To Maintain a Visual Emphasis, Curators Kept Labeling in the Installation to a Minimum

786 The Journal of American History December 2013

To maintain a visual emphasis, curators kept labeling in the installation to a minimum. In almost all cases this is adequate, but in several instances it is less than is necessary for the general public. The photo groupings are succinctly sketched in section labels. Not formulaic, these establish the coherence that unites the images and often anticipate and answer initial questions that might arise from visitors. The labels on individual images provide the basics of title, photogra- pher, date, facts concerning the print, and—if not otherwise clear—the context surrounding the image. The direction of proper visitor ﬂow through the sections is not always intuitive; at several points there is confusion about which section label applies to which photographs. The prose throughout the exhibition is relevant, sharply focused, and appropriate for general audiences. The intellectual foundations of the exhibition are fully developed in the catalog, War/ Photography. The brief text that introduces each of the groupings in the installation is ex- Downloaded from panded in the catalog, providing additional details about the photographs and their dissemination. Those interested in public memory will welcome the excellent essays on dissemination, a topic not easily presented in the installation. Natalie Zelt contributes “Seeing Eye to Eye: The Changing Ways and Means by Which Photographers’ Images Reached the Public Eye.” “

Asserting that published photographs of war have always been a distillation of battle mar- http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ keted for home consumption,” she analyzes three war photographs and discusses how the dissemination of each affected public response. An equally worthwhile contribution is John Stauffer’s “The ‘Terrible Reality’ of the First Living-Room War,” an analysis of the dissemination of war images during the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Civil War. The first “living-room war” was not the Vietnam conflict, he argues; a huge public appetite for war photographs emerged during the nineteenth century, sending hundreds of photographers onto Civil War battlefields. Hundreds of thousands of images were made and then reworked as engravings for newspapers. The curators maintain that such dissemination is as signifi- at Knox College on April 3, 2014 cant to the interpretation of photographs as the subject of the picture. In raising that idea, this distinguished catalog extends the reach of an unprecedentedly bold and ambitious exhibition of war photography. Clay Lewis Washington, D.C. doi: 10.1093/jahist/jat461

“Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair,” Chicago History Museum, Chicago, Ill. http://chicagohistory.org/inspiringbeauty/. Temporary exhibition, March 16, 2013–Jan. 5, 2014. 7,000 sq. ft. Traveling exhibition, Oct. 11, 2014–Jan. 4, 2015, Museum of Design, Atlanta, Ga.; May 22–Aug. 16, 2015, Minnesota History Center, St. Paul, Minn.; Sept. 10–Dec. 16, 2015, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, Mich. Joy Bivens, exhibition curator; Virginia Heaven, consulting costume curator.

Fashion seems to be the museum world’s latest obsession. In the summer of 2013 the ven- erable Art Institute of Chicago was host to three fashion-themed special exhibits held together by its much-anticipated “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” exhibition In 2006 the Chicago History Museum (), which housed a dormant collection of some ﬁfty thousand costumes forover twenty years, showcased “Dior: The New Look”with about half of its Christian Dior couture collection. The next year the  partnered with Valerie Steele, the celebrated Exhibition Reviews 787 fashion historian and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, for a New York City showing of “Chic Chicago,” an exhibit that showcased the best of the ’s costume collection and the elegant Chicago women who wore them. With the public desire for fashion exhibits still red hot, the  is making costume and apparel signature aspects of its acquisition culture and curatorial acumen. In early 2013 the  opened “Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair,” which was developed by the museum in cooperation with Johnson Publishing Company, presented by the Costume Council of the Chicago History Museum, and put on tour by International Arts & Artists of Washington, D.C. “Inspiring Beauty” is the largest and most ambitious fashion exhibit ever mounted by the . It is the story of Eunice Johnson’s trailblazing fashion event and a history that is deeply

rooted in Chicago and in African American middle-class aesthetic sensibilities. Students of fash- Downloaded from ion history may be disappointed by the poor lighting and a layout that does not show the intricate construction of couture handcraft technique at its best, but this awkwardness is part of the make- shift quality that was the essence of the fashion-fair experience. The exhibit works best as a history of racial uplift told through African Americans’ mainstream consumer aspirations. Standard fashion exhibits have explored either the oeuvre of a http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ famous designer, the wardrobe choices of a famous personality, or the interconnections between fine-art movements and apparel design. “Inspiring Beauty” is something different: the fashion it celebrates is less about design and its elite taste makers and more about African Americans’ struggle to access and eventually transform haute couture. Eunice Johnson’s Ebony Fashion Fair was significantly more than a fashion show; it was an annual charity extravaganza that at its height traveled to forty cities and was financed, managed, and curated by African Ameri- cans. Johnson, whoshared theentrepreneurial zeal of herhusband, John,the founderofJohn- at Knox College on April 3, 2014 son Publishing Company and the publisher of Ebony magazine, would charm and cajole her way into the best European couture houses in the 1950s to buy the most striking designer ensembles for a fashion show that was to be directed by black talent, feature on black models, and be shown to black audiences all over the United States. Such taste making required both white-glove diplomacy as well as a backbone of steel. In an era when many elite designers were afraid their wealthy white American patrons would be repelled by seeing their favorite labels marketed to black consumers, Johnson brokered purchases by “beg[ging], persuad[ing] and threaten[ing for] the right to buy clothes.” The Ebony Fashion Fair began in 1958 and delighted its mostly African American audiences until the show’s finale in 2009. The convergence of aesthetics and civil rights history makes curating an exhibit such as “Inspiring Beauty” rich with public-history possibility and equally fraught with design challenges. The garments in each fashion fair reflected Johnson’s burgeoning taste in the rarified world of haute couture culture as well as her deepening un- derstanding of what kind of clothes were crowd pleasers among the African Americans who flocked to the show and were developing layered understandings of their own aesthetic pref- erences. “Inspiring Beauty” might have narrated this story more systematically. The exhibit has no examples of the apparel featured in the early shows of the late 1950s, which, apart from the spectrum of African American fashion models, followed all of the normative protocol of fashion showings in Europe and North America: elegant, stately affairs where models would saunter between tables of lunching women. But as the Ebony Fashion Fair’s popularity grew, its elite black audiences would be mixed with African American middle-class patrons. These women could never afford to buy the Dior and Givenchy clothes that Johnson auctioned off for charity, but they could dream of themselves in dresses with prices that would be more 788 The Journal of American History December 2013 than an average annual household income. The aspirational quality of the fashion fair made the showcasing of couture garments a family affair among its African American patrons. Mothers and their daughters (also frequently with husbands and sons in tow) would dress immacu- lately to attend a show. As explained in the oral histories presented in a video installation at the exhibit, a friendly competition arose between dressed-to-kill patrons and the models waiting outside. Pat Cleveland, one of the first Ebony Fashion Fair models to break through the color barrier and work for white American and Parisian couture houses in the late 1960s, recalled how audience expectations energized the models to “really [put on] a show.” Johnson, aware of the racial politics surrounding black adornment, shifted her purchasing choices toward couture items that were less about each garment’s “wearability” than about its dramatic show- stopping qualities that would delight and mesmerize her audiences. In this way the Ebony Fashion Fair became a kind of costume extravaganza with an African American–inflected verve Downloaded from and performance that made it a unique institution in modern American culture. The challenge for “Inspiring Beauty” was to resist the curatorial protocol of fashion exhibits that focus on aesthetic formalism and design history and instead reconstruct the sense of movement and performativity that was the signature effect of Johnson’s unique fashion shows. http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ The  has attempted to stage the exhibit with the feel of a fashion runway. Mannequins are displayed in groups that are dressed in clothes thematically related to each other. For example, an elegant 1997 Bill Blass tweed suit and muskrat fur–trimmed stole from the ready-to-wear collection stood beside a stunning 2001 Jean-Louis Scherrer haute couture leather jumpsuit and a full-length, fur-embellished matching coat. Such haphazard groupings reflect both the eclecticism of Johnson’s buying habits and the contingencies of the fashion-fair enter- prise that make exhibiting this history particularly difficult. All of the exhibit clothing is on loan from private collectors, since Johnson regularly auctioned off the haute couture to ben- at Knox College on April 3, 2014 efit black charities. That said, more could have been made of the fact that over 50 million dollars was donated throughout the show’s forty year history. But one can only do so much with garments that were carefully edited by Johnson for mo- bility and drama on her effervescent African American models when they are tidily displayed on mannequins. A daring 1974 pink evening gown designed by the iconoclastic Parisian designer André Courrèges is hardly shown to its full advantage since its demure long-sleeved jacket with a feathered hood covers the plunging backless design of the dress, cut daringly low to show the wearer’s buttocks. Johnson bought two of these rare pieces, one in chocolate brown and the other commissioned from the designer in candy pink, and showed them on two models in her show “The Big Whirl of Fashion.” The drama of this pairing electrified the audience and began a trend in the show’s choreography that was a bona fide crowd pleaser. The exhibit would need to invent some type of expensive pyrotechnics and resurrect extant video foot- agetore-createthedramaandtheuniquenessoftheEbony Fashion Fair experience. Johnson’s shows were chock-full of garments with fringe, feathers, and drapes that were enhanced by themovementofblackbodies.Sheemployedfull-timemusicdirectorsandevencontinuedthe midcentury practice of using in-person commentators after it had been jettisoned by the mainstream fashion world. Such boldness was instrumental to Johnson’s civil rights instinct. In the 1960s she dressed her darkest-skinned model in the brightest-yellow couture dress and became responsive to the tastes of her increasingly middlebrow black audiences. They turned the show into a call-and-response extravaganza where music, voice, and outlandish choreography frequently stole the thunder from the most intricate Hanae Mori evening gown. When the audience “holla’d” for full-figured models and larger-sized couture clothing, Johnson complied by commissioning evening apparel from the most prestigious design houses. Two Exhibition Reviews 789 of these commissioned examples are included in the exhibit: an intricately sequined evening dress from Todd Oldham’s 1997 fall collection and an ethereal 2008 Bill Blass strapless gown and stole that flutters with the tiniest ostrich and hand-sewn coque feathers. The exhibit’s main interpretive challenge is the intermingling of the evolution of the fashion fair’s unique cultural history with the truly magnificent collection of couture apparel on display in its halls. Unlike most of the previous  fashion exhibits that featured fewer than thirty garments at a time, “Inspiring Fashion” displays more than fifty, making it one of the largest exhibits of contemporary apparel. But even though these garments are not treated by the exhibit as aesthetic objects, many of them, in fact, are; the interpretive emphasis on the show as cultural history—a necessary emphasis to be sure—trumps

attention to the craftsmanship and historiography of the clothing. The exhibit makes Downloaded from nothing of the pathbreaking modernism of Courrèges, nor his decision to use black models in his shows, which impressed Johnson and initiated their close professional and personal friendship. The exhibit does feature a delightful artifact from Courrèges—Johnson’s personal copy of the designer’s fall–winter 1974 catalog with her handwritten notes about the clothes she chose to buy for herself and for her show. Similarly, the brilliant Amer- http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ ican Indian–inspired beaded evening ensemble from Oscar de la Renta’s 2002 collection— after he resigned from Pierre Balmain’s design house and returned stateside with a lavish collection celebrating the United States—would be a stand-alone display in any other fashion exhibit that did not have the multistranded story of the Ebony Fashion Fair to narrate. Though the choice to exhibit the fashion on a runway stage represents the way that Johnson’s shows were experienced by patrons, it prevents exhibition viewers from being able to concep- tualize the garments as art objects. To see enlarged representations of fabric, beadwork, and at Knox College on April 3, 2014 embroidery requires purchasing the excellent exhibit catalog for an additional $29. The contingencies of this exhibit are apparent in the design choices here: viewers cannot get close enough to the garments to see the formal qualities of workmanship and design; nor can the mannequins reproduce the movement and kineticism that was so important to the performativity of the shows and was a signature quality of the garments Johnson chose on her do- mestic and international buying trips. Clothes that were once meant to move now sit stifﬂy on inert mannequins. “Inspiring Beauty” works best as a cultural history exhibit that shows how African Amer- icans struggled for access and acceptance to the elite world of couture culture and how they trans- formed the aesthetics of fashion design and runway performance. This exhibit is not held together by the formalism of fashion design but by the history of black bodies in couture apparel. All the mannequins in the exhibit exemplify the range of African American skin colors, hair textures, and facial features, which make them “peopled” in ways mannequins are not in regu- lar fashion exhibits. (Fashion curators frequently chose mannequins that minimized the representation of the human body to highlight clothing design instead.) This exhibit has four video installations that provide a fuller oral history of the making of the Ebony Fashion Fair and Johnson’s instrumental role as a curator of fashion. One unique installation is a video narrated by the famous Ebony founder (and Eunice’s husband), John H. Johnson, that puts the history of the traveling fashion show squarely in the context of postwar African American consumerism and articulates her linkage of black entrepreneurism and material acquisition to civil rights history. The rhetorical question that John poses at the start of the video—“Now that you’ve been introduced to the Ebony Fashion Fair, the beauty and glamor, 790 The Journal of American History December 2013 you may be asking, why is this important?”—is key to what makes this fashion exhibit unique. The racialized history of “Inspiring Beauty” is more than the sum of its aesthetics. Natasha Barnes University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, Illinois doi: 10.1093/jahist/jat456

The Woody Guthrie Center. Tulsa, Okla. http://woodyguthriecenter.org/center/. Permanent exhibition, opened April 2013. 12,000 sq. ft. Deana McCloud, executive director and chief curator; Ali Stuebner, opening exhibit curator; Kate Blalack, archivist, Downloaded from Gallagher and Associates, designer.

“The world didn’t mean any more than a smear to me,” Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) wrote in his 1943 autobiography, Bound for Glory, “if I couldn’t find ways of putting it down on something” (p. 177). This powerful urge to express himself would assume multiple forms over http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ the course of his life. Before he was felled by Huntington’s disease following a fifteen-year decline, he produced more than three thousand songs—some with as many as eighty-seven stanzas—plus short stories, novels, letters, articles, hundreds of pieces of artwork, journal entries, postcards, manuscripts, radio programs, newspaper columns, thousands of letters written in composition notebooks, and more than one hundred diaries and assorted essays. He also left behind more than five hundred photographs, ranging from publicity images and concert photos to family pictures, dating from 1938 to 1954. at Knox College on April 3, 2014 Nora Guthrie assumed responsibility for the vast corpus of Woody’s creative legacy when her mother, Marjorie, Woody’s second wife, died in 1983. In 1990 Nora opened the Woody Guthrie Archives in Mount Kisco, New York. The decision to establish a permanent home for the collection in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sixty-four miles from Woody’sbirthplaceinOkemah,was made possible when the George Kaiser Family Foundation purchased the collection and installed it in a repurposed warehouse, located in the controversially named Brady Arts District. (The district is named after W. Tate Brady, a prominent businessman and Tulsa’s first alderman, who had associations with the Ku Klux Klan.) According to Nora, most of the material in the collection had never been orchestrated, seriously studied, or even viewed by anyone outside of the Guthrie family besides a handful of archivists, scholars, and journalists. The Woody Guthrie Center () opening was the culmination of many 2013 centennial celebrations focusing on his one hundredth birthday. It is the actualization of Marjorie’s vision for Woody’swork.Today a new Brady Arts District is emerging in Tulsa with multimillion-dollar Kaiser Foundation– sponsored investments and local small-business development linking with cultural institutions such as the Oklahoma Museum of Music and Popular Culture, the University of Tulsa, the Gilcrease Museum, the Philbrook Museum of Art, and the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa. The  is across the street from Guthrie Green—an “eco-scaped” public space equipped with a sloping natural amphitheater and a stage, a sound system powered by a solar roof, and a geothermal underground field. Nora Guthrie announced at the April opening of the  that the center was named to appeal to audiences who might not think that museums and archives were spaces they could occupy and explore. Bob Santelli,the executive director of the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles