MOMA’s Exhibit of a Century of Design for Kids

by The CraftWhack Team updated 03/04/2021, 10:09 pm 1.8k Views 3 Comments

Tomorrow is the opening of MOMA’s exhibit, Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000. It is all about design for kids for that hundred years. How can I finagle a trip to NYC before it closes on November 5?

wooden blocks — Ladislav Sutnar. Prototype for Build the Town Building Blocks. 1940–43. Painted wood, large block: 1 3/4 x 2 3/4 x 2 3/4″ (4.4 x 7 x 7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Ctislav Sutnar and Radoslav Sutnar

This makes me giddy. Why? Because it’s all sorts of smarty pants museum people putting together an exhibit that focuses on exactly what I’m trying to write about on my blog. (Even though I use more words like totally and awesome, and I haven’t noticed museum folks using those words too often.) In this case the smarty pants museum people are curator Juliet Kinchin and curatorial assistant Aidan O’Connor, both from the Architecture & Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art.

skippy scooter — The Americans John Rideout and Harold Van Doren designed the painted steel Skippy-Racer scooter around 1933

The show doesn’t merely focus on kids’ toys, but reaches into playgrounds, schools, and furniture, amongst other elements. It explores the importance placed on nurturing our children’s creativity and well-being, and how design directly influences children.

plastic modular chairs — Chica modular plastic children’s chairs of 1971, by Jonathan De Pas, Donato D’Urbino, Giorgio DeCurso, and Paolo Lomazzi for BBB Bonacnia

Two ideas come into play with this exhibit that fascinate me, as they are at work simultaneously: design for children, based on making an object or space specifically for children, and the idea that many designers were influenced by how children acted and interacted with their environments, which in turn influenced how the designers worked. The exhibit shows us just how closely children and design have been interwoven over the last century.

century of the child book — Century of the Child book from Artbook.com

If you are planning to go, there is a PDF to download for a family activity guide, and they have a number of gallery talks and related events as well.