Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/art-exhibit-tackles-stereotypes-of-surburban-life Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript An exhibit at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis aims to examine stereoptypes tied to life in the suburbs and shows the work of artists and architects influenced by the slew of social issues outside of cities. Fred de Sam Lazaro reports. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. FRED DE SAM LAZARO, NewsHour Correspondent: From the heart of urban Minneapolis, the Walker Art Center is tackling the stereotype about suburbs, that of a colorless, design-free zone. TRACY MYERS, Curator: I grew up in suburbia and escaped as soon as I possibly could. And so it required a certain amount of effort to maintain a kind of objective or non-judgmental stance. But through this exhibition, you know, I have sort of rethought my assumptions. ANDREW BLAUVELT, Curator: The idea of the American suburb is constantly changing, although the paradox is that it seems to stay static in most peoples' minds. Most people tend to have a post-World War II, what we call a sitcom suburb image in their head of what constitutes suburbia. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: What curators Andrew Blauvelt and Tracy Myers try to show is the rich variety in today's suburbia. The exhibit, called "Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes," features drawings, sculpture, photography, and multimedia platforms, inevitably inspiring comment not just about the art, but about suburbia itself.They offer glimpses of McMansions in outer suburbs, tract homes in what once were cornfields, and the residential settings in California's San Fernando Valley, where the majority of adult films are shot. ANDREW BLAUVELT: How do you begin to represent diversity in the suburb? You're reliant upon artists, because that's what we do, and that tends to be more poetic than it is didactic. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Among the works on display are those of Laura Migliorino, a community college photography professor who lives in a bungalow in Minneapolis. After years of commuting 20 miles outside the city, she began to get curious about the places in between. LAURA MIGLIORINO, Artist: I work in a suburb and I would never live there. And I thought, 'Well, who lives here?' And, you know, I was biased. And I just thought, 'Well, you know who lives here, you know, people like Tim Pawlenty, that's who lives here.' FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The governor of Minnesota? LAURA MIGLIORINO: The governor — yes, the governor of Minnesota to me was the archetypal suburbanite. He was white; he was middle-class; he was evangelical Christian Republican.And then I was just asking myself some harder questions. I don't want anyone to paint all Italians in the same way or all gay people in the same way. And so that's how this started. I just started looking around.It's so massively uniform, and, I mean, I do feel like I'm in the twilight zone right now. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Behind the uniform architecture, she found anything but uniform demographics: same-sex couples, single-parent households, and a diversity of immigrants. She portrays them in their environs with a distinct style and technique. LAURA MIGLIORINO: You have the portraits of the people. And then I overlay them with five, six, seven layers of imagery.So I have the portrait of the family, and that's one layer, but then I overlay other subdivisions, depending on composition, color, tonality, design, traffic, and even farmland.