Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl (Center Books on the American West)

Suburbia has occupied a conflicted place in American life since the end of World War II, when the edges of cities across the nation began rapidly transforming into small metropolises of their own. California was at the heart of that boom, and in Suburban Escape Ann M. Wolfe offers a compelling look at the history and culture of California sprawl through art, from the 1950s to the present.

 

Suburban Escape presents the work of more than fifty renowned artists who use painting, photography, sculpture, and other media to examine the changes that suburbia has wrought on the physical,  political, and social environments of California. The generic blandness of tract-home architecture, the negative—and positive—environmental impacts of suburban land-use patterns, and suburbs’ ever-changing cultural and ethnic demographics become fuel for the artistic imaginations of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams, Jeff Brouws and Fandra Chang, David Hockney and Ed Ruscha, Joel Sternfeld and Lewis Baltz, Laurie Brown and Larry Sultan, Richard Misrach and Camilo José Vergara, and dozens more.