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.
The curators also wanted the show, which focuses exclusively on American design, to be as expansive as possible, including work from Indigenous cultures and U.S. territories. The contributors are diverse, too, ranging from the students of East Jordan Middle School/High School in Michigan, who were participants in a museum program, to the 87-year-old textile artist Robert Earl Paige, who has transformed the mansion’s grand staircase.
But perhaps the triennial’s greatest breadth is in its definition of home.
“We were looking for a subject that was extremely relatable to people as a lens to view design, and also something that was really complex,” said Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, the Cooper Hewitt’s curator of contemporary design. She explained, “You can think about the way that a kitchen table is made, the way that it’s set, the ritual of sitting around it.” Or, she added, “you can think about how a neighborhood is organized,” or “about the land and nature.”
These approaches all appear in the show, whose installations also reflect that they are not in an ordinary museum.
“What we were interested in is the fact that we’re having an exhibition about home in something that was a former residence, right?” said Michelle Joan Wilkinson, curator of architecture and design at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, who curated the triennial with De León and Cunningham. “And how does that complicate the history of the residence?”
In “Going Home,” the triennial’s opening section, an installation by the Lenape Center comments on the mansion’s setting. Titled “Welcome to Territory,” it features the three suspended turkey-feather capes, a kind once worn by the Lenape people, the region’s original inhabitants.
“In a sense, you’re in the belly of the beast,” said Joe Baker, the Manhattan center’s co-founder and the capes’ creator, describing Carnegie’s palatial former house in a phone interview. But he added that the installation, with wallpaper evoking blooming tulip trees, represented a reclamation.
“Not only is it a welcome,” he said, “it’s also a homecoming.”
In Carnegie’s former office, “Game Room,” by the artist Tommy Mishima and the designer Liam Lee, features Lee’s neon-colored, coiled-surface furniture and Mishima’s drawings, both reflecting the industrialist’s networks of influence. Mishima has also created a Carnegie-inspired board game, Philanthropy, which is based on Monopoly. (Visitors can play a version of it during daytime museum game programs.)
The Black Artists + Designers Guild has transformed Carnegie’s vast library into “The Underground Library: An Archive of Our Truth,” where visitors can read books about Black history. According to Wilkinson, the installation underscores literacy’s liberating power.
Several other exhibits capture Black Americans’ efforts to make homes in an often turbulent, transient environment. The opera singer Davóne Tines, the artist Hugh Hayden and the director Zack Winokur conceived “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia,” which recreates a space in the home of Tines’s grandparents, who largely raised him. Set on a plinth that can be mechanically activated to rock back and forth, it is filled with mementos. Accompanied by a composed soundscape, the exhibit will also serve as a stage for musical performances.
“Integrating live music into the galleries as part of a set for this experience is something that’s quite new for us,” Cameron said.
The triennial’s next section, “Seeking Home,” incorporates visionary, technological and experimental concepts. In “So That You All Won’t Forget: Speculations on a Black Home In Rural Virginia,” the transdisciplinary designer Curry J. Hackett and his Wayside Studio have lined the Carnegies’ former dressing room with tobacco leaves and added images of Black life, some of them generated by artificial intelligence.
Other installations contemplate the body as home. The artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg has filled the mansion’s former nursery with shelved vials of fake blood. They evoke biobanks, facilities that store the biological samples taken from medical patients so they can be used for further research — often, she said, without the subjects’ knowledge.
“I think about how going for all of these different tests and analyses over the years, my body becomes splintered, and lives in all of these different places,” Dewey-Hagborg said. Her triennial installation, “Is a Biobank a Home?,” also includes the stained-glass collage “Self Portrait (Pathology),” which incorporates slides of her own biopsied tissue. It is accompanied by a recording of Niki Main’s “Correspondence Song,” an operatic piece with recitative taken from letters Dewey-Hagborg exchanged with medical institutions.
The triennial’s final section, “Building Home,” displays five environments that represent projects currently under construction. They include ideas for living spaces for older Americans and formerly incarcerated people, as well as initiatives that draw deeply on cultural history, like the Mexican American architect Ronald Rael’s “Casa Desenterrada/Exhuming Home.”
This installation consists of a wooden framework holding 300 adobe bricks made from mud excavated from the partial ruins of a building in Conejos, Colo. That site, which Rael is restoring, was once part of a compound that served as the Ute Indian Agency and the home of Lafayette Head, the first lieutenant governor of Colorado. In 1865, the federal government asked Head to draw up a list of Indigenous people in the county who were being held in servitude. Most were children.
“I’m intellectually, or conceptually, digging for my and other people’s histories,” said Rael, who grew up in the region. The bricks, painted with the names, ages and tribes of those who were enslaved, have historical images and exhumed household objects affixed to them. A soundtrack features Rael’s 74-year-old mother whispering the almost 90 names on Head’s list.
“A series of stories unfolds on each adobe,” Rael said, and the installation “feels like a giant blanket that surrounds you.”
The show’s curators acknowledged that many of these works might not represent conventional notions of home design. But part of the triennial’s purpose is to “question our own beliefs about what it means to make home,” Wilkinson said.
She added, “There is a whole world of experiences out there.”
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