a blog by ryan hayes

Graphic Influences III

Left image ¡Romero presente! (1991) by Juan Fuentes in Russ Davidson’s Latin American Posters (2006); center and right National Domestic Workers Congress (2009) and EZLN Women’s Revolutionary Laws (2007) by Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza

The Long Retreat Is Over (2001) by OCAP & We Also Know How to Cut (2011) by Unknown (taken by Craig while in Quebec City)

Silence=Death (1987) by Silence=Death Project  & Harper=Death (2010) by Aids Action Now!

Aids Action Now! Poster/virus project on the streets; General Idea’s IMAGEVIRUS (1989)

 The Creator is Watching You Harper! (2011) by Kent Monkman, AAN! Poster/virus project

I love doing this series on graphic influences. Without taking anything away from the artists, who are all amazing and huge inspirations to me personally, one of the reasons that I like doing this research is that it helps demystify design.

Great designs aren’t just produced by bursts of creative genius. They come out of a social context. They are historically rooted. Great designers are influenced by great designs & social struggles.

Right now I’m helping my friend Natalia organize an 8 part workshop series called Radical Design School. We are working from the premise that “we are all designers”. Given support, anyone can be a designer for social movements. Sure, there are technical ideas about design but we all also all hold a huge wealth of implicit knowledge.

It’s going to be a lot of fun, especially because Nat is formally trained as a designer and I’m self-taught. One of the things I’m interested in exploring is applying the “Everything is a Remix” concept to design – looking at how our designs are products of copying, combining and transforming existing material from our visual environment.

For example, some folks in Quebec borrowed OCAP’s guillotine (who can blame them?). And maybe they were borrowing more than that, maybe they were also using the visual archive to link their struggle with OCAP’s history or aura of militancy. But in their “remix”, substituting Premier Charest for Harris, the comrades in Quebec also added a great slogan that I’m tempted to borrow in this age of austerity and cutbacks: “We Also Know How to Cut”.

In their exciting Poster/virus project, Aids Action Now! writes that they are “intentionally evoking the history of creative responses to HIV … to provoke discussion, controversy and dialogue in a way traditional activism cannot.” Awesome! Be sure to check out the posters and, if you can make it, the launch event on November 30.

 

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