Discover the designers and design styles that reimagined modernism and exported radical new ideas across the world, including the work of designers Isamu Noguchi, George Nakashima, Charlotte Perriand and Ray and Charles Eames, and the Bauhaus, Milan Memphis and Surrealist movements.
This is the final seminar in the three part series: Observations: Moments in Design History.
With a focus on the NGV’s leading collection of historical decorative arts and design, across three seminars historians, writers and curators from around the world examine the movements, materials and manufacturers that shaped global design across centuries.
The entire collection of presentations, conversations and lectures will be transcribed into a printed publication, giving audiences the opportunity to revisit the content from Observations: Moments in Design History. Participants can pre-purchase a copy of the book, set to be released in May 2024, when booking into the seminars.
NGV Members, students and educators enjoy discounted tickets to all Observations seminars.
Program schedule released closer to the event. Participants will have access to content for 4 weeks following the seminar.
TOPICS & SPEAKERS
20th century Viennese Design
Dr Christian Witt-Dörring has a Ph.D. in art history from the university of Vienna and was head of the furniture department at the Austrian Museum of Applied arts in Vienna from 1979 until 2004. A specialist in the history of furniture and interiors, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he was a consulting curator at the Neue Galerie New York from 2004 until 2018. Besides comprehensive activities as a lecturer and teacher on the history of decorative arts, he has curated many major exhibitions, such as The Price of Beauty. 100 Years of the Wiener Werkstätte, Josef Hoffmann Interiors. 1902-1913, and Birth of the Modern. Style and Identity in Vienna 1900.
Surrealism and Design
Dr Kathryn Johnson, is Curator and Head of Exhibitions at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol.
Bauhaus Style
Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin. She holds a European Research Council Advanced Grant for the project “Expanding Agency: Women, Race, and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture.” In 2021-22 she was an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Her books include Architecture since 1400 (Minnesota, 2014), and Modernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany (Minnesota, 2018). James-Chakraborty is the recipient of the 2018 Gold Medal in the Humanities from the Royal Irish Academy.
Mid-Century Modern as a key to understanding tech innovation and lifestyle change
Sarah Teasley is a historian of design, technology and society and Professor of Design at RMIT University. She has published extensively on how designers and manufacturers used new materials and technologies in furniture and industrial design in the twentieth century. Her research focuses on two areas: how people work creatively with new biotechnology and materials and how aspects like class and gender shape how people experience design work, today and in the past. She is the author of Designing Modern Japan (2022), co-editor of Global Design History (2011) and author of numerous articles and book chapters. Her research is highly collaborative and transdisciplinary.
Post-war Italian Design
Catharine Rossi is a design historian and Professor of Architecture at University for the Creative Arts Canterbury, UK, where she leads research in the School of Architecture and Design. Research interests include contemporary design, post-war Italian design and architecture, craft, club culture, feminism, and environmentalism. Rossi co-curated exhibitions, At Home: Panorama de Vies Domestiques at Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne in 2022, and Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 to Today at Vitra Design Museum in 2018.
Looking back, looking forward
Alice Rawsthorn is an award-winning design critic and author, whose books include Design as an Attitude, Hello World: Where Design Meets Life and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli, senior curator of design at MoMA, New York. Alice’s weekly design column for The New York Times was syndicated worldwide for over a decade. In all her work, Alice champions design’s potential as a social, political and ecological tool that can help to foster positive change.
Observations: Moments in Design History is generously supported by an Anonymous donor