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It was a radical act when Andy Warhol rifled through the storerooms at the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in 1970. The show that emerged, "Raid the Icebox," looked nothing like an art exhibition, although it perfectly reflected his idiosyncratic Pop sensibility. Cabinets full of old shoes, stacks of hatboxes, and rows of empty picture frames filled RISD's galleries--the cabinets, stacks and rows as precious to the artist as their contents. That Warhol made us see the art museum as a more exalted version of, but not much different from, Uncle Moe's garage or Aunt Minnie's attic was yet another demonstration of the power of his democratizing gaze. "Raid the Icebox" was significant as well for Warhol's neo-Duchampian appropriation of the curator's role. To blur the distinction between artist and connoisseur--or between esthetic producer and consumer--represented a crack in the edifice of the art world's hierarchy (and its division of labor). What came rushing into the breach was the fresh air of new ways of seeing old things. Many other artists and institutions have collaborated similarly ever since.

The most recent example of this nearly venerable postmodern tradition is "Yinka Shonibare Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection," at New York's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum [to Sept. 24]. It is a small, splendid show, perfect in its way. The lens through which the artist sees the museum's diverse collection is travel. Shonibare, born in London to Nigerian parents and raised in Nigeria, says that he could relate his experience of migration to the regular European sojourns of the museum's founders. Although he has consistently explored issues of "colonialism and the resulting hybridization of culture" in his art, he makes no apology for the privileged status of the museum's founding Hewitt sisters: "Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt--'Miss Sally' and 'Miss Nelly,' as they were known--were well traveled ladies," Shonibare explains in the exhibition's wall text. "Their education was conservative and disciplined, and was complemented by voyages and tutoring in Europe. The sisters knew quality and they had taste." The same might be said of the artist, whose extreme visual finesse is exceeded only by his visionary use of the collection's hodgepodge of objects.

Boats, carriages, hot-air balloons, trains, automobiles, airplanes and rocket ships abound, whether their images are found in 18th-century prints (like the spectacular engraving of Chinese junks and barges by Jean Baptiste du Halde) or on the scrap of ca. 1950 wallpaper for a child's room, picturing space stations and rockets. An early 19th-century bandbox is imprinted with a scene of Sandy Hook at the entrance to New York Harbor and an early 20th-century matchsafe of nickel-plated metal and celluloid shows a man astride an ostrich, a souvenir of the Cawston Ostrich Farm in South Pasadena, Calif. Splendid models of the Marmon automobile by the great industrial designers both named Walter Dorwin Teague (Senior and Junior) alternate with scrimshaw depictions of whaling ships and a 1901 silver-and-wood replica of Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria. At least one vehicle's hybridity matches Shoulbare's own: a Convair 18, of 1947, a compact car that could be transformed into an airplane with the attachment of wings (it is shown in a photograph). All attest to what the artist calls the primary motive for exploration--"desire."

Brilliantly countering these vehicles of transport, Shonibare installed devices of entrapment--cages for crickets and birds that the Hewitt sisters collected on their numerous voyages. The former are elaborate, absurdly small prisons for Japanese and Italian insects, while the birdcages are as varied as their makers' flights of fancy could contrive. Thus there is a Rialto Bridge birdcage from Venice; an American mid-19th-century neo-Gothic church birdcage; a French 18th-century circus wagon birdcage; and, strangest of all, a Dutch birdcage-and-fishbowl combination, another hybrid, in which the bird (at least in theory) could appear to fly alongside swimming fish.

Almost winged, but not quite, are Shonibare's sculptures of Miss Sally and Miss Nelly. Hovering above his exquisitely assembled cabinet of curiosities, the two life-size figures are rendered in the artist's signature style, headless and clothed in Western dresses fashioned from pseudo-African batik textiles. Perched as they are on stilts, the Hewitt sisters stride across the impeccable Rococo room in the former Carnegie mansion (now the Nancy and Edwin Marks Gallery) as if they were African dancers. Or perhaps they are Yinka Shonibare's guardian angels of discernment, gracefully protecting beauty and surprise from the inhibiting potential of an overly developed political self-consciousness.

"Yinka Shonibare Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection" is on view at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York [Oct. 7, 2005-Sept. 24, 2006].