Making Home Saturday Series: Welcome Home - An Introduction from the Curators

In celebration of the opening of Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial, Cooper Hewitt presents session one of the inaugural Making Home Saturday Series program. Curators Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Christina L. De León, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson introduce the exhibition’s themes, participants, and development, and explore how the exhibition’s diverse contemporary perspectives and approaches to home across the United States, U.S. Territories, and Tribal Nations create a greater understanding of how design impacts this country, its value systems, and landscapes. The conversation is moderated by previous Smithsonian Design Triennial curator Andrea Lipps.

The Making Home Saturday Series is a quarterly program that pairs special guests with participants from Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial. The program’s two-part sessions include conversations on exhibition-related themes, including systems, belonging, memory, care, and building, as well as the contemporary concepts of home related to race, class, migration, climate, and technology.

SPEAKERS
Alexandra Cunningham Cameron is the curator of contemporary design and Hintz Secretarial Scholar at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She has served as the editor in chief of independent arts journal The Miami Rail, the creative director of the Design Miami fairs, and an independent curator, writer, and advisor whose work has spanned public art, collections, educational programs, and exhibitions engaging an expansive roster of international artists, designers, and architects. Focusing on multidisciplinary practices, Cameron has organized major projects with Yona Friedman, Dozie Kanu, Philippe Malouin, Duro Olowu, and the late fashion designer Willi Smith. She has contributed to publications such as the Financial Times, PIN-UP, Cultured, and Topical Cream in addition to numerous journals, books, and monographs. Cameron’s work has been acknowledged with awards from the Association of Art Museum Curators, the Smithsonian, Wallpaper, and Designboom. Portrait photo credit: Jeremy Liebman.

Christina L. De León is Associate Curator of Latino Design and the Acting Deputy Director of Curatorial at Cooper Hewitt. Her research focuses on the design and decorative arts of the Americas. De León has held previous positions at the Americas Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Michelle Joan Wilkinson is a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she is expanding the museum’s collections in architecture and design. She co-curated two inaugural NMAAHC exhibitions: A Century in the Making: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture and A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond. In 2018, she served as lead organizer for the museum’s three day symposium, “Shifting the Landscape: Black Architects and Planners, 1968 to Now.”

Andrea Lipps (Moderator) is Associate Curator of Contemporary Design and the Founding Head of the Digital Curatorial Department at Cooper Hewitt—the museum’s first new collecting department in more than 125 years. As Head, she leads efforts to collect and care for new media types in the permanent collection and innovates scholarship in the field. Lipps further conceives and organizes ambitious, award-winning exhibitions and publications including, most recently, “An Atlas of Es Devlin” (2023). Her past exhibitions and books include “Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial” (2019), “The Senses: Design Beyond Vision” (2018), and “Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial” (2016). An accomplished writer and editor, Lipps authors and edits publications, essays, and scholarly articles on contemporary design and digital collecting. She is a sought-after academic lecturer and visiting critic, and frequently moderates and speaks at events, symposia, and academic conferences.