Black Design: History, Theory, and Practice 2019–2020
Kinohi Nishikawa, Faculty Convener
As our media-saturated culture exhausts every possible angle of consuming race, a new generation of scholars, activists, and artists has turned to investigating the structuring conditions of how blackness is experienced in everyday life. Their interest lies in highlighting how race has served as both an invisible subject and a necessary object of design. Bringing together some of the leading figures in the emerging field of Black Design studies, this seminar examines the construction and disruption of racial “commonsense” by those whose creative and technical labor often goes unnoticed. Our work will be geared toward recovering historical precedents for and theorizing contemporary applications of Black Design. In so doing, we will take seriously Teju Cole’s recent contention that design is “not [only] an intellectual exercise,” exploring what it means to “do” Black Studies in practice-based fields such as graphic design, illustration, book arts, game design, industrial design, fashion, museum curation, art installation, urban planning, and landscape architecture.
Speakers
Tia Blassingame
(These resources are representative of Tia Blassingame's artistic practice and relate to the seminar theme.)
- "An Interview with Tia Blassingame of Primrose Press." Printing History, no. 27-28, 2020, pp. 4.
- You are byCall Number: RECAP-103360721Publication Date: 2019This artist book is located in Firestone Special Collections. Colophon: "Paired with pressure-printed self-portraits that shift in terms of fragmentation and obfuscation, the handset letterpress text emerges ... "
Antionette D. Carroll
(This resource includes information about Antionette D. Carroll's work and relates to the seminar theme.)
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Orensten, Evan and Josh Rubin. “Interview: Antionette Carroll, TED Fellow and Founder of Creative Reaction Lab” Cool Hunting. 29 Nov. 2018.
Tanisha C. Ford
(This resource was assigned to seminar participants by Tanisha C. Ford.)
- Ford, Tanisha C. "A Black Girl Song for Dajerria." QED (East Lansing, Mich.), vol. 4, no. 3, 2017, pp. 156-160.
Korey Garibaldi
(This resource is representative of Korey Garibaldi's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
Impermanent Blackness by ISBN: 0691245126Publication Date: 2023-02-14Korey Garibaldi explores interracial collaborations in American commercial publishing--authors, agents, and publishers who forged partnerships across racial lines--from the 1910s to the 1960s. Garibaldi shows how aspiring and established Black authors and editors worked closely with white interlocutors to achieve publishing success, often challenging stereotypes and advancing racial pluralism in the process.
Toni L. Griffin
(This resource is representative of Toni L. Griffin's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
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Griffin, Toni L. “Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White” Just City Lab. 15 June 2020.
Jerome Harris
(These resources are representative of Jerome Harris's work and relate to the seminar theme.)
- Jerome Harris is a graphic designer and curator of the exhibition As, Not For: Dethroning Our Absolutes.
Akira Drake Rodriguez
(This resource is representative of Akira Drake Rodriguez's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
- Rodriguez, Akira Drake. “Remaking Black Political Spaces for Black Liberation.” Metropolitiques. 1 December 2016.
TreaAndrea Russworm
(This resource is representative of TreaAndrea Russworm's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
Gaming Representation by ISBN: 9780253025739Publication Date: 2017-07-03Gaming Representation examines portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, the contributors to this volume push gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.
Jomo Tariku
(This resource includes information about Jomo Tariku's work and relates to the seminar theme.)
- Anne, Flynn W. "A Look at African Furniture Designer Jomo Tariku." Designers Today, 26 Feb. 2023.
Sara Zewde
(This resource is representative of Sara Zewde's work and relates to the seminar theme.)
- Zewde, Sara. “241- 245.” 250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know, Birkhäuser, 2021, pp. 488–97, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035623369-051.
Kortney Ryan Ziegler
(This resource was assigned to seminar participants by Kortney Ryan Ziegler.)
- Ziegler, Kortney. “It is Bigger Than Microaggressions: Moving through tech as a black trans man.” Model View Culture. 19 May 2014.