Pick Posters is a sequel project from Pick Progress in partnership with AIGA Kansas City and Babes Helping Babes. For this project, I was 1 of more than 30 black creatives worldwide to design a poster representing a black empowerment phrase from the original Pick Progress series. Pick Posters to be a space of representation and a signal to show the design world that people of color are ‘out here.’ My phrase for pick posters 2023 was "the revolution will not be televised," and we were also instructed to incorporate colors from the Pick Progress ethos.
When people hear the quote "the revolution will not be televised", they often think of TVs, but when I really bunkered down to read the description and to listen to Gil Scott-Heron’s poem, I absorbed that this concept shouldn’t involve a TV at all. It’s about TV and media being used to quiet the masses to make them feel as though there is no need for revolution, even when there is. That notion reminded me of “The Matrix” (I’m a movie person), where people are kept docile by the distractions of life and arbitrary material things. I combined the binary code-esque aesthetic of the matrix with a styled 70s all-black photo of my husband to create this poster. The words the “revolution will not be televised” are contoured and mapped to the subject’s face. Although we know the revolution won’t be televised, it’s within us all. Although red was my assigned color, I thought it was a perfect match regardless to portray the tone and passion of the piece.
Below are some of the images before I made selections and edited them into a poster.
