Tracy Myers
Despite the many artworks on view, "Worlds Away" is a design-minded exhibition; it was organized by Andrew Blauvelt, design director and curator at the Walker, and Tracy Myers, curator of architecture at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Benjamin EdwardsImmersion, 2004
Learning From Las Vegas meets T…
Benjamin EdwardsImmersion, 2004
Learning From Las Vegas meets The Matrix on the enormous, colorful surface of Edwards' 75-by-125-inch canvas. The Washington, D.C., artist collages images of suburbia, technology, and the brand economy into a seductive yet disturbing vision of contemporary life. Watch an animation of the making of Immersion on Edwards' website, benjaminedwards.net.
The artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago
Brian UlrichChicago, IL, from the seriesCopia/Retail, 2003
Ulri…
Brian UlrichChicago, IL, from the seriesCopia/Retail, 2003
Ulrich, a Chicago-based artist, began photographing big-box retail and thrift stores as a response to President George W. Bush's post-9/11 call for Americans to shop and thereby boost the national economy.
Paho MannRe-inhabited Circle K's (Phoenix), 2004-2006
Over the …
Paho MannRe-inhabited Circle K's (Phoenix), 2004-2006
Over the past two decades, hundreds of Circle K convenience stores have been converted to new purposes, from tuxedo rentals to tattoo parlors. Mann, who lives in Texas, documents the buildings' strange fates in photographs and on a website, circlekmap.pahomann.net.
Cameron Wittig
Jessica SmithTrash Day, 2007
Textile designer Smith sends up a …
Jessica SmithTrash Day, 2007
Textile designer Smith sends up a weekly suburban ritual in Trash Day, a silk fabric based on 18th century toile de Jouy prints. Other patterns from her company, Domestic Element, satirically appropriate such icons of suburbia as Levittown, freeway interchanges, and the Hummer.
Tey Stiteler
Laura Migliorino
Egret Street, 2006
Migliorino, a Minneapolis …
Laura Migliorino
Egret Street, 2006
Migliorino, a Minneapolis based artist, confounds the stereotype of suburbanites as white families with a mom, dad, and 2.5 kids. Her portraits of subdivision residents position people of all sorts in front of their own homes and against a superimposed backdrop of the larger neighborhood.
Think the Brady Bunch still epitomizes the suburban experience? “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes,” on view through May 18 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, exhibits the new realities—and surrealities—of 21st Century suburbia.
Ned Cramer served as editor-in-chief of ARCHITECT from the publication’s founding in 2006 until 2020, and as vice president, editorial, at Hanley Wood.
