User:Jessicaisyijhen/Emmett McBain

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Emmett R. McBain Jr. (1935 – 2012) was an African-American graphic designer and art director.

Biography
McBain studied art and design at several schools in his hometown of Chicago, including the Ray Vogue School of Commercial Art, American Academy of Art, and IIT Institute of Design At age 12 he began taking summer classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. He started his formal art education at the Ray Vogue School of Commercial Art before switching to American Academy of Art in 1954 to study commercial art, while simultaneously taking night classes at the IIT Institute of Design.] He designed advertisements that appeared in print as well as on television. [McBain working for black-owned design firm Vince Cullers and Associates, and for major white-owned firms such as J. Walter Thompson and Associates, McBain teamed with fellow African American designer Tom Burrell to form Burrell McBain Incorporated. Many of his campaigns, for products including cigarettes, cars, and Beefeater Gin, featured African Americans. He also designed album covers, magazines, and public service ads.

McBain joined the first African-American ad agency, Vince Cullers Advertising, in 1956. He worked there for a year and then became an assistant art director at Playboy Records. His cover for the Playboy Jazz All Stars album was named Billboard’s Album Cover of the Week. He founded McBain Associates which developed a relationship with the Mercury Record Corporation. By age 24 he had already designed some 75 album covers, mostly for the EmArcy jazz label, for artists including Tony Martin, Max Roach, and Sarah Vaughan. In 1959, and then went back to Vince Cullers Advertising in 1968 as an art director. In 1964 he was art supervisor at J. Walter Thompson, had a hand in launching another iconic product: the Ford Mustang. His campaign for Newport menthol cigarettes promoted the product to Black consumers and depicted young, fashionable Black people in striking poses. [McBain helped train this new generation of advertisers, teaching intermittently at Columbia College Chicago from 1968 to 1982.

McBain is credited with formulating the idea of "positive realism" in advertising directed to African-American consumers.

In 1971, he teamed up with Tom Burrell, another Black designer, as co-founder of Burrell McBain, Inc (now Burrell Communications). An ad for Vince Cullers Advertising emphasizes the slogan “Black is Beautiful.” In 2017, the American Institute of Graphic Arts awarded McBain the AIGA Medal, given to designers who have made exceptional contributions to the field of graphic design.

In 1974, McBain left Burrell McBain. He continued to offer his services as a designer to non-commercial projects, from a journal of African diaspora thought to a local organization supporting the re-integration of former inmates into Chicago’s southside community.

In 1991, he organized a series of nationwide arts programmes, community projects and scholarships promoting African American voices, funded by Beefeater gin.

McBain passed away in 2012, his friend and fellow artist Lowell Thompson declared, “In a land of Mad men, Emmett McBain was one of the maddest and happiest and hippest.”

McBain's papers are held by the University of Illinois at Chicago.