Public Lecture and Panel Discussion: "Displaying Race: Material Culture, White Identities, and the Postwar House"

Please join the Center for Visual Cultures for a public lecture and panel discussion with Dianne Harris Professor of Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Art History, and History and director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign   Public Lecture: "Displaying Race: Material Culture, White Identities, and the Postwar House" Monday, March 28, 2011 5:30 PM Location: Chazen Museum of Art Room L140 This lecture demonstrates the ways in which the owners and occupants of ordinary postwar houses in the United States (1945-60) used the consumption and display of household objects as a means to confirm their purchase of white, middle-class, American identities. Individuals and families construct and reveal their identities through artifacts purchased for and displayed in the home in an ongoing process that changes as they try out different notions of the self that are nonetheless contained within specific parameters of race, class, and gender. Possessing and carefully displaying the right items helped to ameliorate the homogeneous monotony of hones in some suburban developments--a homogeneity that could be associated with images of the non-white and lower classes. But consumer goods were also a crucial measure of distinction among a group that was newly upwardly mobile, newly affluent, perhaps even newly "white." Material goods then, helped affirm class and race and became especially important to those whose identities were in flux as they moved from dwellings shared with immigrant parents into homes of their own, and in the process, forged new identities. Storage also became a carefully calculated matter that balanced what had to be concealed with what best served the family through being revealed. Built-in storage and cabinetry assumed new significance in ordinary postwar houses since a closed cabinet implies capacity and occupation by goods that are simultaneously well-managed. I will therefore examine some postwar habits of consumption and the ways houses changed to accommodate the new goods that carried specific symbolic meanings for Americans who sought to confirm their racial and class identities in the postwar era.   Panel Discussion: "History and Fate of the Postwar American Suburb" Monday, March 28, 2011 10:00 am to 12:00 noon Location: Memorial Library Room 126 (West Corridor), 728 State Street Participants include: --Dianne Harris, Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Art History, and History; Director, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign --Arnold R. Alanen, Professor Emeritus, Department of Landscape Architecture --Anna Vemer Andrzejewski, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Program --Kurt Paulsen, Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning --Brad Murphy, Director, Planning Division, City of Madison --Daina Penkiunas, National Register Coordinator, Division of Historic Preservation, Wisconsin Historical Society Description: So-called suburban studies is a hot topic of late in academic scholarship; recent books on Levittown and other postwar landscapes are coming out in abundance. Historic preservationists are wrestling with whether or not and how to preserve these landscapes, just as planners and developers are trying, in various ways, to consider the future of postwar suburban spaces as they built "new urbanist" communities in and near postwar developments. This panel examines the state of the "postwar American suburb" as a topic for study as well as a physical reality. Panelists will come at this topic from a number of perspectives, and consider both practical and theoretical questions. Discussion topics will include: --How has scholarship on postwar suburbia changed over the past 60 years? --How has recent scholarship on this topic challenged prevailing ideas of the postwar house? The postwar suburb? Urban sprawl? --What kinds of questions are historians exploring now in postwar suburbia and why? --What has been the impact of the so-called "new urbanism" and "sustainable design" on postwar suburbs and the buildings within them? --How has recent popular interest in "mid-century modern" design affected the ideas about postwar suburbia? --How are preservation regulations and/or urban planning laws favoring (or not) the preservation or redevelopment of these spaces? Presented with funding from the Mellon Foundation/UW Center for the Humanities and in conjunction with Illuminate: Year of the Arts. Professor Harris's visit is also co-sponsored by the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Program, the Material Culture Program, the Design Studies Department, the Department of Art History, and the Visual Cultures Student Focus Group.