Johnny Selman started Peace Post with his team at Selman in 2016 as a way to work on something meaningful between client projects. Led by its eponymous founder, the Brooklyn design studio otherwise specializes in brand identities, campaigns and design systems. Below, we talk about their ongoing initiative for peace.
What inspired you to launch Peace Post?
I wanted to bring some of what I learned from doing BBCx365 to this project—that investing energy in something that expands your understanding and empathy for the world around us is a great use of time.
Was it entirely your motivation and leadership that moved this from idea to finished form?
I led the project with executive producer Christopher Schroeder and with support from our producers Jennie Soccio, Megan Greig and Nicole Motta.
It was an enormous effort by the team to: 1) research potential human rights, environmental and peace advocates for every country in the world, and 2) research the artistic traditions of each of those countries.
We would pick an advocate from that research and create a document encompassing the advocate’s bio and information about the country and its art. We would then commission an illustrator to create the portrait.
At the beginning of the project, these portraits were mostly done by designers who worked at Selman. As the project progressed, we began to commission portraits from illustrators in the countries where the advocate was from, which added a wonderful authenticity.
Why did you choose the postage stamp motif?
Stamps have a rich history of recognizing notable people through portraiture.
The stamp is a unifying visual element where historical heavyweights like MLK are represented within the same simple frame as lesser-known advocates like Asma Khalifa, a Libyan women’s rights and peace activist
It’s an inclusive way to catalog the entire set on the website as a single sheet of stamps.
How did you get 102 artists from the world over to agree to provide their work on time?
It took twice as long as we expected. The original idea was to post one a week, which would have taken us about four years. Now, eight years later, the project is complete and represents 198 portraits from 102 illustrators. We commissioned and posted the portraits in reverse alphabetical order from Zimbabwe to Afghanistan, and there were bottlenecks along the way, for sure.
Are any of these self-portraits?
While these aren’t self-portraits, there were many special connections between the artist and the advocate. For example, advocate Martial Pa’nucci, an African rapper-activist, writer, and co-founder of the citizen movement Ras-le-Bol in Congo, recommended Graphik’noir, an artist connected with the movement, to create his portrait.
All of the portraits are commissioned illustrations of peace advocates that we’d selected.
How do you plan on distributing them?
We have a large traveling exhibit of the project that is opening at the International Peace Museum in Dayton, OH, on Sept. 6. We are looking for other museums, libraries and schools to host the exhibit. Interested organizations can reach out to peace@selman.nyc.
A limited run of a large-format book has been printed and will be donated to select libraries.
The website is a wonderful resource to experience the project and learn more about each advocate.
What’s your hope for the end result?
I hope it lives on as an educational resource and inspires the next generation to see these countries around the world not only for their challenges but for their champions of peace.
The Saigon South International School in Vietnam recently studied Peace Post in their IB Literature and Language course. Students learned how to critique and speak about art, as well as about authorial/artist choice and how it conveys meaning.