Meet Our Grantee-Partner: Design Museum of Chicago
The Design Museum of Chicago provides a platform for rich collections and design histories from the community, especially artists from underrepresented backgrounds.
Student artist Layla D. poses with her artwork during the CPS All-City Visual Arts Exhibition at the Design Museum of Chicago. Photo courtesy of Design Museum of Chicago.
Mission: The Design Museum of Chicago educates, inspires, and fosters innovation through design.
The Design Museum of Chicago (DMoC) started in 2012 as a volunteer-run organization that planned and executed pop-up exhibitions throughout Chicago. In 2014, more than 500 backers provided seed funding so the museum could offer year-round operations. Since then, DMoC has mounted 38 exhibitions and hosted more than 285 public programs for millions of visitors.
DMoC provides a platform for rich collections and design histories from the community, especially artists from underrepresented backgrounds. The museum employs four full-time staff and 33 executive and auxiliary board members who work closely with hundreds of partner organizations. All are committed to ensuring the museum serves as a platform for underrepresented voices rather than an arbiter of taste or repository of artifacts.
From its gallery space in the heart of downtown to pop-up exhibitions in communities across the city, DMoC views its hometown Chicago as a design museum. Exhibitions and experiences delve into the profound ways design shapes the human condition, both in planned and surprising ways. By leveraging its location in the Loop in concert with neighborhood partnerships, DMoC aims to expand awareness of Chicago’s design identity beyond downtown. DMoC partners with everyone from graphic designers to community organizers, restaurants, and even theaters and breweries, highlighting many sectors.
DMoC produces pop-up exhibitions across Chicago and hosts four to five rotating exhibitions in its downtown location each year. All exhibitions and programs are free and highlight themes not often explored by traditional cultural institutions. Recent examples include Home of House, which examined house music alongside organizations from the West and South Sides of Chicago with pop-ups at The Silver Room, Epiphany Center for the Arts, and Navy Pier; and Voices Embodied, which reflected on individual and societal barriers through works created by artists and designers with disabilities hosted at DMoC.
Rotating exhibitions within the DMoC’s primary space explore different design disciplines. Great Ideas of Humanity, which is inspired by the Container Corporation of America’s Great Ideas of Western Man ad series, is one of two ongoing exhibition series. Launched in the 1950s, the original series paired modernist visuals with quotes from philosophers, politicians, and writers, but it largely reflected a narrow, white, Western, and male perspective. DMoC’s series reimagines that model, using design to uplift a broader range of voices across cultures, genders, and histories.
An annual rotating exhibition that centers young people is CPS All-City Visual Arts Exhibition, which showcases original work from more than 10,000 CPS students from 400 schools across Chicago through physical exhibitions at DMoC and virtual exhibitions at Chicago Public Schools All City. The exhibition provides students with the opportunity to see themselves and their peers reflected in a museum.
DMoC has led Designing a Better Chicago (DBC), its annual grant program, since 2020. DBC supports local change-makers who are using design as a tool to improve civic life. DMoC has awarded $200,000 to 14 individuals and organizations addressing challenges within their communities. More than 60% of DBC grants have provided funding directly to communities in West Side and South Side Chicago. Grants have funded projects to increase accessibility to design education programs in Black communities and the renovation of a salvaged school bus to encourage play and programming within a community garden.
10 Great Ideas of Humanity posters by Michele Washington, Steven Ryan, and Sharon & Guy. Photo courtesy of Design Museum of Chicago.
In 2025, DMoC partnered with Young Chicago Authors (YCA), also a Poetry Foundation grantee-partner, to host young poets for a showcase event. Excerpts from the poems performed by students were selected to inspire the designs for 10 Great Ideas of Humanity posters for a June 2025 exhibition. The collaboration with YCA centered 10 youth poets who directly informed the design responses in the exhibition, bringing a raw, urgent dimension to the evolving series.
A Special Projects and Opportunities grant from the Poetry Foundation allowed DMoC to partner with YCA to reshape 10 Great Ideas of Humanity. The funds empowered DMoC to build a new model of co-creation where youth poets don’t just inspire designers, but become core contributors to the cultural conversation. Without the grant, DMoC wouldn’t have been able to offer paid opportunities for artists or commission new work in response to student voices. Funds from the Poetry Foundation directly supported poet honoraria, designer commissions, event production, and printed materials.
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