The Met’s Cottage Industry: The Val-Kill Furniture Shop is now on view through May 9, 2027. More than 40 works pair colonial furniture with Val-Kill models, annotated drawings and woodworking templates. The 1926 workshop founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman and Caroline O’Day treated the museum collection as working material: immigrant artisans and women designers adapted historical forms into a progressive craft enterprise that later helped model New Deal trade programs. It is a compact design exhibition with a sharper question than nostalgia—how study becomes authorship instead of reproduction. The Met