Join curator Dr. Emily M. Orr for a behind-the-scenes peek into the making of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s exhibition Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols (on view now through September 2, 2024). This project marks the 50th anniversary of designer Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols (1972), a manual that compiled and categorized thousands of symbols in use internationally and helped to elevate their importance in our world. This talk will share the origin story of the Symbol Sourcebook and the fascinating histories behind many of the symbols that instruct, protect, entertain, empower, and connect us.
About the lecturer
Dr. Emily M. Orr is Associate Curator and Acting Head of Product Design and Decorative Arts at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Design from the Royal College of Art/Victoria & Albert Museum. Her exhibitions at Cooper Hewitt include Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols (2023-present), Underground Modernist: E. McKnight Kauffer (2021-22), Botanical Expressions (2019-21) and Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s (2017). Orr has published on a range of design history topics and is the author of Designing the Department Store: Display and Retail at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Lecture information
The lecture will be on March 28th, 2024, from 5:30-7:30pm in the Alumni Reading Room. Please RSVP through this link.
* This event is for the Pratt community.
