A Common Language of Design: The Seattle-Havana-Tehran Poster Show

In 2007, he orchestrated “The Seattle-Havana Poster Show” with Menéndez, the first American and Cuban city-to-city design exchange since the end of Cuba’s Revolution.Then “The Seattle-Tehran Poster Show” in 2008 with Raad, also a ground-breaking arts collaboration. This show marks the first time that all three cities come together to produce a collective exhibit. “The posters are substitutes for people. As people, we naturally seek commonalities with one other. It actually takes great efforts to keep us apart,” Smith says. “When we see what the other is doing—and recognize ourselves—the truth is arrived at; we are more alike than different. The real ‘shit show’ belongs to forces that try to manipulate us through stereotyping, through fear, to keep us apart,” he says.

Menéndez describes the moment as “eureka” when the three curators discover a triplet. “It made me happy to find those coincidences—improbably and at the same time inevitable,” he says. “Even in cities as distant as ours, styles approach one another. We have a lot in common. Above all, we have the times we live in—an era in which images cross all borders.”

In looking at the triplets, these unexplainable coincidences leave a beautiful footprint, as you see the similarities as well as a bit of regional flavor. Designers around the world are more in-tune than ever before to widespread styles, thanks to the accessibility that the internet provides. But to Smith, regionalism isn’t dead just yet. “It’s beautiful though—for the moment that we can still be enthralled by our differences and marvel at the random similarities between our work.”

The Seattle-Tehran-Havana Show exhibit debuted in Seattle at the BumbershootGallery in early September, but will travel to Havana and Tehran in 2016.