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MAD | Museum of Arts and Design

MAD champions artists, designers, and artisans, presenting contemporary art and design through a craf
(1542)

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) champions contemporary makers across creative fields—presenting artists, designers, and artisans who apply the highest level of ingenuity and skill to their work. Since the Museum’s founding in 1956 by philanthropist and visionary Aileen Osborn Webb, MAD has celebrated all facets of making and the creative processes by which materials are transformed, from tradi

tional techniques to cutting-edge technologies. Today, the Museum’s curatorial program builds upon a rich history of exhibitions that emphasize a cross-disciplinary approach to art and design, and reveals the workmanship behind the objects and environments that shape our everyday lives. MAD provides an international platform for practitioners who are influencing the direction of cultural production and driving 21st-century innovation, fostering a participatory setting for visitors to have direct encounters with skilled making and compelling works of art and design.

09/03/2026

Opening Sept 12, Nike: Form Follows Motion is the ultimate exhibition of the world’s most influential sports brand. Explore 50 years of design history and learn how a small running outfit in Oregon grew into a global phenomenon. Showcasing sport as a driver of design innovation, the exhibition assembles rarely seen experimental prototypes, original design studies, rarities, and one-offs alongside the brand’s most iconic shoe collaborations.

Nike: Form Follows Motion is organized by Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany, and is curated by Glenn Adamson and assistant curator Marcella Hanika, with exhibition design by JA Projects and graphic design by Daniel Streat, Visual Fields.

Tap the link below to reserve your tickets now!
https://madmuseum.org/exhibition/nike-form-follows-motion

09/02/2026

Thursday, September 17th, join artist and educator Lindaluz Carrillo
for an open bar and hands-on workshop exploring banana leaf weaving! Drawing from her Peruvian heritage and family’s professional boxing legacy, Carrillo will share how banana leaves became an important material in her practice. Participants will learn basic weaving techniques and create their own sculptural weavings using banana leaves, while exploring how materials can carry stories of family, identity, and cultural tradition.

Design Happy Hour invites the public ages 21 and up to enjoy an open bar of wine and beer while exploring design techniques with some of the city's most exciting makers and creatives. All activities take place in the Museum’s studio classroom.

Tap the link below to register.
https://madmuseum.org/events/design-happy-hour-banana-leaf-weaving-lindaluz-carrillo

09/01/2026

Born on this day in 1938: Marvin Lipofsky, pioneer of the American studio glass movement and a MAD Collection artist.

As a grad student at UW–Madison, Lipofsky took part in Harvey Littleton's history-making glass workshops, held in a homemade hot shop on Littleton's farm. He later founded glass programs at UC Berkeley and, in 1967, at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

Berkeley in those years was a center of activism, home to the Free Speech Movement and, by 1965, protests against the Vietnam War—and that energy runs right through his work. On the bottom of Glass Form—Nineteen Dots, Eleven Stripes (1966), featured above, Lipofsky left a pointed question: "What are you doing about the war?"

Made before the intricate forms he'd become known for, this piece captures the free-spirited spirit of 1960s Northern California. Taking a cue from the slick finishes of hot rods, he played with decals, oil coatings, flocking, and metallic surfaces—like the silvered interior you see here, engraved with dots and stripes.

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Marvin Lipofsky
In Me Glass Form - Nineteen Dots, Eleven Stripes, 1966
Glass

08/28/2026

Jessica Lichtenstein's After the Fall is a series of hyperreal landscapes in which traces of human civilization—dilapidated skyscrapers, eroded technology, and other man-made creations—have been overtaken by nature. In 18th- and 19th-century landscape painting, ruined abbeys and classical sites overgrown with trees and vines symbolized the passage of time, human mortality, and the sublime power of nature. Here, you encounter Lichtenstein’s images of nature’s awesome force through the Gothic windows of an architectural ruin, extending the symbolism of the fragility of human achievement and nature’s inevitable reclaiming of culture into real space

See these works and more in Jessica Lichtenstein: Rewilding on view now.

Tap the link in bio for tickets.
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Select works from the After the Fall series:

Jessica Lichtenstein
Oread Mountain Nymphs, 2024
C-print on plexiglass with wood frame

Jessica Lichtenstein
Epimelides Meadow Nymphs, 2024
C-print on plexiglass with wood frame

Jessica Lichtenstein
Naiad Water Nymphs, 2024
C-print on plexiglass with wood frame

Jessica Lichtenstein
Oread Mountain Nymphs, 2024
C-print on plexiglass with wood frame

Jessica Lichtenstein
Oread Mountain Nymphs, details. 2024
C-print on plexiglass with wood frame

08/27/2026

Starting next Wednesday, September 2, join MAD’s mending club on Pay-What-You-Wish evenings, taking place on the first Wednesday of every month. Come rehab your much-loved garments using MAD’s array of supplies and tools to patch holey sweaters, darn socks, and stitch up worn sleeves. Connect with fellow menders, share your favorite techniques, or learn something new in a welcoming, collaborative space. Facilitated by fiber artist and puppeteer J Hann
( ).

Advance registration is recommended. Tap the link below to sign up today!

https://madmuseum.org/events/darn-it-mending-and-repair-mad

08/22/2026

🎂 Happy 100th Birthday to Helen Mason 🎂

We are celebrating artist Helen Mason, who turns 100 today, and we're thrilled to share that MAD has recently acquired a selection of her works.

Born in Boston in 1926, Mason trained as a sculptor and metalsmith and spent her career working in the space between jewelry and sculpture, challenging the line between craft and fine art. For her, the two were never separate disciplines, just different scales of the same investigation. She approached jewelry as small-scale sculpture: intimate objects made to live in direct relationship with the body, with the wearer becoming an essential part of the work.

Her pieces are marked by geometric abstraction, the influence of Minimalism, and a deep engagement with Japanese aesthetics, wrapping, bundling, containment, and the symbolic use of black. Moving fluidly between precious and industrial materials, gold, silver, aluminum, steel, rubber, acrylic, and Teflon, she gave unconventional media the same aesthetic weight as traditional jewelry.

MAD audiences first encountered her work here in 1994, when Sculptural Concerns: Contemporary American Metalworking traveled to what was then the American Craft Museum, placing her alongside artists like Jamie Bennett, Mary Lee Hu, Albert Paley, and Helen Shirk. Around the same time, her circular brooches, industrial materials paired with pearls and precious metals, graced the cover of Metalsmith magazine.

We're honored to bring her work into the collection. Happy birthday, Helen.
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1.Helen Mason
Brooch from the Circular Brooch series, c. 1990
Gold, silver, pearls, Teflon, and rubber

2. Helen Mason
Necklace from the Circular Brooch series, c. 1990
Rubber and silver

3. Helen Mason
Drawing from the Circular Brooch series, c. 1990
Pencil on paper

4. Helen Mason
Drawing from the Circular Brooch series, c. 1990
Pencil on paper

08/21/2026

Just for families! Join us tomorrow, Saturday, August 22, for a morning of artmaking and storytelling with the authors of The Boredom Monster Book, a playful fantasy about creativity, curiosity, and finding adventure away from screens.

Authors Mariana Ellery and Clara Reschke's story about screen-free time, a child and a boredom monster, celebrates the power of noticing. Cameron faces a no-screens, very dreary, worst-day-ever. Oh, the misery! But wait ... maybe there's adventure to be found in boredom after all. When his ordinary living room transforms into the Land of Boredom, Cameron wanders into a bleak landscape where everything seems terribly tedious and drowsily dull. But then a mysterious, friendly monster appears, and Cameron learns to celebrate the silence of a distraction-free world while finding his creative spark.

Free for ages 12 and under. Tap the link in below for tickets.:
https://madmuseum.org/events/storytelling-and-art-making-boredom-monster-book

08/20/2026

Next Thursday, August 27, we invite you to come bind and unwind!

Discover the art of bookbinding while creating your own handcrafted sketchbook or journal inspired by the botanical beauty of Alice Riehl’s Porcelain Florilegium. Led by book artist and educator Hayley Ferber, this beginner-friendly workshop offers a welcoming introduction to bookbinding while celebrating craftsmanship, creativity, and the enduring relationship between art, nature, and the handmade.

Tap the link below to reserve your spot!

https://madmuseum.org/events/handmade-journals-and-sketchbooks

08/19/2026

On this day in 1943, fiber artist Françoise Grossen was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

In the 1960s, Grossen turned away from the loom and its rigid grid in favor of an intuitive, freehand approach — building large-scale suspended sculptures from knots, loops, braids, and twists. At a time when fiber was still associated with utility or ornament rather than fine art, her three-dimensional handling of rope was a quietly radical gesture, one that unsettled the long-held hierarchy placing craft beneath art.

She drew inspiration from the functional world: rope suspension bridges, marine ropes for docking and anchoring, Peruvian khipus, and insect exoskeletons. She translated these into abstraction through a patient, cumulative process she describes as "rope upon rope, braid after braid." Alongside contemporaries like Eva Hesse, Sheila Hicks, and Magdalena Abakanowicz, her work helped make space for artists to move freely between fiber, textile, and sculpture today.

In 2016, MAD presented Françoise Grossen Selects as part of our POV series, in which she mined the permanent collection and set her own rope sculptures in conversation with our baskets and works in fiber, wood, and metal.

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Françoise Grossen
Contact III, 1977
Photo: Joshua White

08/17/2026

We are accepting applications for Cycles 46 (February 15, 2027–August 15, 2027) and 47 (August 16, 2027–February 13, 2027) of the MAD Artist Studios program!

MAD's Artist Studios program invites visitors to ask questions, view works in progress, and gain firsthand exposure to the creative process of resident artists and designers working on site at the Museum. The residents represent diverse experimental creative practices and participate in a wide range of intergenerational public programming. During their time here at MAD, the artists welcome Museum visitors inside their workspaces for conversation and close looking.

Established in 2008, the program is an innovative model for museum education and has been an essential platform for nearly 200 artists and designers who proceeded to exhibit work at MAD and other major institutions, including the Queens Museum, Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum, among others.

Alums include Shradha Kochhar, Chenlu Hou, Michelle Im, Melissa Joseph, Soull Ogun, Anthony Akinbola, Sarah Zapata, Liz Collins, and many more.

Applications are due by Thursday, September 10 at Midnight.

Tap the link below to learn more and apply:
https://madmuseum.org/artist-studios

Photos by Beatriz Meseguer of On White Wall

08/16/2026

Today is your last day to experience the Haas Brothers’ fantastical mid-career survey, Uncanny Valley. This richly immersive exhibition celebrates the artists’ genre-blurring work across art, design, craft, and technology.

MAD is open until 6 pm today.

Tap the link below for tickets.
https://madmuseum.org/exhibition/haas-brothers-uncanny-valley

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2 Columbus Circle
New York, NY
10019

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http://www.madmuseum.org/

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