2023 Senior Exhibition Artists

Kennedy White

Art + Design: Graphic Design

About Kennedy White

Kennedy White was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and spent the first 8 or so years of his life on the Joint Base Cape Cod military base. It was very weird– imagine living in a 1970’s time bubble or some sort of snow globe. Kenn didn’t ‘discover’ art and design, he just never grew out of it. As much as he loved science and history, memorizing facts, rules and dates just wasn’t how his brain worked. Design and illustration is how he lives, breathes, and loves. He went to college to figure out how to use art to pay his bills so he could do cooler art on the side.

Statement

With the growing acceptance of queer people, queer-owned businesses have emerged making apparel for other queers. Kennedy noticed many of these brands, despite marketing themselves as ‘all inclusive’, only have feminine designs. Designs that’d give the average trans man (like Kenn) massive gender dysphoria. He decided to make his own. Kenn picked oversized, thick crewneck sweaters that’d give him a more boxy and masculine silhouette. The designs themselves went on a weird odyssey where he began what his directed study advisor called a “master’s level thesis” as Kennedy tried to discover why the ‘mainstream queer brand’ was so feminine. He researched anti-masculinity within the queer community and how butch lesbians and trans men face persecution for expressing masculinity and ‘joining the side of the oppressor’. Sketches took on an angry, political bent, fueled by screaming sludge and thrash metal. In the end, there were too many things to be angry about to condense into a few shirt designs. Kennedy gravitated back towards doodling what’d make him happy. The end result is what survived the swirling typhoon of changing goals and ideas. He’s pretty happy with it.