Fashion designer Christian Lacroix put it most directly: "...the history of cool in America is the history of African-American culture." That history, largely one of love and theft by white hands, haunts the mid-century artifacts on display in this sprawling exhibition like one of Miles Davis' lingering blue notes. Birth of the Cool explores Southern California as the locus of the African-American urban aesthetic, which then filtered into white, middle-class homes — and American culture at large. Ray and Charles Eames' furniture, Julius Shulman's photographs of Pierre Koenig's prismatic Case Study Houses, Chet Baker's records, and Davis himself all mark the cultural moment when Norman Mailer's white negro became a swinging suburbanite.