New York has a joyful new reason to climb to Museum Mile. At the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Design Across Time: Exploring the Smithsonian’s Design Collection fills the entire first floor of the Carnegie Mansion at 2 East 91st Street with 125 works, in a multi-year presentation that opened on June 26, 2026, and runs through 2028.
It is the museum’s first extended exhibition drawn from its own holdings. Cooper Hewitt has collected design since 1897, and its national collection now holds more than 215,000 objects spanning thirty centuries and six continents. Curators chose 125 of them — including significant works newly brought out of storage, recent acquisitions on public display for the first time, and beloved classics of American and global design history.
Instead of a strict timeline, the galleries follow how designers actually work, in six cheerful clusters: Play and Tweak, Repeat, Transform, Show Off and Simplify. An ancient Egyptian lotus-shaped cup from around 1100 BCE can meet Toots Zynsky’s glowing glass vessel Aurifero II from 2023, Art Sims’s bold 1992 Malcolm X poster, an ornate royal jewel cabinet from 1825–26, and Stephen Burks’s Roping Stool made from rope and textile waste.
Product and graphic design, fashion, textiles, furniture, wallcoverings, digital design and architecture all share the rooms, with object rotations planned during the run, large-print labels, image descriptions and sensory materials to welcome everyone. As Happy City News readers will love, the message is warm and simple: design is everywhere, it serves a civic purpose, and everyone is an expert user of the world around us.
Photo: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
