Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial

 

November 2, 2024, to August 10, 2025

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

 

Installation of “The House That Freedoms Built” by La Vaughn Belle in “Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial” at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

 

Featuring 25 site-specific, newly commissioned installations, Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial explores design’s role in shaping the physical and emotional realities of home across the United States, US Territories, and Tribal Nations. The exhibition is the seventh offering in the museum’s Design Triennial series, which was established in 2000 to address the most urgent topics of the time through the lens of design.

 

 

Installation of “The Underground Library” by the Black Artists + Designers Guild in “Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial” at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. 

 

 

Installed throughout the Andrew and Louise Carnegie Mansion, each floor of the exhibition is organized by themes that evoke experiences of home:

 

“Going Home” (ground and first floor) considers how people shape and are shaped by domestic spaces. Through reinterpretations of diverse home environments that traverse interior and exterior spaces, this section explores the historical and personal factors that influence home design and its profound impact on people’s experiences, behaviors, and values.

 

 

Installation of “Game Room” by Liam Lee and Tommy Mishima in “Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial” at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

“Seeking Home” (second floor) addresses a range of institutional, experimental, and utopian contexts that challenge conventional definitions of home. Installations examine the idea of home through the lenses of cultural heritage, the human body, imagined landscapes, and refuge.

 

 

Installation of “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia” by Hugh Hayden, Davóne Tines and Zack Winokur in “Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial” at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. 

 

“Building Home” (third floor) presents alternatives to single-family construction models, expanding and redefining home to embrace community space, cooperative living, land stewardship, decolonial practices, and historic preservation. Large-scale installations explore building typologies grounded in regional histories and cultural specificity, and address contemporary issues such as housing precarity, environmental advocacy, memory, and aging.

 

 

PARTICIPANTS

 

After Oceanic Built Environments Lab, Honolulu, Hawaii, and Leong Leong Architecture, New York City  *Installation of Hālau Kūkulu Hawaiʻi: A Home That Builds Multitudes

Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE), Miami, Florida

La Vaughn Belle, St. Croix, US Virgin Islands 

Black Artists + Designers Guild, Brooklyn, New York

Lori A. Brown, Syracuse, New York; Trish Cafferky, Boston, Massachusetts; and Dr. Yashica Robinson, Huntsville, Alabama 

CFGNY, New York, New York

Mona Chalabi and SITU Research, Brooklyn, New York

 

 

Nicole Crowder, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Hadiya Williams, Washington, DC   *Installation of “The Offering”

Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, Oakland, California 

 

 

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, New York, New York  *Installation of “Is a Biobank a Home?”

East Jordan Middle/High School, East Jordan, Michigan 

 

 

Curry J. Hackett, Wayside Studio, Washington, DC, and New York, New York  *Installation of “So That You All Won’t Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia” 

Hugh Hayden, Brooklyn, New York; Davóne Tines, New York, New York; and Zack Winokur, New York, New York

Hord Coplan Macht, Baltimore, Maryland

 

 

Terrol Dew Johnson, Tohono O’odham Nation, Sells, Arizona, and Aranda\Lasch, Tucson, Arizona, and Brooklyn, New York  *Installation of “We:sic ’em ki” by Terrol Dew Johnson and ArandaLasch

Liam Lee, Brooklyn, New York, and Tommy Mishima, Bronx, New York

Lenape Center with Joe Baker, Delaware Tribe of Indians, New York, New York, and Oklahoma 

Joiri Minaya, Brooklyn, New York

Sofía Gallisá Muriente, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Carlos Soto, Bronx, New York

Robert Earl Paige, Chicago, Illinois

PIN–UP, New York, New York 

 

 

Ronald Rael, Oakland, California, and La Florida, Colorado  *Installation of “Casa Desenterrada

William Scott, Oakland, California

Amie Siegel, Brooklyn, New York 

Renée Stout, Washington, DC

 

publication

The accompanying publication, Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, co-published with MIT Press, will feature scholarly essays together with first-person home stories, photo essays and conversations. All Design Triennial participants will contribute to the book alongside writers and critical thinkers who represent the expansive geographies, communities and legacies included in the exhibition. Available in February 2025, the publication will be designed by Sunny Park of Park-Langer, based in Los Angeles

https://www.si.edu/museums/cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-design-museum