CURATORIAL DIRECTOR
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION’S COOPER-HEWITT
Cara McCarty is Curatorial Director at the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, where she supervises all exhibitions and related activities in the broad field of design, including architecture, environmental, landscape, and urban design. For 14 years prior to joining the Cooper-Hewitt in 2007, Ms. McCarty was at the Saint Louis Art Museum as the Grace L. Brumbaugh and Richard E. Brumbaugh Curator of Decorative Arts and Design.
In St. Louis, Ms. McCarty served on the Executive Committee of the Saint Louis Art Museum’s expansion, participating in the selection of the architect and landscape architect and working with David Chipperfield, the architect of the master plan and design. In New York, she is playing a lead role in the programming, scheduling and redesign of Cooper-Hewitt’s premises. She initiated the thesis for the Museum’s 2010 Triennial Exhibition, Why Design Now?, which will focus on the latest worldwide innovations in the fields of urban mobility and energy use and she is supervising curator of the Museum’s other forthcoming major exhibitions.
Ms. McCarty is a graduate of Stanford University. In 2004, she was selected to the mid-career Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, attending courses at the Kennedy School of Government and doing advance work in urban design and architecture both at Harvard and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2008 and 2009, she was the American juror for the annual Dutch Design Awards to select the major design awards in the country, including architecture and landscape design.