Polychrome is a magazine whose concept is to disrupt the traditional magazine narrative by showcasing and highlighting artists of colour. Created by six friends — Micah Pegues, Celeste Scott, Kennedy Williams, Gabriela Yadegari, Brandon Douglas, and Theresa Tran — the publication is designed to shift how people of colour, particularly creative people of colour, are viewed by mainstream media and mainstream audiences.
The name means many colours, and the magazine delivers on that promise: it is vibrant, diverse, and deliberately iconoclastic, refusing to present creativity of colour as a subcategory of creativity in general. The artists featured are not tokens or representatives. They are individuals whose work stands on its own merits and whose visibility in a publication like Polychrome is not a favour but a correction — a rebalancing of a media landscape that has historically underrepresented the creative contributions of people of colour.
That six friends could build a magazine this ambitious and this necessary is proof that the most important publishing projects are often the ones that begin with a simple observation: something is missing, and we can make it.