Art Direction // Melanie Walby
Photography // Jay Larson, LineBreak Media, Vincent Night, Free Truth Media, and Amelia Silbert

Design Impact Series was a collaborative event highlighting creatives making a positive impact with their work. The conversation went beyond pipeline issues, digging deeper into racial disparities and retention issues, giving people an actionable list of things they can do, not talk about, do. The series was four lectures and two poster shows featuring dozens of creatives in the Twin Cities. #DesignImpactMN

Garrio Harrison and I hosted an artist meetup, sharing our goals for the poster show. Artists voted between three themes and the chosen idea was identity.  The narrative around diversity in design focuses on a lack of people of color in the industry, ignoring the realities of access issues in a divided city. Creating work about race and ethnicity created by artists, designers, and photographers who are people of color became a critique of visibility in design. Our design community could have representation if we really tried, we have the talent here.

The lecture series addressed common rebuttals that surface when talking about featuring artists of color. For instance, the pipeline argument. In most diversity in design conversations, people conclude that we need to mentor youth so they pursue design — which is true, but can we also feature the creatives already in the field? Our speaker lineup Art Buddies, The BrandLab and Juxtaposition Arts who are already mentoring youth in design talked about the combined efforts we all must do to address this from all angles. 

We took advantage of our access to AIGA Minnesota’s mailing list and mailed out 1,200+ 18×24 fold-out posters — people who make hiring decisions and quite possibly hold the belief, or at least say, that our racial disparities are simply because POCI “don’t work” in our field. So we sent pictures of 42 of us to their house. This forced some harder questions, like, “Why is Minnesota so divided?” “Why don’t people know the names of these talented creatives?” and, “What can we all do differently to change this?”

Following the Lecture Series was our poster show featuring work of creatives in Minnesota using illustration, photography, and design to explore themes around race, ethnicity, and identity. Proceeds were split 60/40 between the artists and an organization of their choice, several of which were groups that mentor youth in art and design. The work featured was a testimony to the amount of talented black and brown folks we truly have here in Minnesota, and it was just a small sample of how many people are actually out here creating good work.

Artist List

 Adja Gildersleve | Aleksandra Gurneau | Ashley Fairbanks | Ashley Tuhy | August Foreman | Austin Nash| Ben Currie | Bobby Rogers | Brandon Werth | Christopher E. Harrison | Chris Cloud | D.A. Bullock | Darren D. Davis | Den-Zell Gilliard | Donald Thomas | Jasmine Creer | Joél Valdez | Jordan Hamilton | Jasvir Jesse Singh | JaVay Barnes | Kimmy Bartle | Kenneth Caldwell | Leslie Barlow | Luis Fitch | Marla Bonner | Marlena Myles | Nicollazzi Xiong | Rachel Avenido | Riché Effinger | Rubens de Mello | Ryan Stopera | Sonya Nayer | Stephanie Chang | Terresa Hardaway | Uriah Sommerville | Violeta Rotstein | Wing Huie | Victoria Vang | Yahya Rushdi

Our second display of the show was at MIA Third Thursday, featuring a panel moderated by Chris Cloud with me, Adja Gildersleve, Donald Thomas, Terresa Hardaway, and Joél Valdez. Multiple people came up to us after to point out it being the first time they had ever seen an AIGA Minnesota panel made up entirely of people of color.