12/1/2023 0 Comments Black graphic designers![]() ![]() This exploitation is compounded by luxury brands at the expense of Black and third-world people.” … And while we know that streetwear culture is Black culture, it has been commodified by all different identities of folks in order to build profit. “As a teenager doing organizing work, I was required to study the five elements of hip-hop (tagging, beatboxing, break dancing, emceeing, deejaying) and streetwear culture. ![]() She thinks critically about what hip-hop culture means for organizing internally and externally. Steez began her design work at BYP100 as a reflection of two vital aspects of her life: community organizing and hip-hop. Further, she is currently working with Levi’s for its Black History Month capsule due out this month. ![]() ![]() Steez is also the former lead digital strategist at the Movement for Black Lives (or M4BL), where she recently designed bomber jackets, sweatsuits, and full regalia for fellows that speak to the continued defunding of the police campaign work. Throughout her time there, she designed all the merchandise for the organization, from hockey jerseys donning Lucille Clifton quotes to " Unapologetically Black" T-shirts inspired by Kanye West’s GOOD Friday music drops. Dedicated to advancing the Black community’s economic, social, political, and educational freedoms, BYP100 sees the future through a Black queer feminist lens. Born in Chicago, the community organizer is deeply involved with BYP100, a chapter-based organization founded in 2013 in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal. Like Newman, Steez is a designer dedicated to creating the visual language of this social moment. As Douglas stated in 1967 of his mission in helping to create the Panthers' newspaper, also with Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, "We were creating a culture, a culture of resistance, a culture of defiance and self-determination." Joe Amon // Getty ImagesĪnyone dedicated to a future that requires Black liberation must use all the tools available to make the fight visually, linguistically, and spiritually appealing to those invested in their own freedom. Works by Emory Douglas on display at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver in 2011. Douglas and his work have provided the blueprint for that liberatory design. These designers are melding together past, future, and current realities to make revolution irresistible. Designers like Newman and Fresco Steez, the former minister of culture at BYP100, uses the poetics of adornment, a clarity of political values, and a hunger for a new world that many deem impossible. This current iteration of young Black queer people building a new visual statement through the Movement for Black Lives looks to the Black Panther Party as a starting point. It’s fitting that Newman was so drawn to Douglas's work. Also a living vessel of Black radical history and visioning, Douglas used printmaking and graphic design to best articulate the Black liberatory politics of the Black Panther Party via comics, illustrations, and visual propaganda. Together, they created The Black Panther in 1967, the newspaper reaching its peak with a 200,000+ weekly circulation. Douglas's work was integral to the music and, really, every day of their childhood.Ī revolutionary artist and the former minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, Emory Douglas was a formerly incarcerated youth who fell in love with graphic design in trade school and after attending San Francisco City College connected with the likes of party cofounder Bobby Seale. They remember the sound of '60s jazz vinyls playing before heading to the grocery store with their dad-an embodiment of their love for Black people as a Black queer kid navigating the world. Vanessa Newman can remember exactly where they were when they first saw Emory Douglas’s work. ![]()
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