Chris Dingwall
Assistant Professor of Design History, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
- Email: dingwall@nospam.wustl.edu
My work examines the history of racial capitalism in the United States through the lens of design history and material culture. Currently I am completing two book-length research projects. In “Selling Slavery: Race and the Industry of American Culture,” I study commercial plantation iconography in a variety of forms (theatrical spectacles, decorated books, postcards, mechanical toys). By analyzing how images of slavery were manufactured, exchanged, and used in everyday life, I narrate how cultural workers and entrepreneurs built racial ideology into American mass culture during the long wake of slave emancipation.
In “Black Designers in Chicago,” I am writing a chronicle of African American craftspeople, commercial artists, and art educators who redefined the place of African Americans in the design profession and of design in African American life. While showcasing and celebrating the stunning design work of Black Chicagoans in the twentieth century, the book also advances an argument about the relationship between race and design in the United States on the levels of visual and material culture as well as the design profession itself.