African American Design

With a collection of over 210,000 design objects spanning thirty centuries, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum possesses one of the most diverse and comprehensive collections of design works in existence and is the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. Collectively, the objects are a tribute to the remarkable plurality of design: its objects, processes, techniques, and makers. The design works of African Americans are a significant and continually expanding contributor to the collection’s mission to both represent the extraordinary achievements of American design and to create provocative dialogues between the historic and the contemporary, the past and the future, the global and the local. These design objects created by prominent African American designers and selected from the museum’s permanent collection date back to 1950.  Currently, the museum’s collecting efforts are focused on the acquisition of contemporary American holdings, including many works by African American National Design Award winners, such as Walter Hood, Stephen Burks, and Charles Harrison.

Cheryle Dent and Kim Bressant-Kibwe established their Brooklyn-based design firm African Home, Inc. in 1989. Benin was inspired by West African textile designs.

Born to Jamaican parents in Cuba in 1917 and raised in Brooklyn, Art Smith received a scholarship to attend Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Smith’s teachers encouraged him to study architecture and seek work in the civil sector. However, Smith chose to major in sculpture. After graduation, Smith took a night course in jewelry making at New York University. He also became friends with the pioneering African American jewelry designer Winifred Mason, who became his mentor.  After working for Mason in her studio and store in Greenwich Village, Smith opened his first store on Cornelia Street in 1946.Smith became an integral part of New York City’s post-war community of African American artists that included the writer James Baldwin, composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn, singers Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, actor Brock Peters, and expressionist painter Charles Sebree. By the mid-1950s, Smith’s career was flourishing and he received coverage in both Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue for his biomorphic, modernist designs. Smith’s jewelry has been the subject of several major museum exhibitions and monographs.