CIW Co-op Member Tanner Woodford’s Chicago Design Museum Announces Move to Block Thirty Seven
The Chicago Design Museum, formerly a pop-up design museum, has announced a move to a more centralized location at Block Thirty Seven at 108 North State Street. The museum’s first exhibit at the downtown location will be a retrospective on Chicago design.
“I’m very excited to announce that we’ll be moving back into Block Thirty Seven,” CIW Co-op member and Chicago Design Museum co-Founder and Executive Director Tanner Woodford said. “This positions the museum in a very public space-with both the red and blue lines meeting in the Pedway, and within walking distance of many other cultural institutions.”
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| CIW Co-op Member hopes to spark conversations around Chicago design with an upcoming exhibit on the history of design at Block Thirty Seven. |
Woodford hopes that the move to a more centralized location will help to spark a conversation around design that extends beyond the design community and to Chicagoans across industries and neighborhoods.
“I think we’re providing a platform for Chicago designers to share their work alongside their heroes,” Woodford said. “I think that we started a lot of conversations on the state of design currently: where the silos occur, how to break down the silos and how to really collaborate with one another better.”
Chicago Design Museum’s first exhibit coincides with the 100-year anniversary of AIGA, the national professional association for design. Set to launch this June, the exhibit is being funded through a Kickstarter campaign that, as of publication, has raised almost half of its $50,000 target.
Since its founding in 2012, Chicago Design Museum has hosted a series of rotating exhibits at locations across the city.
“We need a place to appreciate design excellence that wasn’t in a super highbrow community,” Woodford said of the motivation behind Chicago Design Museum.
To that end, the museum relied on over 230 volunteers to curate and organize the first exhibit, held in Humboldt Park. The museum also teamed with Art on Track, the world’s largest mobile art gallery, to showcase examples of typography on a 6-car Blue Line train.
