Time & Place

The turn of the century heralded the dawn of a new age in many ways. In the design field, the century opened auspiciously with world's fairs in Paris (1900)  and St. Louis (1904), where designers, manufacturers, and consumers compared products from around the world.

Gold is an inert metal which does not corrode on contact with dirt, air, or chemicals, unlike iron and silver. As a shining material that does not decay or tarnish, it has been prized by people all over the world. Among the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans, valuable gold jewelry was often buried with the dead in tombs.

Temperance, a social movement against the consumption of alcohol, increased from a whisper to a cry to arms during World War I.

President Kennedy's mission in 1961 to reach the moon culminated in the successful voyage of the Apollo 11 spacecraft in 1969. The exploration of space and the efforts of the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) to accomplish this objective exerted a powerful influence on the decade.

Space Age imagery entered the cold war design vocabulary after the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957. A short time afterward formal and metaphoric references to the zeitgeist began to appear in American industrial silverware and other products. The fascination with space in popular culture grew in the years between Sputnik and the moon landing in 1969.

Once a sleepy West Texas town, Marfa, Texas became the unlikely focus of the art world when renowned Minimalist artist Donald Judd moved his home and studio there in the early 1970s to escape the art scene in New York City. On his compound there are a total of 15 private living and working spaces including studios installed with artwork by Judd and others.

Although it evolved in the mid-1970s, the German photographic movement known as the Düsseldorf School was dubbed as such by art critics in the late 1980s. The Düsseldorf School was centered at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and associated with the work and teaching of photographic team Bernd and Hilla Becher.

The prosperous West African kingdom of Benin flourished from the 13th until the late 19th century. Located in what is now Edo state in southwest Nigeria, the Benin Kingdom came to control trade between Europe and the inland peoples during the 15th century, at the end of Oba Ewuare's reign. The power of its Obas depended largely on long-distance trade.