Systems of Reproduction: Race and Design
Kemper Art MuseumSeptember to December 2025
This teaching exhibit was curated to introduce students to the intertwined histories of race and design through the works of contemporary Black artists in the Kemper's collections. By showing how artists use design as material and metaphor for representing racial identities and ideologies, the exhibit meant to impart a lesson about the race as an object of design, and about design as an instrument of racial domination.
From top: exhibition view; Herbert Temple designs of Ebony, Negro Digest, and Black World; Charles Harrison chair and slide projector.
Exhibition design by David Hartt.
African American Designers in Chicago:
Art, Commerce, and the Politics of Race
Chicago Cultural CenterOctober 2018 to March 2019.
The exhibition highlights the work of African American commercial artists who shaped the racial politics of mass consumerism during the twentieth century. As co-curator, I helped tell this story by selecting a range of design work from manufactured products such as chairs and dolls to printed ephemera such as album covers and magazine advertising. My long essay on the social history of African American design in Chicago was freely distributed as an illustrated newspaper-style handout in the gallery space. The exhibition was supported by the Terra Foundation of American Art.
A symposium on The Designs of African American Life celebrated the opening of the exhibition on November 3, 2018 with a group of leading scholars in African American studies who spoke on the themes of design, political economy, and politics.
The exhibition and symposium have been reviewed in public and scholarly forums:
Race and the Design of American Life:
African Americans in Twentieth-Century Commercial Art
Special Collections Research Center
University of Chicago
October 2013 to January 2014
This exhibit, which was held at the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago from October 2013 to January 2014, surveyed the ways in which African Americans shaped the visual iconography of consumer capitalism: as images and as makers and consumers of their own image.