Jake Wise - Botticelli

This was the last design project I worked on as a student. Botticelli is a magazine, a class, and a community of artists and writers. Botticelli, as a class, has been in effect for six years and as of 2016, they publish one magazine a year at the end of the spring semester. As a magazine, they are a curation of both student and professional artists and writers. As a community, it is a rotating staff of student writers and artists, alongside the guide ship of poet and professor Sophia Kartsonis. I had the opportunity to lead this class in the fall semester of 2019, to write the schedule, assign the homework, curate what would make up the book that the spring semester staff would publish. However, I challenged the staff of about eight students to see if we could publish Botticelli’s first-ever zine, and we did, not only that but we were able to publish two zines. Furthermore, we wanted these zines to not just be a gallery piece, but to have a point-of-view, to cover topics both relevant to our staff and community but also new audiences.

‘By Hand’ was our first zine, and as we state in the book we wanted this zine to be “A celebration of the mastery and mistakes of the human hand when creating art.” Our audience was writers and artists, and we received over 150 submissions in 3 weeks. As far as visuals go, I was designer and art director and the goal was to create a zine where the energy of the book matched the writing and the art within.

‘B*tch Track’ was our more political piece. For this we were inspired by the Bitch Tracks of the early nineties, artists like Jade Elektra and Moi Rene, who with nothing but a beat and a mic spoke the truth, no matter how vulgar, launched a movement that influences music to this day. Our pitch was for the zine to be the place (bitch) talk about the struggles, prejudice, frustration, heartbreaks, and headaches that you experience as a queer person. However, we decided as a staff that everyone is welcome to submit but we were looking specifically to showcase queer art and writing.

‘B*tch Track’ was our second zine, and with our new mission “A place to vent, moan, complain, confess, declare, criticize, protest, and whine, but ultimately and justly, f*cking b*tch–” Somehow, we broke our own record and we received over 200 submissions in 4 weeks. This time with the visuals we had the idea to use this repetitive motif, and walls of text that were actually our submitted 'bitchings' this was our way to bring the bitch track to the zine.

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