What does it mean to be known, yet different? To be understood? To be felt? To be remembered?

Join bi-coastal, LGBTQ+, and Minority-owned studio Polymode on a journey in workshop form. They will expand upon their own work in poetic research with an invitation to help further develop participants’ and ancestors’ stories.

Eschewing a single authoritative voice, this free afternoon workshop welcomes designers to collectively gather O.U.R. BIPOC Queer Design knowing that can grow and evolve with input from multiple voices.

Brian Johnson is a partner of Polymode, where he focuses on creative direction, design production, writing, and teaching. Born into a family of printers, Johnson is deeply invested in the production of good design without the expense of sacrificing our humanity or environment. He is a member of the Monacan Nation and holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has guest lectured at the School of Visual Arts, Washington University; University of California Santa Barbara; and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. His recent clients include Glenn Kaino Studio, the Getty Museum, Studio Museum Harlem, Pulitzer Art Foundation, Phaidon Press, the New Museum, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, where his writing appears in Willi Smith: Street Couture. His latest publication: Queering the Grid: Reading Codes in Dan Friedman’s Teachings (with Silas Munro), has led him to his current design-writing research on Friedman’s 1994 Radical Manifesto, which will be approaching its 30-year anniversary.

Silas Munro is an artist, designer, writer, curator, and partner of Polymode, a studio that leads the edge of contemporary graphic design for clients in the cultural sphere. Collaborations include the City of Los Angeles, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, David Kordansky Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art. He is a curator and author of Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest, which opened at Letterform Archive in 2022. Munro’s writing appears in the book, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, and he expanded this research as a coauthor of the first BIPOC-centered design history course, Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design, which will be published in book form in 2023. Munro holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a founding faculty member and co-chair for the MFA in graphic design at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

This will be a free online event.

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There will be no livestream, so please join us.