Creative Direction & Community Organizing

Enby is the phonetic spelling of the letters “N and B” which represent non-binary people. Enby Party is a non-binary art and music collective based out of Duwamish, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, and all Coast Salish lands (AKA Seattle), founded in 2018. Our aim is to create safe and accessible spaces for queer and trans joy, centering the contributions of QTBIPOC artists. We put on events and release music compilations on cassette tapes. Last year we produced our first zine. I am the creative director and cofounder of the collective.

Enby Party Bandcamp

Enby Party 2023 Life Cycles Festival

In Summer 2023, Enby Party and Northwest Film Forum collaborated to present a two-day festival featuring live music, film, dance, drag, performance and visual art exploring trans and non-binary identity and life cycles. The lineup showcased over 25 live performers and filmmakers, plus a virtual gallery of visual artists who were selected from an open call. Additionally, Enby Party released Volume 4 of our cassette tape compilation and our very first art and literary zine!

Event Gallery

Open Call

We cultivate the lineup for the events and media we create through an open call and encourage new artists to apply. This helps us to open the door to folks we don’t yet know, expanding our community through common-threads and breaking down social access barriers. We advertised our open call through social media and flyers around town with a QR code leading to the application.

Event Marketing & Merch Design

We use a combination of social media, traditional word-of-mouth, press, screen-printed merchandise and posters to market our events. Donated and thrifted blank T-shirts to keep costs and environmental impact low. Special thanks to Maria and Amy for screen-printing help!

Enby Party Art & Lit Zine

One of my favorite things about Enby Party is how multi-media we are. Since the organizing group has representation from artists of a multitude of mediums, we work hard to bring our corners of the trans and non-binary art community together at our events. For the 2023 event, we released our very first zine. It features 40 different artists of all ages. The cover art was done by a 10 year-old non-binary artist. Each zine pack included 5 different 8-panel booklets which each explored a different life cycle and opened up to reveal a poster inside. The art was collected via open-call. We scored, folded and assembled 50 zines by hand. The zines were also included in Short Run Comic and Arts festival last fall.

Enby Party 2022

“It’s time to dust off your cowboy hats!”

For the 2022 event I created a custom illustration, poster design, and social media promotion assets for marketing online and on the streets. I screen-printed the posters and merchandise by hand, with the help of Long Shot Print. We stapled and wheat-pasted posters all around the city to get the word out. We also released our third compilation on cassette tape and Band Camp.

Creative Direction

3 years since our last event, the creative concept behind this Enby Party was reunion. I chose to depict two friends, holding hands and racing down the road to make it to Enby Party and celebrate their community. There aren’t a lot of events that center trans/gender non-conforming people, and beyond that, non-binary people specifically. It’s exciting for folks to see this happening and I wanted to embody that sense of excitement and energy with this illustration.

For me, being non-binary is about finding the liberation to express myself as exactly who I am at any given moment. After all, gender is a journey and a spectrum; it’s transformative and varied. Non-binary people have existed for centuries and the current gender binary that oppresses us in the western world is driven by white supremacy and patriarchy. Do deny the gender binary is to deny it’s control over us and to embark on our own journey of self determination and freedom to be as we are, where we are, how we are.

Inspiration

Given the timelessness of our community, I wanted to create an illustration that looked older than our current time and play with vintage illustration styles. My primary visual inspirations for this design were Betty Boop and Mario Kart. The motorcycle that I drew is loosely inspired by a Honda Shadow, the motorcycle that Goners MC (one of the artists on the bill) rides. I added the flame text in to embody the energy and rage of our community. In reality, we are under attack in this country and a lot of us carry anger related to this. By organizing for our community, we can redirect our rage into building networks of love and protection for one another. When we congregate, relationships are fostered and resilience is built through connection to one another. These characters look happy, strong and rightfully so, a little mad. I drew this drawing overnight, watching Betty Boop on an iPhone in a vintage RV trailer in Packwood, WA at the base of Mount Rainier.

With such an expressive illustration, I chose to use very clean, international style typography, utilizing Helvetica and our Enby Party logotype. This typographic treatment is repeatable and has become part of our branding.

Screen-Printing

With the help of my friend Amy (@longshotprint) I screen-printed posters, with several different combinations of ink and paper color. Using a separate screen with a simplified design, we also made a bunch of wearables, printed on second-hand garments.

Cassettes

Enby Party released our third compilation at the event. Like each of our past compilations, this mixtape features entirely non-binary musicians from all over the place and was released on a limited number of cassette tapes and on bandcamp for free/donation.

Social Media

Beyond the poster, I created a number of graphics to advertise our event on various social media platforms. I made a separate artist announcement post for each of the musicians and art vendors on the bill, using elements from the original drawing and a similar visual style. The artist announcements were all designed in a collage style, with images sent to me by the artists. I treated each post like a magazine cover, with the photo of the artist as the focal point. By having a number of different promotion assets, we were able to stay relevant in our followers instagram feeds, keeping momentum and awareness for our event high. With a mission of taking up space, it also was an opportunity to treat each artist like the star that they are, each deserving of the spotlight. I also made a graphic to remind folks to wear masks, as well as a graphic asking for attendees to fill out a feedback form after the event.

Banner

I hand-painted a banner by projecting the drawing and tracing the projection with the help of my friends Sorana and Minna. It hung from the balcony above the merch area, full of baloons. When we took the stage to kick off the event, the banner dropped with the baloons and revealed the design

The Event

These photos were taken by Anya Kochis (@can.you.remember.this) and C Livingston (@clivingstcn). I’m proud to say that our event had over 200 attendees, all of whom tested for COVID before coming inside. We had a testing station in front of the venue, with free COVID tests and PPE which we fundraised for. After the event, we posted an anonymous feedback form for attendees and artists to fill out so that we can continue to learn how to best serve our community and make our events as accessible and fun as possible. We rewarded those who filled out the feedback form with gift cards donated by TomboyX.