The Stradanus Project (Cooper Hewitt, 2025)
Beginning in 2021, Cooper Hewitt embarked on a project to conserve, research, and digitize a book of sketches by Jan van der Straet (1523–1605), called Stradanus. The sheets of the book had, over time, been unbound, glued together, rebound, and sketched on, creating a fascinating art-historical puzzle unlocked by the conservation effort.
To present the materials and newly revealed sheets, I worked with the curators and cataloguers to develop The Stradanus Project, a webpage that detailed the conservation process, presented the artwork, and elevated existing and continuing scholarship around the artist. In addition to overseeing the editorial development and digital implementation of the main Stradanus Project webpage, I also designed a printable catalogue raisonné of the works associated with this project, creating a 730-page document pairing the sheets with detailed cataloguing and new translations.
Visit the webpage here; catalogue raisonné available for download here.
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A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes digital exhibition platform (Cooper Hewitt, 2023)
Accompanying an exhibition and publication of the same name, this digital experience created a platform to expand on the themes surrounding textile designer Dorothy Liebes with expanded research, scholarship, and archival references. I oversaw editorial development, working with the curators to organize and structure the experience, and then managed copyediting and transmission to the project’s dedicated researcher and digital content manager. I further contributed three essays of original scholarship and criticism.
The project has been awarded Excellence in Design, Virtual Exhibition (2024) by the Museum Association of New York and the Secretary’s Research Prize (2024) issued by Lonny Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
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Sarah & Eleanor Hewitt: Designing a Modern Museum exhibition (Cooper Hewitt, 2022)
This exhibition celebrated the collecting and educational philosophy of Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt, two sisters who founded the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, the collection of which has become that of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. I co-organized and project managed the exhibition with Margery Masinter, design historian and Hewitt scholar, in honor of the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Cooper Union galleries in 1897. The exhibition featured never-before-displayed archival materials and historical photography alongside treasures from the museum’s early collection.
The project was awarded Exhibition of the Year 2022 (2023) by The Victorian Society of New York for the exhibition’s role in preserving and elevating nineteenth-century art and design.
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“Signs of the Times” digital series (Cooper Hewitt, 2023–24)
As with many exhibitions and publications, mountains of additional research simply do not make it into the galleries or onto the page. This series, researched and written by design historian and symbols scholar Sue Perks, mined Cooper Hewitt’s extensive Henry Dreyfus Archive to reveal in incredible detail the work by Dreyfus and his team to develop The Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols (1972), which itself was the subject of the exhibition Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols (Cooper Hewitt, 2023–24). Across twelve posts, we explored never-before-published stories and documents about the famed designer and the production of the Symbol Sourcebook publication. On this project, I worked with Perks and curator Emily Orr to shape the series, managed editorial review from line edit to copyedit, and implemented the content for digital publishing.
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LGBTQIA+ Pride content (Cooper Hewitt and Smithsonian Institution, 2019–25)
In 2019, inspired by World Pride in New York City that June, I began a yearslong endeavor to elevate LGBTQIA+ design stories in Cooper Hewitt’s collection. I have produced a series of blogs on the topic—largely researched and authored by me—including HIV/AIDS and activist posters, queer modernisms, classical depictions, and collaborations with literary luminaries. I have also generated a database of queer designers and designs in the museum’s collection to document the research and encourage future scholarship in this area. My piece on the evolution of the Pride flag into the Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride flag, which was hung on the museum’s façade in 2023, is the highest-performing blog post on Cooper Hewitt’s platform.
I additionally served as History & Collections Chair of Smithsonian Pride Alliance, an LGBTQIA+ resource group within the Smithsonian, working to connect LGBTQ stories and resources across the many units and holdings of the Smithsonian.
Read some related pieces here.
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Cooper Hewitt History Design Topic (Cooper Hewitt, 2022)
Working at a classic New-York institution (“classic” in the sense that things have been many things and the institution’s history came from a few different places), I recognized the need to aggregate the resources we had produced around the museum’s history in one place. Scholarship around the museum’s founders at a prior location, a book about the Gilded-Age mansion where the museum lives, the large umbrella of the biggest brand in museums on the planet—all these narratives became cleanly grouped together to tell the story of the history of Cooper Hewitt. I utilized my detailed institutional knowledge and savvy content management skills to implement this digital project through Cooper Hewitt’s Design Topics online template.
Additionally, I oversaw the implementation of the Design Topics project overall, producing five Topics and working with graduate fellow Zachary Sauer to build out “Women in Design” on women designers in the museum’s collection as well as renowned curator and writer Ellen Lupton to compile “Health Design”—a poignant resource at the time, given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Matthew J. Kennedy 