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That
graphic designer Chaz Maviyane-Davies' work pushes the
boundaries of social justice is not surprising. If you want to know
what he was like as a child, ask his high school art teacher Ms.
Buckland. "She used to tremble and turn pink," he remembers. "I
caused a lot of problems for my teachers. Everyone said I gave her
such grief because of my work."
Ms.
Buckland's complaint was simple—Maviyane-Davies was being
himself. When competing in a national competition for a hospital
mural, he departed from his classmates' formulaic depictions of
nurses and doctors and painted an image of a traditional healer.
("A witch doctor in the West," he clarifies with a laugh.) Though
the school staff was mortified, his mural won second place, setting
the tone for his future career.
"I
grew up in a racist state as a second-class citizen,"
Maviyane-Davies says of his upbringing in Zimbabwe, then known as
Rhodesia. He was only 12 when Ian Smith created a separatist white
government as an attempt to thwart black leadership. "No African
rule in my lifetime," Mr. Smith brazenly declared. "The white man
is master of Rhodesia. He has built it, and he intends to keep
it."
On being a designer:
Images transport ideas, but design drives them. The act of design
is an act of independence.
Against that backdrop, Maviyane-Davies
dreamed of leaving his
country to pursue art, as such options were unavailable in his
homeland. He couldn't receive a passport until he entered the army
so he was conscripted into the military after completing training
as an electronics draftsman, drawing circuit diagrams. With papers
in hand, he settled on three potential overseas locations that
would welcome a Rhodesian passport: South Africa, which was still
in the throes of apartheid; Malawi, which was too close and was a
puppet state of South Africa; and Switzerland, that bastion of
neutrality. Within weeks of his discharge, Maviyane-Davies was on a
plane to Geneva.
His stay in
Switzerland was short. Although he reveled in the
newfound freedom of expression, Maviyane-Davies spoke neither
French nor German, so he was often isolated from his new
environment. He packed up and headed back to Africa within six
months, ultimately settling in Zambia in 1974. "I went all this way
to travel 300 miles from where I started," he notes. Restless yet
again, he only stayed in Zambia for a year to take a foundation
course in design, until his mainly English faculty suggested that
he consider heading to London. Learning in Zambia was wrought with
practical challenges, namely a lack of proper teaching materials
and supplies.
On
his first big break:
Being invited as part of 30 internationally acclaimed designers to
create a poster on the environment for an exhibition at the Earth
Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. We all had the same brief. Mine
became the largest selling poster and was sold out by the end of
the first day.
London in
the 1970s opened his eyes creatively. Maviyane-Davies
consumed the socialist images that were flooding the city from the
Eastern Bloc. "I flourished when I studied there," he says. "So
much was available—meeting people in universities, bars and clubs
while arguing with everyone from Ethiopians to Eritreans. That
whole bubbling over affected my work." Posters from Cuba, in
particular, with their vibrant colors and revolutionary tones,
grabbed his eye for both their song of hope and change as well
their iconography.
Seeing how global
socialist causes took hold in Britain,
Maviyane-Davies began to question: What did it mean for other
international agendas to be imputed onto the English condition?
Margaret Thatcher was beginning her rise through the House of
Commons, and he remembers a strong conservative element swirling
around him that had no patience for the liberation pronouncements
of Cuba. "That's when I started to identify graphic design as a
nonpartisan discipline that could help to bring about change. It
doesn't only belong to capitalism or anybody. But you've got to be
astute how you connect culturally with your audience."
In 1982, he returned to Zimbabwe and worked
at an ad agency for
about six months before founding his own design agency, The
Maviyane-Project. His country, still in the raptures of its recent
independence, clung to many of the same problems as before. "The ad
agencies remained white-run," recalls Maviyane-Davies. "The
clientele may have changed, but, either out of laziness or
purposely, they just substituted white faces with black faces, the
eight letters of Rhodesia for the eight letters of Zimbabwe. The
way of life was the same. Some discrimination goes away and that
says a lot. But the poor were still poor. One of my jobs as an
agitator was to say: Things have to change for our betterment."
Through his work Maviyane-Davies adopted a
visual vocabulary
developed from the culture of Zimbabwe, to help guide the
burgeoning country. Manipulating images of African bodies and other
local visual cues he began to project a message of social change.
He explains, "It's about breaking down and finding the inherited,
mythically infused iconography and then rebuilding it in order to
fit the feeling and nature of where we are now. The tone, rhythm
and depth of our identity is special and can be used to talk to
each other today. And we have to use that visual language to slowly
try to bring some of our personality and presence into the design
arena."
On technology:
So many different visual languages are being left at the doorstep
of technological progress, as homogenized blandness—in the name of
globalization—emphatically spreads its mediocrity.
An example is a self-authored series of
posters from 1996, in
which he reimagined the United Nation's Universal Declaration of
Human Rights from an African perspective. In contrast to the usual
depictions of starvation and strife that perpetually stereotype the
continent, Maviyane-Davies sought to assert human rights by
representing its people in a positive and dignified manner. "Human
rights are a mandate we should all be born with, something that
should be printed on the back of your birth certificate. It's
something that every human being should have and what we aspire to
achieve as civilized people. But instead human rights tend only to
be discussed when they are violated."
The
authentic voice that Maviyane-Davies found in Zimbabwe is
the same one he hopes to impart to his students at the
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where has has been a
professor since 2001 and now holds tenure. "I tell my students that
graphic design is not only what you learn in college. It's what you
learn in life. You connect your values to who you are and thereby
become the visual voice of the economic and cultural sector on your
own terms."
The epic concerns of
globalization that he tackled through
design in Zimbabwe have taken a practical turn for Maviyane-Davies
as a professor. He believes that one of the biggest challenges for
graphic designers is reconciling the widespread availability of
tools like Photoshop and Illustrator with originality and
personalization. "The software challenge is huge," he laments. "I
judge a lot of competitions and sometimes, when the images are
there lying on the floor, you can't tell what's from Singapore,
Australia or America."
He reserves his
sharpest criticism—and his highest hope—for his
fellow countrymen and women's creative potential. "Look at our
[African] sculptures—they're some of the best and most original in
the world—and yet our graphic design looks the same as everyone
else's. Why can't we see where our sculptors are extracting their
inspiration from? They might not be communicating for a client, but
they're taking from an indigenous, historical and humane source and
that source is open to all of us. We're building a new language,
and believe it can have universal appeal."
But building a new language is not without
its obstacles. In
2001, he fled the country after president Robert Mugabe lost a
referendum and began cracking down on public demonstrations and
civic dissent. Though Maviyane-Davies cannot return while Mugabe
retains control, the flight has bolstered his convictions. "If
anything, design is struggle," he says. "Because if we don't
struggle with something, we're not saying anything."
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