Assignment: Black Women: Image & Perception in Popular Culture
This exhibit addresses the stereotypes that our culture places on Black women, highlights women who defy these characterizations and prompts visitors to consider ways to thwart these stereotypes.
Created by UMD design students and Charles Bethea.
Client: Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture
This exhibit calls attention to and then dismantles three primary stereotypes of Black Women: Jezebel, the Angry Black Woman or Sapphire, and the Mammy.
The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture in Baltimore hosted the exhibit, which was on display August through December 2018.
The exhibit includes a 25-foot timeline that informs and reminds visitors about little-celebrated, stereotype-defying Black women, such as NASA scientist Katherine Johnson and politician Shirley Chisholm.
The exhibit celebrates Black women by identifying the harmful ways popular culture often stereotypes Black women and showing counter-stereotypical images and information to refute those pejorative ideas.
The goal of two participatory chalk-wall components is to give exhibit-goers a sense of agency and self-efficacy in terms of how to cope with and thwart stereotypes.
The exhibit features photographs by Kyle Pompey.
The chalk wall components offer visitors opportunities to join the conversation.