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Graphic design history, like the history of many American industries, excludes Black practitioners’ work and methods, which I suspect is the reason why there are so few of us in the profession now. So in response, I’ve curated “As, Not For: Dethroning Our Absolute” an exhibition celebrating the work of African-American designers, partially as a bit of soul searching for myself, but mostly as an effort to foster educational and professional equity in the industry. As a professional Black designer, I still feel like an anomaly, often finding myself in majority white educational and professional spaces. And having normalized this feeling of alienation, my formal design education is rooted in methods developed by mostly white men. I’m sure any African-American who has pursued a career with little representation can empathize. This feeling, however, is new, because the start of my life in design actually took place within my own community.
BLACK GRAPHICS
I taught myself Photoshop as a teenager and began designing party fliers for friends and family, before developing a hustle during my undergraduate days, designed for mostly Black nightlife in Connecticut, Philadelphia, and New York. I was also actively consuming Black media, looking at mixtape artwork, album covers, and movie posters.
In graduate school, I completed a history project about Buddy Esquire, a prolific flyer designer who worked during the rise of Hip-Hop in the Bronx. The research process left me frustrated. Beside a scholarly article by Cornell University graduate student Amanda Lelonde and a few interviews online, there were no sources. I figured Buddy wasn’t the only historically influential Black designer without visibility. This was the seed for “As, Not For.”
When it was time to apply type and image to the page, my initial sources of inspiration— designers such as Pen & Pixel (Cash Money Records), Cey Adams (Def Jam), Art Sims (Spike Lee), and LeRoy Winbush (Ebony and Jet magazines)— were Black, and they were guiding me.
During the past year, I’ve tried identifying every African-American graphic designer active between 1865 and 1999, following breadcrumb trails to compile a list of designers, locate institutions, visit archives, and bask in Black graphic-design greatness. I was, for example, stunned to find out that multiple active Chicago based Black-owned advertising agencies were creating stunning campaigns for huge American brands in the 1960s and 70s.
JEROME HARRIS
Emmett McBain’s 1972 campaign for Marlboro cigarettes featured photos of the most fly 70s-styled Black man smoking a cigarette at the barber shop, or buying a hot dog on the street, the copy below reading “Where The Flavor Is.”
Collectively, this work honors a specific aspect of Black culture within its respective decade. The two main conceptual inspirations for the show are Harlem Renaissance philosopher, Alain Locke, and a 1977 exhibition in Ann Arbor, Michigan titled “Ritual: Baptismal In Black.” My exhibit’s title reflects two pieces of Locke’s writing: “As, Not For” is a three-word summary of a passage in his book, The New Negro, in which he argues that there is no need for Blackness to be performative to be essential within the culture in which it exists. “Dethroning Our Absolutes” is from Locke’s philosophical essay, “Values and Imperatives,” which prompts readers to assess their subjectivities while being mindful that social norms guide our behavior.
“Ritual: Baptismal in Black” asked its patrons questions that exposed the knowledge gaps the organizers attempted to fill: “Can your faculty/ staff/students each name five nationally or internationally active Black artists?” and “Do your major art books include the work of major Black artists?” I had to ensure that this Black excellence got the exposure it deserved, and it was this expanded research that manifested into “As, Not For,” which celebrates unsung African-American designers and acts as a life-sized bibliography, my sources listed within each piece. The exhibition is separated into four sections. “Parties & Protests” celebrates hip-hop party flyers and the Black Panther newspaper, documents used to activate cultures which eventually made an impact internationally. “Advertising & Commerce” features designers who ran Black-owned advertising agencies (including the legendary Art Sims, who is currently living in California). “Black Data” focuses on infographics created by W.E.B. DuBois documenting AfricanAmerican life in the early 1900s. And “Musicality” displays hip-hop and jazz album art by designers who were agents in the rise of popularity of both genres.
“Do your major art books include the work of major Black artists?”
According to the design census administered by the AIGA and Google, as of 2017, AfricanAmericans account for only 3.4% of all practicing graphic designers in the industry. Luckily, a handful of Black designers have seen this as a call to action. Individuals such as Dian Holton, Antionette D. Carroll, Silas Munroe, Lawrence Burney, and Glenford Laughton, along with websites like peopleofcraft.com, huntgather.design, and goodforpocin.tech, are working to shift the narrative of graphic design history, as well as increase the visibility and representation of Black people in the industry.
AfricanAmericans account for only 3.4% of all practicing graphic designers in the industry.
Increase the visibility and representation of Black people in the industry.
I curated this exhibition in solidarity also considering these goals. “As, Not For� seeks to interrogate and challenge the design community and beyond with the objective of promoting deep history, design theories and aesthetics of African-American designers.
JEROME HARRIS
Imagine (or remember) yourself as an art He admits he likes to test boundaries when director circa 1977. You receive a ledger-size possible, and thinks that politically correct poster bearing the portrait of a black man self-censorship is a chief enemy of the visual with a soft smile, one cheek resting against communicator. Like much of the memorable, his hand. The headline, “Catch a nigger by the industry-altering print advertising of the toe,” is followed by copy detailing 1960s, when he entered the trade, the designer’s experience and Boston’s work could deploy the flexibility across several media, combined payload of a single image ending with the line, “Equal with a declarative, ironic headline. Opportunity Designer.” But largely unlike the graphic Meet Archie Boston and agitation of the era, his identity one his classic buttonpolitics could be as puckish pushing self-promotions. and self-aware as they were Knowing irreverence is confrontational. one of the many tools Boston was born in 1943, in Archie Boston’s in Clewiston, Florida, creative arsenal. the son of a sugar cane Indeed, Boston’s sharecropper father multifaceted career— and a mother who kept encompassing house. The family design, advertising then moved to St. and design Petersburg, where education— he and his five demonstrates siblings grew up the poor, but aware adaptability of the value of and education. ambition that that mailer exalted. Restless and eager to impress his brother, who was already working as a commercial artist, Boston almost dropped out of college for a job in advertising. On Brad’s advice he stayed on, but an internship at Carson/Roberts during his senior year solidified his desire. “The creative people were treated like they were the most important in the agency,” he wrote in his 2001 memoir, Fly in the Buttermilk. “I wanted to be one of them so bad I could taste it.”
ARCHIE BOSTON
Early on Boston bounced between design studios and advertising agencies, while also serving out his National Guard duty (he writes in his book that he joined the Reserve to avoid being sent to Vietnam, and found himself on the frontlines of the 1965 Watts riots at home). Though he and brother Brad had worked together before—notably on a series of posters for the Council on Negro Affairs in 1963— the pair formed Boston & Boston Design in 1967.
They set their logotype in a typeface called Jim Crow. As a new firm courting companies that did not know what to make of this outgoing studio with African-American principals, they scrapped constantly for clients.
After two years, Archie separated from his brother to return to advertising at Carson/Roberts, then the West Coast’s largest independent agency, whose client roster included Max Factor and Mattel.
One lesson from design: “Design is hard work. Striving for design excellence is even harder.” -Archie
In 1969 he took a job at Botsford Constantine and McCarthy, where he worked for eight years. Simultaneously he started Archie Boston Graphic Design, an advertising and design consultancy, but did not pursue his own client work in earnest until 1973.
ALAN RAPP
“I worked hard to become a good designer, so that I would get hired at a good design firm that places value on good work, and not the color of one’s skin.” For most of his career Boston has been a teacher. He began when he was 23, at Chouinard. In 1977, when he was 34, Boston became a full lecturer in the Department of Art at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). In 1978, he helped found the Design department and later the Visual Communication Design program. For the next 32 years, which included 12 terms as chair of that program, he made a significant impact on design education at the school.
A former student remembers him as an instructor who combined nurturing encouragement with no-nonsense criticism. Mike Neal, CSULB class of 2005, credits Boston with solidifying his nascent impulse to pursue a design career: “There are people who command out of fear and others out of love and respect. Archie is the latter. If I did poorly on a project, I wasn’t afraid of getting chewed out by him, but I was more concerned about letting him down.”
Through his art direction Boston internalized traits of the Big Idea-era of visual communication—as exemplified by Helmut Krone’s legendary 1959 “Think Small” campaign for Volkswagen, the style used corporate-looking layouts with a silhouetted photograph and bottom-weighted copy at the service of a trenchant message—and made them his own. He did so quite literally in a campaign he directed for the Japanese marker company Pentel using the headline: “I told Pentel what to do with their pens.” This novel ad included Boston himself, standing confidently in front of a new line of hard-tipped markers, and a message aimed at his art-directing peers. This approach had a strong collateral social component to it; as one of the few African Americans in the industry of the day, Boston’s visual presence made a powerful and immediate impression, a sign that the professional demographic was undergoing a seismic shift.
Provocation and humor go hand-in-hand in Boston’s portfolio. By combining both aspects he has created unparalleled pieces of visual communication that evoke racist history while subverting it too. Attention-grabbing pieces like that “Catch a nigger by the toe” mailer have been part of his repertoire from the start. As Boston & Boston he and Brad were strategic about pointing out their blackness, not only as a means of preempting surprises, but also as a platform to showing off their creativity and audacity.
“It is important for young designers to have role models of their so-called ethnicity. This gives them the feeling, ‘if he or she can become this, so can i’ ”
A 1966 poster shows Archie in a satin starsand-stripes ensemble and top hat, pointing at the camera, with the headline “Uncle Tom Wants You!” The next year Archie and Brad produced one with them side by side, shirtless, each with a “For Sale” sign around their necks and a list of their measurements plus their merits and skills. Another declared, “I don’t want to marry your daughter.” These are artifacts of an era where such promotion doubled as social critique, and in their brashness attempted to hasten society’s acceptance of the shifting racial dynamic.
ALAN RAPP
Changing perceptions about race takes perseverance, but Boston has always been enthusiastic about his role in the Los Angeles creative community. He was the first African American to be elected president of the Los Angeles Art Directors Club, where he served t w o ter ms.
He also paid tribute to the Los Angeles design community in a series of video interviews called 20 Outstanding Los Angeles Designers, which he created while on sabbatical in 1986. Boston visited the studios of designers he admired, from heavyweights like Saul Bass to his former instructor Louis Danziger and digital avantgarde designer April Greiman. Twenty-one years later he released the videos on DVD, sharing these important documents of the creative scene to serve as inspiration for students. For his many contributions he was named a fellow by AIGA Los Angeles in 2007. Boston retired from CSULB in late 2009, an event he commemorated in a video that he characteristically titled “Archie Boston’s FU (Final University) Lecture.�
At first he holds up his middle finger, but then puts all joking aside to detail his career and his influences, and to address the generation taking up the mantle:
“Uncle Tom Wants You!” Boston & Boston self-promotional poster, 1966. Creative director/Art director: Archie Boston; Designer: Brad Boston, Archie Boston; Photographer: Jerry Trafficanda.
“ I want to be remembered as a professor who cared about his students and did what he thought was best for them. I want to be remembered as someone who stood up against criticism and spoke out on controversial issues. And finally I want to be remembered as a designer and educator, someone who documented my experience as an African American.”
“For Sale,” Boston & Boston selfpromotional poster, 1967. Creative director: Brad Boston; Art director: Archie Boston; Designers: Brad Boston, Archie B o s t o n ; Photographer: J e r r y Trafficanda .
Dr. Princeton Perry logo, 1967. Client: Dr. Princeton Perry; Creative director: Brad Boston; Art director: Archie Boston; Designers: Brad Boston, Archie Boston; Illustrator: Brad Boston; Writer: Archie Boston. ADLA, Call for Entries poster, 1973.Client: Art Directors Club of Los Angeles; Designer: Archie Boston; Photographer: Roger Marshutz; Production artist: Ruby Katayama; Writer: Archie Boston
ALAN RAPP
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