The Crate Label

The story of this hall

Before the highway billboard, California advertised itself on the end of a wooden box. Citrus growers commissioned lithographs - sunsets, senoritas, snow-capped peaks over impossible groves - and nailed them to crates bound east, where produce men in cold predawn markets learned to buy the West by its pictures. It was fine art in the service of oranges, printed by the million and meant to be thrown away. Around 1950 the cardboard carton arrived, printing went cheap and direct, and the labels stopped overnight - warehouses full of unused stock became the collections you see here. The grove in the picture never existed. The hall ends here anyway; go back the way you came.

1885–1955