I started @afrovisualism as a passion project of mine because I want to have a blog based on black arts and cultural studies.
I want to:
To broaden perspectives on Black Popular Culture
To contextualize Black Art/Music History.
To effectively analyze Hip-Hop Culture.
To describe Black Aesthetics
This all goes back to my high school years when I was in my visual arts class learning about art.
At that time, I realized I wanted to be a graphic designer/artist, because I had a teacher that was one.
Discovering artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Rammellzee opened my eyes to art and hip-hop culture.
In my spare time, I would draw graffiti letters and characters everyday, while listening to hip-hop music.
I discovered art and hip-hop music on my own surfing through Youtube.
I was a sponge, drawing, listening to music, watching movies, watching documentaries. Repeat.
When I would draw I would listen to music like ATCQ or DeLaSoul or Common.
When I wasn't drawing I would be watching Style Wars, BeatStreet or Breakin'.
I would watch documentaries on art all the time.
I knew wanted to share my love of hip-hop and art with others.
So my high school senior project was on hip-hop studies.
I knew back then I loved to talk about music. I loved to talk about art.
I was beginning to realize that Hip-hop as its own art-form and design field.
I didn't dive into graphic design until college.
It was there in college I studied graphic design and taken an interest in art history.
I was taking classes in Renaissance and Modern Art.
Once again, I wanted to know more than what I learned in class, so I while doing homework I surfed Youtube listening to JAY Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail.
I began recognizing the art references in the music and the videos.
I was discovering the graphic design and photography in the album packaging.
Basically, I was making connections to things I recognized.
I always had a hunger for knowledge and the need to know more about everything.
I continued to discover artistic themes in the music I was listening to.
I once had an assignment where I had to write an artistic manifesto.
I wrote it based on a word I came across a word that spoke to me deeply.
That word was Afrofuturism, an artistic movement about the future of black people's place in society.
It was everything I wanted to say about the artistic sense of the African American experience in one word.
Basically, what I wrote was that I wanted to fill the gaps on black art history.
While in my graphic design classes I began realizing how there was a lack of awareness to African Americans in the history of graphic design.
I began to notice the gaps in what visual communication and why the importance of the existence history of visual communication in relation to African Americans.
Thinking about hip-hop as an art-form and a field visual communication, it makes sense as to why this is overlooked.
There is a gap in how art in the African American experience is perceived.
It all goes back to a series of questions I have had on my mind for a long time:
What is the visual language of African American art?
What is the art of a black artist about?
How has the plight of the black artist been presented?
What are the stories of black artists?
How have these stories been communicated?
Why is a black perspective necessary?
What are aesthetics of blackness?
How does pop culture represent black aesthetics?
These questions formulate their own meanings of what 'afrovisualist' languages are.
A black visual language.
Follow @afrovisualism on Instagram.