>> Click here to watch a brief video on "Say it With Snap!" to get a better feel for the large-scale posters in the exhibition.

Between 1923 and 1929, Chicago-based Mather & Company answered the needs of a rapidly changing American work force by issuing colorful posters with catchy slogans designed to cajole, coax, and even admonish employees to perform at their best.

While the content of some of these posters — such as “Don’t Worry Till it Happens. Everything is for the Best,” or “What Are Loafers Paid?”— may seem naïve today, they captured a moment in time not unlike our own: when changes in society and employment trends upended the relationship between workers and management.

Brought on by the rise of the assembly line and the impact of technology like electricity and the telephone, industrial America in the teens and twenties was not the place it had been a decade or two earlier. Charles Mather had only to look around Chicago to see the need and potential for his posters. Boasting the second largest industrial area in the country, Chicago had experienced historic labor unrest in the late teens, which led to the creation of new forms of employee representation and benefits. In return, management expected higher worker productivity.  Mather recognized an opportunity in this volatile economic climate, and tapped into veins of popular entertainment such as sports, music, and the circus to craft dramatic posters that both motivated and schooled employees in appropriate workplace behavior. During the company’s most successful years, in the late 1920s, Mather claimed his business supplied more than 40,000 firms nationwide.

“Say It With Snap!” surveys the visual strategies and thinking behind 48 Mather & Company posters from 1923 through 1929. The exhibition shows how the direction of the graphic messages changed over time, shifting from incentives targeting white-collar workers and their managers in the early years to a greater focus on factory workers. The exhibition also illustrates the transformation of the Mather posters’ graphic style. While their designs all adhered to a standard format of a three-part message and a single image, the palette and use of visual motifs became more colorful and dramatic in the late 1920s, culminating in a set of vivid pink, green and black creations in 1929 featuring animals such as a tiger, a porcupine, and even a vulture (with the ironic header “HUNGRY!”), an eerie precursor to the stock market crash and Great Depression that would bring Mather’s business to a close.

Although the theme of workplace motivation may not seem like an inspirational topic, Co-curator Dulce Roman of the University of Florida’s Harn Museum sees Mather’s images as signposts of a unique kind of optimism. Such posters, she observed in a New York Times review of the Harn’s collection in 2010, “reinforce the idea that life goes on in spite of great economic hardship.” She added, “I hope viewers will consider the radically different economic times experienced between the boom . . . of the 1920s and the hardship of the Depression . .  . and realize that these periods are cyclical.”  Such reminders certainly remain relevant today.