Design arts
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Overview
The new Design Arts Gallery is located in the Lori Efroymson Aguilera & Sergio Aguilera Gallery on the Museum's third gallery level, which is principally devoted to showing objects from the post-WWII era. International in scope, the objects on display in the Design Arts Gallery include furniture, product design, glass, ceramics and metalwork objects which trace the evolution of design since 1945. The 24 works on view are among 85 recent acquisitions in the Museum's rapidly expanding collection of 20th- and 21st-century design objects.
The IMA's Design Center, a retail initiative on the Museum's ground level, provides visitors the opportunity to purchase many of these contemporary design objects, including furnishings, home decor and gift items.
Highlights of the design arts collection
Frank Gehry, Bubbles Chaise Lounge from the Experimental Edge Series, New City Editions USA, designed in 1979, produced in 1986. Constructed of thick, undulating pieces of cardboard topped with layers of cut and shaved cardboard that form a highly textural surface, the Bubbles chaise is Gehry’s most significant furniture design.
Gaetano Pesce, UP3 Lounge Chair, C&B Italia, produced in 1969. Bearing its original stretch fabric skin over a polyurethane form, the UP3 lounge chair uses innovative materials of the era to respond to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s.
Hans J. Wegner, The Round Armchair, MM Mobler, produced in 1949. Displaying the superior Scandinavian craftsmanship of the immediate post-war period, this wooden armchair with caned seat exemplifies the warmer side of Modernism.
Events
Many of the Museum's recent acquisitions of contemporary European design were on display in European Design Since 1985: Shaping the New Century, a major traveling exhibition co-organized by the IMA, which ran from March 8-June 21, 2009.
