Portrait of Misha Black taken in 1951 (photograph by Clifford Hatts and reproduced courtesy of the Hatts family)
In December 2020 Harriet’s article entitled ‘“Lines of Becoming”: Misha Black and Entanglements Through Exhibition Design’ was published in the Journal of Design History. This explores the networks that exhibition designer Misha Black (1910-1977) created and sustained across five decades and many continents, engagements that impacted on his changing personal and professional identities. Through interrogating Misha Black’s work, the article focuses on exhibitions as sites of personal and professional ‘entanglement’ across time and space, in a single career. It links exhibitions, which are often considered in isolation in historical accounts. In Black’s case, through successive commissions he developed ideas about exhibitions as communications or propaganda, as well as modelling formations in professional design practice. Examples that the article focuses on are The Seville Exhibition, 1929-30; MARS Group Exhibition, 1938; Glasgow Empire Exhibition, 1938; New York World’s Fair, 1939-40; Ministry of Information exhibitions during World War Two and the Festival of Britain, 1951. The article is free and open access thanks to the RCUK Open Access Publication Fund.
