The Wolfsonian–FIU at 30: Design’s Past, Miami’s Present, and a Global Future
Written By Olga Garcia-Mayoral
Exhibition Openings & 30th Anniversary Celebration — November 20, 2025
Interview with Chief Curator Silvia Barisione
Walking up Washington Avenue on a bright November afternoon, the Wolfsonian–FIU still looks like a citadel: a muscular, stone-fronted landmark whose Deco-defiant bulk suggests the word Barisione herself used—fortress. Inside, however, the building opens like a cabinet of wonders. For the museum’s 30th anniversary, the drawers are pulled wide: two new exhibitions—Modern Design Across Borders and La Superba: Genoa and The Wolfsoniana—double as a birthday party and a mini-manifesto for what the Wolfsonian has always done best: tell world history through objects.
On the eve of the opening, Chief Curator Silvia Barisione joined me by phone from the galleries, where crews were finessing sightlines and labels. Our conversation swung from institutional mission to the nitty-gritty of plywood and cocktail shakers; it felt like the museum itself—scholarly and sensuous, global and granular.
“Object Stories” and a 30-Year Ethos
Asked what the Wolfsonian’s most significant contribution has been since opening in 1995, Barisione didn’t hesitate. “We try to talk about design through objects,” she said, “but we are not just a design museum. We can contextualize design objects with books, paintings, graphic design, posters—materials that let us tell object stories inside their economic and social background.”
That phrase—object stories—is the key. It’s why a travel poster can sit beside a teapot and a painting; why a piece of furniture converses with a propaganda booklet. The Wolfsonian’s strength has always been its will to connect; to show how things move across borders, circulate through markets, and gather meanings in the rooms where people live, work, and dream.
Being part of Florida International University, Barisione added, amplifies that mission. “Now we are closer to students. They come as interns, they research in the library, and we collaborate with professors. Being in the university helps us spread our mission.” The pipeline flows both ways. While FIU supports the museum, founder Mitchell “Micky” Wolfson, Jr. continues to collect with tireless curiosity—especially “books and ephemera,” Barisione noted—expanding a collection so vast that “we keep discovering things every time we do an exhibition.”
Modern Design Across Borders: Five Ways Design Travels
The anchor show, Modern Design Across Borders, focuses on the global circulations of interwar design. Rather than march chronologically, Barisione has built five “spotlight” themes—transportation, the 1925 Paris Expo, tea & coffee, plywood, and cocktail culture—that trace specific channels through which forms, materials, and habits moved.
“We wanted to celebrate design, one of our strengths,” she explained. “Lately we have done more exhibitions with paintings and graphic design—more two-dimensional objects—so this was a way to return to design, and also to celebrate many donations we have received in the last years.” The framing matters now, too: “It’s the moment to talk about global connections, cultural exchange on every level.”
Transportation anchors the story in streamlined modernity—those aerodynamic curves that shaped trains, ocean liners, automobiles, and aircraft, then boomeranged back into domestic life. Barisione loves tracing the echo: “You see streamlined shapes in the great ships and planes, and then you find them in everyday objects,” she said, pointing to cocktail shakers and siphons whose gleaming profiles miniaturize the promise of speed.
The 1925 Paris Exposition serves as a hinge: a world’s fair where national pavilions became laboratories of style, and where designers, manufacturers, and audiences tested what “modern” might look like in furniture, textiles, and tableware. The Wolfsonian installation teases out these crossings, using posters, catalogues, and objects to show how display culture accelerated design exchange.
Tea & coffee sets become a micro-history of ritual and industry. Colonial supply lines and metropolitan taste interlock in metal, porcelain, and glass. A service designed for one market could quickly migrate to another via trade fairs and department-store buyers; motifs shift language as they shift latitude.
Plywood maps a technological network: from early European innovation and export (Barisione notes how importers circulated bent and laminated woods) to mid-century American adoption, and forward to contemporary makers. “We end with a contemporary piece to show how plywood still inspires companies today,” she said—proof that material intelligence outlives fashion.
Cocktail culture—a theme with obvious Miami resonance—shows how the bar became a stage for modern living: chrome, glass, and lacquer; ergonomics scaled to the hand; social rituals tuned by design. “I wanted to connect to local culture,” Barisione told me. “Cocktail culture is such a Miami thing—so it made sense here.”
One object crystallizes how these strands braid together: a streamlined jug associated with the 1930s ocean-liner era, designed in dialogue with a ship’s aerodynamic profile and then mass-produced for the home. “The shapes inspired housewares,” Barisione said, “a contrast between the luxury of the liner and the accessible object in your kitchen—yet both speak the same design language.”
Does one theme “best” capture design as a universal language? Barisione resists the ranking. “I tried to be international in every theme,” she said. Designers migrate; companies hire across borders; imports and exports reshape taste. Plywood is a case in point: “From the turn of the century in Europe to examples in Finland, California, Virginia… you see production traveling from Europe to the United States and vice versa.”
That past is prelude. “Design is even more global now than in the interwar period,” she added, citing the contemporary plywood commission by a Finnish company working with an American designer: a tidy embodiment of the 2020s design ecosystem in which education, fabrication, and distribution are routinely transnational.
La Superba: Genoa, The Wolfsoniana, and a Transatlantic Bridge
If Modern Design Across Borders maps global flows, La Superba narrows the lens to a single port city—Genoa—and to the Wolfsonian’s sister institution in Liguria, The Wolfsoniana. “It was the right moment,” Barisione said, “because we celebrate the 20th anniversary of The Wolfsoniana, which opened in 2005—ten years after the Wolfsonian in Miami. It was a good opportunity to celebrate both institutions.” The two share DNA without sharing administrations: FIU governs in Miami; in Genoa, the collection is overseen by the Fondazione Palazzo Ducale ecosystem (Barisione referenced a new foundation structure). The transatlantic relationship remains active and generative.
The selection includes travel posters, paintings, and decorative arts that depict Genoa as both a cultural and industrial hub in the early 20th century. “Genoa is a port city,” Barisione emphasized, “with a powerful steel industry and a commercial center. You can see it in paintings of the harbor and workers, and in posters that present the city and the Riviera.” The curatorial pairing with Miami is sly: Genoa/Sestri Ponente and Miami/Miami Beach mirror each other as urban cores flanked by seaside districts—palms and promenades binding very different histories through everyday geographies.
Barisione highlighted a painting of a harbor scene in which a worker cradles a fallen comrade—an image whose humanist gravity echoes the gravity of Italian neorealist cinema. “It reflects the atmosphere of the period,” she said. What’s remarkable is the way drawings and studies for such works can be split—by intention—between the two institutions, a chessboard of loans that sustains scholarly exchange “on both sides of the ocean.” That dialogue extends to the Wolfsonian library, where researchers encounter Italian materials and then trace those threads to Genoa. “We have study centers in both places,” Barisione said. “It’s a way to keep the conversation alive.”
Two Shows, One Milestone: The Curatorial Lift
Staging two substantial exhibitions for a single anniversary is no small feat. “Working on two shows is more challenging—as you can imagine,” Barisione laughed. The complexity isn’t just logistics; it’s intellectual. Modern Design Across Borders was never meant to be a totalizing history of design, yet it had to “create connections” broad and precise enough to land with Miami audiences. “At first I thought to focus only on coffee culture,” she admitted, “but then tea made sense, and cocktail culture connects to Miami. I wanted a thread on local life.”
Behind the scenes, the curators continually unearth objects Micky Wolfson acquired decades ago that are only now coming into focus. “Every exhibition requires research—things are still to be catalogued, still to be understood,” Barisione said. It’s the kind of “problem” museums dream of: too much good material, not enough time.
The Next Chapter: Opening the “Fortress”
Where does the Wolfsonian go from here? Barisione hopes for more—more space, more students, more community. “We always hope to become bigger and to involve even more of the community,” she said. One path is programming with contemporary artists and designers who can read the collection against the present. “It’s important to understand the present through the past—but also to have new views on the collection.”’
And the building? Barisione is sensitive to the way the museum’s protective posture—hardened for hurricane seasons—can feel remote from the street. “Sometimes it is not inviting. It’s not so inclusive for people passing by,” she acknowledged. The work ahead is architectural and conceptual: to keep the collection safe while making the threshold more porous—to make the “fortress” feel like a forum.’
Miami’s Design Museum, Again and Anew
On opening night, Modern Design Across Borders and La Superba read as two sides of the same coin: one narrating how design travels; the other showing where those travels land and launch. Together, they restate the Wolfsonian’s founding wager: that you can understand the world—its ideologies, fantasies, and labors—through the things it makes.
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In Barisione’s words, “We tell stories through objects.” At 30, the Wolfsonian is still doing exactly that—only now, the stories loop even more clearly from Miami to Genoa and back again, from ships to shakers, from plywood to posters, from classrooms to galleries. The anniversary isn’t a victory lap so much as a recommitment: to scholarship rooted in things, to public life animated by design, and to a city that has grown up alongside a museum that insists the modern is always, already, a conversation across borders.
Modern Design Across Borders and La Superba: Genoa and The Wolfsoniana
On View November 20, 2025 – June 28, 2026
