Arts Listings

Sometime in the early 1960s, Jan Faulkner, an undergraduate at Lincoln University in Missouri, saw some paper ephemera featuring black stereotypes and began a collection that has since been exhibited in museums, featured in monographs and the subject of a film documentary produced by Marlon Riggs in 1986.  

The collection is usually known by the name Ethnic Notions. More recently, Faulkner had hoped to sell the whole collection to a museum, but with no success. Where is the Smithsonian when you need them? 

Now, this whole remarkable assemblage is going to be broken up and offered for sale to collectors. If you saw the show at the Berkeley Art Center in 1982, you only saw a fraction of the whole collection. For this first scheduled sale all of the objects from the collection, not just the couple of hundred in the museum exhibition, will be shown and offered for sale. Paper ephemera items will be featured at a later sale. 

The observant flâneur in the contemporary supermarket will occasionally catch a glimpse of some brand survivors from as far back as the 1890s, fugitive images of Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and Rastus, the chef on the Cream of Wheat box, still being used to sell products today. Few are aware that these taken-for-granted icons are only the tip of an enormous black iceberg of African-American stereotypes used to sell everything from pancakes, syrup, fried chicken, candy, coffee, yams, toothpaste, and laundry detergent to golf tees, tobacco, clothing, liquor, toys, novelties and greeting cards. 

Among the most famous advertising characters of the past were the Gold Dust twins, Goldie and Dustie, two “pickaninnies” who touted cleaning products for Lever Brothers. My own tiny collection includes a tube of Darkie toothpaste, made in Taiwan, showing a very black man with very white teeth. Even ofay Mrs. Butterworth comes in a synechdochal brown, Mrs. Butterworth-shaped bottle. 

Strangely, in America, blacks are both loved and hated, trusted and feared, taboo and desirable, divine and demonic. As far as merchandising, they have been used to sell products for at least two centuries. And this selling of products spills over into the images of blacks in literature, music, radio, film and television. All black performers know that their individual performances can be subsumed either by themselves or their audience into any number of stereotypes. Film scholar Donald Bogle explicates some of these types in his pioneering Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks. Where Europe has Harlequin, Scaramouche, Columbine, Pierrot and Punch, America has Jim Crow, Uncle Remus, Amos and Andy and Sambo. 

Faulkner’s assembling of these enigmatic objects, each of which speaks with an eloquence that transcends the need for explanation or commentary, is a remarkable achievement by a unique individual who had a personal insight into race in America. The films Ghost World and Bamboozled hint at some of this vision, but it is even rawer and more immediate here. It is sad to think that Ms. Faulkner’s conception will be fragmented, but if you have never seen it, you will not want to miss this final showing of Ethnic Notions.