Fifty years ago, Stokely Carmichael, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) made a historic call: “One of the most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities–which is where the racism exists–and work to get rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley. . . . Let them go to the suburbs and open up freedom schools for whites.”
Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements is an exhibition which features new work by contemporary artists, poets, and writers that relates to the Black Power movement’s mandate to “organize your own” community against racism. Exploring the question of what “your own” might mean, the exhibition connects some of the concerns dealt with in the 1960s and ’70s to the conversations and social movements around racial justice happening today.
This is the exhibition poster I designed for the show, combining a 1970s color palette, period typography, and iconography riffing off the idea of organizing the white working class.
The exhibition catalog/book (which I also designed) is available here.
