Box Vox

packaging as content

«
»

June 14, 2010

Nathan Gibb’s Crayola Monologues

Crayola-Race On left: Nathan Gibb’s crayon collection, illustrating Crayola’s 1962 name change from “Flesh” to “Peach”; on right: an 8-pack box of Crayola’s “Multicultural Crayons” (both photos are from Nathan Gibb’s Flickr Photostream)

When I was a kid growing up in Florida—(where orange juice & Caucasian-suntans were the dominant norm)—I somehow settled on the orange crayon as the one that most embodied the ideal skin color.

Last Friday’s post about patented crayon packaging included one box,
in which the crayons represented people—(clowns in a circus text). The video below, however, takes the crayons-as-people analogy to its logical conclusion: as a
metaphor for skin color.

Nathan Gibb’s 2003 Crayola Monologues “uses the crayon as a human metaphor for exploring color and identity in the United States” as well as pointing out Crayola’s (and our culture’s) recent history of race-based color names for crayons.


Regarding my own childhood choice of orange as a skin color, I’m thinking that it must have been partly due to a limited pallet of the 8 original colors. If I’d had the color choices contained in the “Multicultural Crayons” box, above, perhaps I would have identified with a different color.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

2 Responses to “Nathan Gibb’s Crayola Monologues”

  1. Alicia says:
    June 14, 2010 at 12:36 pm

    My mother bought me that multicultural crayon box as a kid in hopes of being able to color the wide range of colors in my family.
    Of course, the main problem with the old “flesh” name for that peachy/beige color is that it assumes one color skin is default, and other types of skin are well… “other”.
    It’s interesting recently that I’ve seen the same thing in posts about fashion magazines. That same color is being named “nude” when really it’s more champagne/beige. It was such a mess-up in an article about the first lady’s dress, in fact, that the publication had to apologize, if I’m remembering correctly. A person’s worldview has to be pretty skewed to think a champagne dress on Michelle Obama is “nude” in color.

  2. Chris says:
    June 15, 2010 at 8:01 pm

    someone with a georgia accent in front of an antebellum structure is saying peaches are sissy?
    peach state and whatnot.
    great job otherwise!