Artifacts of Àlá
Exhibition design for Cooper Hewitt Museum
2021
Introduction
Exhibitions and museums give us the opportunity to explore history and heritage together. As part of an ongoing collaboration with Bronx-based food, design, and art collective Ghetto Gastro, Snøhetta developed the exhibition design for Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects, which ran at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City.
Created as the 19th installment of the Cooper Hewitt’s Selects series, Artifacts of Àlá was designed as a continuation of the series to explore and interpret the museum’s extensive collection of objects through the lens of Afrofuturism. Jon Gray harnessed this perspective to curate an exhibition that tells the story of Àlá, a young explorer from the year 2077 who is tasked with recovering and reuniting lost artifacts of the African continent. Situated in a futuristic fantasy where apocalyptic flooding has disrupted geopolitics and reconfigured everyday life around the world, the objects and exhibition frame Àlá’s expedition as a curatorial voyage through Black history and create a narrative for the liberatory potential of an anti-utopian future.
Technical details
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
To bring Gray’s speculative storytelling to life, Snøhetta designed a cinematic procession that pulls visitors through the exhibition as real-life objects and drawings illustrate scenes from Àlá’s fictional odyssey. These objects collide amid the sumptuous, ornate detailing of the Cooper Hewitt galleries. The drawings, created by the artist Oasa DuVerney, give visual shape to a curatorial narrative written by José Mejia. Taken along an open path, visitors experience Gray’s pairings through vitrines and floating podiums created by Snøhetta that render thought-provoking juxtapositions between the contemporary and the classic.
Photo: Matt Flynn
Photo: Matt Flynn
Photo: Matt Flynn
Photo: Matt Flynn
Photo: Matt Flynn
Photo: Matt Flynn
Photo: Matt Flynn
Photographs of the exhibition, taken by Myesha Evon Gardner, show in each instance, how the maroon walls and clear glass of the display cases reorient and guide visitors’ bodies through the gallery, pointing us toward the objects illustrated in Àlá’s ever-evolving narrative. A trek through textures and media, the exhibition positions ceramics, textiles, posters, and 20th-century artifacts against one another to rethink the traditional curio cabinet approach to collecting, repulsing the museum’s colonial tendencies through a process of reappropriation, reflection, and refraction.
As visions of the objects reflect across the display cases, and representations of these items existing in double and triple form across the drawings, visitors are encouraged to inhabit the in between spaces, where multiple readings are possible as individual journeys and narratives take unexpected turns.
2 About Jon Gray
Jon Gray’s curiosity has taken him around the globe and has had him seated across the table from world-renowned thinkers, artists and chefs, but he’s most passionate about home. A co-founder of the Bronx-based collective Ghetto Gastro, his work honors the block-to-block shifts and overlap in international cuisine and culture that happens in his borough. The collective is committed to feeding, inspiring and growing young entrepreneurs in the Bronx. Conversations about inclusion, race and economic empowerment are explored through food, as the group occupies the crossroads of design, music, film, visual art and cuisine.
3 About Oasa DuVerney
Oasa DuVerney is a New York native, an artist, and a mother. Selected exhibitions, residencies and media include: (2021) Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine: Paradise Is One's Own Place, Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn, NY; (2021) Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, NY, NY; (2020)2020 Women To Watch, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; (2020) Twenty Twenty, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; BLACK POWER WAVE, BRIC, Brooklyn, NY (2019); Something To Say, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn NY (2018); The Window and the Breaking of the Window, Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC (2016); The Brooklyn Biennial II, BRIC, Brooklyn, NY (2016); Through A Glass Darkly, Postmasters Gallery, NYC (2012); Civic Practice Partnership Residency, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2023-2024), Smack Mellon Studio Artist Residency (2014-2015); LMCC Workspace Residency (2012-2013); The Guardian UK, UK (2019, 2015), The Independent, UK (2016), Hyperallergic (2015, 2016, 2021), Palestine News Network (2013), and The New York Times (2022, 2020, 2012, 2011). Oasa DuVerney’s work is in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. She received her B.F.A. from SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology, and her M.F.A. from CUNY Hunter College.
4 About Myesha Evon Gardner
Myesha Evon Gardner is a Brooklyn, New York-based photographer and art director originally from Cleveland, Ohio. Cultural and social examinations by the way of personal experience guides her lens, which aims to expand a historically narrow societal presentation of underrepresented people and cultures. She directly challenges the limitations of such narratives through ongoing explorations depicting themes of legacy, love, and labor, offering an intimate view on the pride, joy, and self-determination of her family members and larger community.