Gin Hammond unveils vibrant new artwork for Living IncogNegro — designed with Cornish-trained artist Cassidy Mitchell to capture identity, joy, and layers of self.
Great visual art for a performance does not just advertise the show. It tells you something true about what you are walking into. When Living IncogNegro creator Gin Hammond began developing new artwork for the show, she knew exactly what she needed it to say: that this story contains joy, that identity is not a single flat thing, and that bright colors are not just appropriate here but necessary. The result, a collaboration between Hammond and artist Cassidy Mitchell, is a poster that earns the word vibrant in every sense. The new Living IncogNegro artwork captures identity, layers, and an unmistakable seventies-inflected energy that feels both personal and immediately recognizable. It is, as Hammond puts it simply, a happy poster. And it is exactly that.
Why the Art Had to Change
The work itself has been evolving. The platform has grown. The community surrounding Living IncogNegro has expanded across podcast, video, live performance, and a digital home that draws people from across the country and around the world. The visual identity needed to catch up.
Hammond was clear about what the new art had to accomplish. It needed to signal that the show is not a heavy sit. It carries weight, yes. It asks real questions about identity, visibility, and what it means to be seen accurately by a world that often gets you wrong. But it does that work from a place of vitality, not grief. The experience of watching Living IncogNegro should feel, in significant part, good. The art needed to say that before a single word was read.
Bright colors, she decided, were not a distraction from the seriousness of the subject. They were the truth of it. Joy and complexity are not opposites. The new poster holds both.
Cassidy Mitchell and What It Means to Collaborate With Someone Who Gets It
Hammond did not choose her collaborator accidentally.
Cassidy Mitchell studied acting at Cornish College of the Arts, one of the Pacific Northwest’s most respected conservatories for the performing arts. That background mattered to Hammond in a specific and practical way: Mitchell already understood the language of performance, identity, and what it means to carry a character’s full interior life in a body that the audience is reading from the outside. She did not need the concept explained. She needed to know what Hammond wanted to feel.
That is where the creative conversation started. Mitchell asked Hammond what she wanted the art to convey, and Hammond’s answer was precise: joy, yes, and layers. The idea that a single person, a single silhouette, can contain multiple identities simultaneously, and that this multiplicity is not confusion or contradiction but richness.
From that conversation, Mitchell built the visual language of the piece. Concentric shapes radiating outward from the silhouette of Hammond’s body, suggesting the many layers of identity that live inside a single form. The design does not flatten Hammond into one readable thing. It expands her, visually, into the complexity she has been describing in words for years.
The Seventies Font That Made It Personal
Hammond is a self-described child of the seventies, and the new artwork wears that affiliation openly.
The typography she and Mitchell landed on carries the specific graphic warmth of seventies film titles, bold, rounded, slightly retro without being costume-y, the kind of lettering you might find on a 1974 movie poster in a collection that someone has been carefully preserving ever since. For Hammond, that choice is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is autobiography. The era shaped her aesthetic sensibility in ways that still surface in how she sees color, proportion, and presence.
Bringing that font into the Living IncogNegro visual identity is a small act of self-inclusion. It says that the person who made this show brought her whole self to it, including the part that was formed watching the films and absorbing the visual culture of a specific decade. The art is, in this way, another layer of identity made visible.
In upscale creative communities where design literacy is high, from the art districts of Los Angeles and Brooklyn to the gallery neighborhoods of London and Berlin, that kind of deliberate aesthetic decision reads immediately. It signals intentionality. It tells the audience that every choice was made on purpose.
FAQ: The Creative Vision Behind Living IncogNegro’s New Artwork
Q: Who designed the new Living IncogNegro artwork?
A: The new artwork was created in collaboration between Gin Hammond and Cassidy Mitchell, a visual artist and Cornish College of the Arts acting alumna. Mitchell’s background in performance gave her a natural fluency in the themes of identity and embodiment that the design needed to express.
Q: What does the visual concept of the new poster represent?
A: The design centers on a silhouette of Hammond’s body surrounded by concentric shapes radiating outward, a visual metaphor for the many layers of identity that a single person can contain simultaneously. The bright colors signal joy and vitality, while the layered forms represent the complexity at the heart of the Living IncogNegro story.
Q: Why did Gin Hammond choose a seventies-inspired font for the artwork?
A: As a child of the seventies, Hammond wanted the typography to reflect something personally true about her aesthetic formation. The era’s graphic style carries warmth, boldness, and a particular kind of confidence that aligns with the tone she wanted the new art to project. It is autobiography embedded in design.
A Happy Poster for a Show That Earns Its Joy
The detail Hammond keeps returning to when she talks about the new artwork is its happiness. Not its intelligence, not its conceptual depth, not its visual sophistication, though it has all of those things. Its happiness.
That choice of word is worth sitting with. Living IncogNegro deals in real weight. The show asks what it costs to be invisible in plain sight, to move through a world that sees you incorrectly and keeps insisting it is right. That is not a light subject. But Hammond has always known that the vessel for that subject is not darkness. It is the full spectrum of a life actually being lived, which includes color, movement, warmth, and yes, joy.
The new poster communicates all of that before the audience reads a single word about what the show is. It is doing the work that the best theatrical art always does: making a promise about what the experience inside will be.
Visit LivingIncogNegro.com to see the new artwork, explore the full project, and join the community. Follow along on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. The show, and now its art, is ready to be seen.