Changing Exhibits

Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture At Midcentury
May 17–August 17, 2008

Julius Shulman, photograph of Case Study House #21 (Pierre Koenig, architect, Los Angeles, 1958), 1958. © J. Paul Getty Trust.

Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture At Midcentury takes a look at the broad cultural zeitgeist of “cool” that influenced the visual, graphic, and decorative arts, furniture, architecture, music, and film produced in California in the 1950s and early 1960s. The exhibition, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, includes a jazz lounge; a media bar with film, animation, and television programming; a period art gallery of hard-edge abstract paintings; selections of art, architectural, and documentary photography; and an interactive timeline that highlights examples of California, national, and international culture and history in the 1950s. Birth of the Cool examines the dynamic community of artists who overlapped and interacted in Southern California at midcentury-Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Charles and Ray Eames, John Lautner, Richard Neutra, Helen Lundeberg, and others who played a germinal role in the development of this iconic style of high modernism.

Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Mid-Century is organized by the Orange County Museum of Art. This exhibition received significant funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency