A year ago, when the content studio of New York Times Advertising, T Brand Studio, began brainstorming how to celebrate and honor the upcoming centennial of the Harlem Renaissance, they leapt into the research phase with full force. T Brand Studio Editorial Director Tanisha A. Sykes and her team began visiting museums in and around Manhattan like the Whitney, speaking to experts across industries, and educating themselves on the magnitude of the Harlem Renaissance’s impact.
“Many of us didn’t fully know what that impact and influence looked like back then, and how it still carries forward,” Sykes told me. “But as we turned more pages and did more research and had more pre-interviews with experts, with curators, with museum owners, with founders of different types of companies, and with artists themselves, we learned more and more and more.”
It’s through this extensive research process that Sykes and her team honed in on the creation of a two-part zine series entitled, “The Legacy Fulfilled: The Modern Renaissance,” designed to shed light on diverse communities through the lens of Black excellence and achievement. These stories highlight the ways that passing wealth to the next generation is fueling community while celebrating the innovative period of Black art, music, poetry, and literature that launched in Harlem, New York, in the 1920s and ’30s. In partnership with US Bank, the campaign is the first of its kind for The New York Times, paying homage to the lasting impact of the Harlem Renaissance and its 100th anniversary through the power of print.
T Brand Studio has commissioned work from Black writers, storytellers, artists, and designers for the two 12-page zines, highlighting the immense contributions of Black creatives to the arts and wider society. The zines feature work from typographer Tré Seals, poet Mahogany L. Browne, cultural critic and writer Michaela Angela Davis, collage artist Magdaline Davis, and photographer Ivan McClellan. The first zine, “Legacy: The Wealth Issue,” was released as a printed insert in The New York Times Sunday issue on August 18, with the second zine, “Legacy: The Culture Issue” set to be distributed with the December 29 print issue. Both zines are now available to view digitally through an innovative online hub unveiled by T Brand Studio last week. The online hub continues the theme and tradition of accessibility that the zine form is already emblematic of.
To highlight this thoughtful and poignant campaign and continue to honor the lasting legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, I spoke in-depth with Sykes about the Legacy project, from development to distribution. Our conversation is below, lightly edited for clarity and length.
Let’s rewind to the genesis of “The Legacy Fulfilled: The Modern Renaissance” zine series. How did the idea first develop?
This time a year ago, US Bank, who’s our partner for this program, came to us and said, “Hey, can you create a coffee table book?” They understood that The New York Times would be doing an editorial alignment with the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance. We said, “We could, but as a custom content studio, our lane really evolves around creating storytelling opportunities.” That’s when we started talking about maybe not a coffee table book, but what could be more realistic is a series of zines.
We wanted to bring the story forward. What does this idea of a Modern Renaissance look like? That’s when we came up with a “Legacy Fulfilled.” We wanted to spark this idea of a national dialog to really show and demonstrate that the Harlem Renaissance was this cultural phenomenon that continues today.
This is a first-of-its-kind program for T Brand Studio and US Bank, where every single contributor on our platform and on this content is Black.
What was your T Brand Studio team hoping to accomplish with this project?
This is a first-of-its-kind program for T Brand Studio and US Bank, where every single contributor on our platform and on this content is Black. We wanted to remove barriers for Black creatives by not only giving them a platform to share new and untold stories but also to say to us, “These are the stories that I want to tell.” It’s a really huge deal.
The series leverages the talents of Black award-winning writers, poets, journalists, photographers, illustrators, and even a typographer, to specifically do a few things: We wanted to build awareness around the impact and influence of the Harlem Renaissance and grant access and opportunity to a new generation of Black cultural thinkers, which we’re really doing in our culture zine. We also wanted to shine a light on Black affluence because that was a specific, targeted area that US Bank wanted us to speak to, and show people that wealth shows up in a myriad of ways. People are building wealth differently today. It’s not just the financial wealth, but it’s also the intellectual capital, and the historical value that brings to bear when we’re talking about inheritance.
We wanted to ask, across poetry and music and art and fashion and culture, What does the Black diaspora look like today, and how is the impact continuing globally? That’s where the zines come into play.
People are building wealth differently today. It’s not just the financial wealth, but it’s also the intellectual capital, and the historical value that brings to bear when we’re talking about inheritance.
Why did you decide on the zine form for this project?
The reason we chose zines is that during the Harlem Renaissance, zines were really designed (around 1918 through the 30s) to allow people without a voice to express themselves, to really communicate with others in the community, and lean into their artistry at the same time in a way that they hadn’t been allowed to do. So we said let’s use this idea of the zines as information for what we do today.
The zines pay homage to the powerful underground press that existed during the Renaissance that became known for delivering prolific poetry and prose, delivering local news, and giving people cultural information. We wanted to create today’s zines to run as an insert inside The New York Times. It runs in a Sunday newspaper for all of our 600,000 home delivery subscribers. Each zine specifically amplifies how the Harlem Renaissance continues to inspire some of our most powerful cultural moments in America.
Also with these zines, so much of it has been about giving access to people, but it’s also giving space and making space for new voices, for poetry, for prose, for local news, for cultural information. They’re inspired by that tradition that gave birth to this idea of old voices and new voices. So that’s what these zines do; they not only give access and opportunity, but they give space to people whose voices hadn’t been heard and were traditionally not heard in a mainstream environment.
What are some of the stories told within the pages of these zines?
One is about a Black family of ranchers, The Bradfords— a fourth-generation family of Black ranchers in Oklahoma. I got to go out there and see them, and talk about what it means to really grow the foundation from the roots. What does that mean for family? What does it mean for legacy? What does it mean for the future? In my mind, that was a really important story to tell, and I knew we could do it through Black farmers, who represent less than 1% of all farmers in America today.
We also spoke with Julian James, who shared a story about inheritance and the idea that money can mean a myriad of things. He had a Movado watch that was passed down to him by his stepfather. He was a man who thought about not the clothes making the man, but the man making the clothes, and how important it was for you to carry yourself as you went out the door. So that was something that Julian took from him, and now he says that every time he wears this watch, he thinks of his stepfather and his legacy.
We had Mahogany L. Brown, the current poet-in-residence for the Lincoln Center, write a custom poem for the wealth zine, and she said that everything about this project just felt like home to her. Her marching orders were simple: I said, “If Langston Hughes talked about this idea of a “dream deferred,” how do we bring it forward and speak to what a dream fulfilled looks like?” So she took us to Harlem. She took us to education. She took us to inheritance. She took us to all of the places and spaces that Black folks lived in during the Harlem Renaissance and said this is where and how we’re succeeding today. I thought it was a beautiful nod to the Harlem Renaissance, and it really hit on all of the cylinders as it related to this storytelling.
Can you walk me through some of the editorial design decisions that were made when bringing these zines to life? I know you worked with typographer Tré Seals, for example, to create a custom typeface for the project.
This is a project that is rooted in the research of the Harlem Renaissance. Many of us didn’t fully know what that impact and influence looked like back then, and how it still carries forward, but as we turned more pages and did more research and had more pre-interviews with experts, curators, museum owners, with founders of different types of companies, and artists themselves, we learned more and more and more.
In that research process we learned that the original zines during the Harlem Renaissance were designed to allow people without a voice to express themselves, to communicate with others in the community, and lean into artistry. We did a handmade approach to texture and color, and used layered compositions as an intentional nod to those artists who had bootstrapped.
We used custom typography called VTC Sarah, created by Tré Seals, the founder, designer, and typographer at Vocal Type. VTC Sarah was inspired by his great-grandparents. They were entrepreneurs and business owners, and their names were Sarah and Henry Johnson, and they were pillars of their community. They had provided financing and resources to their neighbors when banks wouldn’t, and that really helped facilitate hundreds of purchases and land sales to the Black community. Our art director, Bri Moran, literally held up Tré’s great grandparents’ marriage certificate at one point and said, “This is what is inspiring, the typeface throughout our zines.” So in working with Tré at every iteration, he made sure that the typeface spoke to those words and the stories that we were telling.
With the zine’s digital hub launching last week and the physical culture zine mailing out in December, can you shed a bit more light on what’s depicted in that issue in particular?
We’re celebrating what culture looks like through a lot of different Black creatives. It’s an homage to the arts, literature, dance, and music industries created by Black artisans during the Harlem Renaissance.
Who are some of the creatives featured in the culture zine?
We asked Emil Wilbekin, the former editor-in-chief of Vibe Magazine who now runs the platform Native Son, to take us back to having a parlor conversation. These were conversations that were happening in speakeasies and basements during the Harlem Renaissance, where people could really talk about the issues of the day. So we said, “What does that look like if we bring that 100 years forward?” Emil helped to not only moderate the conversation with other Black creatives from different fields, but he also was able to facilitate a Q&A at the Freehand Hotel in Manhattan. I loved this conversation. They talked about what the Harlem Renaissance means today, and the impact that the Harlem Renaissance is having on these particular creatives.
We also talked to Naima J. Keith, an art curator and an educator at LACMA. She talked about paying tribute to the artisans that came before us, and this idea that because of those artisans in particular, now we can talk about skin tones. Now we can talk about Blackness and all of its authenticity, and how that comes to the table today in ways that it wasn’t before.
Then there’s Shanari Freeman, who’s the executive chef of Cadence in Manhattan, and she talked about the idea of paying homage to the Harlem Renaissance through collaboration. She said that oftentimes we know what to do, but sometimes we don’t necessarily know how to do it, so let’s teach each other this idea of “each one, teach one.”
Then we have Fredara M. Hadley, who’s an ethnomusicologist over at the Juilliard School. She talked about the idea of how dances from the Harlem Renaissance are being brought back today through troupes like THECouncil, a collective of five black women who are choreographers, producers, and directors who work with global brands and celebrities.
What was the process like for developing the digital adaptation of the zine? What considerations went into that?
In addition to the print version of the culture issue, people across the globe will have access to a digital, flippable booklet of both zines, and those are going to be housed online, within a New York Times URL that encourages people to learn more about the resources and opportunities offered by US Bank.
We had a long conversation early on about this idea of a digital hub, and I would always say, “Well, what would be the point of us creating something else if we already have our print zines?” And my team explained to me that it’s because not everybody has the same level of access, which is very important here. The one thing that we wanted to do with both of these zines is to give people opportunity and access, not only to the information but to the history. So that’s exactly what the hub is set out to do; now everyone—subscribers and non-subscribers of the New York Times—will be able to have access to it.
It’s a great opportunity for us as a custom content studio to be able to take these zines and this content in its physical form and then allow it to live on digitally while also giving people this access. That was the lesson learned for us in our wealth zine— people were like, “This is amazing. How do we get it? How do I share it? How do I link to it?” But as opposed to thinking of it as a problem, we saw it as an opportunity in order for the zines to continue to live and give access to everyone.
The post T Brand Studio Celebrates the Centennial of the Harlem Renaissance with Zine Series & Digital Hub appeared first on PRINT Magazine.