INFO
Black History of Graphic Design honors four designers Laini (born Sylvia) Abernathy, Archie Boston Jr., Art Sims, and Gayle Asali Dickson whose work sits at the foundation of modern visual culture: Abernathy's radical sleeve design coming out of Chicago's Black Arts Movement, Boston's confrontational self-authored campaigns that forced the advertising industry to look at itself, Sims's poster work that gave Black cinema its iconography, and Dickson's illustration for the movement press, drawn for the people it depicted. Their innovations were absorbed into global branding while their names were left out of the record. This project treats recognition as reclamation restoring authorship, not just acknowledging influence.
The apparel translates that system into a single spot color. The long-sleeve is printed in cobalt blue on white, holding the entire composition in one ink a constraint that echoes both the movement-era print shop and blue-and-white ceramic portraiture. The front chest carries the four medallions in a diamond arrangement, each name set beneath its frame, with the title lockup and project statement below in the manner of a printed colophon. The sleeves run a repeating sequence of comedy and tragedy masks interlaced with Art Nouveau scroll cartouches performance and protest sharing one arm, ornament doing the work of argument. The garment functions as the project intends history to function worn in public, in motion, in real time. A window to the past, a mirror to the present, into the future.
credits
Curator: Jamaal Hale
Graphic Design: Good Green
Print Production: Good Green