The Design of Race: How Visual Culture Shapes America

Peter Fine's innovative study traces the development of a mass visual culture in the United States, focusing on how new visual technologies played a part in embedding racialized ideas about African Americans, and how whiteness was privileged within modernist ideals of visual form. Fine considers the visual and material manifestations of this process through the history of three important technologies of the art of mechanical reproduction – typography, lithography, and photography, and then moves on to consider how racialized representation has been configured and contested within contemporary film and television, fine art and digital design.

Peter C. Fine is Associate Professor of Visual Communication Design in the Department of Visual and Literary Arts, Art and Art History at the University of Wyoming, USA. As a design educator he teaches studio courses in design, design history and visual culture, exploring the role of the designer past, present and future. He is the author of The Design of Race: How Visual Culture Shapes America (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Sustainable Graphic Design: Principles and Practices (Bloomsbury, 2016). In 2019 he was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Quebec, Canada.