Collaging Black History Month
Using collage to visually represent UAL’s Black community layered and personal experiences for Black History Month.
With Bunmi Ekundayo, Lynn Yang and Daniela Di Martino. In collaboration with UAL Communications and collage artists. Campaign live October 2024 and 2025.
Each year in October, the UK celebrates Black History Month. University of the Arts London (UAL) runs an annual campaign to encourage the community to attend events, expand known history and culture, and try new foods throughout the month.
Responding to the Black History month theme for 2024, “Reclaiming Narratives,” the design concept draws from surrealist principles: challenging imposed values and norms, and searching for freedom. Collage is a much-loved surrealist medium and is especially useful for artists wanting to shape or rethink long-held perspectives.
We invited our Black community to attend a one-day workshop and tell their own stories through collage. 3 attendees created an individual collages and a group collage, which become the campaign visuals.
Usually we update the concept and visuals for this campaign every year, but the 2024 campaign resonated so well, we developed it further for 2025. We held another one-day collage workshop with new artists, this time responding to the 2025 theme, “Standing firm in power and pride.”
2025 asset production went analogue. Rather than digitally adding campaign copy alongside the collages, we added copy to the collages by printing the copy and scanning everything together. This allowed us more freedom with text placement, as well as enhancing the relationship between the campaign messages and collages.
I’ve written a full campaign write-up, covering the initial concepts through to campaign application for 2 years running.
Workshop photography by Katwamba Mutale.