The Mandarin Duck and Avian Art at the Cooper Hewitt
The Mexico City-born designer Rebeca Méndez’s new exhibition includes some two dozen taxidermied bir
Department of Design Media Arts professor, Rebeca Méndez is a designer and artist who has achieved excellence and distinction in both fields. She has an international reputation as a leading voice in the production of socially-grounded, aesthetically rigorous design, innovative media-inflected arts, and monumental permanent public art. On view now through Jun. 16, 2019, Rebeca Méndez Selects is the 17th exhibtion in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Selects series, for which designers, artists, writers, and cultural figures are invited to mine and interpret the permanent collection.
"For the past several weeks, New Yorkers have been abuzz over a mysterious visitor. A mandarin duck, an intricately colored waterfowl native to East Asia, has taken up residence alongside the mallards in the Central Park Pond, drawing crowds and inspiring memes, dog costumes, and a Twitter account (bio: “I’m not from around here”). Pundits have argued that the frenzy betrays a desire for good news. But perhaps, the Mexico City-born designer Rebeca Méndez suggested the other day, something deeper is at play. “In our own normal life, we have patterns that we are so used to. When something”—an anatine interloper, say—“comes in and breaks that, it’s incredibly exciting,” she said. “The world suddenly collapses—it’s like a wormhole from far-east Asia to Manhattan.”Méndez recently curated an exhibition of avian art at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, across the street from the Park. It’s part of the “Selects” series, in which the museum invites a guest to put together a show from objects in its collection. (Previous guest curators include the architect David Adjaye and Ellen DeGeneres.) Méndez, a National Design Award winner and the director of a U.C.L.A. design lab, focussed on birds partly in response to migration in the news. “We are setting our boundaries tighter and tighter—we are entrenching in our location,” she said. Birds, with their ability to fly away, “represent incredible freedom.”
On a recent Friday, Méndez and Christina De León, a Cooper Hewitt curator who worked on the show, took a spin through the galleries. In addition to items from the Cooper Hewitt’s holdings (a seventeenth-century falcon hood, a paper-clip-size flying robot), Méndez had included some two dozen taxidermied birds from the National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C., home to six hundred and forty thousand-odd avian specimens collected by explorers and naturalists since 1818."— Dylan Kerr, Dec. 24 & 31 Issue
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the The New Yorker website.
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