Summer 2022
Battlefield of ideas
Greg Bunbury’s Black Outdoor Art project plays on our expectations of media space and expression. By Anoushka Khandwala
In 2014, graphic designer Greg Bunbury posted a graphic to Instagram featuring the words ‘I can’t breathe’ repeated eleven times. The piece was made in homage to Eric Garner, an African American man who had been killed in New York at the hands of NYPD officers on 17 July that year. There was little response in the social media dialect of likes and comments. However, it planted a seed in Bunbury’s mind, and as he produced more work about his social and political stances, it attracted people who shared those values.
This graphic surfaced again in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, when a friend of Bunbury’s from the agency Brotherhood Media asked if they could use the image on their billboards, to stand in solidarity with the Black community. Bunbury initially refused, wary of the ‘virtue-signalling’ that was rampant at the time, but after a long conversation, both friends felt reconciled to each other’s perspectives. Bunbury went home and designed a new poster connecting Garner’s last words to those of George Floyd, which went up on billboards across London. The response was overwhelming and helped Bunbury conceive of a wider initiative, Black Outdoor Art.
Photographs by Greg Bunbury and @London_streetshots. Eye 103 cover photo by Jahnavi Innis.
Today, Black Outdoor Art exists in London, Leeds and Bristol and has displayed work by artists such as Jahnavi Inniss, Nadina Ali and Samuel Mensah. Inniss’s degree show project, a quilt highlighting the names of Black Britons who have often been omitted from history, was featured across the country in 2020. Platformed at such scale, the aim of Inniss’s work was that ‘people were either reminded or made aware of the long history of Black people in Britain,’ she says. ‘I hope the billboard was able to give Black Brits as a whole our due recognition.’
For
Bunbury, it has been vital to showcase the multiplicity of Black
perspectives,
by connecting with a range of artists and
collaborating with them to profile their work, tailoring the visuals
to the medium of a specific billboard. Sites in the capital in
Brixton, New Cross, Hackney and Lewisham have allowed designers and
illustrators to start a conversation with their own communities.
Communication
design has always been more effective at shifting culture, rather
than dismantling structural oppression – artists learn how to adapt
their narratives to the constraints of the medium, in order to
achieve the most effective communication of their ideas. Bunbury’s
take is that racism itself is an ideology, ‘presented on the basis
of an idea, which is then reinforced structurally. Black Outdoor Art
represents the battlefield of ideas, whether it’s a political
statement or something joyful or just aesthetically pleasing,’ he
says. ‘These things play on our expectations of what media space
should be and what constitutes Black expression.’
Anoushka Khandwala, designer, writer, educator, London
First published in Eye no. 103 vol. 26, 2022
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