Past Exhibitions | Smithsonian Institution

Making Home: Smithsonian Design Triennial

Making Home explores the concept of home, bringing together wide-ranging perspectives on how design impacts and transforms lived experiences.

November 2, 2024 – August 10, 2025

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Acquired! Shaping the National Design Collection

Learn how Cooper Hewitt acquires new work to shape the collection to better reflect current issues and design’s evolving role in daily interactions.

March 16, 2024 – August 25, 2024

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols

Give Me a Sign examines the fascinating histories behind many of the symbols that instruct, protect, entertain, empower, and connect people.

May 13, 2023 – August 11, 2024

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

An Atlas of Es Devlin

An Atlas of Es Devlin features over 300 sketches, paintings, illuminated paper cuts, and projection-mapped rotating miniature sculptures that form the seeds of some of the most iconic, cultural congregations of music, poetry, art, and activism in recent times.

November 18, 2023 – August 11, 2024

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Immersion Room

Cooper Hewitt’s extraordinary collection of wallcoverings are featured in a new high-tech space.

December 12, 2014 – February 19, 2024

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes

This exhibition explores the full scope of Dorothy Liebes' contributions as a designer, collaborator, mentor, public figure, and tireless promoter of American modernism.

July 7, 2023 – February 4, 2024

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Designing Peace

Designing Peace explores the unique role design can play in pursuing peace.

June 10, 2022 – August 6, 2023

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Nature by Design: Botanical Lessons

Botanical Lessons explores nature in the Smithsonian collections through thirteen botanical models on loan from the National Museum of American History, and a selection of illustrated books and periodicals from Smithsonian Libraries.

June 8, 2019 – May 29, 2023

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Deconstructing Power: W. E. B. Du Bois at the 1900 World's Fair

Decorative arts from Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection in dialogue with 20 innovative data visualizations created for the 1900 Paris World’s Fair by W. E. B. Du Bois to explore how design can both reveal and mask dynamics of power and equity.

December 9, 2022 – May 29, 2023

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Hector Guimard: How Paris Got Its Curves

This exhibition invites a new understanding of France’s most famous art nouveau architect, Hector Guimard (1867–1942).

November 18, 2022 – May 21, 2023

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics

This exhibition features the work of designers, artists, doctors, engineers, and neighbors who asked, “How can I help?”

December 10, 2021 – March 19, 2023

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Face Values

Face Values is an immersive installation that explores the pervasive but often hidden role of facial-detection technology in contemporary society.

September 20, 2019 – February 13, 2023

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Mr. Pergolesi's Curious Things: Ornament in 18th-Century Britain

Brilliantly hued watercolors from Cooper Hewitt’s collection highlight Michel Angel Pergolesi’s skill in transforming ancient relics into lighthearted decorative motifs.

October 1, 2022 – January 29, 2023

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt: Designing a Modern Museum

This exhibition—through archival photography and documents, personal drawings and correspondence, news clippings and ephemera—chronicles the colorful lives and contributions of the dynamic sisters.

February 4, 2022 – October 23, 2022

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Nature by Design: Botanical Expressions

Botanical Expressions focuses on key figures—Christopher Dresser, Emile Gallé, William Morris, and Louis Comfort Tiffany—whose knowledge of the natural sciences and personal practices of gardening enriched their creative output as designers.

December 7, 2019 – September 25, 2022

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Foreign Exchange: 18th-Century Design on the Move

Drawing from the permanent collection, this exhibition explores the unprecedented circulation of labor, skills, aesthetics, and luxury goods across international borders in the 18th century.

January 28, 2022 – September 25, 2022

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Duro Olowu Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection

Olowu’s exhibition highlights the theme of pattern and repetition throughout the collection, demonstrating how designers, artists, and makers have relied on pattern to express ideas, preserve heritage, capture attention, and construct objects and environments.

March 18, 2022 – August 28, 2022

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Sophia Crownfield: Drawn from Nature

From the 1890s to the 1920s, Sophia Crownfield designed prints for some of the most prominent silk and wallpaper manufacturers in the United States.

February 4, 2022 – July 31, 2022

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Underground Modernist: E. McKnight Kauffer

The largest-ever exhibition of works by graphic design pioneer E. McKnight Kauffer (American, 1890–1954) traces the designer’s transformative role in integrating avant-garde style into modern life.

September 10, 2021 – April 10, 2022

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects

The Bronx, New York-based creative collective Ghetto Gastro curates the 19th installment in the exhibition series that invites designers, artists, architects, and public figures to examine and interpret the museum’s collection.

July 1, 2021 – February 13, 2022

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Nature by Design: Cochineal

This installation explores the enduring legacy of the cochineal insect as a natural colorant and its innovative use among contemporary designers from across the Americas.

November 16, 2019 – January 2, 2022

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Suzie Zuzek for Lilly Pulitzer: The Prints that Made the Fashion Brand

The exhibition features more than 35 original watercolor and gouache design drawings by Zuzek to reveal Zuzek’s artistic contribution to the iconic Pulitzer style.

June 10, 2021 – January 2, 2022

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

The Modernist French Garden: Designs by the Vera Brothers

This exhibition unites over 20 striking Art Deco drawings for gardens with the 1912 published treatise Le nouveau jardin (The New Garden).

June 10, 2021 – January 2, 2022

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Nature by Design: Plastics

From molded tortoiseshell and vulcanized rubber to bioplastic pellets and semi-synthetic yarn, the beauty of natural plastics and design’s achievements with these pliable materials are explored in this fascinating range of objects from Cooper Hewitt’s collection.

June 8, 2019 – January 2, 2022

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Willi Smith: Street Couture

In the first museum exhibition dedicated to American designer Willi Smith (1948–1987), over 200 works by Smith and collaborators will illuminate how the streetwear pioneer broke down social, cultural, and economic boundaries.

March 13, 2020 – October 24, 2021

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum