“Cold War Modern: The Domesticated Avant-Garde” exhibition

This museum exhibition, aimed at a general audience, examined the permeable membrane between high and low culture during the Cold War years. Mixing design, art and both avant-garde and popular music, the exhibition had ambitious goals in a small setting. In reference to the exhibition’s title, Pentagram put a 1950s-era modern house in the gallery. The house became the locus of sound within the exhibition; the radiating “sound waves” seen on the roof were also the marks on maps that indicate the radius of A-bomb sites. The exhibition mixed the paranoid and utopian elements of the period. The “domestication” of the title was also present in Formica and wallpaper patterns we created for the environment. Some of these made patterns out of iconic 1950s furniture, while others used documentary photography to create an environmental backdrop.