I was commissioned to create a poster to promote the Quebec Cree School Board’s Arts Education Concentration Program – MikwChiyâm. This interdisciplinary enrichment program aims to increase student retention by reinforcing Cree identity through artistic expression. The school board’s aspiration for the program is to inspire youth by creating contexts for students to collaborate with professional Canadian indigenous and non-indigenous artists.
The program promotes art literacy, art appreciation and collaboration by bringing together students, artists, teachers and community members in positive learning spaces where creative initiatives can flourish. By inviting professional artists to work collaboratively with teachers to design and implement interactive programming, they hope to encourage students and teachers to learn from and alongside artists.
The biggest challenge I had with this project was to squeeze in so much information into a 11×17″ space, whilst maintaining the Mikw Chiyâm’s newly created brand, and of course having it look good at the same time! The brief was to excite and inspire students, with the listed artists coming to their schools being a big deal and the main message. I also had the challenge of fitting in 12 spots for the artists on the poster in a creative way… so out goes any idea of laying them out in a 4 column by 3 row grid!
I struck upon the idea of a circle, a symbol of bringing people together, dividing that into 12 equal blocks, and then dividing those blocks into 3 lots of 4. 4 residencies at 3 schools. I would also go on to edit the photos of the artists, making them greyscale images to bring about some uniformity, laying them over the red background of the brand’s colour palette. Finally the additional supplied logo and copy details were added, including social media and website call to actions at the bottom.
