Designs for Different Futures, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from October 22 through March 8, will explore the challenges and opportunities that humans may face in the years and centuries ahead. Visitors will encounter lab-grown food, seaweed textiles, and ballet shoes made with sweat among a range of works that raise many questions, including about what technologies may hold for intimacy, identity, and citizenship.
While no one can precisely predict the shape of things to come, the works in the exhibition are firmly fixed on the future, providing design solutions for a number of speculative scenarios. In some instances, these proposals are borne of a sense of anxiety, and in others of a sense of excitement over the possibilities that can be created through the use of innovative materials, new technologies, and, most importantly, fresh ideas.
"We often think of art museums as places that foster a dialogue between the past and the present, but they also can and should be places that inspire us to think about the future and to ask how artists and designers can help us think creatively about it," said Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. "We are delighted to be able to collaborate with the Walker Art Center and the Art Institute of Chicago on this engaging project, which will offer our visitors an opportunity to understand not only how designers are imagining-and responding to-different visions of the futures, but also to understand just how profoundly forward-looking design contributes in our own time to shaping the world that we occupy and will bequeath as a legacy to future generations."
Photo: PhoeniX Exoskeleton, ©suitX, Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art
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