AFRO— is a prototype for a publication I pitched along with the writer and visual artist Bri Pickens focusing on culture and art across the black diaspora. The publication serves as both a business plan and manifesto that uses a visual essay comprised of images from social media and RISD’s picture archive to argue Black People have been pressed out of conversations about the human experience. When we are included, we are expected to fixate on race. Obscure topics are out of range. While the people of the African diaspora are incredibly diverse, there are few platforms that acknowledge our diversity or thread together our experiences. Furthermore, those experiences are rarely represented in an artful way. Our proposal to this problem was to create a platform that:
1) is interested in the human experiences of people in the diaspora;
2) indulges our curiosity about one another;
3) is well crafted and artfully considered.
We envisioned that platform as a publication called AFRO—.
