Uploaded April 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The Making Home Saturday Series is a quarterly program that pairs special guests with participants from Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial. The program’s two-part sessions include conversations on exhibition-related themes, including systems, belonging, memory, care, and building, as well as the contemporary concepts of home related to race, class, migration, climate, and technology.
In Session 2, CFGNY (Concept Foreign Garments New York), an artist collective established in New York in 2016, will lead us through a closer look at Contrast Form Gestalt, their Triennial commission which recontextualizes the Carnegie Mansion’s Teak Room with contemporary construction materials. They will be joined by writer and professor Eunsong Kim to discuss perspectives on 19th- and 20th-century collecting practices of Western museums which systematically depersonalized makers.
The Teak Room was originally the family library when the Carnegie home was built in 1902. For its interiors, the Carnegie family engaged interior designer and landscape painter Lockwood de Forest who conceived a total environment produced by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company in India, a venture de Forest established with trading heir Maganbhai Hutheesing in 1881 to promote and commodify the aesthetics of Indian craft. The resulting room copies and collages details from Ahmedabad tombs, mosques, mausoleums, and domestic architecture, now placed in an elite US context.
For the program, CFGNY members Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, and Tin Nguyen draw attention to systems of classification and knowledge as perpetuated through institutions and reflect on Kim’s recent publication The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property which considers how race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions.
The Making Home Saturday Series is a quarterly program that pairs special guests with participants from Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial. The program’s two-part sessions include conversations on exhibition-related themes, including systems, belonging, memory, care, and building, as well as the contemporary concepts of home related to race, class, migration, climate, and technology.
In Session 2, CFGNY (Concept Foreign Garments New York), an artist collective established in New York in 2016, will lead us through a closer look at Contrast Form Gestalt, their Triennial commission which recontextualizes the Carnegie Mansion’s Teak Room with contemporary construction materials. They will be joined by writer and professor Eunsong Kim to discuss perspectives on 19th- and 20th-century collecting practices of Western museums which systematically depersonalized makers.
The Teak Room was originally the family library when the Carnegie home was built in 1902. For its interiors, the Carnegie family engaged interior designer and landscape painter Lockwood de Forest who conceived a total environment produced by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company in India, a venture de Forest established with trading heir Maganbhai Hutheesing in 1881 to promote and commodify the aesthetics of Indian craft. The resulting room copies and collages details from Ahmedabad tombs, mosques, mausoleums, and domestic architecture, now placed in an elite US context.
For the program, CFGNY members Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, and Tin Nguyen draw attention to systems of classification and knowledge as perpetuated through institutions and reflect on Kim’s recent publication The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property which considers how race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions.
