Duro Olowu Selects is the twentieth installment in Cooper Hewitt's Selects series, which invites designers, writers, and cultural figures to explore and interpret objects in the museum's collection. This exhibition is curated by Nigerian-British designer Duro Olowu, who has received international recognition for his eponymous fashion label, textile designs, and curatorial work, which take inspiration from art and artists both known and unknown, his curious and discerning eye, and his cosmopolitan perspective.
Olowu's exhibition highlights the theme of pattern and repetition throughout Cooper Hewitt's collection, demonstrating how designers, artists and makers have relied on pattern to express ideas, preserve heritage, capture attention, and construct objects and environments.
From Olowu's perspective, "Patterns are somewhat of a hidden dialogue, a means of understanding how cultural shifts occur across time and place. They open a window to how knowledge and aesthetics are shared across the globe. When we look at pattern, we don't just see stripes, polka dots, or other geometrical layering, we see each other."
Duro Olowu Selects includes an international selection of works spanning the 17th-21st centuries, from the artisanal to the industrial. Together, they amplify pattern as a key element of the design process and suggest Cooper Hewitt's collection as an evolving expression of both the appreciation and the appropriation of global making traditions for an American audience of practitioners, patrons, and the general public.
The term "Unidentified Maker" appears on object labels in this exhibition when an individual or team of creative partners has not been documented by the museum. The maker's identity may have been unrecorded, unacknowledged, or lost in historical records and untraceable.
Ruth Asawa is best known for her suspended woven sculptures, but her initial training focused on design and drawing. The lithographs made during her residency at the Tamarind Workshop in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s depicted drawn studies of domestic objects. The Chair’s combination of mosaic and lattice patterns create light and shadow evocative of her three-dimensional work.
Museum purchase from General Acquisitions Endowment Fund
These handmade lace textiles are created by braiding and twisting lengths of thread wound on bobbins. The figures produced by this delicate bobbin lace technique appear to float in the middle of an open-weave checkerboard. Derived from cutwork, the understated organic pattern integrates varying degrees of negative space into the weaving.
The Mexican art of papel picado emerged from Pre-Columbian, Asian, and European traditions of cutting patterns into paper. A chisel is used to hand-cut forms into multiple layers of tissue paper producing a series of identical images that unfold into message-bearing banners for holidays and celebrations.
Italian textile and fashion designer Maria Monaci Gallenga achieved international fame for her designs. Educated in literature and painting, Gallenga became fascinated with the artworks of ancient, medieval and Renaissance Italy. She later referenced historical textile patterns and clothing styles to create simple, yet elegant fabrics and garments suited to modern tastes.
The wall panel design for the boardroom and auditorium of the Ford Foundation’s Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates campus was one of several collaborations between interior designer Warren Platner and Sheila Hicks. They conceived the pattern of embroidered linen medallions, intended to evoke a feeling of warmth, as a structural element of the space rather than a decorative complement to the architecture.
Museum purchase from General Acquisitions Endowment Fund
Considered to have been the first Black female designer of a jazz record cover, Laini Abernathy became known for giving form to abstract sounds. This graphic sun expresses the optimism of Afrofuturist music and the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra.
“Willi Smith is the perfect example of a designer with irrepressible intuition. This jacket illustrates how he sees a layering of pattern inspired by West African print and dye techniques as an opportunity to create new possibilities of form and expression.” Duro Olowu
American Textile History Museum Collection, museum purchase through gift of anonymous donor
Aaron Bohrod designed Pagan Magic at a time when Polynesian motifs were trending in American popular culture, an influence of the expanded American military presence in the South Pacific during World War II. Bohrod himself was posted there as an artist for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Army War Art Unit. The textile’s pattern originally included cartoonish depictions of hula dancers and idols, which were removed before the design went into production.
Museum purchase from General Acquisitions Endowment Fund
Althea McNish was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and began painting at an early age. In the 1950s, she moved to London and became an influential textile designer, known for vibrantly colored tropical patterns. A founding member of the Caribbean Artists Movement, McNish took the Caribbean aesthetic to an international audience through designs for Christian Dior, Mary Quant, and Pierre Cardin, but was unable to breakthrough as a visual artist.
This textile was made in England for export to the African market. It illustrates how European manufacturers recomposed and reinterpreted patterns and motifs found across the African continent, often disconnected from their cultural significance.
Abbott Thayer’s theory of “disruptive patterning” was the basis for the Frog Skin or 5-color jungle camouflage that was developed by the U.S. military during World War II, and was most widely used by the Marines in the Pacific theater. Its designer was a horticulturist, and the garden editor for the San Francisco Chronicle.
This pattern adapts souvenir portraits commemorating the Silver Jubilee of England’s King George V and Queen Mary in 1935 by Yoruba women. Through design iterations over time, the royal couple began to lose their European characteristics, often transformed entirely into a Black African royal couple, and English words were replaced with Yoruba as an expression of anti-colonialism.
Lydia Novillo created this dress while working in a women’s cooperative in Formosa, Argentina. Its design connects the traditional weaving practices of the Wichi, an indigenous people of South America, with a contemporary halter silhouette. For centuries, the Wichi have used the fibers of the chaguar, a plant in the Bromeliad family, to weave fishing nets, bags, and other functional objects.
Bequest of Richard Cranch Greenleaf in memory of his mother, Adeline Emma Greenleaf
Tassels are normally associated with richly colored glossy silk. The techniques employed for these white linen versions combine the skills of the passementier (braiding and knotting) with the materials and techniques of the lace maker, in one case used to create tiny lace flowers and figures.
black and color marking pens, graphite, white and blue crayon on tracing paper
Gift of Ken Friedman
Dan Friedman helped define the postmodern design movement in the United States before dying from AIDS-related complications in 1995. His practice evolved beyond graphics in the 1980s to include furniture, lighting, interior and fashion design, often transforming industrial and familiar objects through patterns and collage. Friedman’s many iterations of screen designs illustrate his development as a designer, creating purpose-driven works that are practical yet layered with profane, political, and humorous meaning.
Museum purchase from Decorative Arts Association Acquisition Fund
furniture
storage
coins
gilding
Studded with Nigerian coins and burnished with gold and copper leaf, the Tudor Coin Encrusted Table recalls the aristocratic costumes of England in the 16th century and traditional East African masks. The textured surface of the patinated table, interspersed with luminous rows of coins, evokes the pattern variety of Tudor and Maasai accoutrements.
Museum purchase from Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program and General Acquisitions Endowment Funds
graphic design
vases
decorative
bamboo
texture
glass
revolve
Voichi Ohira moved to Venice soon after graduating from Tokyo's Kuwasawa Design School in 1969. His Bambu Vase fuses the bright colors of traditional Venetian glasswork with material motifs common to Japanese art. Ohira collaborated on the vase with master glassblower Livio Serena, who used the pasta vitrea technique to achieve its ceramic-like quality.
Wanders’ chair consists of rope made of braided aramid fibers wrapped around a carbon core. They are impregnated with epoxy, hung on a frame, and hardened with heat. The chair represents a craft-based approach to new materials, synthesizing an ancient technique—in this case, macramé—with high-tech fibers and epoxy.
“Robert is an influential member of the Chicago Black Arts Movement whose commercial design work received attention across the United States and in Milan during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He is adept at designing a pattern that remains legible on a body in motion. His hand-drawn geometric patterns never feel flat, even when at rest.” Duro Olowu
blind debossment, screen and relief printing on paper
Museum purchase through the American Women's History Initiative Acquisitions Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative
In Cadastral Shaking (Chicago v1), Amanda Williams explores themes of racism and segregation through an imagined reshaping of Chicago’s historical redlining practices. The ghost print is an image of an historic redlined map from the Federal Housing Administration. The red zones demarcate which zones are risks for housing loans because the federal government has deemed them hazardous. To create this new map of Chicago, Williams cut out pieces approximating each zone and shook them up, speculating what would happen if the forces of nature rather than human bias determined housing policy.
Museum purchase through the American Women's History Initiative Acquisitions Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, and from General Acquisitions Endowment Fund
Patterned beadwork was traditionally worn by Zulu and Xhosa women and men to indicate status and rites of passage. Necklaces such as this could also be used for communication between courting couples.
Museum purchase from Charles E. Sampson Memorial Fund
Magdalene Odundo's sensuous forms emerge from her study of hand-built clay coil pots in Kenya and Nigeria, a construction method used in ancient cultures from around the world. Odundo creates subtle, unique patterns on the surface of her vessels with a firing technique developed in San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico. Odundo is a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), a British order of chivalry awarded for contributions to the arts and sciences, charitable organizations, and public services.
Phyllis Bowdwin passes down African American history through her jewelry designs. She created this brooch to commemorate the transportation of nearly 13 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas from the 16th-19th centuries. The brooch references a 1788 plan of the Brooks ship used by abolitionists of the period to raise awareness for the sadistic designs of the transatlantic slave trade.
“What I love about this fragment of a bag is that you don’t care about what it’s going to become, you’re transported by the process and the luminosity of the beads and you have a direct sense of the skill of its maker.” Duro Olowu
“Tibor Kalman’s varied repetition of the head reminds me of a contemporary conversation about mass customization. No handmade pattern is perfect, and even computer-generated patterns have glitches. Those glitches show the humanity in the algorithm.” Duro Olowu
Dolores Espoña likely embroidered this beaded depiction of the biblical story of “Moses in the Bulrushes” while practicing her needleworking skills as a young girl preparing for adult domestic life. This sampler was made after Mexican Independence in 1810, when glass beads became available for use in samplers, napkins, and trimmings once restrictions on colonial imports were lifted.
basketry covered with acrylic and acetate cloths, embroidered with glass beads
Gift of Gail Martin
“I love the multiplicity of this, the layered, towering gestures of the beading that somehow allows you to have three to four scenarios in one object. None of the repeats are the same, and you can see how pattern is employed for drama and impact.” Duro Olowu
offset lithograph on white wove paper, gate-fold cardboard, black vinyl 33 1/3 rpm record
Gift of Mathew Weaver in honor of Lenora J. and Robert J. Weaver
graphic design
dots
abstraction
music
repetition
rhythm
grid
listeners
music lovers
Bauhaus
Josef Albers studied and taught at the Bauhaus in Germany and then at Black Mountain College and Yale School of Art in the United States. These abstract album covers were commissioned by Charles E. Murphy, art director at Command Records. Murphy had been a student of Albers at Yale.
Gift by transfer from U.S.I.A. Office of Exhibitions Abroad via Renwick Gallery
ceramics
display
feathers
decorative
stylized
globular
Desideria Montoya Sanchez came from a family of potters who reinterpreted the centuries-old P'ohwhóge Owingeh blackware coiling and firing technique to create black-on-black ware ceramics. Montoya Sanchez painted this jar with textured slip paints before firing in an oxygen-depleted kiln to create the burnished black surface and subtle pattern of feathers, a symbol important to many Native American cultures.
