Happy National Design Week!

National Design Week is here, which means that through Saturday, October 24, the country is awash in design-related happenings, many of them free. Here are five that caught our eye:

There wouldn’t be a National Design Week without the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, which is offering free admission all week long. Start with “Design USA: Contemporary Innovation,” a new exhibition celebrating the accomplishments of the first ten years worth of National Design Award winners.

Two words: cowboy furniture. That’s the subject of an exhibition on view through Saturday at the Wyoming State Museum that features the work of Thomas Molesworth, who had a way with antler accents. Don’t miss the hoofed wastebasket holder, which is almost enough to make us forgive the use of Comic Sans on the museum’s website.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, it’s a perfect time to visit the Price Tower Arts Center, which is housed in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed skyscraper and worth it for the Cherokee red triangular elevators alone. The Bartlesville cultural hub has mounted “UK/OK: Exploring Traditions in Contemporary Design,” a homegrown show of objects that focus on the recent resurgence in handcrafted design.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Maine Historical Society welcomes architectural photographer Brian Vanden Brink to its Portland HQ for a discussion of his new book Ruin: Photographs of A Vanishing America, which preserves in photographs abandoned churches, mills, bridges, storefronts, and other iconic American structures.

Bittersweet home Alabama. AIGA Birmingham ends National Design Week on a heartbreaking note with its second annual Salon des Refuses, “a showing of works wrongly rejected.” Check out the entries in the rejection-themed poster contest.

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