ARTD 287

Art for Tim Wise’s Essay Blog by Janet Hunter

Prior to putting anything artist on paper, I did research on Tim Wise, including listening to some of his speeches on YouTube. The first things that I did jot down on paper were more like taking classroom notes...collecting ideas. I find racism a difficult subject to come up with good visuals as is apparent when you google for racism images. The selection is poor.
My first drawings were of the border between Mexico and the United States and sort of general ideas like the layering of:

White Elite
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
White poor
- - - - - - - - - -
Black poor

I heard the word brick and that got me thinking of a brick wall in relation to the layering of these groups. I immediately thought of an ornate rod iron fence atop a brick wall. What if i could subtlety impose the words “black poor” and “white poor” on top of a brick wall which supported the graceful, curves of an ornate rod iron fence and could I use an elegant typeface to include White Privilege on the fence? The top part of the poster would be bigger than the bottom half. It would be spacious and yet oblivious to the lower half even though its very existence up there depends on those bricks in the brick wall.
I read tutorials and was fairly proud that I figured out how to impose the words “black poor” and “white poor” onto some bricks. The trouble was I didn’t like it when I got done. I preferred the scrawl of graffiti on the bricks. I am still having trouble with the vectoring of Illustrator, but I did the entire project in Illustrator. I did learn how to warp text into a shape and even though I didn’t use it for type on my bricks, I did use it to alter the word “White Privilege.” Yeah, a new skill!