Jason
Alejandro
Jason Alejandro is a Puerto Rican graphic designer and educator based between New York City and Philadelphia. He is currently Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the College of New Jersey. Jason’s work examines, addresses, and questions aspects of cultural identity, design history, professional practice, and critical pedagogy through research, making, and writing. More info︎︎︎
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Jason Alejandro is a Puerto Rican graphic designer and educator based between New York City and Philadelphia. He is currently Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the College of New Jersey. Jason’s work examines, addresses, and questions aspects of cultural identity, design history, professional practice and critical pedagogy through research, making, and writing. More info︎︎︎
Email
Instagram
Twitter
LinkedIn
are.na
WNW
LIFTED zine

Inspired by the idea of sampling in popular music, LIFTED is a typographic publication that reclaims design history through a curated narrative of song titles ranging from 1900 (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”) to present day. The musical titles represented offer a topical (and incomplete) glimpse of Black public life and lived experience in the United States—focusing on slavery, protest, civil rights, and revolution. Ultimately, these digitized type specimens, “lifted” from printed ephemera, serve as a means of bridging time, media, and artform while calling into question the legitimacy of the design canon.

The typographic specimens in the publication were digitized from the following sources: NY Public Library Digital Collection, National Museum of African American History & Culture, University of South Florida Libraries Special & Digital Collections.

This work was created for the exhibition With a Cast of Colored Stars curated by Kelly Walters, on display at Parsons School of Design in NYC from January 24–March 1, 2022.
Jan 2022