What this page is: our shelf card for one new book. Read our take below, then tap Buy Now.
Black Designers in Chicago
Long before anyone wrote the history down, Chicago's South Side was a working capital of modern design. Commercial artists, cartoonists, beauticians, sign painters, furniture makers, printmakers and art directors built careers, businesses and institutions there, and shaped how Black life looked across the country. This big, image-rich volume, with 66 color plates and 35 halftones, gathers their story for the first time.
Our read: Some books you read; this one you walk through like a neighborhood. The editors open with two voices fifty years apart. In 1925, William McKnight Farrow tells Chicago Defender readers that painting ads and decorating homes belongs to one of the most honored professions in the world. In 1973, printmaker Barbara Jones-Hogu answers for AfriCOBRA with a motto too salty for our shelf card, though you can guess the gist: we are better than the people who shut us out. Everything in between happens mostly on the South Side.
Chris Dingwall's chronicle moves in four "guides," Futures, Renaissance, Abundance and Revolutions, and it is generous with names you should know. Charles Dawson built twenty dioramas of Black history for the 1940 American Negro Exposition and drew ads and packaging labels for Valmor Products. Marjorie Stewart Joyner patented a permanent waving machine in 1928. Cartoonist Jackie Ormes gave her heroine Torchy her own fashion line, "Torchy's Togs," and gave Black girls the Patty-Jo doll, made in plastic by the Terri Lee Doll Company, at a time when the toy aisle sold Mammy and Topsy caricatures. Charles Harrison recast the View-Master in plastic. Thomas Miller mocked up 7-Up cans at Goldsholl Associates. Sylvia Abernathy drew the design for the Wall of Respect in 1967 and designed Delmark record covers for Sun Ra and Roscoe Mitchell. Emmett McBain turned "Black Is Beautiful" into the calling card of Vince Cullers Advertising.
The critical essays deepen the map. Jacqueline Goldsby shows how the Artists' and Models' Balls, packing thousands into the Savoy Ballroom, kept the South Side Community Art Center on Michigan Avenue afloat. Kinohi Nishikawa follows Herbert Temple, the longtime art director at Johnson Publishing. Brenna Wynn Greer takes on the cheesecake covers of Ebony and Jet, and Alexandra Cunningham Cameron unpacks TrueTwo, the 1968 ad McBain art-directed with Robert E. Paige's textiles. Paige then writes his own memoir of the 1960s scene he calls the "Black Gatsby," and designer Norman Teague closes with the mentorship that ties him back to Harrison. The coda ends in outer space, with Pedro Bell's wild gatefold for Funkadelic's Cosmic Slop.
Good to know: the chronicle is dense by design, packed with names and dates, so read it slowly with the plates beside you. It is a history and a catalog more than a coffee-table flip-through, and it grew out of the 2018 exhibition the editors curated and designed at the Chicago Cultural Center.
In short: a beautiful, overdue correction. Modern design had a capital on the South Side, and this book finally prints its directory.
The book grew out of African American Designers in Chicago, the 2018 exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center that the three editors curated and designed. The University of Chicago Press kindly sent us a review copy. We read it from uncorrected proofs, so details may differ slightly in the finished book.
On the Atlas: the South Side Community Art Center in Bronzeville, Chicago →
What to do: if you love graphic design, Black history, Chicago or album art, and want to meet the makers the textbooks skipped, tap Buy Now.
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The Editors
Editor photos courtesy of the University of Chicago Press.