Spring 2026 · Studio
Hotspot Blues Festival
- Term
- Spring 2026 · 3 credit hours
- Type
- Studio
- Site
- Peacock Tract, Montgomery, Alabama
- Scale
- Large
- Method
- Rule Based Variation, Operative Abstraction
The Laicos Club sits on Holt Street in Montgomery's Peacock Tract. It was a chitlin' circuit venue, one of the rooms where Delta blues was played for Black audiences across the segregated South, and it is the reason the festival lands here rather than on a generic downtown lawn.
The project proposes a one-day festival that brings blues artists back to that ground. The work runs from identity through site: a wordmark, a gig poster, a merchandise suite, a festival site plan with entries, vendor lanes, and crew access, and a stage designed as the thing the whole identity resolves into.
A single motif carries all of it. The peacock of the Peacock Tract supplies the three-feather wordmark, the mandala that fills the collages, and the chevron the stage roof is cut from. Nothing in the set is decoration applied afterward; each piece is the same geometry resolved at a different scale.
Above: The stage at the Laicos Club, Peacock Tract, Montgomery
Identity
The three-feather mark is built from photographic fill rather than flat color, so the wordmark carries the same texture as the collages it sits beside. The letterforms are cut to match: open counters, clipped terminals, the S turned on its side.
The stage
The roof is a chevron cut from the same feather geometry as the wordmark, carried on raking timber legs with a tensioned cable back. A lit band runs the leading edge so the mark reads after dark. Scrims either side hang archival imagery of the room this festival is named for.
Model
A hand-sized sectional model built in black and white board with painted acrylic blades, shot lit and unlit to test how the roof edge reads against a dark field.
Installed
The board and model as exhibited.
Credits and notes
Historical photographs of the Laicos Club are drawn from the Jim Peppler Southern Courier Photograph Collection, Alabama Department of Archives and History. Certain liberties were taken for the purposes of this studio project: the festival, its lineup, its date, and the press quote are proposed rather than actual.