A retro-speculative epilogue (Present day—....)
The research contained in this site began years ago as a thought experiment in 2018, written in anticipation of the eightieth anniversary of the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair. As a longtime collector of Fair ephemera I used the opportunity of a timely academic 2019 RISD sabbatical to explore the New York Public Library’s official records and visual archive of the Fair as well as other related materials from 1939. As our divisive national politics became more pitched in advance of the 2020 presidential election, contemporary geopolitical alignments with the troubling conditions of 1939 became more and more apparent; I was preoccupied with this historical rhyming during my 2019 sabbatical as I delved into research on the Fair.
In the present moment, our precarious democracy is at risk yet again after our 2024 election. What began with an anxious restaging of the 2020 electoral faceoff between the same contenders as a kind of grotesque theater of aged white male ‘unfinished business’ ended with President Biden’s extraordinary decision to step down, putting forward instead Vice President Kamala Harris, our first Black and South Asian woman candidate who among her many stellar qualifications had previously served as a state public prosecutor and California Senator. She was pitted against a disgraced twice-impeached former president who had falsely claimed his own 2020 victory, engaging fringe militant groups and other supporters to stage an insurrection on January 6, 2021 and breach the Capitol in an unprecedented violent attack. He was subsequently found guilty of thirty-six related felonies, together with other guilty verdicts of rape, fraud, and stealing classified documents. With his shocking return to power, having narrowly (but legitmately) won the 2024 vote for President, and with a trifecta of Republican victories in the House and Senate, this research project’s future-tense voice has become its past. It’s time to re-read Sinclair Lewis’s prophetic 1935 dystopian novel, “It Can’t Happen Here been here before. And to read the chilling “Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise” to see where we are likely headed.
It’s impossible, or at least beyond the scope of this part of the research, to keep faithful account of all the events that lead us to this present moment—from the murder of George Floyd and the origin of the Black Lives Matter movement; the global COVID pandemic and its lasting effects; the fractious 2020 election and the violent January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol where democracy was tested to its limits; the rapid succession of ultraconservative Supreme Court rulings that are systematically dismantling our democratic rights—to reproductive freedom; to access to free and fair elections; to fair treatment for all under the rule of law, and more—to the dominant global trend toward technocratic oligarchies, the endless wars in the Ukraine and Palestine and across the colonized globe, and the irreversable effects of climate change that are the dark legacy of the very industries the 1939 World’s Fair promoted.
This site is now a kind of time capsule, evident in the writing and the links within, but my preoccupations with the themes of the Fair—Democracy and Progress—continue. As each news cyle collapses the world of tomorrow with the events of today, this research itself, for now, remains my own ‘unfinished business.’ — Bethany Sage Johns, 2024
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Introduction (2019)
Shadow Fair: The Unfinished Business of the World of Tomorrow takes a critical sociopolitical perspective on The 1939–40 New York World’s Fair, using the Fair as a complex social object suspended in time and space (both future-focused and transitory; a physical site that’s now an archive) (1) to reflect on its abstract themes of Democracy and Progress represented as a mix of design, technology, public policy, and business. The 1939–40 World’s Fair was a spectacle designed for citizens to envision a more prosperous future as the nation pulled itself out of the Great Depression, while at the same time global conflict and rising fascism set the stage for the coming world war. It serves as a highly visible marker for the pivotal years of 1939–40, providing images and texts with which (and through which) to contemplate the turbulent conditions of 2019–20, a time of surprising uncertainty and apprehension that in many ways parallels the end of the decade of the 1930s. How did we get here? Have we been here before?
This research uses 1939–40 World’s Fair ephemera and related graphic material to explore how the Fair’s historical context, predictions, and legacies resonate within the current social, economic, and political climate these eighty years later. Using the Fair’s designs, ideas, and future speculations to refract our present as the ‘World of Tomorrow’ it imagined, this research reflects on a huge relational field of spatial and material objects, corporate and political ideologies, and spectacular optimism for an enduring democracy in vital balance with material posperity. In essence, this project tries to make sense of Democracy and Progress today by using 1939’s World of Tomorrow as a kind of mediating object. The Fair provides the ‘wealth of potential’ and the ‘interplay between problems’ that Keller Easterling (2) describes in Medium Design (Strelka Press, 2018) (3):
“Extrinsic information, contradiction, and mixtures of information systems provide a wealth of potential to disrupt the closed loop and the binary. ...Maybe it is not the existence or content of a [single] problem but the interplay between problems that is important.”
Shadow Fair is meant to be make history visible through multiple vectors and intersections. Together with the rich graphic materials of the Fair itself, many other information sources enter into dialogue to crosscut past and present, including the news accounts of both 1939 and 2019 read in tandem. When writing The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, John Steinbeck (4) “wrote furiously and said that the effort nearly destroyed him. ‘I'm trying to write history while it is happening, and I don't want it to be wrong.’” To ‘read the world’ in 2019 is likewise an exhausting and dispiriting task, and is to witness a daily rewriting of many aspects of the troubled global history of 1939.
Fortune magazines from 1939 provide a vivid visual record of corporate narratives, maps of global supply chains and communication networks, and public sentiment polls as the world balanced on the precipice of the coming war. (Above) A spiraling state of disarray illustrated in Fortune, January 1939; (below) partisan disruption as investigations begin in closed-door depositions leading to articles of impeachment of the President, New York Times, November 2019.
The Fair as form and content invites multiple visual/textual explorations with a nonlinear ricochet of objects, events, places, realms, and theories—aligning past cultural, political, and corporate legacies with the present to question implications for our (next) ‘world of tomorrow.’ Many other texts and design projects (books, collections, exhibitions) exist using the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair as ‘topic’ and its designed forms as ‘collectibles.’ For the purposes of this project, however, the Fair functions more as metonym—a spectacle that represents 1939 at large as a time of contradictory forces that are resonant today. This research prefigures any proposals for possible designed structures that may result from this preliminary stage—and like the Fair itself, it’s possible that this website will be all that remains.
As a graphic designer interested in the narrative potential of archives, I aim to use the Fair, as spectacle and document, to examine—through curiosity, association, swerve, digression, discovery, and surprise—the uncanny echoes of historical conditions from past to present. As a politically attuned citizen, I am deeply concerned about today’s fragile state of Democracy,(5) and the perils of unfettered material production in the name of Progress. This project is a thought experiment that holds both past and present at hand to see what if anything we might learn of The World of Tomorrow we may be busy designing, both consciously and unconsciously.
Notes/Links:
(1) New York World's Fair 1939 and 1940 Incorporated records1935–1945 [bulk 1939–1940]; (2) Keller Easterling: Medium Design, 2018 Fall Lecture Series, Academy of Art University; (3) Medium Design [excerpt], Strelka Press; (4) John Steinbeck’s Bitter Fruit, Melvyn Bragg, The Guardian; (5) The Democracy Doomsayers Consider 2020, Nicholas Casey, NYT
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Note: This site is a repository for graphic material, texts, notes, images, and links. Much of this is preliminary material drawn from my own collection of World’s Fair ephemera; most is from the New York Public Library’s 1939–40 New York World’s Fair archive; some requires access to related archives (Fortune Magazine, etc.); links to other text and image sources that draw past and present into contact are to be updated and added over time. The photos and text are imperfect, the captions are incomplete; the text links to ‘the present’ are practically ‘the past’ within a day of posting; the duties of proper text and image editing, permissions, and data management will follow as the project is focused and refined.