A Kaleidoscope of Color: THE COSTUME DESIGNS OF MILES WHITE

ON VIEW APR 20 – AUG 5, 2018

Elephants transformed into swans, beautiful girls turned into birthday cakes, and clowns became kings. These whimsical visions are captured in the drawings of the talented costume designer Miles White (1914-2000). Paired with original costumes and contemporary photographs, White’s spectacular drawings evoke the adventurous era of design that emerged in mid-century American performance.

In 1941 Miles White joined a team tasked with reconceptualizing the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus and updating it for the modern age. Under the leadership of industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, the vision was to unify the entire circus day experience, including the presentation under the big top, by thoughtfully coordinating design elements including color, light, and visual rhythm. The twenty-sevenyear-old White brought to the team a modern sensibility for costume design, characterized by vivid colors, airy fabrics, and a balanced concern for both function and style.

White’s bold use of color brought a contemporary palette to the circus rings, incorporating Technicolor shades of pink, violet, and yellow. His dynamic blend of colors and textures resulted in sets of wardrobe and props that visually unified the diverse elements of the circus performance in a way that had never been done.

Although Miles White would become best recognized for his designs for the original Broadway debut of Oklahoma!, it was his years designing for the circus that showcased the range and depth of his talents. For twelve seasons of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, White challenged himself to entertain audiences with an entirely different vision of the magical world under the big top.

This exhibition will include original sketches, watercolors, swatchbooks, and other production documents. Some drawings will be paired with actual wardrobe pieces and historic photographs. Over 500 of White’s original sketches and watercolors are in the Tibbals Circus Collection at The Ringling.

Hank Willis Thomas BRANDED/ UNBRANDED

In 2016 The Ringling purchased eleven photographs from Hank Willis Thomas’s provocative series Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915–2015. The entire set of 100 digital chromogenic prints by Thomas, the internationally celebrated conceptual artist, reconsiders classic advertisements over the last 100 years—minus their original text. Released from any context, brand, product, or messaging, the previously subliminal images are free to speak more directly to what is being sold: the constructed identity and reinforced stereotypes of white women in the U.S. over time.

To make the archival ads he has photographed even more accessible, Thomas has added new captions—some funny and irreverent, some ironic and pointed. By mining the past to create regrettably timeless representations of disempowered white women, Thomas confronts issues that continue to inform and circulate throughout our culture today.

As Thomas commented in an interview with Time in 2011, “Part of advertising’s success is based on its ability to reinforce generalizations developed around race, gender and ethnicity which are generally false, but [these generalizations] can sometimes be entertaining, sometimes true, and sometimes horrifying.”

Thanks to funds generously donated to The Ringling by William and Jane Knapp, Ringling Associate Curator of Photography and New Media Christopher Jones, along with former Ringling curator Matthew McLendon, chose one particularly striking image from each decade of Thomas’s series. This distilled version of the project serves as the nexus for a focused exhibition of Thomas’s broader work and concerns.