course

Course announcement for "Native American Design Through Remembered History" with woven patterns and geometric motifs. Facilitated by Brian Johnson, scheduled for July-August 2025.

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

Join us for our fourth course — (re)Creating Turtle Island: Native American Design Through Remembered History. The classes in this course will revisit and rewrite a story of design history that centers on previously marginalized voices of Native American designers...

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course

A vibrant collage featuring maps, book covers, weavings, and posters against a black background. Each image in the collage represents themes from the course Design Histories in Southwest Asia & North Africa: Voices from the SWANA Diaspora.

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

A vibrant collage of posters, books, and art that considers the contributions of people from the African diaspora to graphic design throughout history.

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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class

A tan leather colored bark-cloth with dark brown lines dividing the cloth into square sections, with various motifs composed of lines inside of them.

Afrikan Alphabets & African Diasporic Design Lineage

Counter to colonial notions of the savage or primitive African, there is a complex, rich and multi-cultural history of African design. From the research of graphic designer Saki Mafundikwa on Afrikan alphabets and graphic languages, this opening video will set...

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New

Innovation As Tradition: The Art and Design of Wabanaki Ash and Sweetgrass Basketry

Sarah Sockbeson offers a powerful look into the design, materials, and meaning behind  Wabanaki ash and sweetgrass basketry. Sharing her experience apprenticing with master weaver Jennifer Neptune, Sockbeson discusses the patterns and processes that ground her work in tradition while...

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New

Irrational Indigenous Insights

Anna Tsouhlarakis, a member of the Navajo Nation with Creek and Greek descent, will present her lecture Irrational Indigenous Insights, an exploration of language, perception, and the complexity of Indigenous identity. Through her work words take on many facets of...

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Free

A picture of a screen with a cluster of pink dots, and a couple blue dots. The dots are connected to lines, which look like they want to meet at a center. In the middle there are 3D figures forming that look like incomplete scans of objects that have not yet loaded.

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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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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Free

A painting with 4 figures, one of them being a baby. On the left we see a dark older woman raising her hands in relief. A lighter and younger woman sits next to her. It can be assumed they are related. She holds a baby with pink white flesh. There is a man sitting next to her smiling.

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

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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A diagram with a photo on the left side labeled A, and an illustration on the right labeled B. A. is an aerial photograph of an African settlement. From the top view we see swirls in how the buildings have been mapped out across the land. B. illustrated the fractal pattern that the settlement has composed.

Radical Design Pedagogy: Towards an Autochthonic Black Aesthetic for Graphic Design Pedagogy

Since Cheryl D Holmes Miller's 1987 Black Designer's Missing in Action, there have been far too many calls for increased access and visibility of Black folx in Graphic Design education and the field at large. In 1998, Sylvia Harris offered educators...

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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

Historical Black and White sign reading “I AM A MAN”. It is now yellowed with time. The typeface on it is Thick, the forms feel long. “AM” is underlined.

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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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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