Philadelphia Museum of Art to open major contemporary design exhibition

Although the Philadelphia Museum of Art's modern design collection has grown to be the biggest and best-regarded of any general museum in the country, it has lived mostly under the radar.

Even the name of the group largely responsible for that hefty trove has kept a low profile.

Starting Saturday, that era is over.

"Collab," the 40-year-old, all-volunteer committee of design professionals who have helped build the collection of more than 2,500 contemporary objects, will get its own exhibition.

"We are looking to bring Collab out from the shadows and into the limelight," says Lisa S. Roberts, a member since 1992 and, with her husband, David Seltzer, the patron behind the Perelman Building's Collab Gallery and a new book about the museum's modern collection. "I think it is the future of the museum's audience. We attract people who are interested not just in design, but because these are everyday objects . . . the things that we live with."

The exhibition, "Collab: Four Decades of Giving," includes the iconic Up 5 chair by Gaetano Pesce, which is shaped like a woman's lap; Milton Glaser's 1966 poster of Bob Dylan with kaleidoscopic hair; and the Valentine Typewriter, the first "designed" piece of office equipment, by Ettore Sottsass.

"It's never an easy thing to develop a collection at an institution that collects so many areas and has so many needs," says Timothy Rub, the museum's director and chief executive. "Having a group that is an advocate for design but also helps acquire pieces is a way of establishing a lasting and very significant legacy."

What started in 1970 as the Inter-Society Committee for Twentieth Century Decorative Arts and Design - made up mostly of interior designers - has evolved to reflect the diversity of Philadelphia's design community. The 14 current members include an architect, a graphic designer, a curator, an artist, a professor of merchandising, and two design historians.

What they all have in common, says Collab chair Eileen Tognini, is they're all "design passion-istas."

The one constant throughout the last four decades is Kathryn Heisinger, the museum's curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700 and author of Collecting Modern: Design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Since 1876. In the book, Heisinger tells the story of the shifting fortunes of the decorative arts and design field at the museum.