noseyAF Recommends: The Four Percent Amplified

This week I'm sharing an episode of The Four Percent Amplified, hosted by Shari "Sunni" Fairclough of Sunni Aesthetics, who joined me on noseyAF for Episode 133 during my 31 Days of Black Business series. Sunni created the show to amplify BIPOC voices in the design industry, where Black designers are still only about four percent of the field.

In this episode, "Branding with Purpose When Activism Becomes the Brand," designer Leila Kharem of KHI Design Group talks about growing up between cultures, tracing her family back to Barbados and to a great-great-grandmother born into slavery in 1850s Maryland, and what she learned from her late father, Omar Kharem, a Civil Rights era photographer whose work has been exhibited at the Met and the Brooklyn Museum. His lesson, as she tells it: he never compartmentalized, and authenticity is freeing.

Stay for Sunni's opening, too. She spends the first few minutes walking through design as a tool for activism, from the Russian Constructivists to Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party to ACT UP to the rainbow flag. It's a great piece of writing.

Chapters:

• 00:03 - Featuring the 4% Amplified Podcast with Sunni Aesthetics

• 05:36 - Leila’s Family History: Roots, Migration, and Identity

• 13:02 - Legacy Lessons: My Father's Photography and Today's Turbulent Climate

• 17:12 - Design as Activism — Beyond Aesthetics

• 25:43 - Being a Black Artist in Design

• 31:32 - Balancing Business, Design, and Activism

• 36:12 - Confidence: How Creatives Move the Needle

• 46:22 - Reflecting on History, Design, and Activism

Shared with permission from Sunni Aesthetics.

🎧 Listen to The Four Percent Amplified at sunniaesthetics.com/podcast

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