Justseeds' participation in the Poor People's Campaign portfolio was something of an exercise in "service" design, by which I mean we worked directly with the PPC under their own messaging priorities, rather than our individual priorities as artists. The PPC determined which quotes and slogans they wanted participating artists to work on, and we either selected or were assigned something from their list. From that point we had the freedom to design...
I was late to the game, so I opted for whatever opening hadn't already been taken by another artist. Unsurprisingly, nobody had chosen to work with this very long quote from Martin Luther King Jr's fourth and last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967). I mean, I'll be honest, it's a LOT of text for a poster! So I took it as a challenge, and I've made some fairly text-heavy work in the past. I started thinking about how the last couple years have been something of a golden era for protest slogans, and how I could make that work with the deliberately paced words of King, which had never been meant as a fast read. This print was the result.
Printed by Jesse Purcell/Repetitive Press (Toronto, ON).
