Poster design and protest have forged a historic alliance, epitomizing struggles for liberation and justice. The upcoming exhibition, 'Flight Organizing Towards Flight' embodies this synergy. Featuring iconic works and a series of public lectures.

Poster design and protest have had a long-lasting partnership that traces, tracks and preserves many historical endeavors of liberation, emancipation, unchaining and justice. As a visual, versatile, relatively cheap and easy distributable medium, a well-designed poster can quickly capture the zeitgeist of the public space in which it is presented, grabbing the attention of its denizens and contributing to the rapid-fire spread of ideas and ideals.

Design of course plays a pivotal role here: colors, lay-out, fonts, style, and artistic imagery can often visualize the proposed realities and circumvent restrictions or censorship. This can make them more memorable than other forms of advertising, such as radio or television ads, which can be easily forgotten. Artist Anish Kapoor writes in the introduction to The Art of Protest (2019): “The political slogan, the poster, and the sign or symbol of a movement speak the voice of an individual but capture the voice of the many.” From a historical perspective, one could argue that the protest poster is the surface on which art, design, activism, progress and liberation meet. The intersection between design and protest has yielded some of our culture’s most powerful and well-remembered imagery, by artists such as Josh MacPhee, Jeremy Deller, Dignidad Rebelde (Jesus Barraza, Mazatl and Melanie Cervantes), Hilda MaryDallas, Félix Beltrán, Abdias Nascimento and Kemba Earle, to name just a few. In their work they visually expressed (and continue to express) some of the most pressing matters in our society, ranging from women’s liberation queer rights and racial equality to anti-war demands and calls for environmentalist policies. 

Flight Organizing Towards Flight takes shape as a collaboration between MOTORMOND, The Black Archives and Oscam. This three part exhibition will manifest as an archival poster exhibition at the Motormond space on Kinkerstraat 96, a series of public lectures at The Black Archive. 

Simultaneously, newly commissioned poster work by five NL-based POC (graphic) artists/designers will be presented as a guerrilla poster street exhibition across the Bijlmer area in Amsterdam. This exhibition would bring the project into the public space: a space where poster material historically meets its main audience. This part of the project would run on the same dates as the archival exhibition at Motormond, and would be co-organized with OSCAM. 

Currently in the research phase, Flight Organizing Towards Flight will open on the 11th of July.