Paola Antonelli


Paola Antonelli is an Italian author, editor, architect, and curator. She is of Lombard ancestry. She is currently the Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture & Design as well as the Director of R&D at The Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
Antonelli was recognized with an AIGA Medal in 2015 for "expanding the influence of design in everyday life by sharing fresh and incisive observations and curating provocative exhibitions at MoMA". She was rated one of the one hundred most powerful people in the world of art by Art Review and Surface Magazine.
Although a recipient of a laurea degree in architecture from the Politecnico di Milano university in 1990, she has never worked as an architect. Antonelli has curated several architecture and design exhibitions in Italy, France, and Japan. She has been a contributing editor for Domus magazine and the design editor of Abitare magazine. She has also contributed articles to several publications, among them Metropolis, the Harvard Design Review, I.D. magazine, Paper, Metropolitan Home, Harper's Bazaar, and Nest. In 2014 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Royal College of Art.

Career

Lecturer

From 1991 to 1993, Antonelli was a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught design history and theory. In the spring of 2003, she started to teach a course of design theory at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She has also lectured elsewhere on design and architecture in Europe and the United States and served on several international architecture and design juries.

Curator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Antonelli joined MoMA in February 1994 and is a curator in the Department of Architecture and Design there. Her first high-profile exhibition for MoMA, "Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design", was followed by "Thresholds: Contemporary Design from the Netherlands", "Achille Castiglioni: Design!", "Projects 66: Campana/Ingo Maurer", "Open Ends," and "Matter". Her exhibition "Workspheres" was devoted to the design of the workplace of the near future. In 2005 she curated the exhibition entitled "Safe: Design Takes on Risk" for MoMA.
She curated the exhibition entitled "Safe" in 2005 based on her show at the International Design Conference in Aspen, similarly entitled "Safe: Design Takes on Risk." Other recent projects include a book about food from the world over, as examples of distinctive design, and a television program on design. As a curator, Antonelli has added various video games to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and she has been attempting to include Boeing 747 in MoMA's permanent collection as well.
Together with Jamer Hunt, Antonelli established an installation entitled Design and Violence which focuses on the physical representation of some of humanity's most prominent features, such as sex, aggression, and smelliness. One piece, for example, is a vial of synthetic sweat. Of the exhibit, Antonelli says, "We wanted objects that have an ambiguous relationship with violence." Each object--an outline of a drone, a self-guided bullet, a stiletto--is selected to highlight both the beneficial and also the destructive side of design. Design is so multidimensional nowadays, and Antonelli and Hunt aimed to represent this.
In 2017, Antonelli and Michelle Millar Fisher curated "Items: Is Fashion Modern?," an exhibition that explores 111 items of clothing and accessories that have had a strong impact on the world in the 20th and 21st centuries The Museum of Modern Art, New York and taught a related massive open online course Fashion as Design.

Design Philosophy

Paola Antonelli's objective is to change the perception of design, making sure that people are aware of the importance of design in every day life. She believes that design is an incredible expression of human creativity and that designers should feel responsibility towards the users they create for. Without design, innovation would be futile, because no one would be able to use any new inventions. She is frustrated by the misconception that design is just styling and feels that it is her job to help people realize that it is so much more.

Controversy

In an exhibit that featured video games such as Pac-Man, Tetris, and Minecraft, viewers are intended to actually play the games in order to showcase the interaction design of these products. The Guardian, for example, responded, "Sorry MoMA, Video Games Are Not Art".

Publications

Contributions