Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes
Walker Art Center,
February 16 - August 17, 2008
Carnegie Museum of Art,
October 4, 2008 - January 18, 2009
Yale School of Architecture
March 2 - May 10, 2009
Because suburbia occupies a dominant presence in so many lives—a place of not only residence but also of work, commerce, worship, education, and leisure—it has become a focal point for competing interests and viewpoints. The suburbs have always been a fertile space for imagining both the best and the worst of modern social life. more
Exhibition Photos
Related Events
Lecture
Drawn Here: Sean Griffiths of FAT
Target Free Thursday Nights
Thursday, March 6 7:00 pm
Family Program
Escape to the Suburbs!
Free First Saturday
Saturday, April 5 10:00 am to 3:00 pm
Film
Next Exit: The Shifting Landscape of Suburbia
Target Free Thursday Nights
Thursday, April 24 7:00 pm
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Essays
- Worlds Away and the World Next Door
Andrew Blauvelt - A Conversation with Andrew Blauvelt and Tracy Myers
Katherine Solomonson - The View through the Picture Window
Robert Beuka (excerpt) - Intermediate Landscapes
Holley Wlodarczyk (excerpt) - Suburban Aesthetics Is Not an Oxymoron
John Archer (excerpt) - Learning from Sprawl
Robert Bruegmann (excerpt)
All essays are originally from the companion book for this exhibition, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes. Some essays appear in excerpted form where noted.
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Artists
- Chris Ballantyne
- Kim Beck
- Andrew Bush
- Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)
- Julia Christensen
- Coen+Partners
- Gregory Crewdson
- Adam Cvijanovic
- Benjamin Edwards
- Estudio Teddy Cruz
- FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste)
- Chris Faust
- Floto+Warner
- Dan Graham
- INABA
- Interboro
- Lateral Architecture
- John Lehr
- LTL Architects
- Paho Mann
- Sarah McKenzie
- Laura E. Migliorino
- Matthew Moore
- Stefanie Nagorka
- Catherine Opie
- Edward Ruscha
- SITE (Sculpture in the Environment)
- Jessica Smith
- Greg Stimac
- Lee Stoetzel
- Angela Strassheim
- Larry Sultan
- Brian Ulrich
- Michael Vahrenwald
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Video
We asked people to make a video telling us about the suburbs and put it on YouTube. Selected videos are showing in the gallery at the Walker Art Center during the run of the exhibition.
Selected Videos
- West St. Paul, by mnwebb
- Suburban Opera, by echucho
- Continuous Fence, by lgilge
- Suburbs, by myspacesubby
- “The City of Tomorrow, Today” (a suburb of Detroit), by jtondera
- loopty, by gabrielbbrown
- My orange push reel mower,by bbqpope
- The Last Tree by rythom
- Suburban Satellites, by kditullo
- Problems With Suburbia, by joshoakhurst
- this was actually a nice place to grow up, part 2, by sonicmaneuver
- Westlake - Spot #10 Enter Sandman, by moresmc
Original Submission Call
Do you live in a suburb? Do you work or go to school in one? What is your experience of the “burbs? ”…
Whether you love them or hate them we’re interested in your thoughts on the phenomenon of the American suburb. We invite you to make a 5-minute video about strip malls, cul-de-sacs, office parks, and green lawns or whatever suburbia means to you. A select number of videos will be chosen to screen as part of the exhibition Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes in the Target Gallery from February 15 to May 18, 2008.
To participate, upload your video to YouTube and add the tag “walkerworldsaway” or post it as a response to our video above. We’ll feature all videos on the Walker’s YouTube page. To be considered for gallery screening, entries must be 5 minutes or less and be online by January 18, 2008.
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Lexicon
Exurb
A semirural suburban area, beyond densely settled subdivisions, where upper and upper-middle class residents have widely separated large, expensive homes usually surrounded by woods, creeks, and ponds. A. C. Spectorsky coined the term in 1955 in the satirical book The Exurbanites to describe displaced successful New Yorkers who move away from the city to establish an ideal home on a large plot of land.1 More recently, exurbanites have become a sought-after political demographic and the subject of many growth debates and census studies.2
For more on rings of suburban development see first ring- first tier?, inner ring, and leapfrog.
1 A.C. Spectorsky, with drawings by Robert Osborn. The Exurbanites. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1955. (↑)
2 One example is Alan Berube, Audrey Singer, Jill H. Wilson, and William H. Frey. “Finding Exurbia: America’s Fast-Growing Communities at the Metropolitan Fringe,” The Brookings Institution- Living Cities Census Series, October 2006. http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/20061017_exurbia.htm (↑)