When finalizing plans for their new home in 1902, the Carnegie family engaged interior designer and landscape painter Lockwood de Forest to create a unique space for their private library. De Forest conceived a total environment produced by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company in India, a venture he established with trading heir Maganbhai Hutheesing in 1881 to promote and commodify the aesthetics of Indian craft.
Tin Nguyen, Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, and Kirsten Kilponen (CFGNY), Installation of "Contrast Form Gestalt" in Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution
The resulting room copies and collages details from Ahmedabad tombs, mosques, mausoleums, and domestic architecture, now placed in an elite US context. In response, multidisciplinary collective CFGNY (Established 2016, New York, New York) interrogates the practice of anonymizing Asian design through the decorative arts economy.
In “Contrast Form Gestalt,” the mansion’s library is recontextualized with contemporary construction materials, revealing through careful cutouts carved teak details and collaboratively painted landscapes that splice together elements of paintings that de Forest made on his travels around the world. At the center is a group of unattributed objects from Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection, each originating from a region that informed de Forest’s work. By arranging them in the shape of a human figure, CFGNY critiques the 19th- and 20th-century collecting practices of Western museums, which systematically depersonalized makers. Together, these interventions draw attention to how appropriation can dilute cultural artistic practices and invite a closer look at the complex legacy of inherited material culture in the US.
CFGNY is Tin Nguyen, Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, and Kirsten Kilponen.