
In the Bartels Gallery, Floor 1L
This exhibition is a collaboration between the Johnson Museum of Art and the College of Human Ecology (CHE) on the occasion of the College’s hundredth anniversary.
In the mid-1960s, Cornell’s College of Home Economics began considering a change of name to reflect its new focus: away from the language of home economics, which had come to suggest a traditional, female sphere of homemaking and toward a less gendered, more innovative, and interdisciplinary approach to optimizing daily life both within and outside the home.
The works on view center artists’ explorations of the domestic from that same period up to today. Beginning with the radical feminist interventions of Martha Rosler’s Body Beautiful, Beauty Knows No Pain series (1966–72), it asks how some of the most recognized and exciting artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have questioned, redefined, and reconceptualized home—a loaded word that signifies something unique for each of us. From the spatial interrogations of Gordon Matta-Clark (Class of 1968) to the anxious imagery of Nan Goldin, to the joyful and biting diaristic series of Nona Faustine and Michael Jang, Home Making suggests the modern home as a space of play and contemplation, scientific inquiry and creative exploration, and far more complex and boundless than the physical structure that contains it.
This exhibition draws from the permanent collection of the Johnson Museum, the Cornell University Library’s Human Sexuality Collection, and CHE’s Department of Human Centered Design collections, including the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, the Design Resource Library (dLib), and the Design Furniture Collection.
The exhibition team at the Johnson Museum included Kate Addleman-Frankel, Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography; Andrea Inselmann, Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art; and Annie Abernathy, curatorial assistant. The CHE exhibition team was Eddy Man Kim, Director of the Digital Design and Fabrication Studio and Senior Lecturer of Human Centered Design; Denise Green, Associate Professor of Fashion Design + Management, Director of Graduate Studies in Fiber Science + Apparel Design, and Director, Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection; and Sephra Lamothe, PhD student and graduate assistant.
Selected Artworks
At home with the Jangs, from the series The Jangs
Michael Jang
Princess and the queen
Nona Faustine
Dollhouse
Yinka Shonibare