Carnegie Hall Migrations Festival

Visual Identity

In the Spring of 2019, Carnegie Hall presented its largest citywide festival that traced the journeys of people from different origins and backgrounds who helped to shape and influence the evolution of American arts and culture. The festival featured more than 100 events celebrating the many contributions—cultural, social, economic, and political— of the people who helped to build our American culture. The festival featured musical programming at the Hall and public programming, performances, exhibitions, and events at more than 75 leading cultural and academic institutions across New York City and beyond.

For the identity of the festival, a watercolor treatment and texture illustrations were created to evoke the organic movement of elements in nature that is also historically seen with the migration of people. The title of the festival was also roughly hand-lettered using Chronicle Display typeface as a reference, to create a more authentic feel.

The festival concerts examined the musical legacies of three migrations: the crossings from Scotland and Ireland during the 18th and 19th centuries; the immigration of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe between 1881 and the National Origins Act of 1924; and the Great Migration—the exodus of African Americans from the South to the industrialized cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1917 into the 1970s.

Handlettered title treatments were created for each of the three migrations.