The Cultural Center is really good at having oddly specific exhibits that turn out to be fascinating and have me doing even more research back home.

http://designobserver.com/feature/love-for-sale/38927/

Basically, the gist of this is that this was a mom-and-pop cosmetics operation on the South Side c. 1920s-1940s that sold all sorts of cheap little hair relaxers and perfumes to the African-American market. The deeper part is that it was a Jewish chemist employing a black graphic designer to synthesize Southern black folk traditions and mysticism with European Jewish variations of the same, making illustrations of people with obviously black facial features but pale white skin. It's strange to imagine a time when people were sprinkling scented talcum powder on money for good luck, or putting scented oils on themselves in hopes of casting love spells on their quarries and getting laid. I mean, I guess people still do the latter, kinda, we're just much more sophisticated about it. Maybe.

After reading up on this stuff later, I see now that products like "Follow Me Boy powder" and "Lucky Hair Fix" weren't just clever names but were drawing on old hoodoo conjuring spells and the heavy emphasis on luck and lucky charms in old black culture. (One line of products is called "Sweet Georgia Brown," which, well, no ambiguity there.) It's amazing to see how crudely they preyed upon the insecurities of their customers vis-a-vis white beauty ideals. I think there's one piece in the exhibit that shows a before-and-after of woman with kinky hair with "This woman is sad about her hair" and "Now she is happy because her hair is straight." Apparently this designer also influenced R. Crumb and the designer of the Some Girls album art. You can get your picture taken in a cutout of it, if you've ever wanted to combine cultural exhibits on exploitation with a petting zoo.

An interesting epilogue to the whole thing is that the company's founder, Morton Neumann, had a second career as a major art collector and patron (funded an Art Institute expansion), and his obituary in the Trib almost completely glossed over how he made his fortune selling hair dye and incense in the backs of pulp magazines and the Chicago Defender. Moreover, the exhibit itself leaves you to fill in the blanks about his Jewishness by mentioning that his family came to the South Side from Hungary, where one would not expect to find many Neumanns.

If you're in the Loop and have half an hour to kill, go check this out! It's free!

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Good people drink good beer - Hunter S. Thompson

<º)))><

Waiting for the time when I can finally say
That this has all been wonderful, but now I'm on my way