Lenore Metrick-Chen and Drake Art History Class
Room 3: Race and Advertising: The Power of Representation
From the beginnings of trade and business, there has been advertisement. Taking the form of trading cards, product labels, signs, ads, commercials, articles, sponsorships, billboards, social media ads and every other form imaginable, America has been immersed and built upon the foundations of our advertisements. In paraphrasing Jay Walker-Smith, the president of the marketing firm Yankelovich, Caitlin Johnson writes that “we've gone from being exposed to about 500 ads a day back in the 1970's to as many as 5,000 a day today,” and that was in 2006.1 Extrapolating the data, that means that the average American in 2006, would have seen as many as 1,825,000 ads in a year. With the rise in social media, how many more ads are we exposed to today in 2020? Clearly in America, advertisement has become a part of our consumerist culture, and has been so throughout our history. Consequently, in order to more holistically explore the interracial realities of our nation, we must consider our advertising industry. Norman Douglas, in his book titled South Wind in 1917, wrote that “You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements,” so what pictures do our advertisements paint?2 What message is being sent? How do these artifacts of different times reflect the social realities in which they were presented? They paint a visual history of division, othering and relegating people to definition by fictitious and derogatory stereotypes, often used to justify concepts and systems of segregation and used to define by contrast white identity during periods of change. They paint a record of companies and audiences who, for the sake of a few bucks or goods, would willingly relegate a whole population to images of servitude, foolishness, and debasement in the public eye. However, they also paint the pictures of progression, of change, and of the recognition of a people so long suppressed. No doubt as we look to our advertisement industry, we see the marks of racism and the continued aftermath of segregation inherently built into its systems, however, we also see a persistence to progress, progress that has not yet seen its completion but is rather a commitment to change going forward. If history has taught us anything, it is that we must not blindly accept the rhetoric of another, but must instead take the role of being active seekers of truth, of being active witnesses. So here, we ask you to seek out the truth and to examine a few humble snapshots of our past and present.
To enter the next room, please visit the link below:
https://artspaces.kunstmatrix.com/en/exhibition/3729081/room-4-the-harlem-renaissance
