Queer History is Poster History

From posters celebrating pride to promoting nightlife events to even combatting the AIDS crisis, queer culture is deeply embedded in poster history. Poster House is pleased to partner with Silas Munro and Brian Johnson of Polymode for a deep dive into queer touchpoints within the medium. Explore the iconic contributions the queer community has made to the graphic design cannon and how they continue to shape poster history today. Whether advocating for queer rights or advertising the right to have a good time, posters and queer history go hand in hand.

Silas Munro is a partner of Polymode and is particularly interested in the often unaddressed postcolonial relationship between design and marginalized communities. His writing appears in the book, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America published by Princeton Architectural Press. Munro has been a visiting critic at MICA, RISD, and Yale, and is a Founding Faculty and CoChair at the MFA Program in Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He holds an MFA from CalArts and a BFA from RISD, where he met Brian Johnson and began collaborating.

Brian Johnson is a partner of Polymode where he focuses on creative direction, design production, writing, and teaching. Born into a family of printers, he is deeply invested in the production of good design without sacrificing our humanity or environment. He is a member of the Monacan Nation and holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His most recent publication, Queering the Grid: Reading Codes in Dan Friedman’s Teachings (with Silas Munro) has led him to his current design writing research on Friedman’s 1994 Radical Manifesto, which will be approaching its thirty year anniversary. 

This program is presented by CMYK Council, Poster House’s working advisory board of BIPOC creatives, designers, educators, and museum staff.