Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, the first major museum exhibition to examine both the art and architecture of the contemporary American suburb and its catalytic role in the creation of new art, premieres at the Walker Art Center from February 16–August 17.
Organized by the Walker in association with the Heinz Architectural Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Worlds Away features more than 75 works—paintings, photographs, prints, architectural models, sculptures, and videos—addressing commonly held assumptions about the origins, demographic composition, persistence, and sustainability of the suburban landscape.
Some 30 artists and architects draw inspiration from, provoke discussion about, or cast either an appreciative or critical eye on today's suburbs. The exhibition co-curators are Andrew Blauvelt, Walker design director and curator, and Tracy Myers, curator of architecture at Carnegie's Heinz Architectural Center.
The exhibition's opening-weekend celebration features a Walker After Hours preview party on Friday, February 15, with DJ Glen Leslie Powell and music by Alpha Consumer. (A complete listing of related programs follows.)
Background
The suburbs have always been a fertile space for imagining both the best and the worst of modern social life. On the one hand, the suburbs are portrayed as a middle-class domestic utopia and on the other as a dystopic world of homogeneity and conformity. Both of these stereotypes belie a more realistic understanding of contemporary suburbia and its dynamic transformations, and how these representations and realities shape our society, influence our culture, and impact our lives. Challenging preconceived ideas and expectations about suburbia (either pro or con), Worlds Away hopes to impart a better understanding of how those ideas were formed and how they are challenged by contemporary realities.
By 2000 more Americans lived in suburbs than in central cities and rural areas combined. As Americans have drifted ever farther from the urban core that historically was the site of the country's economic, social, and cultural dynamism and evolution, the nation's landscape, economy, and demography have been radically altered. Despite its sheer ubiquity and influence, the American suburb remains a critically under-examined force in shaping American cultural life.
Suburbs have been in a state of perpetual change: from early streetcar suburbs and postwar, sitcom-style "bedroom communities" to the more self-contained citylike suburbs of the late 20th century, such as the postindustrial "technoburb" with its new office parks and high-tech research campuses or "boomburbs," whose explosive growth rivals the size of adjacent cities. As the suburban landscape evolved over the last century, its demographic composition has also changed. The mid-20th-century image of largely white, middle-class, two-parent families as the predominant household of suburbia has been transformed as contemporary statistics reveal that an increasing number of ethnic minorities and new immigrants make their homes in the suburbs and that households without children now comprise a plurality of suburbia.
The Exhibition
The exhibition is arranged in three sections: the residential tract home; the retail zone, comprised of the strip mall, shopping center, and big box store; and the infrastructure for automobiles and the culture it has engendered.
Several design firms are producing new works for the exhibition. Estudio Teddy Cruz explores the reciprocal influence of American suburbanization and Latin American immigration on suburban San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico; FAT (Fashion.Architecture.Taste) presents its work on a multiethnic suburban park in the Netherlands; Lateral Architecture explores the spaces between and around big box power centers, the successor to suburbia's regional mall; Interboro examines life at a so-called "dead mall" in New York; Minneapolis-based Coen+Partners revises a traditional cul-de-sac development; the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) documents the major automotive test tracks located in various urban peripheries of the United States; and Jeffrey Inaba of INABA/C-Lab recasts the humble suburban trash container and the society of consumption and waste it represents. -- www.walkerart.org
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