• March 1, 2019, 6–7:30 p.m.

Common Things Surprise Us: Black Chicago’s Artists and Models Balls and the Politics of Middlebrow(n) Taste

Featuring: Jacqueline Goldsby, Yale University

Chicago Cultural Center, Claudia Cassidy Theater

78 East Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois 60602

Ernest Alexander,  Cover, 11th Annual Artists and Models Ball Program, 1948. William McBride Papers, Vivian Harsh Collection, Chicago Public Library. James Prinz Photography, Chicago. 


In conjunction with the exhibition African American Designers in Chicago: Art, Commerce and the Politics of Race, Yale University Professor Jacqueline Goldsby discusses the South Side Community Art Center's legendary Artists and Models Balls as enactments of Black middlebrow taste; as a practice of vernacular and high design, as and as evidence of Black Chicago's special symbiosis of commerce and cultural production.

This event is free and open to the public.