There’s usually a trim crimson carpet on the grand carved-wood staircase inside the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, but earlier this month it was swapped out for an exuberant, black-and-white patterned rug by the 87-year-old Chicago-based artist Robert Earl Paige. Above the landing, Paige hung gauzy fabric panels featuring more of the African motifs his textile designs are known for, plus an inscription by the poet Robert Frost: 'Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.'
Since 2000, The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has staged triennial exhibitions that explore what is new and notable in the world of design. This year, it’s on the idea of home. The curators of ‘Making Home’—Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Christina de León, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson—commissioned 25 original installations from artists based in the United States and its tribal nations and territories that interpret the layered, nuanced, and personal meanings behind the term. 'Us being sneaky curators, we do not define home,' de León says. 'We allowed all of the participants in this exhibition to define home in their own ways.'
