Over the course of their careers, the husband-and-wife architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown reveled in source materials that others might dismiss as mundane or unsophisticated. The decoration of these plates, which Venturi produced for the housewares firm Swid Powell, was inspired by a floral tablecloth owned by a colleague’s grandmother. Venturi and Scott Brown saw the pattern’s profusion of roses in soft, pastel colors as both old-fashioned and cloyingly sweet. They recreated the floral print and overlaid it with a grid of hatch marks taken from a painting by Jasper Johns. The resulting Grandmother pattern is a quintessential postmodern product that blends elements of kitsch with high art, the familiar with the avant-garde. Venturi and Scott Brown used Grandmother as a textile in collaboration with Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop (now the Fabric Workshop and Museum), on furniture for Knoll, and on dishes by Swid Powell. These plates are from a later version of Grandmother, which was originally released in 1984.