As this company embarks on its twenty first year of artistic struggle, there was a desire afoot to re-image the organization. “While we remain resolute in our mission, offered Founder/Artistic Director S. Robert Morgan, I felt we needed to do some culturally significant make overs.” The founding corporate documents filed with the DC office of Regulatory Affairs dictates the company logo be circular in form. “We didn’t want to move away from that because of the administrative issues it might present regarding redrafting the documents offered Morgan, but we wanted it to resonate a little more purposefully if that makes sense.” Offering assistance in the search for a good and reliable Graphic Artist, Company Photographer Sharon Farmer introduced Artists extraordinaire, Isa Angulo who was completing her PhD, in Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland. A native of Barcelona Spain, Angulo began working with the company in 2007 during a production collaboration with Howard University Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry and the Alzheimer’s Association. “Each time she produced a design for us, said Morgan, we would receive so much positive feedback. When I explained to her our aspirations and how we wanted the logo to somehow connect to our history in a significant way that would be welcoming from all vantage points, we began discussing the Sankofa symbols. To which I was introduced sometime ago, but had no specific knowledge.” In explaining the current symbol located at the center of the company logo, Angulo explained, “it’s the Sankofa image symbolic for storytelling. The term Sankofa means to learn from the past, literally, to go back and get it.”
An Akan term of prime importance in African culture, according to information excerpted from African Traditions Proverbs and Sankofa at The Spirituals Project (University of Denver, 2004). The majority of the records and manifests obtained from ships carry transporting captive Africans to Europe and the New world during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade identify the ancient civilizations that inhabited the coast of Africa from Senegal to Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Benin as their source of human cargo.
The Akan have an ancient and rich cultural heritage that includes the extensive use of pictorial symbolism in the writing system known as Adinkra, which was created by the Ashanti craftsmen of Ghana. The Danka symbolize the Akan way of life, and individually each symbol can be associated with an aphorism or proverb rooted in the Akan experience. African proverbs offer insight into African philosophical thought, cosmology, and worldview, so that collectively, the Adinkra and their accompanying proverbs form a communication system that preserves and transmits the accumulated cultural and spiritual values of the people.
Our most recent collaborator, Dana Coelho, worked over this concept to execute the logo's design and our shiny new website. Tell us what you think about our new and purposeful look. Blog about it!
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