Pirouette: Turning Points in Design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art looks at design as an agent of change rather than static form. Organized by Paola Antonelli with curatorial assistant Maya Ellerkmann, the show is on MoMA’s Floor 3 and runs through November 15, 2025; it opened January 26, 2025.
Drawn largely from MoMA’s collection, the exhibition assembles more than 100 works spanning from the late 19th century to today. Familiar touchpoints—Milton Glaser’s original I ♥ NY sketches, the Sony Walkman, and Apple’s Macintosh 128K—appear alongside the updated Accessible Icon, underscoring how symbols and consumer devices have reshaped communication and everyday behavior.
The checklist adds depth with Susan Kare’s early Macintosh icon drawings; Ed Hawkins’s climate visualizations Warming Stripes and Global Temperature Spiral; and Golan Levin and Shawn Sims’s open‑source Free Universal Construction Kit, which bridges incompatible toy ecosystems. These sit with work like Gabriel Fontana’s Multiform series, extending the show’s attention to social and cultural contexts.
MoMA complements the galleries with a 15‑track audio playlist featuring reflections from designers and writers. A one‑day Pirouette Abecedarium program (February 21, 2025) framed 26 “turning points” as an A‑to‑Z of design ideas; a recording is available. Together, these elements position the exhibition as an inquiry into leverage points where design redirects expectations around technology, consumption, and expression.
Rather than a retrospective, Pirouette reads as a map of influence: how everyday objects and visual systems—labels, logos, interfaces, and tools—quietly reorganize habits, access, and meaning over time. The result is a clear view of design’s cultural work across more than a century.
