Curator - Designer - Consultant

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Click on the LAUGHING MATTER image to the left for a five-minute video of the exhibit. 
“Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.”  - Pablo Picasso

NoirTech Research has been the Designer, Provider and/or Consultant of several nationally touring exhibits about Black Sitcoms, the Negro Baseball Leagues, African American Heritage Stamps, along with showcases of Black Americans on coins & currency.  

A Laughing Matter: Black Sitcoms in Review from 1950 to 2000

Pride & Passion
Premise:
A Laughing Matter is about negotiating the authenticity of Black life in American culture, using stereotypes that peel back the layers of embedded systemic challenges, with hopes of increasing your awareness about marginalized people of color through situation comedies.

​Examine what each sitcom, over a 50-year period, reveals about us.

Meanwhile, don’t choke on the joke!


​Beyond the Help shows that these down-trodden women of the kitchen, nursery and mothering, provided generations of White families with a support system.  In segregated America, these women offered advice, as nurturing mid-wives in complex social and family situations that were disturbingly real then and the genesis of systemic racism today.

Reach out to NTresearch@comcast.net for rental options.


Featured ​Personalities:

stamps of recognition
Louise Beavers - another overweight mammy figure who was always generous, forgiving and apologetic in submissive roles as a maid, servant or slave.  Often insightfully gifted, she bashfully played down her intellect to accommodate her bosses.  

Hattie McDaniel - a big-boned woman, with an ebony complexion, big hips, and toothy smile, perfected the optimistic, sentimental Black woman whose sweet, sunny disposition and kindheartedness almost always saved the day. 

Butterfly McQueen - with a high-pitched voice, the diminutive maid had the gift of operating in a world of her own. She is best known for playing helpless hysterical maids, not worthy of employment.

Juanita Moore - a very underrated actress who is best known for her role as Annie Johnson, the ever-smiling, accommodating, soft-spoken Mom in the 1959 version of Imitation of Life.
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Ethel Waters - is another Black matriarch myth in American pop culture. Perhaps better known as a blues and gospel singer.

Other significant maid actresses featured are: Ruby Dandridge (pictured as Beulah), Viola Davis, Jackie “Moms" Mabley, Lillian & Amanda Randolph and Octavia Spencer.