Western design has long obeyed the end of the century dicta and Beginning of the 20th century Berlin And Paris – This ornament is crime, this form follows the function, that clarity prevails over complexity. Non -European traditions, however, were not peripheral influences to design, but rather systems with their own complex codes. Slide now famous glass forest At the Ford Foundation, I felt that the water will rise towards something impactful, to live and deeply modern Reverberations: lines in the history of design. The exhibition traces the pulse of design through indigenous, black cultures and other historically marginalized cultures – not as isolated oases, but as multiple continuous and resounding centers.
A form of the refusal of the program of the hegemony of Western design is its decentration of anthropocentric perspectives. Two Tlingit Formline Raven masks draw the viewer's gaze – a wood, a digital; One made by father, the other son. This powerful Dyade bases the accounts of creation in native cosmology: the “raven mask” of Nathan P. Jackson embodies the portfolio of light, while Jackson Polys reinterprets it in “issue (Verbal name) (1) Imitation; counterfeit | “The one that the crows” “(2025), a mask rendered in 3D turning slowly, sparkling with a pixelated iridescent, it is constantly and reconstituted, an entity in flow.
This land in non -Western cosmologies extends to the examination of tradition through contemporary lenses. Melissa Cody's brilliant tapestry gestures with standardized Navajo geometric abstractions, disturbed by digital problems: the dark purple soil of a pixealized argyle panel, for example, bursts in black, gray and white. This shocking but magnificent collision of ancestral code and technological interference finds a parallel in the “brilliant Sunset of Sarah Sockbeson on the Carabassett” (2011), a basket with sweet herbs whose transparent weaving reaches a delicate and waterproof functionality rivaling with modern design.
In all oceans and archives, these artists engage alternative knowledge, historical cartography and the fight against surveillance, the dislocation design of industrial and power industrial systems that have been challenged for a long time. A “Lukasa Memory Board” from the end of the 19th century manufactured by the LubaFor example, encoding grooves and constellations of pearls using techniques that have once mapped geographies and local genealogies more than a century before Starlink hovers over the head. In a similar approach, William Villalongo and the map of Shraddha Ramani, “Black Migration ½” (2025), draws from one of the less known sociological hobbies of the Wood Web – the visualization of pioneer data – drawing the slave trade on a disadvantaged map. In it, Europe is decent, resized, dismissed as a paper taught adventure in paper – an uncompromising cartographic design of the Empire's Grid.
These acts of recovery of non -Western knowledge informs Jeffrey Gibson's assertion of indigenous sovereignty. Gibson's pyramid sculpture “because once you enter my house, it becomes our house” (2020) engages the idea of simultaneous timeWith slogans like “in numbers numbers numbers / too too / big to ignore” and “the future is present” sporting its facades. He contrasts the stereotypes of indigenous peoples as incapable of complex industrial exploits of design by honoring the metropolis of the Mississippian of JerkaIncluding more than 120 mounds on the ground on a massive scale, including the colossal Moundrepresents an unprecedented feat for prehistoric engineering and organized work.
I left Reverberations Not with the feeling of discovery, but of recognition – to see with strength and clarity which had long been obscured by the brilliant dazzling of European modernism. From dense navajo weaving geometries to semiotics with code switching to Gibson's sculpture, the spectacle dismantles the myth of a singular design line and replaces it with something more precise and more arresting: a world in which design has always been plural, relative and located. If modernism has once flattened the difference in the name of universality, Reverberations Redraw the map entirely – a card where the center and the edge are no longer fixed, but continuously in motion.
Reverberations: lines in the history of design Continue at the Ford Foundation Gallery (320 East 43rd Street, Murray Hill, Manhattan) until May 3. The exhibition was organized by Brian Johnson and Silas Munro.
