Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America at Milwaukee Art Museum

28 September 2018 - 6 January 2019

Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America explores the projects of over 40 designers who advocated for playfulness and whimsy within their creations for corporations, domestic interiors, and children. The exhibition presents play as a serious form of inspiration, experimentation, and problem solving. In midcentury America, such playful design occurred against the backdrop of a booming consumer market and as a counterbalance to Cold War–era anxiety. Furniture, toys, textiles, films, posters, ceramics are among the objects featured.

The Archives department at R & Company is pleased to loan a 1959 portable oven design drawing from the Estate of the Swedish-born American industrial designer Greta Magnusson Grossman.

Co-organized with the Denver Art Museum