Great American Kitchens at MIAD

The Great American Kitchen: 1900 – 2010
Brook Stevens Design Gallery
Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design
273 E. Erie St.
www.miad.edu

Accessories of the Jetsonist 50s-era kitchen

Over the last 100 years, the American kitchen evolved from rough, isolated work place to clinical food prep area to homey family center to high-tech food prep/entertaining space. The Great American Kitchen show, running at MIAD through February 2010, sketches that evolution in minimal strokes.

The exhibit  is an outline; the Brooks Stevens Design Gallery is not large enough for a dissertation, and the show is not that ambitious. It comprises a handful of nifty pieces, drawn from MIAD’s storerooms and from friends of the institution. Mark Lawson, the gallery director and this show’s curator, arranged them cleverly into a vest-pocket chronology of kitchen design. It shows how things looked, but the single banks of appliances and cabinets don’t give you the feel of living in kitchens of different eras.

“I feel like I’ve lived in every one of these kitchens,” Lawson said, during a Tuesday afternoon tour. “That was my grandparents’ farm kitchen.”

He referred to a rough stand for a manual pump, a massive, industrial-look gas stove and a free-standing “Hoosier” cabinet. Built-in cabinets did not come to the average American home until after World War I.

Technological developments and burgeoning prosperity changed everything in the 1920s. Hot and cold running water, refrigeration, electricity, and safe, cheap gas stoves became common. A widely publicized kitchen sanitation movement came with them.

“It was a major force for change,” Lawson said. “Every surface had to be cleanable.”

Kitchens tended to be austere during this period. The porcelain and smooth, enameled metal surfaces in the gallery’s 1920s/’30s kitchen reflect the scientific sanitation movement. But beauty became an element in many of the small electric appliances that were coming on the market.

“Every toaster, every coffeemaker, every mixer had to be designed,” Lawson said. “‘Industrial design’ became a term people started to use at about this time. There was no training for it. People just fell into it.  Some of them were architects, and some were even stage designers.”

The Hamilton Beach Solid State Mixer, circa 1960

Lawson is especially fond of the 1920 Sunbeam Mixmaster Junior, a sleek, polished chrome hand mixer. It’s under a glass case for the show, but it’s not always under glass.

“Whenever I get a chance, I plug it in and turn it on,” Lawson said. “It’s really well-made. It just purrs.”

The Great Depression and then World War II stopped kitchen advancement in its tracks, until the late 1940s and 1950s. Then, homeowners swept out 1920s styles with giddy, sometimes futuristic kitchens for their new ranch homes.  Late Deco streamline and newer abstract designs, such as the legendary “Starburst” on Franciscan dinnerware, dominated.

“It was a great period for adventurous design, with exuberant colors,” Lawson said.

He’s especially pleased to finally display a pink Caloric oven, which was squirreled away in MIAD’s  storeroom for ages. It’s hard to show something that  must be mounted in a wall, rather than on it.

Remember Harvest Gold (aka Baby Shit Brown)? Yes? Then you lived through the icky 1960s and ’70s. I remember those kitchens as Mr. Natural reactions to the Jetsonist artificiality of 1950s design. I recall embracing my earth-toned inner being — and becoming thoroughly sick of those brown/avocado color schemes by 1982.

“I remember feeling really cool wearing bell bottoms,” Lawson said, as he looked over MIAD’s 1960s kitchen. “If I wore them today, I’d feel like a clown. Younger people actually get nostalgic for this kitchen. They grew up watching “The Brady Bunch.'”

I find the kitchen repulsive, except for a gleaming Hamilton Beach Solid State Mixer I’d be proud to drop on my own Tropical Green granite countertops.

After the wretchedness of the ’60s, the wackiness of the ’50s and the rationality of the ’20s, the show’s 21st century kitchen looked a little bland. Ho-hum, gleaming black. Ho-hum, stainless steel. The cookbook under glass is The Vegan Kitchen.

It seems time to think about what’s coming next.