What Does It Mean to Decolonize Design? | Dismantling design history 101, by Anoushka Khandwala

“In everyday design work, to “shatter the familiar” might start by rethinking the needs of the audience you’re designing for. For example, have you considered how people of different ethnicities may identify with what you’re creating? An aspect of decoloniality is questioning how solutions might be experienced in someone else’s shoes.”

Decolonize Design

“Decolonize Design is a community development organization that delivers results and effective alternatives to the status quo, centering African and other Indigenous approaches.”

Why Can’t the U.S. Decolonize Its Design Education? | By Margaret Andersen

“When you begin to ask those questions of what it means as a designer to be a culture maker, you ask harder questions about what kind of culture you’re creating.”

What a Decolonisation of Design Involves: Two Programmes for Emancipation | By Ahmed Ansari 

“Both of these programmes must, of necessity, work together to achieve liberation for the modern subject: to understand and articulate is to challenge and resist is to create and emancipate. This eventual emancipation also cannot come from the coloniser lest it follows the colonial logic of liberation, and in any case, the coloniser is unable to imagine alternatives, having never experienced anything beyond the world-system. It can only come from the colonised; from the ones whose bodies, subjectivities, and epistemes have so long been ignored, underestimated, inferiorised, ostracised, or appropriated.”

Four Black Creatives on the Importance of Building and Cultivating Community

“The creative technology industry has a diversity problem. Put differently, both industries—creative and technology—have some real work to do when it comes to building welcoming, inclusive spaces for people of diverse racial backgrounds. Though there’s a thriving community of people of color working at the intersection of art, design, and technology, when it comes to jobs and recognition, they’re woefully underrepresented in comparison to their white counterparts.”

A Rush to Use Black Art Leaves the Artists Feeling Used By Tiffany Hsu and Sandra E. Garcia

“Black creative professionals say they have been used to lend legitimacy to diversity campaigns while being underpaid and pigeonholed.”

Searching for a Black Design Aesthetic by Sylvia Harris

“We must also look outside the design disciplines to the performing arts and to fine arts movements, such as the Afri-Cobra, which have based visual explorations on African and jazz rhythms. We can study these disciplines for characteristic black expression (improvisation, distortion, polyrhythms, exaggeration, call and response) that can be translated into graphic form. Black design traditions must be pieced together from a variety of sources to make a complete canon of black expression.”

13 AFRICAN AMERICAN GRAPHIC DESIGNERS YOU SHOULD KNOW, PART 1 + PART 2

“Let’s check out those who flourished in the face of racial adversity, fighting to have their artistic voice heard; who created their own companies and excelled as Black entrepreneurs at a time when this was unheard of, and those who continue to do so to this day.”

The Power of Mapping, Naming, and Connecting Black Creatives by Anoushka Khandwala

“Once a Google Sheet, Black Creative Ecosystems is now a vibrant digital garden that celebrates Black creative thought.”

Black Art in America

Black Art in America is a multifaceted media company based in Columbus Georgia. Since 2010 our mission has been to document, preserve and promote the contributions of the African American arts community.

Bisa Butler's Portraiture Quilts | Brooklyn Made (Video)

Find Black Designers + Artists (Directories + Collectives)

• ARTNOIR ensures the next generation of Black and Brown creators, curators, and collectors are connected in community, and contributing to each other’s success.

• Black Artist + Designers Guild directory provides direct access to our members who are artists, makers and designers at the top of their prospective field.

• Blacks Who Design

• Black Artist Space

• The Black Art Expo The Peoples’ virtual culture museum | a space for unapologetic Black creatives+lovers of Black art

• Women Who Design is a Twitter directory of accomplished women in the design industry.

• A Spectacular Black Girl Art Show is a bi-annual art exhibit displaying the work of all black female artists using varying forms of media. This show is aimed toward celebrating black women, the strength in their diversity, and the power in our unity.

• Color Positive was created out of the idea that we not only need to showcase Black talent on its own, but help facilitate growth of new artists for the community at large.

• Creative Ecosystems is a growing digital garden and directory of ecosystems that explore Black art & imagination.

• Dope Black Art Championing black culture through visual art.

• People of Craft is a growing showcase of creatives of color and their craft in design, advertising, tech, illustration, lettering, art, and more. It’s time to redefine what a creative looks like.

• SheLovesBlackArt Virtual gallery specializing in art by established & emerging artists of the African diaspora.

• Young Black Artists The purpose and goal is really simple: black artists need more exposure.

• A Directory of Black-Owned Design Businesses to Support Now and Forever

• 21 BIPOC Visual Artists to Commission Your Gig Posters, Album Art, and More

Find Black Creatives

• Shades of Noir: The Creative Database is an ongoing project to archive and document creatives from various disciplines, including design, fine art, sound art, writing, film, fashion and photography. The Creative Database is an online space that champions creatives of all disciplines who do not tend to be celebrated in traditional and mainstream media, centring the achievements of people of colour in particular.

• #blkcreatives (pronounced hashtag Black creatives) was created to showcase the vast breadth of what’s possible for Black creatives.

• People of Craft is a growing showcase of creatives of color and their craft in design, advertising, tech, illustration, lettering, art, and more. It’s time to redefine what a creative looks like.

• Creative Women Build (CWB) is a platform created by and for Black women entrepreneurs.

• The Idea Girl Design Studio collaborates with creative women in business to tell their brand’s story through emotive design that cultivates meaningful relationships and hella cash.

• Dana James Mwangi, owner of Cheers Creative, an award-winning branding and website agency

• Sage Leaf Design — “Our target demographic is mostly Muslim and within that demographic, we serve the convert (converts to Islam), women, Blackamerican, and immigrant populations the most. We work a lot with Muslim nonprofit organizations and small businesses as well. We try our best to help people out who are just getting started with things.”

Find Black-Owned Galleries

• Richard Beavers Gallery (Brooklyn, NY)

• Black Art Gang Black Art Gallery connecting artists with the people!

• Black-Owned Galleries to Support across the United States | Artsy

Find Black-Owned Businesses

• I Am Black Business

• Support Black Owned

• Official Black Wall Street searchable directory

Support Black Artists

• Adebunmi Gbadebo is a visual artist who creates sculptures, paintings, prints, and paper using human hair sourced from people of the African diaspora. Rejecting traditional art materials, Gbadebo saw hair as a means to center her people and their histories as central to the narratives in her work.

• Adrian Brandon “My work focuses on the Black experience. Through playful day-to-day scenes of the Black community, my work highlights the unique joy, swagger and love that is shared in our community. In addition, much of my work acts to raise awareness to the injustices that the Black community is forced to live with. Unfortunately, much of America has become numb to the loss of Black lives. My goal is to create art that creates an understanding of Black culture, Black love and Black pain so that we can move forward together.” 

• Diedrick Brackens “Textile work is exciting audiences again because the field of makers has expanded. It is an expansive space where women, queer people, and Black and brown folks have made huge contributions historically and presently.”

• Hillary D Wilson “I’m an artist based in Boston Massachusetts who seeks to, above all else, celebrate the beauty in people, nature, and stories. Though my art focuses on the fantastical, with bright colors and and fantasy themes, my background in medical illustration strengthens my desire to convey realism in my portrayal of skin tones and anatomy. I am constantly inspired by the world around me, and like to bring that sense of wonder to my work.” 

• Mary Sibande “Sibande’s work not only engages as an interrogator of the current intersections of race, gender and labour in South Africa; but continues to actively rewrite her own family’s legacy of forced domestic work imposed by the then Apartheid State. Sibande employs the human form as a vehicle through photography and sculpture as a focused critique on the stereotypical depictions of women, particularly black women in South Africa. The body, for Sibande, and particularly how we clothe it, is the site where this history is contested and where Sibande’s own fantasies can play out.”

• Nikkolas Smith “A native of Houston, Texas, is a Master of Architecture recipient from Hampton University. After designing theme parks at Walt Disney Imagineering for 11 years, he is now a Concept artist, Children's Books Author and Film Illustrator. He is the author/illustrator of the picture books "The Golden Girls of Rio" (nominated for an NAACP Image Award) and My Hair Is Poofy And That's Okay.”

• Otha Davis III aka Vakseen Museum-exhibited Visual Artist

Black Artists in America

Shop their collections online or support their Patreon here.