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Object Timeline

1958	Work on this object began.
2016	We acquired this object.
2017	We photographed this object. We photographed this object.
2024	You found it!

Textile, Suburbia

This is a Textile. It was manufactured by Preludes Inc.. It is dated 1958 and we acquired it in 2016. Its medium is cotton and its technique is printed. It is a part of the Textiles department.

An estimated twenty million Americans – many of them veterans returning from World War II – moved to the suburbs during the 1950s. These planned communities promised an idealized version of “traditional” family life, with quiet streets of close-set houses and tidy lawns. These semi-private outdoor spaces led to a sort of public domesticity which is the hallmark of suburban living.
Just as the skyscraper became an element of 1930s design, the suburbs themselves became a subject of novelty printed textiles and wallcoverings. An anonymous design of about the same date (2005-32-1) shows a variety of different housing styles, traditional and modern, side by side on the same street. This design, titled Suburbia, shares features of Lanette Scheeline’s 1939 Egyptian Garden (1984-56-1), which likewise depicts outdoor domestic activities like gardening, lawn mowing, and barbequing.

This object was donated by American Textile History Museum. It is credited American Textile History Museum Collection.

Digital image of a matrix of blue, red, yellow, green, orange and black dots arranged in an irregular plaid pattern, with mostly blue and green dots on either side of the matrix and mostly red, orange and red in its middle. A few points seem trickling away at the bottom of the matrix. There is no explanation of the significance of the different dot colors. There are more columns than rows, so the matrix appears as a wide rectangle. A legend on the left (title: Taxonomic depth) indicates that each row in the matrix represents a different type of bacteria. The legend consists of several bars next to each other (in a gradation of colors from light yellow to magenta) that show the classification of bacteria in its hierarchical subdividision. A bar next to most rows reads “Bacteria” (yellow); on its right, a light orange bar is split in “Proteobacteria”, “Actinobacteria” and others; Proteobacteria is further subdivided in the next bar (dark orange), in “Alphaproteobacteria” and “Betaproteobacteria”, and so forth. Thus the legend indicates that rows in the matrix are clustered according to the scientific classification of bacteria, so that rows next to each other represent bacteria that are more closely related on an evolutionary scale. A diagonally aligned text at the top of each column creates the illusion of depth and, although the font is very small and hardly readable, appears to indicate that each column represents a different gene product (a specific protein). Overall, the impression gained is that of a summary of genetic diversity within a sample of bacteria, organized both according to the type of bacteria (rows) and the diversity of specific metabolic functions (columns) identified within the sample. Above the matrix is a general title of the visualization: 'Thiocyanate bioreactor genome summary. High density genome summary matrix linked to a phylogenetic hierarchy'.

Metagenomic Data Visualization, 2016
videos (2), data visualization.
Courtesy Banfield Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley and Stamen....
NATURE.010

Its dimensions are

H x W: 215.9 × 118.7 cm (7 ft. 1 in. × 46 3/4 in.)

Cite this object as

Textile, Suburbia; Manufactured by Preludes Inc.; cotton; H x W: 215.9 × 118.7 cm (7 ft. 1 in. × 46 3/4 in.); American Textile History Museum Collection; 2016-35-91

Short URL http://cprhw.tt/o/2FYrnr/
Accession Number 2016-35-91
Object ID 1108711727