Barbecue Nation
Client: Atlanta History Center
Scope: Exhibit Design
Barbeque Nation explores how barbecue has come to claim an enduring place at the American table, and how it connects us to cultures around the world, in addition to traditions, history, and the future. A wide array of artifacts, images, and oral histories from restaurants, festivals, community gatherings, and archives and museums from across the country are displayed.
The Taste of History
Historic photos and '50s and '60s advertising images (including an ad for the astonishing-in-retrospect Armour's Ribs in a Can), and features cookbooks, postcards, menus, place settings, from the Centers’ archive are displayed as well as other artifacts from iconic barbecue joints.
BBQ Equipment Evolution
Vintage grills demonstrate the evolution of backyard cooking from trench to brick pit to mobile cooker. Among them: a 1948 Char-Broil Wheelbarrow Picnic Cooker, a 1965 Weber kettle, and a Japanese kamado brought home by a U.S. serviceman in the 1970s (Big Green Egg cites “ancient cookers” from China and Japan in this style as a design inspiration).
Also on view is President Dwight D. Eisenhower's GE PartioCart, a high-end, dual-fuel cooker trimmed in turquoise that he fired up at his retirement home in Palm Springs, California. A more contemporary eye-catcher is the 13-foot-long “Space Shuttle BBQ Pit” created by Houston-based Gator Pit of Texas.
On another presidential note, Barbecue Nation also tells the story of the 1909 banquet that Atlanta threw for president-elect William Howard Taft in which the main course was—wait for it—barbecued possum.