The Museum of Applied Arts has a new design center

Prague - The Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague has newly established a Center for Design and Applied Arts. Its activities will continue the earlier Design Center of the Czech Republic and will serve as a partner for both state administration institutions and museum workplaces, as well as civic and professional initiatives. The head of the center has become its initiator, curator of the collection of modern books and graphics Iva Knobloch. Radka Potměšilová, a spokesperson for the museum, said this today to ČTK.

The Czech Republic had a state-established Design Center of the Czech Republic (DC ČR) until 2007, which operated in Brno and Prague. After its dissolution, an independent group of enthusiasts formed, leading to the establishment of Czechdesign, which aims to continue promoting design. Some functions were taken over by Czechdesign and others by the agency Profil Media, which organizes the Designblok design festival and the Czech Grand Design awards.

The Museum of Decorative Arts is not establishing a new institution; rather, it speaks of creating a certain cell for design within the museum. The design center should be part of methodological centers established by the Ministry of Culture in state collecting institutions. The museum plans to have two and a half positions, which must be approved by its founder, i.e., the Ministry of Culture.

The center is intended as part of the methodological centers established by the Ministry of Culture. The center's activities will focus on design as a key sector of cultural and creative industries, in cooperation with other methodological centers in the Czech Republic. In its development strategy for the years 2018 to 2023, the museum states that cooperation with the Museum Conservation Center at the Technical Museum in Brno, the Center for the Development of Museum Education, and the work of museums with youth with disabilities at the Moravian Museum, and the Methodological Center for Information Technology in Museology at the Moravian Museum, appears particularly fruitful.

This year, the center prepared a concept for the Czech state's participation in the international design exhibition Triennale di Milano. It will collaborate on the Czech Grand Design awards, the Student Design competition, and others.

One of the oldest international exhibitions of its kind, the Triennale of Design and Architecture in Milan, began on March 1. The Czech Republic has participated since its first year; however, successful presentations were interrupted by normalization conditions in the second half of the last century. This year, the Czech Republic returned to the exhibition after 50 years.