A landmark San Jose Museum of Art exhibition offers up Suburban Escape.
By Traci Vogel
In California, if you don’t move to the suburbs, the suburbs will eventually
move to you. According to a population estimate released by the U.S. Census Bureau
in June, the suburbs are the fastest growing places in America. The increasing
sprawl brings with it attendant lower housing prices, longer commute times, and,
of course, controversy.
Ann Wolfe, curator of a new exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, has experienced
that controversy firsthand. Wolfe grew up on an apricot farm in Northern California
and watched the orchards of her childhood slowly succumb to encroaching development.
Today, her family farm is surrounded on three sides by a gated retirement community
and golf course.
“For me,” says Wolfe, “suburbia and the politics of land use
are personal issues that have complicated my relationship to the place I consider
home.” During a stint in Los Angeles, Wolfe began encountering art that
dealt with these issues, and the idea for a project was born – the exhibition
Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl, and an accompanying book.
Suburban Escape takes an artist’s-eye view of what folk songwriter
Malvina Reynolds famously called “little boxes made of ticky-tacky,”
and the landscape that surrounds them. But this is no one-sided anti-development
screed. It’s clear that the artists hold complex and differing viewpoints,
ranging from Todd Hido’s seemingly fond misty, voyeuristic photographs of
welcoming, inner-lit houses to Lewis Baltz’s cool black-and-white images
of new homes that look almost Mondrian-like in their linear starkness.
“All of the artists in the exhibition and book approach the suburbs differently,”
says Wolfe. “Early aerial photographers were struck by the abstract patterns
and geometries of new suburban tracts, [while] in the 1970s, photographers approached
suburbia with a cool eye that emphasized the banality of these places.”
Besides photographs, Wolfe has included painting, photography, sculpture, and
new media in the exhibition. A contemporary Southern California-based artist,
Darlene Campbell, creates oil paintings on wood blocks and panels, working with
gold leaf and on a small scale to evoke Renaissance and Baroque landscapes –
but in the world of Campbell’s painting (I.M.B.Y.) In My Back Yard,
an Orange County hillside is denuded by development and dotted with tract houses,
and an airplane contrail snakes across the blue sky. The paintings are “both
beautiful and haunting – true manifestations of the sublime,” says
Wolfe.
While many of the artists in Suburban Escape, such as Bill Owens, Larry
Sultan, and Stéphane Couturier, are fairly well known on their own, the
SJMA exhibition marks the first time their work has been shown together in a single
survey. Wolfe hopes the project will “add the collective voice of these
artists to larger, ongoing debates about suburban sprawl.”
“Many of the artists in the book and exhibition have devoted entire careers
to creating artwork that addresses suburban culture and land use,” says
Wolfe. “Taken together, the artwork in this exhibition is not intended to
paint a wholly positive or negative picture of suburbia. We must consider suburbia
an extension of the California Dream, and to a larger extent, the American Dream.
If someone’s experiences in the suburbs have been the positive fulfillment
of those dreams, they may look to these paintings and photographs with a hint
of romantic nostalgia. Those who believe that uncontrolled suburban growth is
an example of America’s Manifest Destiny gone awry may someday look back
on this art and see it as an unheeded, cautionary warning.” Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl runs through Feb. 4, 2007, at
the San Jose Museum of Art, 110 S. Market St., San Jose (408) 271-6840www.sjmusart.org.
*This Article appeared in Volume 6, Issue 23 of The
Wave Magazine.
