Cool Outside – California’s Mid-Century Landscape
Exhibition runs June 20 through August 22
Gallery Hours:
Thursdays, Friday & Saturdays 10 am to 4 pm
Sundays 12 to 4 pm
Marin Art and Garden Center celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding in 2020, and in 2021 we are putting the spotlight on the mid-century design heritage of the Center. The founders of the Center commissioned distinguished architects and landscape architects whose buildings share the clean lines and simple materials that are hallmarks of the postwar mid-century modern style, which swept the West Coast in the 1950s and 1960s.
This dynamic period and the people that helped shape the landscape of the period are the subject of Cool Outside, an exhibit hosted by the Marin Art and Garden Center. Cool Outside explores a distinct, and certainly Cool, approach to the design of outdoor space and garden furnishings as they developed across California in the 1950s and early 1960s. Photographs and drawings as well as models of now iconic mid-century gardens and landscapes drawn from the collections of the University of California Berkeley College of Environmental Design Archives will be on display, supplemented by period film, garden furniture, pottery, and art.
This exhibition draws on research done for the recently published Robert Royston (Rainey & Miller, University of Georgia Press). The book recently received the JB Jackson Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies and is a comprehensive survey of Royston’s work and its impact in Northern California.
