David Adjaye Selects

June 19, 2015 – February 7, 2016
http://www.si.edu/

Architect David Adjaye mines the museum’s permanent collection for the 12th exhibition in the ongoing Selects series. The exhibition features 14 West and Central African textiles from the museum’s textile holdings, including an Asante kente cloth from Ghana, a bògòloanfini mud cloth from Mali, a Dyula ikat wrapper from Ivory Coast, a Yoruba indigo dyed wrapper from Nigeria and men’s hats from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Cameroon.

How Posters Work

May 8, 2015 – November 2015
www.cooperhewitt.org

Featuring nearly 125 works from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum's permanent collection, the exhibition shows how dozens of different designers—from prominent pioneers like Herbert Matter, Paul Rand, Philippe Apeloig and M/M Paris, to lesser-known makers—have mobilized principles of composition, perception and storytelling to convey ideas and construct experiences.

The exhibition features 14 principles of how designers look at the world: focus the eye, overwhelm the eye, use text as image, overlap, cut and paste, assault the surface, simplify, tell a story, amplify, double the meaning, manipulate scale, activate the diagonal, make eye contact and make a system.