Minneapolis-based interdisciplinary artist Essence Enwere designs a variable typeface rooted in the textures of Mississippi’s Black Delta, combining it with an artist book, archival research, original writing and a physical installation to explore African American ecomusicology and the use of type as cultural preservation.
Essence Enwere began with a question about what typography can carry. Not just information or aesthetic, but memory, resilience and resistance across time. Juke Joint Slab is the typeface that came from that question, designed around the cultural and musical histories of Mississippi’s Black Delta, where spirituals, blues and gospel grew from the specific conditions of land, sound and lived experience.
The typeface draws from the physical textures of the Delta itself: gator skin, the atmospheric interiors of juke joints, the qualities of a particular geography that shaped a particular music. Designed as a flexible system with multiple weights and a variable format, it can shift in tone while holding onto a strong sense of place and identity.
“I use type design and artist books as ways to preserve and showcase underrepresented Black American culture,” Enwere says. “Design, much like the land, shows history. The artifacts of a type style hold the memory of its use and origins through time, and for me that is a form of reclamation and cultural context.”
The typeface needed somewhere to live beyond the screen. The artist book, completed in 2024, is 8 by 8 inches, perfect bound with a soft touch finish, combining editorial design with Enwere’s own writing. Multiple prototypes and dummy books were made, testing pacing, structure and ways of telling the story, with the typeface forms developing in parallel with the historical research so that the two were always in conversation. The project expanded further into a physical installation translating the typeface into spatial form through a radio cabinet bookshelf, allowing the work to exist beyond the page entirely.
Juke Joint has been featured in the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s Artists’ Books Unshelved series and shared at the Walker Art Center, Scripps College, the University of Minnesota, the National Gallery of Art Library and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art Library, the Minnesota Historical Society and Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.
Essence Enwere is a Black and queer interdisciplinary artist living and working in Minneapolis, working across type design, artist books and printmaking to tell stories of Black history, genealogy and ecology.
Website: essenceenwere.com Instagram: @e_bylon
Juke Joint, 2024. Juke Joint Slab variable typeface, 8 × 8 inch perfect bound artist book, soft touch finish, physical installation. Photography: Kai Bobbi.
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