course

Incomplete Latinx Stories of Diseño Gráfico Borderlands/ La Frontera*

Incomplete Latinx Stories of Diseño Grafico centers the work and histories of art and design in Latin America. From a Latinx diasporic perspective, we look at the pluralistic work that comes out of the diverse cosmologies, perspectives, and points of...

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course

Design Histories in Southwest Asia & North Africa: Voices from the SWANA Diaspora

Design Histories in the Southwest Asia & North Africa: Voices from the SWANA Diaspora 12th – 21st Century is a course that highlights the diversity of our communities and puts forward the most vulnerable in our liberation. For the SWANA...

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course

Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design 19th Century – 21st Century

Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design 19th – 21st Century is the first in a series of BIPOC Centered design history courses facilitated by Polymode. Through recorded lectures, readings, and discussions, the class...

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New

Disorientating SWANA: A Journey Through Maps

South to North, East to West, where does SWANA begin, where does it manifest? Maps are more than a neutral representation of Earth; they are flattened, edited, labelled, distributed, and along the way, they are imbued with layers of subjectivities....

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Some Theoretical Considerations in Reading Latin American Design History

A talk in two parts focusing on certain conceptual and theoretical considerations in response to reading design histories of Latin America. Through the lenses of Latin American philosophers, critical theorists, and writers, we will make observations on local art, design,...

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The Georgia Negro Plate 2. Assessed value of household and kitchen furniture owned by Georgia Negroes. 1900 W.E.B. Du Bois and Students of Atlanta University

Black Data: W.E.B. Du Bois and Data Visualization

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...

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Free

Strikethrough: Typography Messages of Protest for Civil Rights

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,...

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New

Woven in Feminism: Amazigh & Al Sadu Symbols

This lecture discusses feminist craft practices across Morocco and Kuwait—from aesthetic and functional value to political value. The visual language of Amazigh design in rugs is used as a feminist tool of collective memory, resistance, and innovation within an oppressive,...

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There Are Black People in the Future, by Alisha B.Warmley

Behind and Ahead of the Times: Histories and Futures of Black Futurity

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...

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Otros Susurros Desde los Andes

A typographic-dingbat journey, titled Abya Yala: Visual Chronicles, through the little-known stories of the original cultures that inhabited the Andes. Vanessa Zúñiga develops her design from the semiotic and morphological analysis of the archaeological pieces’ visual signs. Then she translates...

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Buddy Esquire, Kips Bay Boys Club, Feb 13, 1982 Flyer Design, Cornel Hip Hop Collection

Funk, Blaxploitation, & Hip Hop Aesthetics

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. Many scholars have foregrounded Phase...

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Diseñando Identidad: Community Education, Design, and Politics in Puerto Rico

In the mid-twentieth century, Puerto Rico’s first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, developed a radical educational program that leveraged design, film, and art to provide basic education for predominantly rural Puerto Rican communities. DIVEDCO (the Division of Community Education), a...

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Free

New

Knowledge Making Against Digital Colonialism

This class will focus on questions of access, knowledge production, and knowledge protection using Digital Colonialism as its methodology. What are the ways we can protect cultural and ancestral knowledge while giving access? How can we turn around power structures...

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Ashley Anderson on attending BIPOC Design History

“As a black woman, I have not always seen myself reflected in discussions of design history, especially within my formal education. Participating in the BIPOC Design courses has been a tremendously eye-opening and affirming way to connect with other folks interested in learning more about the countless contributions communities of color have made and continue to make to design.”

Licenses for institutional use are available and customizable to fit your needs. Contact us at [email protected] to provide your students, employees, and designers with access to our BIPOC Design History Course.

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