On the Consideration of a Black Grid

Abstract

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. As a queer Black artist, designer, and design historian, living and working in conditions of a triple consciousness of overlapping marginalization, I have been in countless situations throughout my career, surrounded by a sea of practices and pedagogies that don’t represent me, my lived experience, or that of kindred spirits. As a result, I have committed to redirecting and centering art and design BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) voices and scholarship in making, writing, and education as a transformational process. To that end, I enact poetic research, which seeks to find lineages from biological ancestors, antecedents in art and design, and chosen family.