Cooper Hewitt Announces 2016 Exhibition, "Beauty―Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial"

NEW YORK, Sept. 15, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum will present "Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial," the fifth installment of the museum's popular contemporary design exhibition series, from Feb. 12 through Aug. 21, 2016. With projects ranging from experimental prototypes and interactive games to fashion ensembles and architectural interventions, "Beauty" will fill most of two floors of the museum with more than 250 works by 62 designers from around the globe.

"Featuring recent work from the most outstanding voices in the global design scene, 'Beauty' will expand the discourse around the transformative power of aesthetic innovation," said Caroline Baumann, director of the museum. "The exhibition will celebrate design as a creative endeavor that engages the mind, body and senses with works of astonishing form and surprising function."

Organized by Assistant Curator Andrea Lipps and Senior Curator of Contemporary Design Ellen Lupton, the exhibition explores beauty through seven lenses: extravagant, intricate, ethereal, transgressive, emergent, elemental and transformative.

Inaugurated in 2000, the Triennial series looks at new developments in design as they surface in studios, fairs, shops, galleries and media around the world. The 2016 Triennial is dedicated to beauty, celebrating design as a creative endeavor that engages the spectrum of our senses. It will present objects, fashion, media and spaces that employ changing concepts of beauty in order to expand design's social and material possibilities, sensorial experiences and working methods.

A 276-page book with 274 images, designed by Kimberly Varella of Content Object Design Studio, is published by Cooper Hewitt and distributed by Artbook | DAP (Distributed Art Publishers), $50.00. The publication "Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial" will be available beginning December 2015, in advance of the exhibition.

"Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial" is made possible by generous support from Edward and Helen Hintz.

Additional funding is provided by Margery and Edgar Masinter, May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation Inc. and Rockwell Group.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM
As the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design, Cooper Hewitt educates, inspires and empowers people through design. The museum has recently undergone a transformative renovation resulting in an entirely new visitor experience and 60 percent more exhibition space to showcase one of the most diverse and comprehensive collections of design works in existence.

SOURCE Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum