Mami Wata (meaning “mama water” in West African pidgin English) is a guardian water spirit, venerated throughout Africa. Legend has it that those she takes as her lovers return to land more beautiful and successful than before—a fitting lore for the surf apparel brand that is not only named after the spirit, but whose garments, embodying African traditions and cultures, crowned the surf label as …
Decolonizing Chinese Typography With New Font “Ku Mincho Hong Kong native Julius Hui is on a mission to build a new typeface that traces the lineage of the Chinese language, a font he calls Ku Mincho. In China, typography has a sordid history of colonialism and political standardization—first, calligraphy styles were dictated by the whims of emperors, then by Japanese imperialism, and then by the …
Wildly influential though mostly unknown, A.R. Gurrey Jr was born in Kansas in 1874. By 1900, as a trained civil engineer, he relocated to Hawaii. There, he surfed, declined a role within his father’s insurance business, and began working to open and operate an art gallery. In 1914, he published at least one edition of The Surf Riders of Hawaii—a hand-assembled book comprising mounted gelatin-silver …
