Black Women as/and the Living Archive
You are the Mother
Services
Brand Strategy
Branding
Print Design
Social Media Design
Art Direction
Web Imagery
Brief
Tsedaye Makonnen and the Washington Project for the Arts team approached Denae Creative at the height of the pandemic to help adapt to an intended in-person exhibition to an online format. The challenge was finding ways to innovate how people continue to engage with art, and shift the gallery space into something more readily available on a screen. Zoom screenings, virtual backgrounds, and IG Live act as design tools to support this innovation. An exhibition publication also imagined new ways to engage with printed matter, serving as a repository for conversations and interactions during online programming.
Solution
Black Women as/and the Living Archive became a 4-part virtual exhibition series and 116-page publication inspired by Alisha B. Wormsley’s film Children of NAN: Mothership. BWA initiates a conversation about how Black women encode, archive, and share memory through community. Our design choices were intended to reflect imagery from the film, including a pervasive quote, “You are the Mother.” Through portal frames and magenta hues, the visual identity transports viewers to a sacred space of ritual, performance, and dialogue about Blackness, time, and mothering.
Humanist fonts evoke mystical futurism to awaken folks to the magic within them, while rainbow chroma works to convey maternal power and gentleness reflecting the essence and experiences of all the women involved.
Tsedaye and WPA wanted to honor the womxn involved in the project, spread across several cities, capturing interconnectedness while still creating visual consistency.
The result involved social media templates for each program, creating a visual through line for the exhibition, and distinguishing the different virtual programming on the Washington Project for the Arts Instagram.
To generate awareness for the exhibition’s publication, released a year after the virtual programs concluded, we designed three limited-edition prints with distinct design motifs and lines from the film.
Folios were placed on the sides of the book to make space for color-coded footnotes around the book’s edges.
This was intended to inspire readers to explore the publication non-linearly. These notes are where Makonnen recorded thoughts and relevant context to content pages before, during, and after the exhibition’s inception.
At the back of the publication is a fold-out relational connection map, visualizing the interwoven connectivity between the artists featured in the project.
The information visualization evokes celestial bodies and overlapping threads of time.
“I was really looking forward to us having meetings, and working with you was just lovely and really enjoyable. This process could’ve been super static because we were on Zooms, but it felt so fulfilling and so creative, and it felt like there was no division between the virtual space and reality. Talk about portals!”
—Tsedaye Makonnen, Black Women as/and the Living Archive
TESTIMONY