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Imagine
(or remember) yourself as an art director circa 1977.
You receive a ledger-size poster bearing the portrait of a black
man with a soft smile, one cheek resting against his hand. The
headline, "Catch a nigger by the toe," is followed by copy
detailing the designer's experience and flexibility across several
media, ending with the line, "Equal Opportunity Designer." Meet
Archie Boston and one his classic button-pushing
self-promotions.
Knowing irreverence
is one of the many tools in Archie Boston's
creative arsenal. Indeed, Boston's multifaceted career—encompassing design, advertising and design education—demonstrates the adaptability and ambition that that mailer
exalted. He admits he likes to test boundaries when possible, and
thinks that politically correct self-censorship is a chief enemy of
the visual communicator. Like much of the memorable,
industry-altering print advertising of the 1960s, when he entered
the trade, Boston's work could deploy the combined payload of a
single image with a declarative, ironic headline. But largely
unlike the graphic agitation of the era, his identity politics
could be as puckish and self-aware as they were
confrontational.
On
overcoming racism:
I worked hard to become a good designer, so that I would get hired
at a good design firm that places value on good work, and not the
color of one's skin.
Boston
was born in 1943, in Clewiston, Florida, the son of a
sugar cane sharecropper father and a mother who kept house. The
family then moved to St. Petersburg, where he and his five siblings
grew up poor, but aware of the value of education. In 1961, his
drawing and painting skills got him accepted into Chouinard Art
Institute (soon to become CalArts), where his older brother
Bradford attended and which he afforded with National Defense
Student Loans. Restless and eager to impress his brother, who was
already working as a commercial artist, Boston almost dropped out
of college for a job in advertising. On Brad's advice he stayed on,
but an internship at Carson/Roberts during his senior year
solidified his desire. "The creative people were treated like they
were the most important in the agency," he wrote in his 2001
memoir, Fly in the Buttermilk. "I wanted to be one of them
so bad I could taste it."
Early on
Boston bounced between design studios and advertising
agencies, while also serving out his National Guard duty (he writes
in his book that he joined the Reserve to avoid being sent to
Vietnam, and found himself on the frontlines of the 1965 Watts
riots at home). Though he and brother Brad had worked together
before—notably on a series of posters for the Council on Negro
Affairs in 1963—the pair formed Boston & Boston Design in 1967.
They set their logotype in a typeface called Jim Crow. As a new
firm courting companies that did not know what to make of this
outgoing studio with African-American principals, they scrapped
constantly for clients.
One
lesson from design:
Design is hard work. Striving for design excellence is even
harder.
After two years,
Archie separated from his brother to return to
advertising at Carson/Roberts, then the West Coast's largest
independent agency, whose client roster included Max Factor and
Mattel. In 1969 he took a job at Botsford Constantine and McCarthy,
where he worked for eight years. Simultaneously he started Archie
Boston Graphic Design, an advertising and design consultancy, but
did not pursue his own client work in earnest until 1973.
For most of his career Boston has been a
teacher. He began when
he was 23, at Chouinard. In 1977, when he was 34, Boston became a
full lecturer in the Department of Art at California State
University Long Beach (CSULB). In 1978, he helped found the Design
department and later the Visual Communication Design program. For
the next 32 years, which included 12 terms as chair of that
program, he made a significant impact on design education at the
school. A former student remembers him as an instructor who
combined nurturing encouragement with no-nonsense criticism. Mike
Neal, CSULB class of 2005, credits Boston with solidifying his
nascent impulse to pursue a design career: "There are people who
command out of fear and others out of love and respect. Archie is
the latter. If I did poorly on a project, I wasn't afraid of
getting chewed out by him, but I was more concerned about letting
him down."
On
being part of Design Journeys:
It is important for young designers to have role models of their
so-called ethnicity. This gives them the feeling, "If he or she can
become this, so can I."
Through
his art direction Boston internalized traits of the Big
Idea-era of visual communication—as exemplified by Helmut Krone's
legendary 1959 "Think Small" campaign for Volkswagen, the style
used corporate-looking layouts with a silhouetted photograph and
bottom-weighted copy at the service of a trenchant message—and made
them his own. He did so quite literally in a campaign he directed
for the Japanese marker company Pentel using the headline: "I told
Pentel what to do with their pens." This novel ad included Boston
himself, standing confidently in front of a new line of hard-tipped
markers, and a message aimed at his art-directing peers. This
approach had a strong collateral social component to it; as one of
the few African Americans in the industry of the day, Boston's
visual presence made a powerful and immediate impression, a sign
that the professional demographic was undergoing a seismic
shift.
Provocation and humor go
hand-in-hand in Boston's portfolio. By
combining both aspects he has created unparalleled pieces of visual
communication that evoke racist history while subverting it too.
Attention-grabbing pieces like that "Catch a nigger by the toe"
mailer have been part of his repertoire from the start. As Boston
& Boston he and Brad were strategic about pointing out their
blackness, not only as a means of preempting surprises, but also as
a platform to showing off their creativity and audacity. A 1966
poster shows Archie in a satin stars-and-stripes ensemble and top
hat, pointing at the camera, with the headline "Uncle Tom Wants
You!" The next year Archie and Brad produced one with them side by
side, shirtless, each with a "For Sale" sign around their necks and
a list of their measurements plus their merits and skills. Another
declared, "I don't want to marry your daughter." These are
artifacts of an era where such promotion doubled as social
critique, and in their brashness attempted to hasten society's
acceptance of the shifting racial dynamic.
His
favorite designer?
Georg Olden
Changing perceptions about race takes
perseverance, but Boston
has always been enthusiastic about his role in the Los Angeles
creative community. He was the first African American to be elected
president of the Los Angeles Art Directors Club, where he served
two terms. He also paid tribute to the Los Angeles design community
in a series of video interviews called 20 Outstanding Los
Angeles Designers, which he created while on sabbatical in
1986. Boston visited the studios of designers he admired, from
heavyweights like Saul Bass to his former instructor Louis Danziger
and digital avant-garde designer April Greiman. Twenty-one years
later he released the videos on DVD, sharing these important
documents of the creative scene to serve as inspiration for
students. For his many contributions he was named a fellow by AIGA
Los Angeles in 2007.
Boston retired
from CSULB in late 2009, an event he commemorated
in a video that he characteristically titled "Archie Boston's FU
(Final University) Lecture." At first he holds up his middle
finger, but then puts all joking aside to detail his career and his
influences, and to address the generation taking up the mantle: "I
want to be remembered as a professor who cared about his students
and did what he thought was best for them. I want to be remembered
as someone who stood up against criticism and spoke out on
controversial issues. And finally I want to be remembered as a
designer and educator, someone who documented my experience as an
African American."
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