A century ago, Eleanor Roosevelt and three fellow activists started a furniture workshop at their country retreat in Hyde Park, New York. Its makers came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study colonial furniture before building their own. Now their work is back at the Met. Cottage Industry: The Val-Kill Furniture Shop, on view on Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side through May 9, 2027, marks the 100th anniversary of Val-Kill Industries.

What is in the show

The exhibition brings together more than 40 works from the Met's collection with loans from the Val-Kill Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, run by the National Park Service, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. It pairs colonial-era furniture from the Met with the Val-Kill pieces modeled on it, so visitors can see an 18th-century form next to the 1920s version it inspired.

Process materials borrowed from the National Park Service, including annotated sketches and woodworking templates, show how the shop's makers worked. The show also includes a slat-back Appalachian-style chair from Arthurdale, West Virginia, and a Southwestern Ndé basket, which trace Roosevelt's later support for regional craft communities during the New Deal.

Who made the furniture

Val-Kill was founded in 1926 by Eleanor Roosevelt, Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman and Caroline O'Day as both a business and a social project meant to bring steady skilled work to the Hyde Park area. The workshop employed immigrants trained in European woodworking, among them Frank Landolfa and Otto Berge, alongside young people from the surrounding countryside.

Nancy Cook directed the shop and designed much of its furniture, drawing on the Arts and Crafts movement and on 17th- and 18th-century pieces she studied at the Met and at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. The Met's announcement notes that Cook, an LGBTQ designer and craftsperson, led the workshop at a time when women running industrial work was rare.

Val-Kill made furniture until 1936, later adding pewter and textiles, during the years Franklin D. Roosevelt went from governor of New York to president. The workshop served as a model for trade programs the Roosevelts launched under the New Deal during the Great Depression.

Why the Met

The exhibition also looks back at the Met's own American Wing, whose early installations in the 1920s were among the collections the Val-Kill makers studied. The show was curated by Alyce Perry Englund, curator of American decorative arts in the American Wing. The Met says programs tied to the exhibition will be announced later.

Plan your visit

Cottage Industry: The Val-Kill Furniture Shop is on view now through May 9, 2027, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street. Hours and admission are on the Met's website. The 4, 5 and 6 trains stop at 86th Street on Lexington Avenue, and the M1, M2, M3 and M4 buses run along Fifth and Madison Avenues.

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