A design company for Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo. Posters and tshirts from the Novo Anniversar
In March 2012, Elliott Young and Napoleon Landaeta met Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo in Havana during the lead-up to the Havana Biennial. Together they founded Novo Designs to produce and market the Novo Anniversary Collection of t-shirts and posters from Portland, Oregon. The Novo Anniversary Collection is comprised of a series of t-shirts and posters designed by Reynier Leyva Novo, and inspir
ed by contemporary ideology and Cuban political iconography. Fashion is a popular form of political choice and a means of making a public statement. The images used in the collection are designed to have multiple meanings, and therefore use difference as a means to forge unity. The Novo Anniversary Collection, a play on the hype surrounding the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, turns everyday fashion into a democratic and participatory arena. The hijacking of political propaganda for art, at the same time as the art is being hijacked for commodification, invites us to question the complex relationship between politics, art and capitalism. The fact that these commodified popular art forms were designed in the last bastion of socialism in the hemisphere (Cuba), and produced in the center of advanced industrial capitalism (USA) adds a layer of delicious irony to the polysemic collection.
