DOTUN BELLO
artist, CREATIVE DIRECTOR, COPYWRITER
“For Black History Month in 2020, I wanted to share a special sentiment with the African American community. I was desperate to speak on this divide between Africans and African Americans. It was driving me crazy that people could deny other Black people their heritage simply because they were not born on the African continent. I made descendants of gods as a way to push the notion that our culture lives within us and can never be taken away. The pairing of Sango and Martin Luther King Jr. came up first and seemed so natural that I started to look at other gods and the African American heroes that could be matched to them. It was a bit eerie to see the pairings come together so easily. The rest was about figuring out the execution strategy: we made posters that would drive to a website where the entire collection lived and brought the project home by making an AR filter so people could see which god lived within them. [The title of this piece is “Rosa Parks.”]”
