Exhibition Reviews

"Beyond the Cleavers: Life in the 1950s." Neville Public Museum of Brown County, 210 Museum Pl., Green Bay, WI 54303.       Temporary exhibition, June 26, 2004–April 17, 2005. 2,300 sq. ft. Trevor Jones, project curator.       Internet: exhibit description, visuals, and related press releases < http://www.nevillepublicmuseum.org > (April 2005).
In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988), Elaine Tyler May noted that scholars had explored either the tense political landscape of the Cold War or the rosy picture of the "private world of affluence, suburban sprawl and the baby boom" in isolation; in contrast, her approach examined "the cold war ideology and the domestic revival as two sides of the same coin" (p. xxi). Ultimately she analyzed private lives that both provided refuge from and manifested the tensions of Cold War America. May's book has since become the starting point for historical explorations of American culture in the 1950s and her interwoven paradox of optimism and anxiety the reigning paradigm in the historiography. Now that paradox has found its way out of the seminar rooms and into the halls of America's public museums. The Green Bay Neville Public Museum's "Beyond the Cleavers: Life in the 1950s" is a thought-provoking exhibition of objects and moving images that examines the tensions at the heart of the cultural history of postwar America.	1
A kitchen loaded with appliances and a mannequin in a dress, apron, and high-heeled red shoes illustrate the importance of material prosperity and the domestic ideal for Americans in the 1950s. Courtesy Neville Public Museum, Green Bay, Wisconsin/Larry LaMalfa.
Upon entering the exhibit, the visitor is launched into a corridor filled with objects and images that evidence the first of its two primary themes—prosperity. Here a video screen loops clips from the long-running television serial Leave It to Beaver; there a fully appointed, state-of-the-art midcentury kitchen; now a gleaming 1956 Lincoln Continental Mark II. As is the case throughout the exhibit, concisely written labels demonstrate the curator has done his homework. For example, a label near the model kitchen notes that despite the domestic ideal many women worked outside the home during the 1950s, a statement that recalls Joanne Meyerowitz's Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (1994)—a work whose title seems to have inspired the exhibition's own. A furnished "tv room" stands as a particularly noteworthy element in this corridor of prosperity. Evoking Lynn Spigel's Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (1992), a label notes that television altered not only entertainment but myriad areas of everyday life as Americans rearranged their living rooms and their schedules to accommodate the new medium.	. . .