Open Dialogue: WORK/PLAY

Danielle & Kevin McCoy of WORK/PLAY discuss their love for type within their practice.

Danielle: What is your determining factor when selecting typefaces?

Kevin: I’m typically drawn to typefaces that can aid in communication, grab a viewer’s attention solely based on the letterforms, and those that have an underlying history.

For our piece titled I AM A MAN, I was unaware of the exact font used, nor could I find it online until I stumbled upon Tré Seals who is a typeface designer. He recreated the font used on the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike poster, and we were able to delve into a new body of work. The piece explores the complex histories between the sanitation workers and the duplicitous role of famed Civil Rights photographer Ernest Withers, who was also an FBI informant.

D: Talk to me about the solidarity poster in collaboration with Riso Hell. It read “The murderers of Breonna Taylor are STILL at large.” When I look at that poster, it reminds me of the blocky text you see in traditional printmaking.

K: Yeah, I knew I wanted to address the officers responsible for her death. The initial inclination was to make a protest poster. Since we decided to go this route, it needed to be concise, utilize a tight lockup, and feature bold type to quickly grab attention and easily convey the message.

I drew inspiration from old “wanted” posters and the work of the Colby Poster Printing Company.

D: I wanted to transition to talk about tactile objects. For me, one of the things I like to think about is how my grandparents religiously got a Sunday paper and discussed the news. I find that when people purchase the newspapers we’ve designed—online or at an art book fair—many come back after they’ve sat with the content and want to discuss it with us. I just love having that dialogue.

K: Ah, yes!! Unite, Protect, Grow, Teach, Build, Repeat. I remember that broadside! The font emblazoned on the front page was also created by Tré Seals, which was borrowed from the 1915 Suffrage Parade in New York. I fell in love with the letterforms and the history! It’s not very aggressive, but the type lockup got people’s attention. To me, it helped the poster embody the spirit of a protestor, an organizer, or someone that seeks to galvanize community. It simply felt apropos.

K: What was your relationship with typography as you grew up?

D: My earliest memories—while not knowing anything about fonts and typefaces—came from the glossy pages of Jet magazine. My great-grandmother had them all over her house.

Then, in high school, I used my money and got a subscription to Vibe and The Source. I loved those! They were so forward-thinking and contemporary. I also collected Black fashion magazines. You have these sans serif fonts on the cover of Ebony and Essence. They were strong and bold, yet feminine and sexy to me. It felt like they were standing proud in their Blackness, and I remember just always wanting to cut out the women on those pages.

K: I, too, collected The Source, Vibe, and also XXL. There was some duality infused into those typefaces where they didn’t feel super masculine or feminine, but had their own presence.

No matter who the artist was, the image always blended well with the logo that went across the top, and I feel like it communicated in a contemporary way to so many readers.

D: Yeah, agreed. I’m thinking about how we use type in our work to express a feeling to the viewer. We have Am I Accepted Now?, where there are nine ombre letterpress paper bags, or Bread and Circuses with Ctrl Z across Trump’s face, or the Black Moses piece you did at Washington University in St. Louis.

K: What’s crazy is the reemergence of Isaac Hayes as “Black Moses” in Kendrick Lamar’s “Squabble Up” video. I grew up listening to Isaac Hayes, and I was always a fan of the music, font, and artwork. Naturally, it was going to come back into the fold later in life.

In grad school, I started collecting declassified FBI files on some of our most prestigious Black leaders, which eventually transformed into a suite of prints. I regarded great thinkers such as James Baldwin and Malcolm X as a modern-day Black Moses. Moses, as a biblical character, led people into their salvation. So you have these two great thinkers who were on this quest to expand our minds, beliefs, spirituality, togetherness, and unity. And we continue to see how these pillars are ubiquitously referenced in our culture today.