As deputy curatorial director and head of the Textiles department at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Matilda McQuaid proposes and organizes national and international exhibitions and publications and oversees one of the premier textile collections in the world.

Since joining Cooper-Hewitt in 2001 as the exhibitions curator and head of the Textiles department, McQuaid has curated a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions including “Josef + Anni Albers: Designs for Living” (2004), “Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance” (2005), and “National Design Triennial: Design Life Now”(2007).

McQuaid came to Cooper-Hewitt after a 15-year tenure at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she organized more than 30 exhibitions, including “Shigeru Ban: A Paper Arch,” “Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles,” and “Lilly Reich: Designer and Architect.”

She is an accomplished author and editor on art, architecture, and design, with many books and articles to her credit, including Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from the Museum of Modern Art (The Museum of Modern Art, 2002); Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles (The Museum of Modern Art, 1998); Architecture: A Place for Women (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); and Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005).

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