The Nue Black Aesthetic opens at the Design Museum

The Design Museum’s new exhibition, The Nue Black Aesthetic, opens its doors to an ambitious gathering of contemporary Black design voices, each one refusing to be contained by a single aesthetic or approach. Guest curated by author and journalist Charlene Prempeh, the show brings together sixteen designers whose work spans furniture, fashion, jewellery and beyond, united not by style but by the complex lived experience of creating within and beyond the structures of design establishment.

Over one hundred objects are distributed across six sections, each one a careful articulation of identity, culture and community. The exhibition’s title references the cultural movements of the 1960s Black Aesthetic and the 1980s New Black Aesthetic, but proposes instead a ‘Nue’ era, one defined by nuance and plurality. The premise is quietly radical: that Black design is not monolithic, that there is no single way to be a Black designer, and that the assumptions we carry about who shapes design culture need careful, deliberate dismantling.

Many of the designers featured belong to diasporic communities, their work reflecting the distinct traditions of their specific heritage alongside shared experiences of navigating identity within global design practice. Saul Nash’s inclusion sits alongside the work of Ini Archibong, Bianca Saunders, Samuel Ross, Tosin Oshinowo and others, each bringing their own vocabulary of form, material and meaning to contemporary design.

The exhibition runs at the Design Museum in London. The breadth of practice on display, from jewellery and textiles to furniture and fashion, from documentary film to digital media, serves as a necessary corrective to the narrowness of design histories and award systems, opening sight lines to practices and makers whose contributions have long deserved far greater visibility.

Imagery courtesy of Saul Nash (@saul.nash).