Bid now to win this Kravet Furniture Custom, One-of-a-Kind Georgetown Side Chair!
In celebration of 30 years of Kravet furniture, Holly McWhorter of the Black Artists + Designers Guild will transform an iconic Georgetown side chair into a signature masterpiece!
The concept for Holly’s decoration of the Georgetown side chair from Kravet, in acrylic paint, is grounded in a series of infographics created in 1900 by the Black sociologist W.E.B. DuBois for the 1900 Paris Exhibition.
DuBois was invited to create a booth at the exhibition on the topic of The American Negro, for the purposes of educating the French public at large on the lives and achievements of a massive sector of Americans who most of them would never have the opportunity to encounter in person. As part of his lifelong fight against racism, he created an exhibition including photographic portraits, charts, and graphs that would upend the then-popular racist caricatures that ridiculed and sought to diminish African American social and economic success, as well as false scientific “evidence” of their mental inferiority.
His charts, many of which can arguably be considered fine art, embodied a colorful, geometric graphic style that was several decades ahead of its time (though DuBois did not consider himself an artist at all)—and would nowadays be called infographics, a concept that didn’t even exist at the time. The style has elements in common with the style of Holly’s own flat, colorful, geometric abstract paintings, which inspired her to use them as the foundation of her design for the chair—which riffs on key elements from four of the charts and graphs.
As such, the chair becomes a tribute not only to DuBois and his inestimable body of work, but a nod to the resilience, strength, and incredible professional, economic, and cultural achievements of Black Americans during the Reconstruction period and since.
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