Frey House 

Carrie Graber painted "Frey House" to offer a contemporary view of mid-century modernism. Graber’s painting evokes the architecture of Albert Frey and the Southern California desert landscape with its utopian promise. The image creates meaning through an array of visual codes, cultural references, and historical associations. The scene offers a languid male figure, the pool, and the mid-century design as the epitome of leisure. The painting is both progressive and conservative, as it updates the male gaze for a contemporary audience. The historian’s role is to provide a critical framework to assess the legacy of modernism and the way that visual pleasure intersects with class and gender. This can be achieved by looking through periodicals, architectural plans, and social media, which offer insight into the interpretation of art as contingent on social and institutional context.