FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (Garrison, New York) September 13, 2019

Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center is pleased to announce a grant of $300,000 from the Henry Luce Foundation for a permanent collection gallery of Russel Wright designs for the American home at Manitoga.

The design gallery will illuminate Wright's influential career as one of America's premier 20th century designers. The display of over 200 objects will  be the only permanent, in-depth public exhibition of Wright's industrial design work anywhere. 

 

The Henry Luce Foundation seeks to enrich public discourse by promoting innovative scholarship, cultivating new leaders, and fostering international understanding. The Foundation's American Art Program, a leader in arts funding since 1982, supports museums, arts organizations, and universities in their efforts to advance the understanding and experience of American and Native American visual arts through research, exhibitions, collection projects, and publications.

 

Says Program Director Terry Carbone, "W e are pleased to support Manitoga in their effort to share with the public their important collection of Wright's designs in a setting completely informed by the designer's aesthetic and ideas."

 

Russel and Mary Einstein Wright (1904-1952), his wife, collaborator and business partner, were designers and master marketers of modern lifestyle in America. Homeware innovations such as the starter set, "mix and match," and open stock began with them. After Mary Wright's death, Wright increasingly explored themes from the natural world and from his travels to Asia in both his professional work for mass production and in shaping Manitoga, his intensely personal expression of modern living. 

 

According to Executive Director Allison Cross, "At Manitoga, Wright drew upon his decades-long career in industrial design, and his home embodied and expanded his ideas about American lifestyle, democracy, individualism and design. How grateful we are to the Luce Foundation for this lead support."

The project is being developed by Allison Cross, Manitoga Executive Director; Vivian Linares, Manitoga Director of Collections; Curator Donald Albrecht, author and co-curator of Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum; Wendy Evans Joseph, FAIA, LEED AP, award-winning exhibition designer, architect, and founding principal of Studio Joseph, NYC; and project architect James Hartford, AIA, LEED AP, Partner, River Architects. 

Above: Designs by Russel Wright from the Collection of Manitoga, Inc., and promised gifts from the 

Dennis Mykytyn Collection.