Q&A with Chris Dingwall

The exhibition is about bringing race and design together and sharing all the ways that design as an industry, profession, and practice has been involved in perpetuating racist ideologies and systems. At the same time, design has also been a place where people can test and protest against those same ideologies and systems. I really wanted to show students how their own professions and practices are involved in this history and how artists are using things like graphic design, architecture, and fashion to think about that connection between race and design.

I selected work that specifically used design as a material or as a metaphor for thinking about racial identity and representation. My selection included pieces from Glenn Ligon, Radcliffe Bailey, and Nick Cave, who use visual media such as photography, prints, fashion, and even archival advertisements from 18th and 19th century newspapers. It also includes work by Kara Walker, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems who take up design concepts of such as typography, technology, algorithms to get at the histories of racial capitalism.

The museum has an extraordinary collection of Black art from the ’80s and ’90s through to today. There are a million ways we could put it together and come up with an amazing show.

The history of graphic design is more than just a sequence of different styles. There are other ways of understanding that narrative that might begin with print labor in southern colonies in the 18th century, or the newspaper the Frederick Douglass ran and how important printing was during the Civil War. I’ve made an effort to take things that are familiar to students — grids, screen displays, visual media technology — and put them in an unfamiliar and provocative context. My aim is to get design students to be more critical about the history of their profession and their practices.

It’s been rewarding to bring classes from African American Studies, American Cultural Studies, and more to the museum to think about these issues, and think about this space as a way to talk about how the relation between design and race is changing today, both on campus and in the wider world.