Silas Munro: On the Consideration of a Black Grid

Details

Image: 'Fractals Ascending, Storyboard as Grid, Polymode, 2021-2022'

From the funky, fresh Black modernism of the Johnson Publishing Company’s headquarters designed by John Warren Moutoussamy with Arthur Elrod and William Raiser to the expressive graffitied grids of Adam Pedelton’s monumental canvases in black and white, there lives a wide-ranging matrix of possibilities for what I consider to be a Black Grid. The renowned design scholar Audrey G. Bennett’s text Follow the Golden Ratio from Africa to the Bauhaus for a Cross-Cultural Aesthetic for Images traces a lineage of fractal ingenuity in the Sub-Saharan Cameronean palace of a Chief in Logone-Birni that likely influenced Egyptian, North African Temple architecture, linking to Italy through the mathematician Fibonacci know for his so-called “golden ratio” that then informed European ideals of beauty circulating in the infamous Bauhaus art school. Bennett’s postulations connect to my meandering search to see myself as a Black designer, artist, and unexpected design historian in a sea of pedagogies that don’t represent me or my lived experience.

This brief visual essay charts a series of experimental meditations on how grids can shape Black liberatory forms—as in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois’s collaborations with his students at Atlanta University in 1900. Black Grids can operate as tools of resistance in graphics by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the collective visual production of the AfriCobra movement, and the printed materials of The Black Panther Party. In Marlon Rigg’s Tongues Untied, Black Grids become call and response poetic utterance, queer bodies voguing Ballroom, and early digital animated typography burning on screen and in our minds. Today you find Black Grids in the letterpress printing of Amos Kennedy, Schessa Garbutt’s identity system for The Nap Ministry, and Amanda William’s What Black is this You Say? My Polymodal design experiments set a curious space that asks, What is a Black Grid?

More information can be found on the LA Design Festival website.

Event Host

Los Angeles Design Festival