Dissent! Liberty & Loyalty in Early Richmond
The Valentine, Richmond, VA
For Dissent! Liberty & Loyalty in Early Richmond at The Valentine, I was involved from concept through production — building the art direction framework and navigating one of the exhibition's most deliberate decisions: how to use AI meaningfully without letting it overshadow the work. The technology served a specific purpose: recovering visual presence for 30 Virginians from the 1770s–1830s whose likenesses were never recorded — people who dissented, stood for their values, and were erased from the historical record. The design challenge was to keep their individual stories at the center, using AI as a quiet instrument rather than a spectacle.
The identity begins with the logotype: two typefaces in direct tension — a bold, condensed serif standing for the weight and courage of dissenting acts, layered against a delicate script that carries the voice of each individual, the way people of that era wrote by hand, personal and irreplaceable. The contrast isn't decorative; it's the argument. Red and blue — read today as opposing political colors — are set against each other to signal that these contradictions didn't end in the 1770s. They're still live, still being translated.
Featured in Style Weekly, March 2026. As curator Christina Vida noted,