Announcing the recipient of the 2025 APS Publication Grant

The Association of Print Scholars is pleased to award its ninth annual Publication Grant to Brian Johnson. The grant, in the amount of $2,000, will support the production of his book, Designed to Be Red: Native American & Indigenous Graphic Works, a companion catalogue to the exhibition Designed to Be Red: Native American and Indigenous Poster Works, on view at Poster House in New York from September 24, 2026 to February 21, 2027. The catalogue will be distributed in partnership with DelMonico Books. The APS Publication Grant is funded through the Association of Print Scholars and the generosity of C.G. Boerner and Harris Schrank.

Spanning nearly two centuries and representing over forty tribes and nations, Designed to Be Red gathers together posters, prints, broadsheets, ephemera, and related materials that document a history too often overlooked or erased. Instead of focusing on imposed representations that reduce Indigenous peoples to caricatures or stereotypes, the book highlights how Native artists and designers have employed graphic media as instruments of self-determination, resilience, and celebration. Posters, prints, and broadsheets become not passive vehicles of imagery but urgent tools for organizing, teaching, resisting, and affirming identity. By tracing the stories, processes, and intentions of individual artists and collectives, Designed to Be Red foregrounds Indigenous agency in shaping the visual field and makes visible the immense contributions of Native designers whose work deserves acknowledgment alongside more widely celebrated canons of graphic design history.

Brian Johnson is a designer, curator, partner at Polymode studio, and a founder of the online learning platform BIPOC Design History. He is the curator of Designed To Be Red: Native American & Indigenous Poster Works, an exhibition and publication opening September 2026 at Poster House in New York. A 2025 Mellon Fellow at the IAIA Research Center for Contemporary Native Arts, Johnson was also awarded the 2023–2024 Hyperallergic Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators. His clients include The New York Times Magazine, MIT Press, A24, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

APS would like to thank Carey Gibbons, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of North Texas; Nikki Otten, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Milwaukee Art Museum; and Elizabeth Wyckoff, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art, for their service and commitment to the grant selection process.

Please contact grants@printscholars.org with any questions regarding this announcement.

The Association of Print Scholars is grateful to C.G. Boerner and Harris Schrank for their continued support of the organization and its mission.

To learn more about the APS Publication Grant online, click here. 

Please contact grants@printscholars.org with any questions regarding this announcement.