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.
Nikola Bradonjic
A Lenape round dance at the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial opening night.
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…
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Members of the Red Blanket Singers of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribe perform a traditional dance at Montclair’s 2022 celebration of Indigenous Peoples Day. (Photo by Mike Peters) 