Studio Designer Tees
Black cultural production and experimentation has always been integral to the diaspora, anchoring storytelling around traditions, rituals, and generations prior, present, and future.
Inspired by the diaspora’s dynamic relationship to craft, this past spring Studio Store invited four designers working across the United States to transform a blank cotton canvas: the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Studio T-shirt. Through intimate practices including beading, dyeing, and fiber deconstruction, designers Melinda Griffith, Tajah Ellis, Jasmine Plantin, and Praise Fuller utilized material, color, and language to evoke memory and reflect the storytelling traditions that have long been instrumental to the diaspora.
Available beginning July 31, you can purchase T-shirts from Griffith and Ellis on July 31, with Plantin’s available to shop on August 14 and Fuller’s available to shop on August 28.
Melinda Griffith (b.1991 Brooklyn NY) is a folk artist, researcher and collector from Bed Stuy who uses various mediums to examine the diaspora's relationship to craft and self-representation.
Tajah Ellis (b. 1997, Brooklyn) transforms the growth and decay cycles of Eart material into a vibrant range of color, texture and patterns. Her craft takes the shape of fiber de-construction, emphasizing the stress endured during beautification processes, interpreted through biomaterials. Through research and experimentation, Ellis’s artisanship of garments and tapestries draw rituals of antiquity into extended futures.
Jasmine Plantin (b. 1991, Manhattan, NY) is a textile artist and designer whose practice explores the intersection of color, material experimentation, and diasporic storytelling. She attended Parsons the New School for Design and Central Saint Martins for her undergraduate degree and graduated with a BFA in 2013. Her practice centers around textile and graphic exploration; interweaving both into garments used as a mode of communication. She is currently a Design Director at Jordan Brand, in Portland, OR.
Praise Fuller (b. Houston, Texas) is a New York-based, self-taught artist, poet, and educator with a practice spanning printmaking, installation, and mixed media with a central focus on the cyanotype process. Fuller’s work emerges from historical analysis and introspection, exploring what lies beyond the constraints of family, the church, trauma, and the cultural realities of the South. These introspections reflect how memory exists beyond, or even escapes, the individual mind by inhabiting objects, places, and communities.
