Image: Frost Art Museum, Miami
The Wolfsonian–FIU in Miami Beach has extended 'Modern Design Across Borders', an ongoing exhibition that examines the international exchanges behind modern design and is now on view through July 19. Installed on the museum’s sixth floor at 1001 Washington Avenue, the exhibition draws largely from The Wolfsonian’s collection and traces how people, ideas, and movements circulated across national boundaries in the first half of the 20th century.
According to the museum, 'Modern Design Across Borders' focuses on five spotlight subjects within the global story of interwar design: transportation, the 1925 Paris Expo, tea and coffee, plywood, and cocktail culture. Those themes frame the exhibition’s account of how innovation and trends spread from country to country, carrying with them new ideas about progress and new ways of living. The display is organized in celebration of The Wolfsonian’s 30th anniversary.
The exhibition features works and products by designers including Norman Bel Geddes, Josef Hoffmann, Alvar Aalto, and Charles and Ray Eames. The museum says the installation highlights the trademark design choices that helped define modern visual languages, including geometry, clean lines, and functionality. In that way, 'Modern Design Across Borders' places individual objects within a wider history of modern life and design circulation.
The Wolfsonian describes itself as a museum devoted to the inventive and provocative character of the modern world, using objects and design to show how the past influences the present and shapes the future. That institutional context is especially visible in this exhibition, which uses collection material to connect industrial design, domestic objects, and transport-related forms to broader cultural changes.
Among the object highlights listed by the museum are a 1960 BMW R 60/2 motorcycle, a c. 1955 Steib S500 sidecar, a 1925 poster for the International Decorative Arts Exhibition in Paris by Charles Loupot, Eva Zeisel’s 'Hallcraft Tomorrow's Classic' coffee and tea service from around 1949, Gerald Summers’s 1934 'Bent Plywood Armchair (BPAC)', and a 1938 'Soda King Syphon' seltzer bottle designed by Norman Bel Geddes and Worthen Paxton. These examples show the range of material the exhibition uses to chart modern design’s reach.
The show is curated by Silvia Barisione and is credited to The Wolfsonian–FIU. The institution’s exhibition page states that 'Modern Design Across Borders' is ongoing at the museum’s 6th Floor. The Wolfsonian’s email newsletter also notes that the exhibition is “extended” and “on view through July 19,” aligning with the museum’s online listing for the installation.
