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Afrikan Alphabets & African Diasporic Design Lineage


SAKI MAFUNDIKWA

Counter to colonial notions of the savage or primitive African, there is a complex, rich and multi-cultural history of African design. From the research of graphic designer Saki Mafundikwa on Afrikan alphabets and graphic languages, this opening video will set the course from African design lineages that travel from the continent to America through the transatlantic slave trade.



RESOURCES


  BOOKS 


The Decorative Arts of Africa by Louise E Jefferson

African Alphabets by Saki Mafundikwa

Making Africa : A Continent of Contemporary Design

AFRICA : Art of a continent
Tom Phillips
Royal Academy of Arts (Great Britain)

MBUTI DESIGN : Paintings by Pygmy Women of the Ituri Forest
Georges Meurant and Robert Farris Thompson
Thames and Hudson

TEXTILE ART OF THE BAKUBA: Velvet Embroideries in Raffia Sam Hilu and Irwin Hersey with Value Guide
A Schiffer Book for Designers and Collectors

AFRICAN REFLECTIONS : Art from North Eastern Zaire
by Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim Washington
American Museum of Natural History

ANAFORUANA: Ritual y simbolos de la Iniciacion en la sociedad secreta Abakud Lydia Cabrera
Ediciones R Madrid, 1975

PATTERNS THAT CONNECT : Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art byCarl Schuster & Edmund Carpenter
Abrams

Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou by Mary H. Nooter

African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design.
by Ron Eglash
1999. 1st edition. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press.

Designs for the Pluriverse by Arturo Escobar


The Intimacies of Four Continents by Lisa Lowe

Epistemologies of the South by Boaventura de Souza Santos

“Culturally Situated Design Tools: Ethnocomputing from Field Site to Classroom.” by Ron Eglash, Audrey Bennett, Casey O’donnell, Sybillyn Jennings, and Margaret Cintorino. 2006. American Anthropologist 108 (2): 347–62. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2006.108.2.347.

“Notes for a Cosmopolitical Design: Regarding the Comments from Marisol de La Cadena and Keith M. Murphy.” Tironi, Martín, and Pablo Hermansen. 2018 Journal of Cultural Economy 11 (4): 354–58.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2018.1483254.

The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King

“Decolonizing Design Innovation: Design Anthropology, Critical Anthropology, and Indigenous Knowledge.” by Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, 2013.

In Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice. edited by Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, and Rachel Charlotte Smith, 2114–2230. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by Adrienne Maree Brown

Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock

Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking by Robert Bringhurst

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by Bell Hooks

http://modernitycoloniality.com


Systems of Slavery and White Supremacy 

ZIDDI MSANGI with SILAS MUNRO


Slavery was a designed system that expanded into a mechanized and colonial tool of European empires. The proliferation of design products marketed to Africans on the continent, such as the Dutch wax prints of the company now known as Vlisco, have their origins in the Netherlands' imperial presence in Indonesia. These Dutch wax fabrics proliferated mainly in West Africa in countries like Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal. In parallel in the East African countries Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, local African designers created Kanga–a community authored cloth garment that speaks cultural norms through distinctive patterns and Swahili phrases typeset in Arabic and Latin Alphabets. 





RESOURCES


  BOOKS 


  • On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life by Sara Ahmed

  • Sweetness and Power. by Sidney Mintz. 1985. New York: Viking Penguin.

  • “1492: A New World View.”
    In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View.     by Sylvia Wynter. 1995. edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, 5–57. Washington: Smithsonian.

  • Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (Sexual Cultures Book
    53) by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

  • And she told 2 friends : an international exhibit of graphic design by women by Kali Nikitas
  • “Bauhaus and the People Without Design History.” In Bauhaus Futures. by Elizabeth Chin, 2019. edited by Laura Forlano, Molly Wright Steenson, and Mike Ananny, 85–94. Cambridge: MIT Press.

  • Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. by Aimi Hamraie. 2017. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press.



  ARTICLES & LINKS 








Designing Emancipation


PIERRE BOWINS

From the early 1830s to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation outlawing slavery in 1863, Boston was the center of the American anti-slavery movement. Organizations such as the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society posted broadsides throughout the city to publicize the day’s events and advocate for the freedom of slaves. These single-sheet notices were printed in large, bold lettering and often contained quotations from the Bible, the Constitution, and the founding fathers. These sources gave legitimacy to the movement and a significant visual record of Black freedom in the Antebellum Era.




RESOURCES


  BOOKS 


  • Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. by Simone Brown

  • Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. by Ruha Benjamin. 2019. 1 edition. Medford, MA: Polity.

  • Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life by Theodor Adorno. 1978. New York, Shocken Books.

  • Aesthetic Theory, Continuum by Theodor W. Adorno

  • Picturing Black New Orleans: A Creole Photographer's View of the Early Twentieth Century

  • Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble

  • The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff


  • Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print

  • Drawn to Art: A Nineteenth-Century Dream

  • Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze

  • Capitalism - How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things, Explain Things, Make

  • Things Look Better, Make People Laugh, Make People Cry, and (Every Once in a While) Change the World
  • The Politics of Design
  • In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays









  ARTICLES & LINKS 

ARCHIVES & MORE


TYPOGRAPHY & PRINT

AESTHETICS, RACE & POLITICS




  • Advertising Race/Raceing Advertising: The Feminine Consumer(-Nation)





DESIGN & CAPITALISM SEMIOTICS & MEMES





Blackface and Minstrelsy Tradition


KELLY WALTERS

This lecture will explore a brief history of Black representation as it appears in music publishing during the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. Following Emancipation, White entertainers and musicians adopted Black stereotypes into minstrel show performances. Minstrel shows were a form of popular entertainment that typically included racist blackface depictions and derogatory caricatures. In the Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction eras, we begin to see how white supremacy influenced the way Black people were represented in the realm of entertainment. Visual examples like Stephen Foster’s Massa’s in de Cold Ground (1852) or White, Smith & Co.’s I’se Gwine Back to Dixie (1874) will highlight the ways American popular music emerged and Black culture became intertwined.



RESOURCES


  BOOKS 





  ARTICLES & LINKS 



  VERNACULAR 

  TYPOGRAPHY 

  IDENTITY & INTERNET 




Black Data:

W.E.B. Du Bois and Data Visualization


JASON FORREST with SILAS MUNRO 

Known for being a prolific author, renowned sociologist, fierce civil rights advocate for people of color, founder of the NAACP, and historian, WEB Du Bois was also a pioneer of data visualization. The American Negro was one initiative of the United States Exhibition to a global audience at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Du Bois was part of a collective of black intellectuals and professionals who contributed to a multidisciplinary display representing the best of African American advancement at the turn of the century. A cornerstone of the exhibit was The Georgia Negro, a set of 63 brightly-colored diagrams visualizing a sociological study by Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University. The dataset made arguments in visual form for the equality and sophistication of black Americans. Du Bois and his team generated avant-garde graphics 20 years before the founding of the Bauhaus. Du Bois and his collaborator's work is a prototypical case study of design for social innovation, decolonized design pedagogy, and expanded practice.





RESOURCES



  BOOKS 



  • Design, Writing, Research: Writing on Graphic Design by Ellen Lupton and Abbot Miller


  • Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome
    Women and Queer Radicals

  • Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin

  • Data Action: Using Data for Public Good

  • Race After the Internet by Lisa Nakamura




  ARTICLES & LINKS 



RESEARCH AND PRACTICE





PEOPLE

W.E.B. DU BOIS 



DATA PORTRAITS






BLACK IN DATA








Black Queer Stories in Print:

19th Century to the Harlem Renaissance


JON KEY with SILAS MUNRO

In the 1830’s The Sun Newspaper ran a story never shared before in print: a man by day and woman by night who was on trial in New York for theft. Mary Jones/Peter Sewally was one of the earliest known public Transgender people. Her story was one of the first black queer narratives documented and shared in printed form in the early 19th century. A few decades later in 1880’s D.C. The Evening Star newspaper printed “The Queen is Raided” referring to William Dorsey Swann, the earliest Drag Queens in American history, lavish underground parties overturned by the police.  In 1925, Alain LeRoy Locke was asked to be guest editor of an issue of Survey Graphic, the richly designed periodical covering sociological and political issues. The issue, titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro”, was Locke’s first publication connecting an emerging generation of young black writers, poets, and artists, in what would be known as the Harlem Renaissance. The infamous issue became the basis for the seminal 1925 anthology The New Negro, marking a shift from a focus on Black bodies to Black consciousness and Black thought.

The following year, a collective of young, black, and some queer artists would write, design, and self-publish FIRE!!, a publication devoted to younger Negro artists. FIRE!! was conceived and edited by Wallace Thurman with contributions from Langston Hughes, Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, and Aaron Douglas. The magazine’s varied content contained diverse genres, including essay, design, illustration, plays, and poetry that addressed taboo subjects of the time such as interracial marriage, prostituiton and homosexuality. Tragically, the headquarters of FIRE!! burned down after the completion of the first issue, but not before its content made equally fiery controversy. In November 1928, Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life was published as a revivalof FIRE!!. This would be Thurman's last artistic publication journal. 




RESOURCES



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The Great Migration:

Harlem Artists Guild, and the 306 Group


TASHEKA ARCENEAUX-SUTTON


The harsh impact of Jim Crow laws in the South of the United States triggered a mass exodus of  Southern Black Americans to northern cities seeking equality and economic opportunity. Cities like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia were well known magnets for what is now known as The Great Migration. Less populous cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, and Kansas City also built up thriving Black neighborhoods, though the journey north was not an easy road.

This talk will focus on designers and artists from New York and Chicago, and highlight the work of Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight, Louise E Jefferson, that form a multi-generational network of Black Excellence.





RESOURCES



  BOOKS 




  ARTICLES & LINKS 







COLLECTIVES & INSTITUTIONS




COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES



TALKS, INTERVIEWS, PODCASTS






Strikethrough:

Typography Messages of Protest for Civil Rights


COLETTE GAITER

In the 1960s and 1970s of this country, everyday activists took to the streets with placards in their raised arms with urgent messages made visible in typographic form.

This selection of protest graphics will focus on a Black experience. However, the Civil Rights movement represented and inspired diverse protest movements with wide-ranging socio-economic, racial, geographic, and class hierarchy origins. From Emory Douglas’ prolific body of Black Panther publications, countless graphics from the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the iconic “I AM A MAN” poster, many known and unknown makers used graphic design to advocate for Black equality.




RESOURCES



  BOOKS 






  ARTICLES & LINKS 




I AM A MAN

ART & PROTEST

TYPOGRAPHY


  • How iconic typographic picket signs became our eternal cry for justice



POLITICS


BLACK PANTHER PARTY





INFRASTRUCTURE


RACE AND TECHNOLOGY
PRINT & PRESS





Iterative Identity: 

Art Deco, World’s Fair, and American limits on humanity


One of the key promises of the American Dream made by the automobile industry in the 1930s–1950s was the individual freedom of a car owner on an open road. This was marketed with innovations in advertising, exhibition design, and product design typified by the term “streamlining,” The limited availability of streamlining to Black Drivers was particularly prevalent in the Southern states. Victor Hugo Green, a travel writer and postal worker, saw an opportunity to make “Driving While Black” safer for his fellow Black Americans by publishing his annual Negro Motorist Green Book. Publishing out of his Harlem office, The Green Book was printed annually from 1936 to 1966 and grew from New York City to include the entire United States and international destinations as far away as Mexico and Bermuda.




RESOURCES





  BOOKS 


  • Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"by Zora Neale Hurston

  • How It Feels To Be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston

  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

  • Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

  • In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West by Wendy Brown

  • Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

  • Ideas Arrangements Effects: Systems Design and Social Justice by DS4SI



  ARTICLES & LINKS 



STRUCTURAL RACISM


COLLECTIVESFILM

EVENTS
RACE & DESIGN








DESIGN THINKING



Black Revolutions:

Organizing the Production of Black Design


CHRIS DINGWALL

The cover of the August 1969 issue of Ebony declared the age of The Black Revolution. As a commodity, however, the issue of Ebony embodied the ethos of Black capitalism. The flagship publication of the Johnson Publishing Company, was the largest Black-owned company on planet earth in 1969. Reliant on ad sales from the likes of McDonalds and Newports, JPC augured a future for Black design as another market niche in the world of corporate capitalism.
The same year, a group of Chicago-based Black artists and craftspeople formed AfriCOBRA, the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, as a way to build a grassroots, cooperative economy for disseminating Black design to everyday Black people autonomous from white-controlled markets.

This lecture surveys the contrasts as well as the connections between Johnson Publishing Company, and AfriCOBRA, as models for Black design production. While the corporation and the collective proposed different futures for the meaning and materiality of Black design, they emerged from and built upon the overlapping social networks of Black Chicago, mediating between the values of community and capitalism. This not only shaped their design work but also prepared the ground for future experiments in organizing Black design production today.






RESOURCES


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Funk, Blaxploitation, & Hip Hop Aesthetics


TASHEKA ARCENEAUX-SUTTON, PIERRE BOWINS with SILAS MUNRO


From the bass heavy riffs of Curtis Mayfield’s SuperFly 1973 soundtrack to the scratch and synthesized Brox rhythms of 1970s and 1980s DJ’s like Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash—the histories of Black music and Black design have been intermixed.

Similarly in Film, the generative collaboration between Art Sims and Spike Lee that began with the posters such as Do The Right Thing, 1981 and New Jack City, 1991 lead to audiences literally breaking down bus shelters to collect the posters. This talk will dig through the crates to show the global influence of Black design.




RESOURCES



  BOOKS 



  • Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York by Craig Castleman

  • CONTACT HIGH: A Visual History of Hip-Hop by Vikki Tobak


   
  ARTICLES & LINKS 







Behind and Ahead of the Times:

Histories and Futures of Black Futurity


LAUREN WILLIAMS
The Black experience(s) in the United States cannot easily be extracted from how we are collectively situated in time: it is shaped simultaneously by the weight of past and present oppressions and the precarity of our futures. White supremacy would have us believe that Black people are "behind the times" economically, socially, and otherwise; time shapes constructions of race and Blackness; our time is literally worth less than others' on the labor market; time is an instrument of carceral punishment; the time for justice is never now.

Still, Black folks—designers and non-designers alike—demonstrate an enduring commitment to constructing thriving, expansive Black futures. By troubling the definition of "design," this talk addresses Black futures of yesterday, today and tomorrow, radical imagination, and emergent strategies in Black design, whether acknowledged by the canon or not. From traditions in Black speculative futuring like afrofuturism, to the ubiquitous acts of future-building that Black Americans undertake on a daily basis, to the role of Black designers in mainstream industry, we'll explore the ways in which Black folks have troubled this liminal time-space we occupy through
design and explore the implications of that lineage for the future of Black design.



RESOURCES



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Radical Design Pedagogy:

Towards an Autochthonic Black Aesthetic for Graphic Design Pedagogy


AUDREY BENNETT
Since Cheryl D Holmes Miller's 1987 Black Designer's Missing in Action, there have been far too many calls for increased access and visibility of Black folx in Graphic Design education and the field at large. In 1998, Sylvia Harris offered educators ways to continue Searching For a Black Aesthetic in American Graphic Design. We now live in an age of a rising tide of Black Design Pedagogy, where the legacies of Radical, Intersectional Black Feminism. Simultaneously, the recent cluster Black Design Faculty at OCAD University, led by the first Black Dean of Design of any program in the world—Dori Tunstall—shows that progress sometimes happens quickly and sometimes slowly. Meanwhile, many Black Design educators have done been doing the work for years. Audrey Bennet brings an update to her Towards an Autochthonic Black Aesthetic for Graphic Design Pedagogy that brings us back to this course's beginning. Her work shows that by studying the ethnomathematics of African design, art, and architecture, as seen in the research on African Fractals by Dr. Ron Eglash, we can shift the underlying cultural grids of design education. This talk offers strategies and examples 0f educators and designers who are drawing inspiration from Black cultural aesthetics.






RESOURCES



  BOOKS 

  • “Black Designers: Forward in Action” by Cheryl D. Miller. Print Magazine, 2020.

  • “Black Designers: Still Missing in Action?” by Cheryl D. Miller. Print Magazine, 2016.

  • “Decolonized Anthropology and Design: the Utility of Design Anthropology,”
    by Elizabeth Tunstall. 2012. Participatory Innovation Conference Digital Proceedings [CD], paper 94. Melbourne, Australia.

  • “Design Anthropology: What does it mean for your design practice?” by Elizabeth Tunstall. Adobe Design Center Think Tank. May 13, 2008.

  • “Culturally Situated Design Tools: Ethnocomputing from Field Site to Classroom.” by Ron Eglash, Audrey Bennett, Casey O’Donnell, Sybillyn Jennings, and Margaret Cintorino. American Anthropologist, 108.2 (2006): 347-362. AWARD: General Anthropology Division Award for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship.

  • “Towards an Autochthonic Black Aesthetic for Graphic Design Pedagogy.” by Audrey Bennett. Journal of Design Research, 3.2 (2003).



  ARTICLES & LINKS







COLLECTIVE ACTION

SUSTAINABILITY


MATHEMATICS & CULTURE
  • “Follow the Golden Ratio from Africa to the Bauhaus for a Cross-Cultural Aesthetic for Images.” by Audrey Bennett. Critical Interventions, 9.10 (Spring 2012): 11-23.

  • Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm by György Kepes