REBECA MÉNDEZ SELECTS: COOPER HEWITT SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM
“Designer, artist, and educator Rebeca Méndez is the 17th guest curator of the Selects series, for which designers, artists, writers, and cultural figures are invited to mine and interpret the permanent collection. Winner of the 2012 National Design Award for Communication Design, Rebeca Méndez was born in Mexico and is the founder of Los Angeles-based Rebeca Méndez Design. For her installation, Méndez draws on the tragic history of Aztec ruler Moctezuma II’s private aviary to reflect on birds as sources of design inspiration and scientific study, as well as victims of climate change and human avarice. Selecting design objects from Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection, bird specimens from the National Museum of Natural History, and rare books from the Smithsonian Libraries, Méndez evokes the tensions arising from humankind’s conflicting impulses towards nature. Animated with the sounds and images of bird life, Rebeca Méndez Selects invites visitors to consider how culture, design, technology, and the natural world have converged throughout history.” —intro by my brilliant collaborator Christina L. De León, Associate Curator of Latino Design, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
I was invited to curate an exhibition for the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum’s Select Series. Providing a platform for provocative visual discoveries, I was given full access to the museum’s 220,000 objects to assemble an intimate show based on my vision for Rebeca Méndez Selects. I chose to explore humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world. The show was framed by the sixteenth-century account of Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés’ destruction of Tenochtitlan, during which the aviaries of Aztec ruler Moctezuma II were burned. Part of an extensive private menagerie, the aviaries contained thousands of birds from across the region, and all were burned alive—the most poetic, fragile, and beautiful aspect of the city, senselessly destroyed. For me, this historic event was a turning point, highlighting a societal shift from a moment of curiosity—in which humans sought to understand nature through collection, observation and study—to a time of conquest, greed and destruction. To provide historical context and a scientific anchor for the exhibition, I chose to include bird specimens from the National Museum of Natural History representative of the diverse species collected by Moctezuma II. The inclusion of these examples underscored the need for the protection of specimens for subsequent generations, as well as the use of archival collections to gain knowledge and understanding of the world via observation and study.
For the exhibition design, I organized the objects by themes—Invaded, Objectified, Nurtured, Symbolized, Identified, Invented, Feathered, Inspired, and Hunted—to foreground humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world. I designed the exhibition catalog and co-authored the catalog essay: ‘Feathered: Beyond the Aviaries.’
In the press release, Caroline Baumann, director of the Cooper Hewitt, said: “Within the design world, Rebeca is an impassioned voice for environmental awareness through a multidisciplinary body of work rooted in her identity and elevated with her knowledge of science, history and visual culture. For this ambitious installation, Rebeca has assembled objects, from an extraordinary Resplendant Quetzal specimen to an autonomous flying microrobot about half the size of a paperclip, to illuminate design’s interplay with the natural world.”
Press:
Review in The New Yorker.
DISEÑO | Feathered by Design: Rebeca Méndez Selects
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsaUchJddCA
I was invited to curate an exhibition for the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum’s Select Series. Providing a platform for provocative visual discoveries, I was given full access to the museum’s 220,000 objects to assemble an intimate show based on my vision for Rebeca Méndez Selects. I chose to explore humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world. The show was framed by the sixteenth-century account of Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés’ destruction of Tenochtitlan, during which the aviaries of Aztec ruler Moctezuma II were burned. Part of an extensive private menagerie, the aviaries contained thousands of birds from across the region, and all were burned alive—the most poetic, fragile, and beautiful aspect of the city, senselessly destroyed. For me, this historic event was a turning point, highlighting a societal shift from a moment of curiosity—in which humans sought to understand nature through collection, observation and study—to a time of conquest, greed and destruction. To provide historical context and a scientific anchor for the exhibition, I chose to include bird specimens from the National Museum of Natural History representative of the diverse species collected by Moctezuma II. The inclusion of these examples underscored the need for the protection of specimens for subsequent generations, as well as the use of archival collections to gain knowledge and understanding of the world via observation and study.
For the exhibition design, I organized the objects by themes—Invaded, Objectified, Nurtured, Symbolized, Identified, Invented, Feathered, Inspired, and Hunted—to foreground humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world. I designed the exhibition catalog and co-authored the catalog essay: ‘Feathered: Beyond the Aviaries.’
In the press release, Caroline Baumann, director of the Cooper Hewitt, said: “Within the design world, Rebeca is an impassioned voice for environmental awareness through a multidisciplinary body of work rooted in her identity and elevated with her knowledge of science, history and visual culture. For this ambitious installation, Rebeca has assembled objects, from an extraordinary Resplendant Quetzal specimen to an autonomous flying microrobot about half the size of a paperclip, to illuminate design’s interplay with the natural world.”
Press:
Review in The New Yorker.
DISEÑO | Feathered by Design: Rebeca Méndez Selects
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsaUchJddCA
