illustration - exhibit Design - Event Planning - Branding
Forbidden Fruit was an exhibition at the 40k Gallery, a student run gallery on the Harvard Graduate School of Design Campus in April 2017. The aim of the exhibit was to position the music videos of contemporary black artists as landscape precedents analogous to landscape painting at the beginning of the field's formation. The exhibition uses this form of artistic expression to explore the meaning of landscape from an unconventional cultural perspective. Conscious of the fact or not, each selected artist has used landscape as a primary element in their visual messages. By examining their work through the lens of landscape architecture, we speculate on each artist's decision making and creative process.
Though landscape architecture as a discipline proclaims to be interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and inclusive, it has historically failed to consider contemporary black culture due to an attachment to its Western colonial past. Forbidden Fruit begins to diverge from this historical narrative.
The gallery is divided into two rooms, one of which was installed as a lounge space and the other room was transformed into an enclosed dark space with projections of music videos on its walls. Large scale illustrations of the artists displayed in the various projections were printed on translucent paper and placed in each of the gallery's window frames.
