Lindsee Downer

Lindsee “The Lieutenant” is a modern day polymath: a rapper, stylist, and designer using archival and auto/ethnographic research to inform her work within Black visual-sonic-material culture. She explores Hip-Hop and fugitive aesthetics as they align with both the Black Radical Tradition and what she notes as “the embodied comms impulse.” She transmutes found data into sample-based music, styled looks and garments, video & written works, systems and beyond; all as collages and commentaries of her recontextualization. Born in New Haven, CT and raised in Atlanta, GA as half-Jamaican, half-Black American, she has found her home in Brooklyn, NY. She is the founder of PLTN, a creative house and collective of studios by Black Gen Z cultural workers and designers. She maintains her practice through her own research-based studio, Operation (L); and her material design-based atelier, GUERRILLA.