Hella Jongerius at the National Museum of Women in the Arts

Fri, Oct 30 - Sun, Feb 28  2016

From October 30, 2015 until February 28, 2016, work by Hella Jongerius will be featured in the exhibition “Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft, and Design, Midcentury and Today,” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The exhibition features more than 40 midcentury and contemporary artists who explore the concepts of Modernism. 

Hella Jongerius 

Hella Jongerius is an industrial designer working from her Berlin-based studio, Jongeriuslab. Since graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven (the Netherlands) in 1993, Jongerius has fused industry to craft, high technology to low, and tradition to the contemporary by reintroducing an artisanal hand to the industrial process throughout her work with furniture, ceramics, and textiles. Hella Jongerius’s research on colors, materials, and textures is never complete. All her questions are open-ended, and all her answers provisional, taking the form of finished and semi-finished products. These are part of a never-ending process, and the same is essentially true of all Jongeriuslab designs: they possess the power of the final stage, while also communicating that they are part of something greater, with both a past and an uncertain future. The unfinished, the provisional, the possible – they hide in the attention for imperfections, traces of the creation process, and the revealed potential of materials and techniques. Through this working method, Jongerius not only celebrates the value of the process, but also engages the viewer, the user, in her investigation.

About National Museum of the Women in the Arts

Founded in 1981 and opened in 1987, NMWA is the only museum solely dedicated to celebrating the achievements of women in the visual, performing and literary arts. The museum’s collection features 4,700 works from the 16th century to the present created by more than 1,000 artists. The NMWA is located at 1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C., in a landmark building near the White House. It is open Monday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and Sunday, noon–5 p.m. For information, call 202-783-5000 or visit nmwa.org. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for visitors 65 and over and students, and free for NMWA members and youths 18 and under. Free Community Days take place on the first Sunday of each month.