Birth Of The Cool - California Art, Design, And Culture At Midcentury
date:Wednesday, July 9, 2008 time:10:00 AM to 5:00 PM venue:Oakland Museum Of California address:1000 Oak Street Oakland, CA 94607 View map from:Oakland Museum of California
Great Hall Low Bay
Presented by the Art Department.
Opening on May 17, 2008. Looks at the painting, architecture, furniture design, decorative and graphic arts, film, and music that launched midcentury modernism in the United States, and established Los Angeles as a major American cultural center.
Birth of the Cool was organized by Elizabeth Armstrong, Orange County Museum of Art chief curator and deputy director of public programs. In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the project, Birth of the Cool features a jazz lounge; film, animation, and television clips throughout; an area with Van Keppel Green furniture and architectural pottery; a period art gallery of hard-edge abstract paintings; selections of art, architectural, and documentary photography; and an interactive timeline that highlights examples of California, national, and international culture and history in the 1950s.
The Birth of the Cool exhibition captures an era in post-war Southern California when exploration in architecture, art, music and design coalesced to form a modern sensibility based on living well,” said Phil Linhares, chief curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California. The exhibit was inspired in part by the formal parallels between modernist architecture and the West Coast hard-edge paintings of the 1950s. Just as the light-filled modernist house is open to the elements, with walls and ceilings more like planes floating in space than enclosures, hard-edge paintings of the period are characterized by an instability of spatial division, an ambiguity between flatness and depth.
Admission:
- $8 for adults
- $5 for seniors (65 and over)
- $5 for students (youth and adults, with valid ID) Children under the age of six are free.
- Free Second Sundays.
