SLUG Global Partners With Emerging Artists To Elevate Black And Brown Voices
The team at SLUG Global is made up of artists and creatives who use their specialties to help clients market their brand.
Slug Global
BOSCO, Atlanta-based R&B musician and visual artist, redefines the term “agency” when it comes to her company, SLUG Global. The business was developed in 2016 to elevate Black and brown voices in the art world. The team itself is composed of artists of color, who lend their perspectives in helping to market the important stories that set their participating artists apart. BOSCO joined “City Lights” producer Summer Evans along with co-founder Chibu Okere and content manager Kylah Benes-Trapp to talk about their agency and why it was created.
“SLUG Global was inspired by the need of community, and to feel seen in spaces that were not necessarily representing the type of work, the type of voice, and the people that I was connected to,” said BOSCO. “This was during a time where exclusivity wasn’t a trending topic or wasn’t a catchphrase. I was in Atlanta during the time, and I just kind of put out a ‘bat signal.’ I was like, I know it’s other, quirky, weird, left-of-center Black artists, of multiple and various mediums… I just wanted to be around that energy, because I wasn’t celebrated in certain spaces.”
After leaving art school and struggling to find design jobs, BOSCO met her eventual future co-founding partner Okere, who shared her vision of seeing art spaces open up to more people who looked like them. “To be honest, when I met BOSCO, I was like, ‘I just want an art job,’” said Okere. “I want to just draw for a living… Nobody was looking for me. I got nothing. And so I wanted to just create my own job.”
“I feel like Black and brown artists are poached for their ideas, but not given the opportunity to elevate, or scale financially,” said BOSCO.
Okere spoke to the origin of the name they chose for their collaboration. “‘Slug’ is grimy,” said Okere. “In essence… it automatically hit home, on the kind of retro, the vintage tip of, ‘slug’ just being something gross, but low-key kind of cute.” He added, “You lift up a rock and you see a slug, you know? That’s like an underground scene.”
“It also gives homage to the South, where people pull inspiration and music and culture from the South, but it’s always deemed, or being seen, as ‘slower than,’ or the ‘lesser paced city,’” said BOSCO. “I wanted to show, a slug is known to be slow, but we rise to the top. We’re ahead of the culture, we’re ahead of the curve.”
A case in point, SLUG Global managed to elude many of the commonly-felt pains of the COVID pandemic, with so many businesses having to restructure and re-invent. Their operations, though bolstered by a strong on-the-ground presence in Atlanta, had already focused primarily on digital content. “When the pandemic hit, everyone was in a panic, it was crazy. But honestly, we were looking at what we were doing, and we were like, ‘Well sheesh, we’re already there,” said Okere. Benes-Trapp added, “If anything, I think it made our communication tighter… We were just more in touch, and that’s when we created SLUG TV, because of the pandemic.”
She was referring to the new animated comedy series the company started releasing on IGTV, Instagram’s long-form content format. “We took the stuff that was going on in the news at the time, like being in the pandemic, and we put our own spin on it. A mini-news segment… It’s all really fun, and kind of based in an alternate reality, which is the world of SLUG that we created for ourselves,” said Benes-Trapp.
Intent on bringing Black, female, minority, and other creative minds into the spotlight, SLUG’s brain trust assures that their whimsical world doesn’t need to be a rare phenomenon. “Innately, as a collective, we just know that diverse programming is as simple as putting artists of various backgrounds in charge of the curation, and then boom, there’s the programming,” said Benes-Trapp. “It’s not that hard.”
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