The collection at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Library focuses on design and decorative arts. We house hundreds of reference and book materials used by researchers, scholars and students alike. more »
Category: Art and Design
It is a truth universally acknowledged that of all creatures, great and small, the mosquito is the absolute worst. It is the most deadly species on the planet, killing over more »
August 2019 will mark the 50th anniversary of the mother of contemporary music festivals: Woodstock. Held over three days in 1969, the festival featured three-days of performances for folk and rock artists like Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. The legacy of the festival was cemented by the Woodstock documentary and a song of the same name by folk luminary, Joni Mitchell. That’s a lot of talk about Woodstock when the festival wasn’t actually held there. Woodstock the event was actually held in Bethel, a neighboring town in upstate New York. Woodstock itself wasn’t even considered as a site for the festival. According to Woodstock the Oral History (1989) the only connection between the concert and the town is that the event’s promoters originally considered building a music studio in Woodstock, NY and incorporated under the name Woodstock Ventures. So what about the other Woodstock? Though it didn’t host the eponymous music festival, Woodstock, NY had been home to a thriving art colony since the early 1900s.
In honor of Pride Month, we’re featuring several members of the LGBTQ community whose work is represented in our Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library. We appreciate their willingness to share more »
In the series called “The ABCs of the Corcoran Artist Files” the American Art and Portrait Gallery (AA/PG) Library will explore artists through the materials from the recent Corcoran Vertical File Collection donation by featuring artists whose surnames begin with that letter. This time we are looking at the artists whose last names that start with J.
We are back with another entry of the ABCs of the Corcoran! This month we have some great files with rich materials on artists with strong ties to the Washington, D.C. area.
This post was written by Ariel Macon, a Masters of Library and Information Science student at the University of Kentucky. Ariel interned with the Smithsonian Libraries in March 2019 as more »
This post was contributed by Evelyn Meynard, graduate student in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies program offered jointly by the Parsons School of Design and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and Elizabeth Broman, Reference Librarian, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Library.
All incoming students in The New School Parsons History of Design and Curatorial Studies (MA) Masters’ Degree Program at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum take an object and research based class called Pro-Seminar. This course trains students in conducting formal analyses, writing catalog entries, and making visual presentations that require students to conduct and integrate primary and secondary source research. The Cooper Hewitt Library regularly collaborates with faculty and students, providing research resources, curriculum consultation and Special Collections presentations for classes. Selecting one work from the Cooper-Hewitt collection to study during the semester, that ”work” can be a book from the Cooper Hewitt Design Library presented by staff during curatorial orientations.