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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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(re)Creating Turtle Island: Native American Design Through Remembered History

Our fourth course is coming soon!! Join us for (re)Creating Turtle Island: Native American Design Through Remembered History. Classes will take place from mid-July through August. The classes in this course will revisit and rewrite a story of design history...

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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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Printing, Sovereignty, and Protest

Jimmy Dean Horn is a multidisciplinary artist and designer whose work lives at the intersection of print, protest, and personal story. What began as a deep love for printmaking has grown into a broader design practice—one that now spans clothing,...

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Free

On Queerness & Race in Brazilian Art & Design

Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, is “full of potential and imagination.” It is a land brimming with regional customs and traditions and multiple histories and encounters both clash and coalesce. This pair of lectures dig through layers of...

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New

Mary Sully’s Practice of Native Design: Tradition, Crisis, Futurity

Historian Philip Deloria offers a deeply personal and detailed exploration of Mary Sully’s innovative personality prints—her striking three-panel pieces. He discusses her unique creative process and shares his journey to bring her art to a wider audience. Deloria highlights how...

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On Typography and Language in Peru

This class will be an overview of the rich visual culture of Peru through the lens of typography and language. We’ll look at visual and written communication from pre-columbian times until the early 21st century, and explore the aesthetics of...

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New

New Red Order: Signs of Savage Philosophy in Action

New Red Order delves into the provocative and evolving work of New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society of Native artists and collaborators who use humor, media, and performance to confront colonialism and interrogate cultural appropriation. Through the lens...

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The (Arab) Queering of Design Practice

It has taken many years for queer subjects from the SWANA region to be represented in design practice. It has taken even longer for queer voices from the design community to emerge. Marwan Kaabour and Wael Morcos both operate within...

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Black Queer Stories in Print: 19th Century to the Harlem Renaissance

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...

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Free

New

Designed To Be Red: Notes on Native American and Indigenous Graphic Works

Brian Johnson is locating, identifying, and archiving Native-made and designed printed posters, while also challenging conventional definitions of what a poster can be. This lecture explores Indigenous design art forms like wampum belts, beaded regalia, and painted hides as powerful...

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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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Painting Her Own Path: The Legacy of Angel De Cora

Yvonne Tiger explores the life and lasting impact of Angel De Cora (Hinook-Mahiwi-Kalinaka), a Ho-Chunk artist, designer, writer, and educator who helped shape the foundations of Native American visual culture. Through her illustrations, typography, and teaching, De Cora blended Western...

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Nicole Mourad

Living as a Lebanese American woman in today’s America has been a unique experience filled with so much community, culture, and a twinge of loneliness. While jumping into the world of design exposed me to so many rich diversities, it was still difficult at times to see myself and my people represented in the education I was receiving. Getting the opportunity to take the BIPOC SWANA course truly allowed me to indulge in not only the rich history of my culture, but the depth and visual beauty behind it. This course inspired me in a way that I had not been before, so much to the point that I booked a flight not much longer than a month after to Lebanon - to see where myself and much of the design I’d recently learned about had originated from. It was a blessing to participate in an experience that brings together minorities in such a rich and meaningful way.

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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