There are two fabulous exhibits at the Cooper Hewitt Museum:
the first, Provocations:
The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio, is an exhibition of models and photographs of
some of the innovative and fascinating architectural projects—and other
projects (Thomas Heatherwick
has designed everything from furniture to handbags, buses to boats)—by this
London-based designer; the exhibit ends
3 January;
the second, David Adjaye Selects: Works from
the permanent collection, is the 12th
in a series in which the Cooper Hewitt asks major figures
from the world of art and architecture to create exhibitions by selecting items
from its prodigious permanent collection; in it, architect David Adjaye has chosen some exquisite textiles—and hats!—from
West and Central Africa; the exhibit ends
14 February.
The wonderful, newly-renovated, Cooper Hewitt Museum is at
2 East 91 Street
(between 5th
and Madison)
Hours:
Weekdays and Sundays: 10 AM – 6 PM
Saturdays: 10 AM – 9 PM
Details about and images from both exhibitions follow below:
David Adjaye Selects: Works from
the permanent collection
19 June 2015 through
14 FebRUARY 2016
Architect David Adjaye has chosen 14 magnificent West and Central
African from the museum’s great textile collection, and they are on display on
the first floor in the Cooper Hewitt’s
renovated Marks Gallery:
Below is a selection of images from what is on display:
ADINKRA CEREMONIAL WRAPPER (GHANA), mid-20th century.
Adire Wrapper (Nigeria), ca. 1960
Kente Prestige Cloth (Ghana), early–mid-20th century
Kente Prestige Cloth (Ghana), early to mid-20th century
Adinkra Ceremonial Wrapper (Ghana), mid-20th century
Man's Cap (laket) (Democratic Republic of the Congo), late 19th–early
20th century
Man's Hat (ashetu) (Cameroon), mid- to late 20th century
From the Museum’s online description:
Architect David Adjaye presents 14 West
and Central African textiles from the museum’s permanent collection in the
latest installment of the Selects
series. On view in the renovated Marks Gallery on the museum’s first
floor, the exhibition is the 12th in the ongoing series, in which prominent
designers, artists and architects are invited to mine and interpret the
museum’s collection.
Hailed as an architect with an artist’s sensibility and with
projects underway on four continents, Adjaye is known
for combining the aesthetics of his African heritage with classic, modernist
design. In exploring Cooper Hewitt’s collection, he has created a dialogue
between the museum’s textiles and his own “library of patterns” that he draws
on as a source of inspiration in his work. Having lived in Africa as a child
and visited each of the continent’s 54 nations as an adult, Adjaye
is deeply affected by the importance of textiles in the visual culture of
Africa, whose forms and patterns are often reflected in his buildings.
Highlights of the works on view include:
·
an Asante
kente cloth from Ghana
·
a bògòloanfini mud cloth from Mali,
·
a Dyula ikat wrapper from Ivory
Coast
·
a Yoruba
indigo dyed wrapper from Nigeria
June 24, 2015 through
January 3, 2016
[this
exhibit had been at the Nasher Sculpture Center in
Dallas (13 September 2-14 – 4 January 2015) and at the Hammer Museum in LA (15
February – 24 May) before coming to NYC]
The title of the show, “Provocations,”
is apt, as Thomas Heatherwick’s designs challenge our expectations
and push the borders of our aesthetics—in a wonderfully creative,
and usually (but not uniformly) successful way.
The title piece from the exhibit, Provocations, is an industrial,
futuristic sculpture at the entrance to the exhibit that invites visitors to
crank out a 4”-wide printed description of the exhibition (detail below the
main photo)
The studio’s first permanent project in 2000-2 in London, the Paternoster
Vents, is presented by the exhibit in the following way:
There are two models, both presented below. The first gives more of the sense of the
above ground part of the completed project:
the second gives a better sense of its scale:
There were examples of a Spun (2007-11): a spun metal,
circular object designed to answer the question: “Can a rotationally symmetrical form make a
comfortable chair?”
Al Fayah Park, Abu Dabi
(2010- ). “Can you make a park out
of the desert?” The solution is to
preserve and celebrate the existing environment by raising cracked portions of the
desert surface on columns top form a shade canopy for the people and vegetation
beneath.
One of Heatherwick’s
justifiably most famous projects is his Rolling Bridge (2002-4) in London,
used by pedestrians to cross an inlet behind Paddington Station, but which
rolls up into a ball to allow the passage of boats
Even more well-know was his UK Pavilion in Shanghai for the 2010
World Expo. Known as the “Seed
Cathedral,” it had 66,000 acrylic rods extending outward from its surface. On the outside (according to the exhibit), it
formed “a shimmering dandelion-like surface.
Inside, the rods’ tips displayed the collection of
250,000 seeds” from the Millennium Seed Bank at London’s Kew Gardens.
The rods channeled sunlight into the building, but also contained tiny fiber
optic lights for when it was dark outside.
What follows are two models and a photograph of the seed on the inner
ends of some of the rods on the building’s interior:
And a very controversial project in NYC, Pier 55 (2014- ), a park
built out over the Hudson River:
There were a couple of good articles written when the show
opened: James Russell’s “The
Price of Thomas Heatherwick’s Imagination” in
the NY
Times of 30 July; and “Review”
by Julie V. Iovine
on 13 July in the Wall
Street Journal.
From the Museum’s online description:
Provocations
is the first museum
exhibition to introduce the imaginative work of British designer Thomas Heatherwick and his London-based studio to an American
audience. Heatherwick is known for his unique design
concepts ranging from products, infrastructure and temporary structures, to
large-scale architecture projects around the world.
Highlights of the work on view include:
the Learning Hub at Singapore’s Nanyang
Technological University
the 2014 Bombay Sapphire Distillery in Laverstoke, England
the 2012 redesign of London’s double-decker buses, known as the New Routemaster
the cauldron for the London 2012 Olympic Games torch
architectural models and large-scale renderings for Pier55, a public park and performance space to
be constructed in the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side
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