Lunchbox memories

You can practically smell the aroma of tuna fish sandwiches and potato chips wafting off the exhibits in Lunch Box Memories. Memory turns out to be a very appropriate word choice for these pop culture madeleines of metal and TV graphics, capable of provoking Proustian fugues into the personal and communal past.

This exhibit of that most iconoclastically American of objects charts a progression from the recycled lard and tobacco tins (“Mom, why does my lunch smell like Uncle Stan’s ashtray?) once employed as primitive lunchboxes, into the first TV-themed 1950 Hopalong Cassidy box.

Armchair observers of design will not miss the box’s noticeable decline from the simply illustrated and clever trompe l’oeil boxes of the past like the Wild Bill Hickok and Jungles lunchbox with hand-tooled leather details and a bullet reserve. In the ’60s that design sensibility took a zeitgeisty turn for the psychedelic with Go Ask Alice paisleys and the Dali-esque domed box made to resemble a loaf of bread, undoubtedly carried by budding conceptual artists. The lunchbox’s justified death knell came in 1980 with the hideously ugly Rambo lunch box.

Though it’s an unfamiliar sensation for most museum-goers, thrift and vintage store devotees will recognize the frisson of pure, melting pleasure you experience when stumbling upon some forgotten detritus of your childhood past. Lunchboxes were an Everychild early primer in the American habit of defining oneself by consumer choices. But more than that, a child’s choice in lunchbox seemed as perfect as a Rorschach test in indicating personality hardwiring. Can we not, after all, divide the world into those who carry Jonathan Livingston Seagull boxes and those who tote Miss America boxes (like one Alma Royer, who never became a Miss America, but whose signature is sweetly preserved on the box’s exterior)?

The appeals to historical relevance are a little shaky in a show so clearly about the sentimental value of these objects. As if acknowledging the subordinate role of edification, wall text is totally Squaresville: as clunky and droning as a health class filmstrip, and seemingly pitched to the Early Reader ears of the 8-year-olds who once toted these Snoopy pails.

Lunch Box Memories runs through Feb. 14 at the Museum of Design (formerly the Atlanta International Museum of Art and Design), 285 Peachtree Center Ave. Mon.-Fri. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. 404-688-2467. www.atlantainternationalmuseum.org.