Wait, what?
Why is the exhibit about the Frank Bros. furniture emporium over at the University Art Museum getting so much attention?
Why is Brian Trimble, curator of education at UAM saying that the opening reception two weeks ago was massively successful, with over 650 people showing up on the first day alone?
Why should Cal State Long Beach students care about an exhibit chronicling the history of a store they can’t go to, buy anything from and hasn’t existed for years?
Well, let’s talk about what the exhibit is like from the perspective of someone who literally couldn’t care less, because until I went down there yesterday, I didn’t.
But I went in to catch a walk ‘n’ talk of the exhibit at noon Tuesday. It was hosted by curators Cara Mullio and Jennifer Volland, who literally wrote the book — “Frank Bros.: The store that modernized modern,” to be published next month — on the history of the world famous Frank Bros. furniture store that’s been located in downtown Long Beach for 44 years.
What I discovered was that, despite Frank Bros. emporium being a furniture store that sold furniture and helped revolutionize the designs of modern American furniture, the gallery really isn’t about chairs (even though yes, there are a handful of chairs there — several hang in the air like wind chimes).
“This isn’t a furniture show. This isn’t about furniture,” said Mullio after she and Volland conducted a tour of the exhibit. “This is about a store and its longevity and its history.”
Mullio isn’t kidding – the main focus of the exhibit is chronicling the details of history that are all too often forgotten.
The mailers and invitations to sales that were sent out to customers in the ‘60s. The print advertising used to pitch the designs of modern designers like Charles Eames, Edward Killingsworth and Stacy Dukes (the latter two are CSULB legends — Killingsworth designed the CSULB campus in the ‘60s, Dukes taught design here for many years). The ephemera and art pieces that couldn’t easily be seen, even when Frank Bros. was still in business.
“When you think about the broader picture of modern design, you don’t really think about Long Beach as being a center of that,” said Trimble. “[Long Beach] had Killingsworth and other architects and Frank Bros. This really was a center for modernism. This [exhibit] reestablishes the role that Long Beach played in that.”
Walking through the gallery, Trimble’s words ring true. There are pieces like a series of lamps by designer Neal Small on loan from the Getty Center that demonstrate the modernist’s take on mixing form with function – smooth singular curves creating poetic artifacts of practicality. Early examples of furniture made out of plastic in the post-war age where that started to become common practice.
But the core of it all is, as Mullio says, history, not just art and design. There’s an excellent timeline chronicling everything on the west wall. An exploration of Case Study House #25, the residential architecture experiment run by Arts & Architecture magazine from 1945 to 1966.
History is always important to take note of and explore if you don’t want to end up repeating what’s already done. This is something every CSULB student of history – and all our design students – should check out if they want some niche inspiration for their next project or paper before the show closes in April.
And while the exhibit is getting a fair amount of notice among extant fans of the Frank Bros., for the general student body, there’s a much simpler problem: no one else knows it exists!
“We tell people where we’re curating the show and they say ‘where is it? There’s a museum on campus?’ said Mullio. “So I think you’ve got to get that out first. It’s an important museum, there’s a lot of history.”