African-American Designers in Chicago: Art, Commerce and the Politics of Race” at the Chicago Cultural Center is a show that serves as a much-needed corrective to design history: it covers a century’s worth of fine art, commercial, and industrial design by black creators in Chicago, some of whom first came here during the Great Migration.
Another cabinet nearby contains the work of Miller, a designer from Virginia who settled in Chicago after World War II. He worked at Morton Goldsholl Associates specializing in logo design from 1955 till his retirement in 1988. He was best known for the 1974 iteration of the 7Up logo with its hundreds of white dots, similar to a theater marquee display and also reminiscent of dot matrix printing and early video game graphics.
The world of design is often portrayed as being very white and very male. And yet the designs and principles of the artists on display here, created by black people, have persisted throughout 60-plus years. I have a desk chair, for example, that strongly resembles the blue midcentury modern chair on display that was designed by Charles Harrison. The principles of the Black Arts Movement—boldness, humor, and an unapologetic love and celebration of blackness—are still persistent in contemporary art. It’s edifying to see in this exhibition how much innovation and everyday designs that we still live with came from black people in Chicago. v
Through 3/3/19: Mon-Fri 10 AM-7 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, cityofchicago.org. F
