Okay, two days is just not enough! But we loved what we chose to experience.

William West Anderson (September 19, 1928 – June 9, 2017), known as Adam West, was an American actor who famously portrayed Batman beginning in the 1960s and after being typecast, he reprised the role in various media until his death in 2017. It must have provided him with a comfortable income because his home was exceptional.

Mr. West played Batman in one of the first ever live adaptions of the character for over 120 episodes during three seasons. He had a home here in Palm Springs and also Ketchum, Idaho.

The house consists of 3,189 square feet of living space with 3 bedrooms, 5 baths, and a large outdoor space featuring a swimming pool on a 11,326 square foot lot.

When last on the market, the selling realtor described the property as having A caped crusader's courtyard of stone leading to the double door entry foyer, living room with fireplace and storied wet bar with pass-thru to its draped outdoor lounge. Home features a 1,200 sf poolside primary suite with cork floor, dual baths, fireside lounge, and huge walkthrough closet for spandex and capes GALORE!"

"Super friends coming over? no problem, the dual guest bedroom suites are perfectly private with separate patios! Enjoy the fantastic fully equipped center island kitchen with tropical open-air atrium/waterfall. Adjacent formal dining with Insulated glass wall sliders removes boundaries. It expands indoor/outdoor spaces open to the Pool/Spa/waterfalls. The walled/gated and hedged lushly turfed grounds are dotted with sculptural Olive and Palm Trees. Skylights and indoor-outdoor LED lighting systems create magical, intimate entertaining environments in a FLASH! Aquaman would make a SPLASH in the saltwater pool/spa and MARVEL at the legendary mountain views. Reap the benefits of turn-key designer furnishings, easy-care smart home improvements, and energy-efficient low maintenance grounds, ready to move right in and enjoy BAM!"

Closet envy, anyone?

"If you hang around long enough,

they think you're good.

It's either my tenacity or stupidity

- I'm not sure which."

-Adam West

Inside, light oak wood-paneled walls bring a sense of midcentury-modern flair with a more contemporary touch. The heart of the home is the living room, with fluted wall accents and sculptural lounge chairs upholstered in a midcentury-modern fabric. Here there’s also a floor-to-ceiling gas fireplace. Off the living room is the warm dining room, which has bold, printed upholstered chairs, and a window connecting to the kitchen. The kitchen has also been heavily updated with state-of-the-art appliances, custom oak wood cabinetry, and a curved kitchen island with black barstools designed to look like chess pieces. The kitchen also has sliding doors that open to the back.

This house truly is one for a Super Hero. What an opportunity.

We then paused at CAMP (“Community And Meeting Place”) for free coffee provided by my local fav... KOFFI. CAMP is located in the Hyatt and is the central hub for Modernism Week. It is just a really cool place to recharge and regroup.

Next stop was the Palm Springs Art Museum for the free presentation,  Stories Untold: Howard Smith–Rediscovering A Lost Black Modernist.

Howard Smith, (1928–2021) was a black artist from New Jersey who emigrated to Finland at the height of the cold war as an unwitting asset of the CIA. He then rose to prominence there for his artwork, textiles, and ceramics, which were produced by some of Scandinavia’s biggest design firms during the heyday of post-war Modernism. He is the only black artist to have been part of the rich design conversation between the Nordic countries and the US and one of the few black artists of his generation to collaborate with industry successfully. Yet, because he worked primarily in Finland, he is almost entirely unknown in the United States.

When Howard Smith arrived he was a ray of sunshine... literally and figuratively. Helsinki was drab and all gray. No wonder the people welcomed him so.

After success in Finland (and a divorce), Smith returned to America and spent eight years in Southern California during the 70s and the 80s, working through issues of blackness and representation in the waning years of the Black Arts Movement. However, despite solo exhibitions at UCLA, Scripps College, and the Museum of African American Art, he remained an outsider in Los Angeles, a Finnish ex-patriate living on the margins.

For over an hour, independent curator, Steven Wolf, introduced us to this talented artist and shared Smith’s roundabout journey through art history. He introduced us to his uniquely fluid body of work: he made art in almost every medium you can think of and passed effortlessly across the rigid boundaries that separate art and design and fine art and commercial art. Smith’s story is of a singular artist contending with the grand historical forces of his time: racism, Modernism, cold-war ideology, and the African diaspora. So interesting!

That said, when Howard Smith returned to Finland, he became one of the leading designers of Arabia Ceramics. One of his best-known series is Runfree from the early 1990s. It consists of six stoneware animals with modernistic shapes and monochrome decor. They were a huge hit which allowed a comfortable life, remaining in the town of Fiskars, remarrying, and seemingly being a success. And now, after this told story more of us will know him and his talents.

Lunch was a picnic overlooking the Art Museum.

Our final event of our time with Modernism Week was one I had highly anticipated- Fallingwater’s Edgar Kaufmann, jr.: The Life and Legacy of a Modern Movement Tastemaker. Edgar Kaufmann, jr. is famed for preserving Fallingwater, but he was also a renowned architectural historian and MoMA curator. Justin Gunther, director of Fallingwater, shared his influential story.

Edgar Kaufmann, jr. (1910–1989) was the only child of Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann, owners of Pittsburgh’s largest department store. Entrepreneurial retailers, civic and philanthropic leaders, progressive Modern thinkers, and respected patrons of the arts, the family moved into creative and intellectual circles that nourished an open-minded approach to art and design.

This exposure led the young Edgar Kaufmann, jr. (the lowercase “jr.” was his preferred abbreviation) to attend the School of Applied Arts in Vienna, apprentice as a painter in the artist workshop of Victor Hammer, and study architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright as part of the Taliesin Fellowship. His time at Taliesin established an enduring connection between the family and Wright, one that resulted in the creation of Fallingwater, the family’s world-famous vacation house.

Before jr. came along, Edgar, Sr. took over the family business (began in 1879) and with his first cousin/wife Liliane, he grew Kaufmann's to be the ultimate shopping experience. What was once the cheapest place to shop, he transformed the Downtown store into a showcase of fine art, antiques and high-fashion clothing, gathered from 27 buying offices the company maintained around the world. Kaufmann’s regularly sent buyers to Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Lyon, Florence and Vienna.

This presentation was ultimately the story of jr. and his incredible life. After studying with Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship in 1935, he joined the family business and became merchandise manager for home furnishings, and in 1938, was elected secretary of the Kaufmann Department Stores, Inc. In 1940, Edgar wrote to Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, proposing the Organic Design in Home Furnishings Competition, won by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen. That same year, he left Kaufmann's to join MOMA. What didn't he do?!

After his parents' untimely deaths, he eventually donated Fallingwater to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963, allowing the house and land to be shared as a public museum. Outside of this contribution, which is regarded as one of the greatest acts of architectural philanthropy, jr. became a leading scholar of architecture and design and for many years was an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Earlier in his professional career, he served as the Museum of Modern Art’s director of industrial design and later headed up the museum’s Good Design program.

As an influential curator, collector, scholar, and philanthropist, Edgar Kaufmann, jr. played a significant role throughout his life in popularizing artists and designers, helping establish careers that made many of them household names. What a guy! What a lecture!

What made me choose this presentation was my love of Fallingwater. I had the dream opportunity to tour this architectural masterpiece in 2023 (link here). That visit was a feast for my eyes, this talk was food for my brain... Layers of information. Questions answered. Unbelievable stories told. Unique characters explained. WOW. Now I want to go back to Pennsylvania and Fallingwater!

"The union of powerful art and powerful nature

into something beyond the sum of their separate powers

deserves to be kept living".

-Edgar Kaufmann, jr.