Photo: National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo. Image courtesy of Nasjonalmuseet

In addition to its Annual Conference in Dubai, ICOM–DESIGN is also organizing a separate 2025 International Symposium on the theme of “Collection Displays Reassessed” at the new National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (Nasjonalmuseet), 28–30 October, 2025. This program, organized by Nasjonalmuseet Senior Curator and ICOM–DESIGN board member Dr. Denise Hagströmer, will be followed by a special post-symposium tour to local destinations 30 October–1 November. Stay tuned for more information to come!

Photo: Museum of the Future, Dubai

Join ICOM–DESIGN for our 2025 Annual Meeting at the World Trade Centre, Dubai, during ICOM’s triennial General Conference, 11–17 November 2025. Find more information on their newly launched website: https://dubai2025.icom.museum/
 
The overall theme of ICOM Dubai is “The Future of Museums in Rapidly Changing Communities,” with three subthemes: “Intangible Heritage,” “Digital Technologies,” and “Youth Power.”

ICOM–DESIGN is planning three separate joint sessions with the international committees GLASS, COSTUME, and DEMHIST on the theme of “Adornment and Identity,” with slight variations depending on the partnering committee. We will also have a specially organized DESIGN IC Day of touring museums and other sites in Dubai of relevance to decorative arts and design professionals. Look for a Call for Papers on this topic in the coming weeks. Presentations will likely be relatively short, 10–15 minutes, and should relate to “Adornment and Identity,” hopefully in the context of one of the conference subthemes. Deadline for CfP submissions is 15 June 2025 unless otherwise stated on the Dubai website. Please submit your proposals through the General Conference portal: Shaping the Future of Museums and Heritage | ICOM Dubai 2025.  We will also send out a mailing to ICOM DESIGN members and members of interest as soon as the ICOM Dubai 2025 CfP registration is open.

Dwelling, Design, and the Decorative Arts
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, United States
Conference: November 19-21, 2024
Post-conference tour: November 22-23, 2024  

Photo: A visit to the Gropius House, home of Walter and Ise Gropius, Lincoln, MA, a property of Historic New England.

The Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, is the oldest continually operating museum in the United States, founded in 1799. And so it is fitting that it is also the first museum to install period rooms within its galleries as well as being an early leader in the preservation of historic houses. This commitment to “rooms” reflects a longstanding preoccupation with the domestic sphere in the world of decorative arts and design. Many of the decorative objects found in museums today were originally made for use in the home and by families, and so their interpretation and study must grapple with the domestic in a myriad of ways. 

A bedroom in Yin Yu Tang: A Chinese Home, Peabody Essex Museum. Photo by Dennis Helmar.

How do domestic objects reflect the values and mores of their time? How do they declare or hide their production histories? How do homes function as constructed spaces, and how do museums reconstruct them or, as is sometimes the case, create imagined interiors? Questions around gender, comfort, emotion, taste, function, politics, nationhood, technology are just a few of the topics that emerge when considering the decorative arts of the home. 

This conference explores domesticity and the home through decorative arts and design, and we invite papers that interpret all these terms (domestic, home, decorative arts, design) from a broad perspective. The town of Salem and the Peabody Essex Museum itself have numerous homes dating from the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries; however, this conference also welcomes papers that explore the domestic sphere both before and after the heyday of Salem’s historic architecture. In addition, explorations of non-traditional domestic spaces and their objects (ships, trains, institutional homes) are equally welcome, as we are interested in the “production of home” through objects in unexpected places. 

Why Salem?  

Salem is a historic New England city that served as a hub of cultural exchange at the crossroads of the early Atlantic World. An international port city, Salem was an eighteenth and nineteenth century center for global trade, art, furniture making and architecture. Today it is home to a density of historic houses and examples of architecture from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, including Yin Yu Tang, a reconstructed and relocated nineteenth century multigenerational merchant’s home from the Huizhou region of China. Salem is perhaps most famous for the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, and the city continues to explore and engage with this troubling yet compelling history. Its location on the North Shore of Massachusetts makes it a site of rich maritime history, and the city’s harbor provides both a dramatic backdrop to the workings of this contemporary community and an important and ongoing area of historic research.  

While Salem will serve as our home base for the conference, we will also explore sites of historic and contemporary decorative arts and design throughout the region. The post conference tour will take participants farther afield into broader New England. For attendees coming from outside the United States, this conference represents a unique opportunity to engage with Boston and New England’s rich museum resources. Its location along the Eastern seaboard also makes it convenient for further travel to major cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM 

CONFERENCE PROGRAM DOWNLOAD

Post Conference Excursion November 22-23
 

A post-conference overnight tour to museums and galleries in Western Massachusetts will take place Friday and Saturday, November 22-23, 2024

• Visits will include museums historic sites, contemporary art and craft galleries, and active artist studios. Limit 25 participants, first come first served.
  
  Post-Conference Program
  

Membership Requirements

Please note that all participants must be individual members or representatives of institutional members of ICDAD at the time of the conference. Spouses and other interested ICOM members will be welcome if space permits. Find more information about how to become a member of ICOM and ICDAD here: https://icom.museum/en/get-involved/

If you are already a member of ICOM, please log in to the IRIS memberspace and choose ICDAD as your primary International Committee: https://icom-museum.force.com/login 

Call for Papers

ICDAD 2024 Annual Conference Call for Papers: Dwelling, Design, and the Decorative Arts

Dwelling, Design, and the Decorative Arts
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, United States
Conference: November 19-21, 2024
Post-conference tour: November 22-23, 2024

Deadline extented: CFP closes August 10!

The Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, is the oldest continually operating museum in the United States, founded in 1799. And so it is fitting that it is also the first museum to install period rooms within its galleries as well as being an early leader in the preservation of historic houses. This commitment to “rooms” reflects a longstanding preoccupation with the domestic sphere in the world of decorative arts and design. Many of the decorative objects found in museums today were originally made for use in the home and by families, and so their interpretation and study must grapple with the domestic in a myriad of ways. 
How do domestic objects reflect the values and mores of their time? How do they declare or hide their production histories? How do homes function as constructed spaces, and how do museums reconstruct them or, as is sometimes the case, create imagined interiors? Questions around gender, comfort, emotion, taste, function, politics, nationhood, technology are just a few of the topics that emerge when considering the decorative arts of the home. 

This conference explores domesticity and the home through decorative arts and design, and we invite papers that interpret all these terms (domestic, home, decorative arts, design) from a broad perspective. The town of Salem and the Peabody Essex Museum itself have numerous homes dating from the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries; however, this conference also welcomes papers that explore the domestic sphere both before and after the heyday of Salem’s historic architecture. In addition, explorations of non-traditional domestic spaces and their objects (ships, trains, institutional homes) are equally welcome, as we are interested in the “production of home” through objects in unexpected places. 

ICOM-ICDAD ANNUAL CONFERENCE | LISBON 2023

ORNAMENT

10-12 OCTOBER 2023

PALÁCIO NACIONAL DA AJUDA, LISBON, PORTUGAL

Click here for the Conference Program

Click here for the Program of the Post-Conference Tour

“Ornament is not only produced by criminals; it itself commits a crime,” So said architect and designer Adolf Loos in his 1910 lecture-turned-essay “Ornament and Crime,” where he described the effort in designing and creating ornaments as superfluous and wasteful and helped to set the stage for the minimalist, stripped-down forms that would shape modern architecture and design for much of the twentieth century. More than fifty years later, postmodern designers rejected the strict functionalism of modern design, with Robert Venturi declaring, “more is more, less is a bore,” and Ettore Sottsass poetically describing decoration as “a state of mind, an unusual perception, a ritual whisper.”

 The debate over ornament—what is its purpose, what should it look like, how should it be applied, and is it even necessary at all—chronologically and geographically transcends any of these figures and is in fact as old as the field of decorative arts itself. Skilled craftspeople have been producing ornament-laden decorative arts for more than a millennia. Throughout the world, cultures have developed complex relationships to ornament, making it an ideal topic for ICDAD’s 2023 annual meeting. 

This year’s ICDAD conference invites papers that consider the many dimensions of ornament and its multiple roles in decorative arts and design. For instance, what is its role today? How have relationships to decoration evolved over periods of time?  What are its social and political functions? Does ornament enhance or obscure meaning and use? How do different cultures address ornament and decoration, and where have they served as a connector between communities? How does decoration function in global art history, and how might the approaches taken by artists and makers in non-western countries illuminate alternative relationships to ornament? 

Lisbon is an interesting site for this productive dialogue; a city marked by its centuries-old tradition of decorative tile as well as gilded and polychrome wood carving. Lisbon is also the home of present-day designers rethinking associations to material and aesthetics. The ICDAD meeting in Lisbon will take full advantage of this fertile ground, visiting significant historical sites and museums throughout the city and the surroundings while engaging with contemporary collections and makers.

Schedule

Submission deadline: 15 May 2023 to icdad.lisbon23@gmail.com

Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2023

Annual Conference and General Assembly: 10–12 October 2023

Post- Conference Tour: 13–14 October 2023

Registration

Please note that there’s a limit of 60 participants. Registration will close when the conference reaches capacity. Register now to secure your spot.

The fee for participating in the conference (10–12 October) is 200 euros. Members who have registered by 20 August, up to the capacity of 60 participants, will receive an invitation to pay by bank transfer. If payment is not completed by the required deadline, the spot will be offered to the next member on the waiting list. You will receive an invoice first and a receipt afterwards. Any banking fees accrued from the transfer are the responsibility of each participant.

The fee for the two day post-conference tour (13–14 October) to Sintra and Coimbra will be 130 euros. Payment for this tour will be arranged in Lisbon, in cash. 

Membership Requirements

Please note that all participants must be individual members or representatives of institutional members of ICDAD at the time of the conference.

Find more information about how to become a member of ICOM and ICDAD here: https://icom.museum/en/get-involved/

If you are already a member of ICOM, please log in to the IRIS memberspace and choose ICDAD as your primary International Committee: https://icom-museum.force.com/login

Questions and contacts

For questions on the conference: icdad.lisbon23@gmail.com

For any questions on ICDAD membership: secretary.icdad@icom.museum

Image source: CC-BY-SA 3.0, IPPAR/IGESPAR

ICOM Prague 2022 is almost upon us! The ICDAD programme has been finalized, and is available below. We thank all applicants for their abstracts! All three ICDAD sessions will be presented both online and on-site. If you are considering joining, please do so! Registration is still open.
 
You can find further programme information here: https://prague2022.icom.museum/committees-meetings and here: https://icomprague2022.gcon.me/programme. Furthermore, enrich your Prague experience by participating in excursions to member institutions within the Czech Republic! See here for more information: https://prague2022.icom.museum/excursions.

ICDAD PROGRAMME

22 August 2022, 16:00–17:30 - ICDAD Session

Session Moderator: Anika Reineke

The Art of Collecting and Exploring the Collection: From Past Crafts to Its Design for the Future
Nirit Shalev Khalifa
curator, Art historian
Yad Ben-Zvi Institute, Museum council, Ben Gurion university , Har Hadar, Israel

Collecting Ideas: Historic Objects for Contemporary Audiences
Shoshana Resnikoff
Curator
The Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami Beach, Florida, United States

What is missing? On the power of NOT collecting and NOT exhibiting.
Claudia Banz
Curator Design
Kunstgewerbemuseum - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

23 August 2022, 14:30 – 16:00 – ICDAD/COSTUME/GLASS Joint Session

Session Moderator: Kai Lobjakas

Polish Design Polish Designers. The Power of Collection
Anna Śliwa
Curator
Muzeum Miasta Gdyni (Gdynia City Museum), Gdynia, Poland

The Influence of Martin Battersby
Martin Pel
Curator of Fashion and Textiles
Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove, United Kingdom

The Pforzheimer Collection of Studio Glass joins the Peabody Essex Museum’s Two Century Glass Collection
Sarah Chasse
Associate Curator
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, United States

23 August 2022, 16:30–18:00 – ICDAD Session

Session Moderator: Melissa Rinne

From room to portrait. The furniture in the photography and painting collections of the National Palace of Ajuda
Maria Jose Gaivao Tavares
Furniture Curator
National Palace of Ajuda, Lisbon, Portugal

Imagining Guangzhou: James Drummond's Chinese Painted Wallpaper at the Peabody Essex Museum
Lan Morgan
Assistant Curator
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, United States

A palace for everybody: the afterlife of decorative arts
Maria Isabel Baldasarre
National Director of Museums
National Ministry of Culture (Ministerio de Cultura de la Nacion), Buenos Aires, Argentina

The power of wallpaper: turning a farm into a palace and a modest collection into one of international recognition
Helen Bieri Thomson
Head
Swiss National Museum - Château de Prangins, Prangins, Switzerland

25 August 2022, 9:00-18.00 – Off-Site Meeting

Uměleckoprůmyslové museum v Praze / Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague

Address: 17. listopadu 2/2, 110 00 Praha

· Round Table Discussion
· Visit to the museum's newly built depository building
· Dinner at UMP

We are looking forward to seeing you in Prague!