Her past exhibitions and books include “Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial” (2019), “The Senses: Design Beyond Vision” (2018), and “Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial” (2016). An accomplished writer and editor, Lipps authors and edits publications, essays, and scholarly articles on contemporary design and digital collecting. She is a sought-after academic lecturer and visiting critic, and frequently moderates and speaks at events, symposia, and academic conferences.