Jamaica and its diaspora celebrate their historic 50th anniversary of Independence.
To mark this event I was privileged to have the opportunity to create a series of several bold, iconic artworks representing a select group of Jamaican historical and cultural figures.
This unique outdoor exhibition was launched as part of the annual Brixton Splash Street Festival in London, which embraced Jamaica’s 50th anniversary celebrations and national motto, ‘Out of many, One People’ as its central theme.
The iconic display dubbed “Jamaicons” was a cultural hijack of the exterior picture wall of the renowned Ritzy Picturehouse cinema in Brixton, and the first time the organisation had ever permitted it to be used in this way.
There is no doubting the enormity of Jamaica’s cultural impact on the world. Therefore selection of just nine individuals to portray Jamaica’s true historical depth and breadth was certainly a challenge. However, I made my selection based on my own personal judgement and decided to leave it to ‘the people’ to determine if what i had portrayed was just.
In my selection, I not only wanted to ensure I had a fair mix between male and female, but also between the deceased and the living; the political and the cultural; and the famous and the infamous.
The artistic style of the portraits is deliberately graphic and contemporary, thus embracing a younger audience to be drawn to the more historical and political subjects, without alienating an audience who already has a heightened awareness and black historical consciousness.
The iconography of the portraits is then further embellished through the consistent powerful use of the Jamaican national colours of black, golden yellow and green.
Through these images, the emotion I hoped to elicit was one of ‘Pride’. Not just from Jamaicans, but also from the public in general.
Their prominent display at this time in Brixton was extremely fitting. Not only for its historical importance as a home to primarily Jamaican immigrants that formed part of the ‘Windrush Generation’ of the 1940s and 50s; but also due to its significance as Britain’s premier multicultural heartland and a place, that admirably reflects the Jamaica’s national motto, ‘Out of many, One people’.
The resulting exhibition was embraced not only by all the Brixton Splash festival revelers, but also by the thousands of daily Brixton residents and visitors who passed by for the following 3 months that it remained on display.
The final exhibition of nine ‘Jamaicons’ were: Queen Nanny, Marcus Garvey, Grace Jones, Robert Nesta Marley, Usain Bolt, Merlene Ottey, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mary Seacole and Michael Holding.
The year is 1980, I’m 14 years old and listening to Invicta, one of the few London pirate radio stations around at that time playing pure funk, soul and r’n’b music.
All of a sudden a track comes on that literally blows my mind. The track was called ‘Agony of De-feet’ by Parliament and it’s completely unique sound was to lead me into a whole new universe and lifelong fascination with “P-Funk”.
It remains to this day one of my greatest inspirations, for P-Funk is a complete and entire culture that manages to philosophically and aesthetically bind together a giant funk gumbo of; music and musicians; art and artists; and a plethora of super-cool funkativity masterminded by the most magnificent godfather of Funk, George Clinton.
Back cover image from the 1980 album ‘Trombipulation’ by Parliament.
Fusing the greatest musicianship with black social commentary, psychedelia, sharp, satirical lyricism and general cosmic creativity; it has informed my ‘through the line’ thinking and approach to branding and campaign communications on many an occasion and inspires me to bring my best game to all I do. Or in the words of the maestro, George Clinton, ‘If you ain’t gonna get it on, take your dead ass home…’
Original Article published by Design Week | 26 November 2012
In 1991 I went to New York to attend my great Uncle Belfield’s 95th birthday.
For the duration of the vacation I stayed with my Uncle Deuel and Aunty Lorraine in their house in Brooklyn. It was here that I first set eyes on my uncle’s small collection of Blacklight posters.
Adorning the walls of his den were these bold, funky and fluorescently colourful velvety images of 1970s Afro-American culture; depicting themes of a primarily ‘Black is Beautiful’ nature.
I fell in love with them too and my uncle very kindly let me take away a few.
I wholeheartedly intend to build on my small collection one day, but in the meantime here are some I have sourced from on the internet for your viewing pleasure.
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About Blacklight Posters:
A Blacklight poster is a poster printed with inks which fluoresce under black light. The inks used contain phosphors which cause them to glow when exposed to the ultra violet light emitted from black lights.
In the United States, blacklight posters are commonly found in head shops and other retail outlets that sell items associated with counter culture. Blacklight posters commonly depict images of psychedelia, musicians/bands, African-American and hippie culture.
Growing up through the late 1960s and early 1970s, I think I am fairly typical of the British born, first generation offspring of West Indian parents, in my search for identity.
It took me a long time to come to terms with Britain being a part of who I am. There was little in the British culture that either appealed to me or I felt I could be a part of.
Any positive images or messages, were all coming from the West Indian culture of my family and the African American culture of the United States.
I was fortunate as a child to visit America on a few occasions to visit other members of my family living there. Everything about America seemed brighter, bolder, blacker and better.
The sheer volume of the sophisticated tv programming available such as ‘The Jeffersons’; cartoon series like ‘The Jackson 5’ and The Harlem Globetrotters; motion pictures like ‘Shaft’, ‘Car Wash’ and ‘The Wiz’; and the music, funk, soul and r’n’b that we could also access in the UK through import records or pirate radio all had a profound influence on me.
If I could have grown up in Harlem at that time, I could not have been happier.
And no doubt, this is a desire that has been instrumental in the nature of the collection of Action figures I have subsequently acquired.
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Contrary to the childhood nature of the subject matter, I did not start collecting them until I was in my late twenties / early thirties. Possibly, the birth of my children was a major factor. But more likely, it is due to the rise of the internet, as the availability to scour the globe and find these items more easily became a reality.
My main focus is collecting figures from the 1970’s and 80’s, as they are naturally the rarest, and embody the period of time I most identify with.
One such figure that I am most proud of (and only recently acquired after a search for several years and many unsuccessful eBay bids) is the 1975 Shindana Super Agent Slade action figure.
A truly ‘superfly’ figure modelled on Richard Roundtree’s black private detective character, Shaft, it is highly sought after by collectors of this genre.
What’s next?
One day I hope to finally acquire a Medicom Jean Michel Basquiat RAH action figure. It’s not extremely rare, but it is extremely cool.
And at the end of the day that’s what its all about.
In 1945, before Jackie Robinson played Major League baseball, or Marian Anderson sang at the Metropolitan Opera, Georg Olden, the grandson of a slave, took a job with CBS. There, as head of the network’s division of on-air promotions at the dawn of television, Olden pioneered the field of broadcast graphics. Working under CBS’s art director, William Golden, he supervised the identities of programs such as I Love Lucy, Lassie andGunsmoke; helped produce the vote-tallying scoreboard for the first televised presidential election returns (the 1952 race between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson); and collaborated with esteemed artists and designers, including David Stone Martin, Ed Benguiat, Alex Steinweiss and Bob Gill.
Olden was widely celebrated in his day. The 1981 reference book 250 Years of Afro-American Art: An Annotated Bibliography notes that between 1951 and 1960—the year Olden left CBS to work in advertising—his name appeared 108 times in Graphis and Art Directors Club annuals. By 1970 he had won seven Clio awards and had even designed the Clio statuette in 1962, a figure inspired by Brancusi’s Bird in Space sculpture. Olden was respected not only for helping to usher TV from a fledgling industry into a golden age, but also for serving as a model for black America. Ebony magazine profiled him several times in the 1950s and ’60s as one who had grasped the opportunities offered by a new communications medium and risen to an executive rank. But it was far from easy. In 1954,Ebony reported that of the 72,400 people employed full-time in television, fewer than 200 were black. The jobs included “print-machine operator” and “wardrobe mistress.” “Acceptance is a matter of talent,” Olden told the magazine in 1963. “In my work I’ve never felt like a Negro. Maybe I’ve been lucky.”
By all accounts, Olden was endowed with many graces. Nina Blanchard, the writer of a 1965 Elegant magazine profile, observed that he was “awesomely handsome, extremely male, and very polite, all of which can be momentarily unsettling for a woman attempting to conduct a serious interview.” Arthur Young, a college classmate, remembered Olden’s “thriving wit and sense of humor.” Eve Lee, Olden’s niece, who is a professor of German at the University of Southern California, recalled, “I never saw him angry; I never saw him in a bad mood. Even when my brother [Everett] was teasing him, he just laughed it off.” The advertising luminary George Lois, who worked at CBS in the 1950s, also remembered Olden as someone who could take a joke: “I would say, ‘Georg, you’re one letter away from greatness!’”
Olden appeared to have settled on the unusual spelling of his first name when he was in his early twenties and occasionally sold cartoons to The New Yorker. “You have to do something to attract the attention of the magazine editors,” he later told Advertising Age in 1963. He was born George Elliott Olden in Birmingham, Alabama, on November 13, 1920, the son of a Baptist minister whose own father had escaped slavery and fought in a black regiment of the Union Army during the Civil War. Olden’s mother, a New Orleans beauty from whom he apparently inherited his much admired looks, was a classically trained singer. Advised to abandon her husband for an operatic career, Olden’s mother instead performed at concerts and recitals around Washington, D.C., where the couple eventually settled with Georg and his older siblings, James Clarence and Sylvia. (The latter, under her married name, Sylvia Olden Lee, grew up to be a renowned musician and teacher. She was the first person of color to work at the Metropolitan Opera, where she coached many notable divas and has been credited with helping to bring about the groundbreaking appearances of both Marian Anderson and the baritone Robert McFerrin, Sr.)
Olden attended Dunbar High School in D.C. and nearby Virginia State College before dropping out shortly after Pearl Harbor to work as a graphic designer for the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. When the war ended in 1945, his OSS supervisor recommended him to the agency’s communications director, Colonel Lawrence W. Lowman, who in civilian life was vice president of CBS’s TV division. From a one-man operation involved with six programs a week, Olden eventually headed a staff of 14 in charge of 60 weekly shows. When he joined the network in 1945, there were 16,000 TV sets in the entire U.S. By the time he left in 1960, there were 85 million sets, one for every two Americans.
Olden might have rested comfortably at CBS, but he soldiered on in corporate America, surmounting obstacles that barred many other people of color from advancement, despite the efforts of the civil rights movement. In 1960, he took a job as television group art director at the advertising agency BBDO. Ebony magazine photographed him in his windowed office on Madison Avenue and described him admiringly as “an artist, a dreamer, a designer, a thinker and a huckster.” In 1963, he joined an elite department within the ad agency McCann-Erickson. That year, he became the first African American to design a postage stamp—a broken chain commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. At a White House ceremony with Olden in attendance, President John F. Kennedy praised the stamp as “a reminder of the extraordinary actions in the past as well as the business of the future.”
Georg Olden helped to ensure that future by inspiring other designers of color. Lowell Thompson, Michele Y. Washington and Frank Briggs are contemporary practitioners who have each claimed him as an inspiration and worked to bring his contributions to light. So it is infinitely regrettable that he soon parted company with the industries within which he blazed such notable trails. Olden died in Los Angeles in 1975, at the age of 54. In a posthumous edition of Who’s Who, he supplied his own unconscious epitaph: “As the first black American to achieve an executive position with a major corporation, my goal was the same as that of Jackie Robinson in baseball: to achieve maximum respect and recognition by my peers, the industry and the public, thereby hopefully expanding acceptance of, and opportunities for, future black Americans in business.”
Olden succeeded in his ambitions. For the design field there is no higher symbol of respect and recognition than the AIGA Medal. And today there are African Americans running corporations such as Time Warner, Merrill Lynch and American Express. He left this world prematurely, but Olden is survived by his legacy of creative and professional accomplishment that deserves to be treasured.
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