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Home Audio S8E5: Kelly Walters

Jessica Helfand, Ellen McGirt|Audio

November 10, 2020

S8E5: Kelly Walters

Kelly Walters is the founder of the multidisciplinary studio Bright Polka Dot and an assistant professor of communications design at Parsons School of Design

In her work, Walters explores Black visual culture such as reaction GIFs and posters promoting films with Black performers. Her studio course in Black visual culture encourages similar explorations, and students approach the material with from wide range of perspectives:

There is a spectrum of understanding what blackness is — and that it’s not a monolith. There were students in my class who were of African descent, but did not grow up in the U.S., to students who did grow up in the U.S. but were anywhere from in the city, outside the city, in the suburbs.…In terms of the delivery of this material, both in terms of historical documents or archival documents that I might share, or trying to have a lecture about any of this, there’s trying to figure out where people are with their comfortability and their understanding of some of this. Some people need a significant amount of context.

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