Milestones of Design – 100 Years

Marking the bicentennial of the birth of Frederick Law Olmsted, perhaps best known for designing New York’s Central Park and Prospect Park and laying the philosophical foundation for the later creation of America’s national and state park systems, “Olmsted 200: Parks for All People” is uniting over 120 organizations in events, concerts, celebrations, and advocacy campaigns unfolding across the country all year.

In 1929, seven years after founding The Barnes Foundation, Dr. Albert C. Barnes and his wife Laura (left, in 1933) made their first of many trips to the American Southwest, initiating the couple’s collecting of Native American art; now, to kick off its centennial, the Philadelphia institution is presenting “Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in Community,” its first exhibition dedicated to the subject, its myriad Pueblo and Navajo pottery, jewelry, and textiles, including Ramona Sakiestewa’s wool-cotton Basket Dance/11 from 1991, on view through May 15.

Jeremiah Goodman would have become a centenarian this October. Although we lost the renowned artist and Interior Design Hall of Fame member in 2017, at age 94, his spirit and talent live on in perpetuity through the dozens of covers he illustrated for the magazine between 1952 and 1967. Among the standouts that would likely fly off newsstands today are his pink-and-white confection from May 1953 and verdant yet minimalist salon from November 1952. In addition to his magazine work, Goodman was invited into the private spaces of such notables as Carolina Herrera, Pablo Picasso, and Diana Vreeland to paint portraits of their rooms, either in gouache or watercolor, as seen in the Paris office of the late head of Fiat, Gianni Agnelli (below). Many of these were chronicled in Jeremiah: Inspired Interiors, his second monograph published by PowerHouse Books, released posthumously in 2018. Today, his illustrations are in the permanent collections of the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.