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From
the outside it looks easy: Art Sims skipped a couple of
grades in elementary school, attended the prestigious Cass
Technical High School in Detroit, earned a full ride to college,
immediately scored a job in New York, then flew to LA, where, while
still in his 20s, he bought a Mercedes, started his own company and
gained the attention of directors such as Steven Spielberg and
Spike Lee while crafting a unique identity in a big city. And the
dynamic Sims encourages this perception—talking fast, listing
upcoming projects, detailing personal goals and announcing what's
wrong with America today. He's a whirlwind, a dynamo, a man of
action.
And maybe a miracle. Dig
deeper, and you find that Sims, an
African American, worked very hard for to get where he is today as
the founder and CEO of his own firm, 11:24 Design Advertising.
Based in
Los Angeles, the company is dedicated to promoting African-American
art and culture as part of a larger mandate Sims dubs
"urbanization," which refers to the recognition and melding of
disparate cultural and creative histories.
One
lesson from design:
Design is just one part of being a designer. The other part is you
must be a good person in life. It does not matter how much talent
you have.
Sims's career
started modestly, with the "Draw Me" test featured
in magazines and on TV back in the 1950s and '60s designed to
uncover artistic talent. Sims had it. His mother, a grade-school
teacher, nurtured his creativity, guiding him through school and
instilling a love of learning. Sims started winning awards for his
artwork in elementary school, then attended Cass Tech, where his
curriculum was dedicated to the arts. He excelled and earned a
scholarship to Michigan State University.
"I remember that one of my teachers at
Michigan State said I
would never make it," recalls Sims. "I don't why she felt this way.
But it was funny—I'm the kind of person who likes challenges, and
this was a challenge."
During the
summer between his junior and senior year in college,
Sims headed to New York. "My mom put up the money for me to go,"
recalls Sims, who was applying for art director positions. "The
first meeting went well, and the guy [Ed Lee at Columbia Records]
said, 'Call me before you head back home.' And I remember standing
in the rain, in a phone booth, just before I headed back and
feeling pretty dejected. But I called the guy. I didn't expect
anything, but he said, 'I want you to work with us. Go pack your
stuff up, fly here and find a place to stay.'"
That summer, Sims produced a series of album
covers for Columbia
Records, which he promptly took back to college where he still
needed to finish his final year. And of course, he went to the
teacher who had dismissed him. "Do you see my name here?" he asked
her, showing her the covers that featured his name prominently. "Do
you see this? I did it, right?"
On
obstacles to becoming a designer:
The obstacles were mostly competition. I worked hard. I did lots of
research to make sure my work was the best it could be. My
standards were perfection—to be best the designer in the world.
Sims decided that he couldn't go back to
New York. "I couldn't
stay in Detroit, either," he explains. "I could have worked on cars
but I just wasn't feeling it. I had to have a fresh start. So I
decided to go to LA, and when I saw those palm trees at LAX, there
was no way was I going back to the snow. That was it."
Sims got to work quickly. He pursued
African-American luminaries
in the film and music industries and started work as an art
director at EMI, where he stayed for four years, until he was let
go. "I had started doing some freelance work," Sims explains, "and
the company didn't like that. I had crossed a line, so they fired
me." Sims says he was very upset, but moved quickly into a job at
CBS Television. "I told them upfront that I was starting my own
company, and would be doing my own work." CBS countered by trying
to keep Sims so busy he wouldn't have time to do anything else. "I
just starting saving all my money and setting up my own office
space," he says. "Finally, it came to an ultimatum with CBS. When I
left, my office was already set up. So 11:24 Design Advertising
came out of that effort."
"11:24"
refers to a particular chapter in the New Testament,
Mark chapter 11, verse 24. "When I got to LA, I had strong
Christian ethics, and I was searching for something spiritual, a
purpose," explains Sims. "I was intrigued by the spirituality of
Earth, Wind and Fire, and I wanted a name that would bring all of
this together. I knew there were other ad agencies, but I was
trying to be more a creative, more artistic; I was trying to make
images people hadn't seen before. I needed a name that would
capture all that."
Now that he had his
own company, Sims was ready to go. He saw
Spike Lee's film She's Gotta Have It and decided he needed
to work with Lee. A contact in Lee's office connected Sims at the
same time to Steven Spielberg's project The Color
Purple.
On
the influence of race on his work:
I love doing work for and about African Americans. I feel I am
reshaping history to show our beauty.
"When opportunity shows up, either you're
ready or you're not. I
was ready," says Sims, who had not done a movie poster before. "I
rose to the occasion. I put my most creative thoughts in my mind
and came up with the most beautiful images I could come up with. I
wasn't taking any prisoners with this one. I was out to show how
good I was."
And he was good. Soon
after that project, Sims created the
New Jack City poster. "Wesley Snipes was the drug dealer—the
bad guy—but I wanted to show him on the poster, smoking a cigarette
and wearing sunglasses," says Sims. "I remember Spike called me and
said that people were breaking down bus shelters to get the poster.
He said, 'Are you that good? I have to get you on salary.'"
Sims's work for Lee included the iconic
posters for Do the
Right Thing and Malcolm X, as well as the incendiary
poster for Bamboozled in 2000, which was attacked for its
racial stereotypes. Sims explains the poster's genesis: "Spike
said, 'I want the poster to be like a Barnum and Bailey circus
poster meets racism.' So I used an image of a baby, like a
pickaninny, with a watermelon. It was so racist. There was a
group in LA from the Nation of Islam, and they were saying people
should boycott the movie because the poster was so insulting. I did
interviews with The New York Times and the LA Times,
and when they realized that I was African American, it changed
everything. And what I said in those interviews was these were
images of things that happened in America. We are not just trying
to upset people. This is about what really happened."
Sims, who has earned many awards and was
featured in a book and
exhibition titled Close Up in Black: African American Film
Posters, is currently working on a poster for Spike Lee's
second Hurricane Katrina documentary, titled If God Is Willing
and the Creek Don't Rise. But he's also diversifying. He's
exploring the social-media arena with a new networking site for
African Americans; he's created a greeting card line; and he has
written several screenplays and hopes to direct his first feature
in the near future. He also teaches graphic design at a middle
school for African Americans, and is getting ready to launch a
project called the Artists in Residence Foundation, designed to
unite artists with students who don't have art classes at their
schools. Which is to say, Sims is not contemplating
retirement. "If I'm on this earth, I'm going to be doing something
expressive, or creative, and I'm going to be giving back. You won't
see Art Sims lying on the beach with a mint julep, pondering his
life. There's too much to do."
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