MICHAEL RAKOWITZ

2024

Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American artist whose award-winning work interrogates the damages caused by long-term political conflict and colonialism. With generous support from Appalachian State University’s Smith Gallery, Department of Art, and Honors College, promotional material prepares for Rakowitz’s visit to campus as a guest speaker and artist-scholar. 

With grants from the Office of Diversity and North Carolina Humanities, this small brand campaign centers around the date palm tree, a design element that morphs across large window displays, digital scala signage in the University’s student union building, advertisements in the Watauga Democrat newspaper, social media posts, and an 11x17 risograph poster series. 

In order to design a solution that best reflects Rakowitz and his work, without appropriating or misinterpreting Neo-Assyrian relief carving patterns, I worked with art history professors to find ways to connect ancient art and Rakowitz’s contemporary style. A fluid shape emulating the date palm, mentioned throughout Rakowitz’s practice, alludes to recycled packaging materials and the wing silhouettes of Assyrian Dieties seen in his most known project, The invisible enemy should not exist. 

“As with all my projects, the cycle of materials, their provenance and their aura, is important. The salvage of date syrup cans makes present the human, economic and ecological disasters caused by the Iraq Wars and their aftermath. Iraqi dates were once considered the best in the world and constituted the country’s second largest export after oil. In the late 1970s, the Iraqi date industry listed over 30 million date palms in the country. By the end of the 2003 Iraq War, only 3 million remained.” -Michael Rakowitz