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2008 AIGA MEDAL
It took LeRoy Winbush 11 years to become the first black member
of the Art Directors Club of Chicago, but once the organization
accepted him, only five years to become its president. “Winbush was
a great motivator for designers of color,” says AIGA national board
member Vernon Lockhart, who considered Winbush his mentor. Lockhart
adds, “He would tell me, 'You have to get to the table where the
decisions are being made. The way to change something is to be
active in it instead of complaining on the sidelines.'”
Winbush moved to Chicago from Detroit as a teenager and became a
graphic designer there in 1936, one week after he graduated from
high school. At the time, the profession had only a few black
practitioners, one of whom—Charles Dawson—had numerous clients on
Chicago's South Side. Winbush started out in the same community,
but his role models were South Side sign painters. He jumped from
an apprenticeship in a sign shop to a job designing signage, murals
and flyers for the Regal Theater, where he “rubbed shoulders” with
performers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Duke
Ellington, according to Lockhart. Music was an important influence
on Winbush's career as well as a beloved hobby: as a teenager, he
performed at Chicago's Century of Progress exposition with his band
the Melody Mixers, and he later designed album covers for the
Ramsey Lewis Trio and other groups signed to Mercury Records.
Yet unlike Dawson, Winbush worked for a diverse range of clients
at a time when racism seemed to be an insurmountable barrier. After
leaving the Regal Theater, he joined the sign shop at Goldblatt's,
a local department store chain where he was the only black
employee. By the time he left seven years later, he was the art
director for all the Goldblatt's stores, creating merchandising
displays and managing a staff of 60 people. He had also become an
accomplished airbrush illustrator. Winbush founded his own firm,
Winbush Associates (later Winbush Design), on the South Side in
1945. Every morning, he spent three hours working as the art
director for the Consolidated Manufacturing Company. Every
afternoon, he spent three hours working as the art director for
Johnson Publishing, designing layouts for magazines including
Ebony and Jet. During this period, Winbush served as
the president of the renowned South Side Community Art Center as
well. “Because of the Great Migration, Chicago had a set of black
institutions that you did not have in any other city in the United
States,” notes design historian Victor Margolin. Winbush's
opportunities at thriving local enterprises like the Regal Theater
and Johnson Publishing helped him build a strong support network in
Chicago's black community. To win clients outside it, he had to
rely on his own ambition—and what Lockhart describes as “charisma”
combined with a willingness to learn.
A self-portrait in the December 1955 ADC Chicago News
Bulletin illustrates how busy the multitasking designer must
have been: the photomontage depicts Winbush with six arms sprouting
from his well-tailored suit, the better to hold his camera, hammer,
T-square, paintbrushes and other implements. Margolin suggests that
this illustrates how Winbush “couldn't just be one guy; he had to
be five guys at once.” His diligence paid off. “LeRoy was a pioneer
in establishing a business model for black designers,” states
Margolin, who notes that while some of Winbush's peers were
literally forced to “work behind a screen, he was out there as a
black entrepreneur.”
A 1958 Ebony article profiling Winbush—entitled “The
Barnum of Bankers Row”—indicates how successful his business model
was. Winbush “excelled at exhibit design,” according to Margolin,
and he convinced a bank in the heart of Chicago's financial
district to hire him to create window displays. Such things were
unheard of in banking at the time, but Winbush Associates soon
cornered the market its principal had invented, devising elaborate
narrative displays with mannequins and props for 62 clients in the
financial industry. When enthusiasm for this form of advertising
waned among the banks, Winbush found other outlets for his
expertise in exhibit design. In 1959, he served as chairman of
exhibits for the International Design Conference at Aspen, which he
was closely involved with for eight years. Winbush also helped
design Illinois's exhibit at the 1964 New York World's
Fair—including its animatronic Abraham Lincoln, which was the
prototype for the figures in the Hall of Presidents at Disney
World.
A few years later, Winbush began teaching visual communications
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and typography
at Columbia College Chicago. This was an impressive feat for
someone who had never received any formal design training. (In a
1988 interview with SAIC professor Frank DeBose, conducted for the
Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution Oral History
project, Winbush admitted that after high school, he had wanted to
attend the SAIC so badly that he sat outside it for hours, but he
lacked the money for tuition.) At the same time, he mastered a new
personal skill—scuba diving—having finally learned to swim in his
late 40s. In 1985, when he was almost 70, Winbush was part of the
underwater crew that built the coral reef for the Living Seas
pavilion at Epcot Center, and he celebrated the start of each new
year by diving into icy Lake Michigan for more than a decade
afterward.
Although Winbush insisted that he wanted to be known as a “good
designer,” not a “black designer,” he “believed he could use design
as a tool to help the black community,” says Lockhart. He developed
a long-term exhibition about sickle-cell anemia for the city's
Museum of Science and Industry and in 1990 became an exhibition
consultant to the DuSable Museum of African-American History, the
first museum of its kind. Winbush continued designing exhibitions
for the DuSable on subjects such as the Underground Railroad and
the uprising on the slave ship Amistad until he was well into his
80s.
Lockhart sees these achievements as evidence of the same
determination that enabled Winbush to overcome whatever prejudice
he encountered. In his interview with DeBose, Winbush acknowledged
that he might not have been the only black designer fighting for
unequivocal acceptance, “but I didn't know of too many others.
Every place I went I was by myself.” He told DeBose that he joined
the ADC and the Society of Typographic Arts largely to “open the
door” for other black designers.
“He was a real pioneer for my generation,” Lockhart concludes.
“Seeing Winbush let us know that a career in design was
possible.”
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