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# Whitney Museum Launches Emoji Designed by Laura Owens
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/whitney-museum-laura-owens-emoji/
- Published: 2018-01-17T23:29:15.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T15:56:04.000Z
- Description: The new pack of 50 stickers is based on a series of ceramic sculptures Owens made based on the beloved facial icons.
- Author: Claire Voon
- Tags: In Brief, Emoji, Laura Owens, Whitney Museum of American Art, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-18 14:37 (2018)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/01/laura-owens-emoji.jpg)

Emojis designed by Laura Owens (image by the author for Hyperallergic via Apple Store)

[Laura Owens](https://hyperallergic.com/tag/laura-owens/) is known primarily for her paintings, but her sculptural work will likely soon be shared and seen by countless people with the launch of a new emoji pack. Released earlier this week by the Whitney Museum, where Owens’s [mid-career retrospective](https://hyperallergic.com/417482/laura-owens-whitney-museum-of-american-art-2017/) is ongoing, [the pack](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/emojis-by-laura-owens/id1333657586?mt=8&ref=hyperallergic.com) features 50 stickers the artist designed for iMessage. Each is a digital version of a porcelain sculpture that Owens made, IRL replicas of [the classic facial icons](https://hyperallergic.com/tag/emoji/) — presenting a very fitting way to interact with Owens’s work, which often mixes traditional painting conventions with digital techniques.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/01/laura-owens.jpg)

Owens made this little-known series of sculptures in 2015, and they were included in her solo [exhibition at Sadie Coles](http://evansiapoe.blogspot.com/2016/12/laura-owenssnails-emojis-gloves-and-no.html?ref=hyperallergic.com) the following year. You can’t really tell from the emoji set, but each real-world piece is about the size of a ping pong ball. In digital form, they still cast shadows and retain the reflective gleams from the real world, making for some really unique emoji — ones that revel in objecthood and materiality. I like that they convey a sense of weight; using one seems to send a much more emphatic message than what gets across by deploying a smaller, flat emoji.

Available for free download in the [Apple App Store](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/emojis-by-laura-owens/id1333657586?mt=8&ref=hyperallergic.com), the pack makes a great addition to other art-related emoji sets, such as Hyo Hong’s [Cindy Sherman icons](https://hyperallergic.com/189014/the-many-faces-of-cindy-sherman-turned-into-emoji/) and Molly Young and Teddy Blanks’s emoji of [Old Master paintings](https://hyperallergic.com/333178/express-your-feelings-with-emoji-characters-from-old-master-paintings/).