“My day is mad, hellish. In so many different ways,”  says Charlene Prempeh with a laugh when I call her ahead of the opening of , the major new exhibition at London's Design Museum she has guest curated. The remark is understandable; at the time she was mid installation, and clearly a few things demanded her attention. The show incorporates 16 designers – from sculptor Phoebe Collings-James to multidisciplinary designer Samuel Ross – more than 100 objects, and two and a half years’ worth of work to distil it all into the space in an effort to reframe how an entire cultural and creative landscape understands Black design. No pressure, then.

Prempeh, however, is not easily fazed. The writer, curator and founder of creative agency and art consultancy A Vibe Called Tech has spent much of her career interrogating the relationship between culture, creativity and identity. Her work has consistently sought to challenge the limitations of representation, not simply by demanding greater visibility for Black creatives, but by questioning the structures that have historically determined whose creativity is considered worthy of attention in the first place.

Running until August 2027, is one of the most extensive exhibitions of contemporary Black design ever staged in Britain. Bringing together fashion, furniture, architecture, sculpture and product design, it features an extraordinary breadth of work, from the radical tailoring of Bianca Saunders and the sculptural explorations of Simone Brewster to the multidisciplinary practices of Samuel Ross and Nifemi Marcus-Bello.

But to describe it simply as an exhibition celebrating Black designers would be to miss the point. Prempeh is asking a far more layered question: what does it actually mean to be a Black designer today?

The seeds were planted while she was writing her 2023 book, Now You See Me: An Introduction to 100 Years of Black Design, an exploration of the contributions Black creatives have made to design history. What began as a historical investigation quickly exposed an uncomfortable truth: Black designers had not simply been overlooked in the past – the structures responsible for that neglect had, in many respects, remained wholly intact. “When I wrote , I was really kind of delving into Black design, looking at the different movements. But also, obviously, that process made it very apparent that there was an absence of institutional support of Black design. And that had to have happened kind of historically, but it also became super apparent that it hadn’t resolved itself in the contemporary landscape.”

It was a realisation that stayed with her long after the manuscript was delivered. She began imagining what a survey of contemporary Black design might look like, and the Design Museum seemed a natural place to begin that conversation. Yet Prempeh had no interest in assembling a predictable “greatest hits” of Black creative excellence. The exhibition needed to be something that would move the conversation forward. That framework began to crystallise during a visit to the Barbican’s exhibition of the late American artist Noah Davis. There, she picked up a copy of , a text she had previously referenced in her own writing, and began revisiting the ideas that had shaped earlier cultural movements. This led her back to Trey Ellis’s influential 1989 essay , which explored an emerging generation of Black creatives who refused to be constrained by inherited ideas of identity and artistic expression.

“After re-reading that piece, I was like, ‘Okay, so really what I want this show to be is a kind of defining moment of what I think – I mean, obviously this is an opinion, right? – the Black aesthetic is .’”

The exhibition’s deliberately unconventional spelling of Nue signals a new chapter in that conversation, one in which nuance, individuality and multiplicity of Blackness takes precedence over the familiar shorthand through which Black creativity has so often been interpreted. For decades, Black design has often been expected to announce its Blackness in ways that are immediately recognisable to audiences unfamiliar with the cultures from which it emerges. African wax prints. Certain colours. Certain motifs. A particular idea of what African or Caribbean identity is supposed to look like. The result is that the vast complexity of the Black cultural experience is reduced to a handful of (over-) familiar and hackneyed references.

Prempeh has had enough of that.

“On some slightly more far away level, I want this to be the beginning of no more wax print being the sole visual reference for Africans,” she says. She laughs, but the frustration is real. This is not, of course, an argument against wax print or any other established cultural expression. Instead it is a rejection of the expectation that Black creativity be represented by a single aesthetic vocabulary. “You won’t see that in the show,” she says emphatically.

Rather than organising the designers by discipline or geography, Prempeh has constructed a narrative around three interconnected ideas: identity as a source of inspiration, design as a means of building community, and the impulse to challenge established systems. The exhibition unfolds across six sections, encompassing those themes, their historical foundations, a specially commissioned film and a spectacular finale. There is a suit designed by Bianca Saunders and worn by Usher to the 2023 Met Gala, its tailoring challenging conventional ideas of masculinity. There is furniture made from synthetic hair by Taiba Akhuetie, whose work transforms a texture often subjected to – at least for those with textured hair – negativity, scrutiny and control into something celebratory. Elsewhere, the Arsenal away kit created by Foday Dumbuya’s LABRUM in collaboration with Adidas draws on Pan-African colours, transforming football clothing into an expression of diasporic belonging. And architect Giles Tettey Nartey reimagines the West African balafon, confronting a design canon that has too often treated traditional African objects as historical artefacts rather than part of a living, evolving creative culture.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Prempeh says, “like you can make a chair that’s just a chair, and that’s cool. And lots of these designers do that, right? But the moments I find most exciting, the moments that are in the show, are about when they bring their stories. That kind of tradition of storytelling is so embedded in Blackness, so of course it’s going to end up in the objects that they create.”

Prempeh is well aware that there will be conversations (contentions perhaps?) around which omitted designers deserved a spot in the show; however her selection process was simple – and personal. “Essentially this is lens of what I think the Black aesthetic is today, to my mind. And someone else who was doing the show might have a different perspective on what it is.”

There is, of course, a larger political and cultural conversation underpinning all of this. The exhibition arrives at a moment when discussions around race, identity and representation have become increasingly contested. The institutional enthusiasm for diversity that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020 has, arguably, waned. What once seemed like an overdue reckoning now risks being dismissed as an exhausted conversation. And Prempeh is acutely aware of the implications.

“We are living in a particular moment where there is this sense of an erasure of Blackness. People are trying to tell you that it’s not valid anymore to think about your experience through a Black lens. And I want this to be a reminder that it very much is valid, and it’s possible, and it’s necessary. And in moments of cultural turmoil, the idea of what the Black aesthetic is tends to be reassessed. I want this to be one of those moments.” When I ask whether the current cultural climate makes it harder for Black creatives to express themselves without compromise, she is careful not to speak on behalf of the designers in her exhibition, however she is unequivocal about the role of money and power. “A lot of (having a sense of freedom) depends on your economic situation and how deep into your career and how established you are. There is much more need to play the game when the game is how you survive your day-to-day life. But when you have much more agency and power, you can do whatever the fuck you want. There are some designers and artists and creatives who are Black and at that level. And you see how they move through the world. And it’s wonderful.”