Friday, February 13: Art of Noise at the Cooper Hewitt Museum

“Music is the soundtrack to our lives, and design is at the center of how we experience it,” said Maria Nicanor, director of Cooper Hewitt. “Through iconic works that many will be able to trace back to their own memories, ‘Art of Noise’ underscores how design shapes the very emotions of our auditory encounters.  On view across the museum’s entire third-floor gallery, the exhibition will feature more than 300 artworks drawn largely from the collections of Cooper Hewitt and SFMOMA, as well as Stockholm-based studio teenage engineering’s unique choir installation and Turnbull’s immersive listening room. Above: Detail from 2010 Goldenvoice poster by Chuck Sperry

Unforgettable album covers, flamboyant posters and eye-catching flyers demonstrate graphic design’s ability to provide a visual accompaniment to auditory experiences.

“Art of Noise” features music posters by designers such as Milton Glaser, Victor Moscoso, Bonnie MacLean and Takenobu Igarashi, alongside album covers that range from the 1950s mid-century modern style to the 1980s post-modern era.

Dozens of psychedelic rock posters from the 1960s and 1970s will also be on display. These posters became iconic symbols of their time and reflect the music and ideas of San Francisco’s counterculture—a movement that spread coast-to-coast and beyond.

The exhibition also features devices for listening to music, dating from the early 1900s to 2023, including a jukebox, radios, hi-fi systems, speakers and headphones that enhance the enjoyment of music through their design. Central to the exhibition’s experience and located on the first floor of Cooper Hewitt is the installation of a large-scale, handmade, audio system by multi-disciplinary artist Devon Turnbull. The “HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3”   

The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian DesignMuseum, 2 East 91^st Street, New York, NY Info

Thaddeus Mosley | Glass at Karma Chelsea

Before becoming associated with steel, Pittsburgh, which has been Thaddeus Mosley’s home for eight decades, was known as the center of the glass industry in the United States—in 1926, when the artist was born, the city made about eighty percent of the country’s glass. Mosley’s use of this found material with a local history relates to his practice of salvaging wood from Pittsburgh’s forestry division and nearby lumber mills.

With these glass sculptures, the artist chose pieces that are at turns crystalline and cloudy, ranging in surface texture from burnished smooth to jagged like the face of a cliff. The artist has combined pieces of varying textures, colors, and shapes into an array of small-scale sculptures that are at once foils and companions to his often-monumental carved-wood sculptures. In both media, Mosley works with the inherent properties of the material rather than against them. Polished and molded by the elements and time, the fragments Mosley joined together each have their own 

While Mosley’s rippling wood surfaces catch and reflect light, the glass sculptures refract it, revealing the bubbles and striations that mark their interiors and casting an almost transcendental glow on their surrounds. Mosley’s guiding principle of “weight in space” remains key: despite the apparently precarious arrangements of glass elements, these sculptures remain stable, balanced through the artist’s careful calibration of mass and gravity. 

Through March 28 at Karma, 549 West 26^th Street, New York, NY Info

Jakkai Siributr | There’s no Place at Canal Projects

Bringing together both monumental and intimate hand-stitched works, this exhibition explores Jakkai Siributr’s experience of  Thailand’s political and social histories, personal narratives of grief and remembrance, and the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Siributr’s practice draws from both private and collective experience, translating contemporary Thai social realities into works that oscillate between personal testimony and historical record. His textile assemblages—often made from uniforms, clothing, and domestic fabrics—become memorials to resilience, protest, and healing.

This presentation expands upon Siributr’s ongoing investigation into collective storytelling through textile and participation, creating a space where personal and communal histories are interwoven through acts of care and collaboration.

At the center of the exhibition is  the artist’s  ongoing collaborative embroidery project that began in the Koung Jor Shan Refugee Camp on the Thailand–Myanmar border. The project invites participants from around the world to contribute stitched reflections on home, displacement, and belonging. As a collective act of making, There’s no Place builds connections between communities through shared labor, empathy, and storytelling.

Through January 30 at Canal Projects, 351 Canal Street, New York, NY Info

Michele Pred: Projecting Democracy at Nancy Hoffman

This exhibition of work by Swedish American artist Michele Pred brings together five large-scale photographs, sculptural installations, and new mixed- media works that explore themes of equality, bodily autonomy, freedom, and collective resistance. The  work uncovers the cultural and political meaning behind everyday objects, with a concentration on feminist themes such as equal pay, reproductive rights, and personal security 

Using architecture as canvas, Pred projects bold feminist statements, phrases like “Vote for Democracy” and “Equal Pay”, and “This Land is Your Land” to reclaim public space as a forum for dialogue. These proclomations are executed guerrilla-style, independently produced, temporary, and without permission. There was no collaboration or affiliation with the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., or any other public building included in this series. Pred often integrates images of her artwork with the text slogans, creating a visual conversation between message, form, and place. A looping projection inside the gallery extends this dialogue globally, featuring images from additional activations in Berkeley, Washington, D.C., and Sweden. Through these diverse works, Projecting Democracy underscores the power of collective visibility and the importance of art keeping the democratic spirit alive through a unified language of resistance and hope.

Through March 21 at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, 520 West 27^th Street, New York, NY Info

Relics curated by Show&Tell at Platform Project Space 

Platform Project Space is pleased to present Relics, a group exhibition featuring the work of ten artists whose pieces explore ideas contained within that word.  A relic can be both venerated as a holy object or relegated to the dustbin. Paradoxically it is a symbol of the eternal as much as the has-been. From paintings and drawings to sculpture. the obiects in this exhibition allow us to consider art's relationship to the supernatural and its appeal to our most deeply held convictions about what is sacred or profane. Left: Gaby Collins-Fernandez, 12/31/25 (Last drawing of the year), 2025, right: Mitch Patrick, Lv (love is crazy quilted), 2020

The artists in this exhibition share an interest in time, a requisite concept for the creation of anything deemed a relic.  Each artist in the show has participated Show&Tell Art Talks, organized by artists Alyssa Fanning, Michael Aaron Lee and Patrick Neal. Founded with the goal of bringing artists and creatives together over conversation at the New York Irish Center, LIC, NY, S&T works to foster an exchange of ideas and creative thought. Info

Through February 28 at  Platform Project Space, an artist-run space located at 20 Jay Street, #319, Brooklyn, NY Info

Ruth E. Carter: Afrofuturism in Costume Design at African Aemerican Museum in Philadelphia

Costume designer Ruth Carter has brought memorably bold and colorful looks to the screen for decades. Carter earned her first credit on Spike Lee’s School Daze in 1988 and has gone on to have a long working relationship with the director. In 2019, she made history as the first Black designer to win an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, for her work on Black Panther. From indie films to Marvel blockbusters, Carter’s work is now the subject of a well-deserved exhibit, Ruth E. Carter: Afrofuturism in Costume Design,  now on view in Philadelphia.

The goal of the exhibit is to show Carter’s work throughout her career and how it blended inspirations from various historical American periods with the ideas and visual storytelling behind Afrofuturism. “Although these pieces are fantastical and imaginative, they are very grounded and very real culture and very real African culture and design and creativity,” said Dejay Duckett, vice president of curatorial services for AAMP.

The exhibition features over 70 of Ruth Carter’s costumes, as well as sketches, ephemera and even her childhood sewing machine. Visitors are guided through 40 years of her multifaceted career, with costumes on display from Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Amistad, Selma, Black Panther, Dolemite is My Name, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and more. As visitors tour the exhibit space, they will be able to see rare, hand-drawn images of legendary film characters and experience a behind the scenes look into Ruth’s research, design, and production process which will inspire the creative story-teller within.

Through September at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, 701 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA Info