These U.S. civics test questions are written in Neue Haas Grotesk. Can you answer them?
Plus: Visualizing the 1 million Americans we’ve lost to COVID-19
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at…
These U.S. civics test questions are written in Neue Haas Grotesk. Can you answer them?
Nike doesn’t shy away from Kaepernick for its 50th anniversary
Visualizing the 1 million Americans we’ve lost to COVID-19
These U.S. civics test questions are written in Neue Haas Grotesk. Can you answer them?
One requirement to become a U.S. citizen is to get at least six out of 10 questions right on a U.S. civics test, which draws from 100 possible questions on U.S. government and history, like “What is the capital of your state?” and “When was the constitution written?”
Those questions are now art by Lebanese artist Rayyane Tabet, who’s preparing for the test as part of his application for U.S. citizenship. “100 Civics Questions” (2022) uses Neue Haas Grotesk, the original version of Helvetica found in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s type-centric branding, to pose the questions to viewers across the museum and on the museum’s website and social media for its 2022 biennial.
The idea for “100 Civics Questions” came while Tabet was reading through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services study guide, he said.
“While looking through those study guides, I realized that if these questions and phrases were taken out of context and disseminated throughout the space of the museum and across the website, they could be read like concrete poetry or open-ended, contradictory, and often hermetic questions,” Tabet said in a statement.
The test has a cumulative pass rate of 91% between October 2009 and June 2021, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, but most Americans wouldn’t do very well. A 2018 survey of 1,000 U.S. adults by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found just 36% passed.
Tabet moved to the U.S. as a student in 2004. He is in the provisional phase of the citizenship process and expects to complete it in three to five years, the museum said. The 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept, runs through Sept. 5.
Nike doesn’t shy away from Kaepernick for its 50th anniversary
It’s a more fraught landscape for brands that want to speak out on social and political issues today than it was just a few years ago, but Nike isn’t changing its tune for its 50th anniversary. The sports apparel brand included former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s activism in a list of highlights from the company’s first half century in a new short film.
Nike and ad agency Wieden + Kennedy teamed up for an ad titled “Seen It All” starring and directed by Spike Lee. In the spot, Lee plays Mars Blackmon, a character from his 1986 film “She’s Gotta Have It” who he appeared as alongside Michael Jordan in early Nike Air Jordan commercials.
While playing chess, Blackmon calls out great athletes from Nike history, and when he gets to Kaepernick, he raises his fist.
“I’ve seen justice shout from the 50-yard line on the bended knee of a record-breaking QB all in the name of equality,” Lee’s character says over images of art of Kaepernick kneeling and Nike’s 2018 outdoor billboard of Kaepernick in San Francisco. The ad also features athletes like Steve Prefontaine, Kobe Bryant, and Serena Williams.
Nike is celebrating the big 5-0 with a look into its archives as well. My favorite so far is this post on the Nike Swoosh, designed by Portland State University graphic design student Carolyn Davidson.
In a video, Davidson says Nike co-founder Phil Knight said it would be nice if the logo “looked like movement.” “I just doodled and doodled and doodled,” Davidson said. Knight was reluctant with the mark she turned in and responded “Well, I don’t love it. But it will grow on me.”
Then known as the “stripe” — which Davidson still calls it, per Nike — it was registered with the U.S. Patent Office in 1974.
Visualizing the 1 million Americans we’ve lost to COVID-19
The U.S. has now lost at least 1 million people to COVID-19, a once unfathomable death toll that’s higher than the death toll of two decades of car crashes, the population of six states, and all U.S. wars combined.
For its May 15, 2022 front page, the New York Times marked 996,612 COVID deaths for which a county is known across a full back-to-front map of U.S. states and Puerto Rico, by graphics editor Jeremy White. The paper used the headline “One Million: A Nation’s Immeasurable Grief.”
“For more than two years, Americans have made their way through a pandemic that has upended plans, brought tumult and despair, and sickened millions,” the Times’ Julie Bosman wrote.
“But one group has been forced onto a separate path,” she wrote. “These are the loved ones of the nearly one million people in the United States who have now died of COVID-19, a catastrophic toll that reflects a death rate higher than in almost any other wealthy country. These families have walked a path in isolation, mourning, and anger. They are carrying a grief that feels lonely, permanent, and agonizingly removed from the country’s shared journey.”
Axios published a special report with a timeline showing when COVID’s death toll surpassed the population of major American cities, like Salt Lake City on Sept. 21, 2020, and San Francisco on Jan. 25, 2022. The Washington Post’s front page story included an illustration of a flower in water with ripples emanating outward, by illustrator Hokyoung Kim.
Suzanne Firstenberg’s installation In America: Remember honored our COVID dead last year on the National Mall and it ended its run when the death toll hit more than 700,000. Online, Firstenberg updated her work, posting images combining actual photos of the installation with projections of what it would look like now, with 1 million flags. It covers 40% more ground with even more flags extending all the way to 17th St. NW and flags up around the Washington Monument.
When I visited the installation last September to remember my father who died from COVID in February 2021, Firstenberg told me the flags made grief viewable. She thought it was too soon to build a permanent memorial then, but she now believes it’s time.
“I have changed my mind,” she wrote on Instagram. “We have no place to house America’s groundswell of grief.”
Love your work, Hunter. This week’s newsletter was particularly insightful, with items I would have otherwise not known about ~ “100 Civics Lessons”, the NIKE swoosh trademark application (I had their track shoes as a kid in the 70s, and, of course, your COVID coverage 💛