Bridget Bartal is an emerging curator and design historian. She is the inaugural MillerKnoll Curatorial Fellow at Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, where her current project is an exhibition and publication titled “Eventually Everything Connects: Mid-Century Modern Design in the US” which opens summer of 2025. In 2022, Bartal received her MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan, while working at R & Company design gallery. In 2020, she received her BA in English Literature from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.
DC: First I’d love to just begin by learning a bit about the history of this exhibition and how it came together. What was the initial impetus for this show and how has it transformed from the initial idea to its final form?
Our Director, Andrew Satake Blauvelt, had identified that despite Cranbrook being known as the cradle of Mid-Century Modernism, we’d never conducted a large-scale survey of mid-century American design. Cranbrook brought the idea to MillerKnoll, and the company sponsored my position which entailed three years of research, working on both the exhibition and the accompanying publication.
Very early on, Andrew had the idea to use a quote by Charles Eames: “Eventually everything connects: people, ideas, and objects.” We were thinking about these networks of people, ideas, and objects that come together to make Mid-Century Modern design so long lastingly impactful. With that quote as a title and a starting point, I traveled across the country to universities, museums, and archives, to chart out these magnetic nodes that drew people in, whether it was an architectural firm or a project like General Motors Technical Center. I’d sketch these crazy connective maps onto 11 x 17” paper to illustrate which designers knew each other and how. I must have looked like a mad scientist.
So we were really using that idea of connections as the framework for the entire project. The hardest part, undoubtedly, was knowing when to cap it, because you can go on forever under the connections premise. Eventually we got a page count from Phaidon, the publisher, and you have to make the call of what fits and what doesn’t. But we were continually asking ourselves, “Is there someone we’re missing?”
DC: The exhibition also makes a point of highlighting artists, designers, and architects who haven’t been as highlighted in the history of mid-century modernism. Was this part of the premise for the exhibition from the very beginning?
Yes, very explicitly it was. We could easily curate another show of Cranbrook designers such as Charles and Ray Eames or Eero Saarinen, but that’s a tired story, so we used this as an opportunity to expand the Cranbrook design collection to chart a more complete and more dynamic look at the history. That pursuit resulted in about 50 new acquisitions of furniture, textiles, and lighting for Cranbrook Art Museum’s permanent collection.
I like to use designer George Nelson as an example of how we charted in a more inclusive, fuller story of the inner workings of a design office. Nelson was Director of Design at Herman Miller from 1947–1972. Typically, the lead designer’s name goes onto the products. But let’s look beyond George Nelson and into his prolific office. Nelson had fairly progressive hiring practices for the period. One of his graphic designers was a woman named Tomoko Miho who worked there from 1960–1964, working on iconic catalogs and advertisements. Lucia DeRespinis was the only woman working specifically in industrial design, but there were also many other women in interior and exhibition design.
Taking Nelson Office as an example, let’s break down the division of labor. Who is the photographer for the catalogs, advertisements, and brochures? Who are the interior designers that are working closely alongside architects for these huge pavilions at the World’s Fairs? Who were the secretaries meticulously curating the corporate archive so the history could be preserved? Suddenly you see that there is a whole other universe of people involved who have their hands in these projects. It’s a more dynamic, interesting, dramatic, and entertaining story than the tale of one guy in his office who designed a bunch of furniture.
DC: Who are some of the designers that have perhaps been under-represented in previous histories of mid-century modernism that you are most excited to be showcasing here?
One of my favorite designers in the exhibition is Charles Harrison, the designer of the first ever plastic garbage can, the View-Master toy, and around 750 other products. He was a Black industrial designer that studied design in Chicago. After graduating, he would see job openings in the newspaper, but then he would arrive at the office to be told they were no longer hiring. Eventually, he connects with his mentor Henry Glass who gives him some work. The second Harrison gets just one foot in the door, word spreads like wildfire that he’s an incredible product designer. Suddenly he’s getting calls left and right.
Harrison goes on to a very prolific career at Sears, eventually becoming their first Black executive. Ultimately, it is a very celebratory story, but one full of hardships – as Harrison described in his autobiography — being Black in the rural south, growing up with dyslexia, and many other things working against him in a systemically racist industry and country.
There’s a quote that I love from his autobiography: “As an industrial designer, your purpose, your gift to the world, is to provide straightforward solutions to real problems for living, breathing human beings.” He didn’t want to be a hero — he wanted to anonymously make a better life for people through well-designed products. It wasn’t about becoming an icon or getting his name on all of these products. For example, we see hundreds of plastic garbage cans every day, and almost no one knows the innovation was by a Black designer. Now we can celebrate his successes.
DC: At a time in which there is a federal pushback on efforts to highlight diversity and issues of identity (gender, race, culture, etc.) in the arts, why do you think it remains important to continue this work?
In the case of, for example, Charles Harrison, identity became a very important facet for us to highlight. We wanted to make it clear how many hoops Harrison or other designers of colors had to jump through to land a spot in a firm. It felt very important to point out that certain people had to work that much harder in a system built against them.
At the same time, sometimes people don’t want to be singled out as a “woman designer” or “Black designer” or “Japanese American designer,” because it can often read as an essentializing grab at inclusion. To me, it’s all about intent. Make sure you’re truly embedded in your research – you can’t simply utilize the identities of others when it’s convenient for you and makes you look good. I would hope that goes without saying.
DC: What do you see as the most pressing social and political responsibilities of curatorial work?
As a curator and historian, you’re given an unbelievable amount of access to museum collections, archives, personal collections, and artists and designers themselves. It’s a lot of responsibility to wield. Doing so responsibly and with passion is something that I take very seriously.
With curatorial work, it’s so easy to get bogged down in your own research and positionality that you forget that the primary goal is to bring other people into these stories that you spend time with day in and day out. I make a concerted effort to write almost any article so that almost anyone can understand what I’m saying, and I’m not using layers of jargon that exclude 90% of potential readers.
Also, at the end of the day, I am biased toward pushing people to learn more about design history. It’s my job to get people to think more closely about the products and objects we live with and interrogate who designs them – who gets to design them?
