Eye Candy: Jet Beauties of the Week

If you are a black person who grew up in America in the 70's and 80's, chances are that  JET and Ebony magazines were part of your childhood.  I remember visiting my grandparent's house in Maryland where I would sit in the sunny front room reading issue after issue of JET.  They had a chair that was upholstered in red and gold fabric, and it swiveled when you sat in it.  There were issues of JET on the glass coffee table, and I can recall spending hours reading while my brother played outside. These are some of my most vivid childhood memories.

  Something is different about Kenya Moore . . . Photo: Jet Archives

My favorite section of the magazine was "The Week's Best Photos," which featured photos of black celebrities and politicians.  I can remember being tickled when JET published pictures of stars in interracial relationships with the caption"so-and-so and his white wife," like we couldn't see that from the pictures! The advertisements for Ambi Fade Cream, Carefree Curl, booze, and Newport cigarettes showed black people coupled up and being fabulous. (Obviously, at this point in my childhood I had no understanding of the concept of irony. )

Where is this scotch when I need it? Photo: Pinterest

This year when Jet abruptly stopped publishing a print edition (in the middle of my father's subscription) I felt a bit sad, like another piece of my childhood was taken away.  I was excited to visit Speaking of People: Ebony, JET, and Contemportary Art at The Studio Museum in Harlem and share this part of my history with Chloe. The exhibit is a collection of works by more than a dozen artists who were inspired by these two black-owned publications.

Jeremy Okai Davis, Makes the Man

In the midst of all of the negative images of black women in popular culture it was thrilling to walk into a room wall papered with JET Beauties of the Week.  It was interesting to to look at the range of skin color, hairstyles, and body types of the women chosen to appear in the magazine.  Although, the Beauties of the Week all posed in swimsuits, it was refreshing to female bodies without digital or surgical "enhancement".

The women were all relatively thin,  but they were shaply in a way that was not grotesque. I can imagine that these images of black women were less psychologically damaging than the ones that exist today in pop culture because they did not represent anything that couldn't be achieved with diet and exercise.

I also enjoyed viewing Theaster Gates's piece On Black Foundations.  Before there was MAC or Nars, there was Fashion Fair. I can recall seeing pink tubes of ruby and burgundy lipstick on my grandmother and aunt's vanities.  In fact, I think that Mikita's first lipstick was a Fashion Fair shade called "Brown Sugar."  There was part of the installation in which a bald headed brown skinned woman repeated "I am beautiful" in various intonations. Chloe was transfixed.

Theaster Gates On Black Foundations

I brought Chloe to the museum to share JET and Ebony with her, but the exhibit that had the most impact on both of us was The Jerome Project by Titus Kaphar.

Titus Kaphar

In 2011, Kaphar was looking on the internet for his father's prison records.  He found dozens of men who shared his father's name, and he used photographs of these men as the inspiration for a collection of  portraits (it is kind of like a visual arts version of The Other Wes Moore).  The paintings of these men were covered in gold leaf and dipped in tar, and they are at once royal and tragic. It is interesting to think about the tar significance of the tar in light of the story of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby.

Photo: songofthesouth.net

Originally Kaphar used the tar to symbolize the amount of time that each man had been under the supervision of the criminal justice system, but it evolved into a means of obscuring the men's faces to preserve their privacy.  The exhibit is a striking and thought provoking commentary on race and the judicial system in America.