Carmelle Kendall

Carmelle Kendall is a true Atlanta business success story! Not only is she a talented creative director and the co-founder of popular paper goods company Neighborly, but now there’s another title she can add to her list of accolades — children’s book illustrator for “Your Freedom, Your Power: A Kid’s Guide to the First Amendment”!

We talked about how she got involved with the book, and she spoke about getting her start in the advertising industry in NYC, and later in Atlanta with rebranding the well-known hamburger chain Krystal. She also shared how she pivoted her creative interests into her current business, and she gave some great advice for others who are looking to do the same.

Carmelle’s story is one of ambition, determination, and the triumphs of pursuing your passions!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Carmelle Kendall:

So I’m Carmelle Kendall. I am a creative director, designer, founder of Neighborly Paper, and illustrator for a children’s book called “Your Freedom, Your Power.”

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I saw the book as I was doing my research, came out with Penguin Random House on July 25, and I’ll make sure that we put a link to that in the show notes. I’m curious, are you spending the summer doing a book tour or doing anything with publicizing the book?

Carmelle Kendall:

I’m not doing a book tour, but I have spoken with the authors, and we kind of have our rollout plans on how we plan on getting the word out there. I’m super excited about it. This is my first children’s book ever, so this was a goal of mine for, like, a long term goal. So I was very surprised when they hit me up to do this project. But I’m super excited about it and just trying to get the word out there any way that I can, because this is a book that is very much needed right now with the current climate in the United States.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. How did you get involved with it? Did the author reach out to you directly?

Carmelle Kendall:

Actually, the art director at Random House hit me up, saw my work just on the Internet and on Instagram and kind of traced it back to me, hit me up and just know there’s a new book coming out called “Your Freedom, Your Power” and wanted to know if I was interested in learning more about the project. And of course, you know, I said yes. I was over the moon elated about it. And then she, you know, just went into detail about what the book was going to be about. She showed me who the authors were. Allison Matulli is a lawyer, and then Clelia Castro-Malaspina, I believe is how you say her last name, is a writer. And they kind of paired up to write this book. And it’s really about…it’s a middle school level book, and it’s about how to protest, how to write a letter to your representative, how to write a petition, just everything on how to get your voice out there. I think it’s a super important book that middle schoolers, you know, adults need. LLike everybody needs [it], but it’s super fun. It’s in a way that’s just, you know, really straightforward and plain for the younger audience. It also talks about previous historic cases throughout the United States history that kind of changed the course of America and learning from those cases and how to implement all of that into today’s society. So it’s really important.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I love the idea of a sort of kid / I guess teenager focused book about civics. Cause I mean…I don’t have children. But like, I don’t know if they teach civics in school anymore. That sort of stuff you mentioned with the book, I learned it in civics in seventh grade, but I don’t know if that’s such the case now, especially over the past I would say maybe ten to fifteen years. And we definitely have seen in the news, you know, protests and things where people are really exercising their civic rights. It’s not really taught as to how you go about doing it, because I think it really crops up around elections because we’re like, oh, write your congressperson this, that or the other.

Carmelle Kendall:

Right.

Maurice Cherry:

But how do you start that? How do you even make that happen?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. And you can do it on such a small level, you know what I mean? It doesn’t even have to be around presidential elections, but it’s literally just about anything that you want to change. You have the power to do it. You have the voice to do it. And here are the tools to help you. Yeah. Even I learned a lot from reading the book and illustrating the images. I was just like, “wow, this is such a needed book right now.”

Maurice Cherry:

Very cool. We’ve actually had…man, I think we’ve had a few children’s illustrators on the show fairly recently. I know we had Alleanna Harris. We had Akeem Roberts. We’ve had a couple of folks on the show recently that have done like children’s books, illustrations — kid lit, as they called it. Is that sort of a dream of yours to do more books like that?

Carmelle Kendall:

It is. I have so many ideas. I have so many ideas for children’s books that I want to do. So I’m hoping that this kick starts just a new line of employment for me because I had a lot of fun doing it. It was a lot of work. I will say this book, it took over a year and a half, I believe total, to do it. The deadline got pushed back a few times. The manuscript changed a few times. So very much a labor of love, for sure. But I love doing it. And I have so many ideas for other children’s books, so I’m hoping to get started on those now so that I can keep the momentum going and keep this ball rolling. But yeah, I loved it. I definitely want to continue. For sure.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. Do you have representation yet?

Carmelle Kendall:

I don’t. So I am debating on…I’ve had people reach out to me for representation, but I have another illustrator friend and she was like, “don’t do it.”

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, why is that?

Carmelle Kendall:

From her experience. She said that she had a representator or representative for her illustrations and that it didn’t work out because she felt like they weren’t really pushing her work out there and that they were pretty much just tacking on their percentage for a lot of the work that was coming in. Not from them. Like just people coming in organically to her and then having her representative take a percentage off without really finding the work for her. And so she got into some royalties, like children’s books that have royalties, and now her representative gets a percentage for life.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, wow.

Carmelle Kendall:

She said, so from her experience, she said that she had a representative for her illustrations and that if it didn’t work out because she felt like they weren’t really like pushing her work out there. And that they were just pretty much tacking on their percentage for a lot of the work that was coming in not from them. Like, just people coming in organizally to her and then having her representative take a percentage off without really finding the work for her. And so she got into some royalties like children’s books that have royalties and now her representative gets a percentage for life.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh wow.

Carmelle Kendall:

And they didn’t come to her through the representative, and so she was just telling me, you know, it’s not worth it and you know, just kind of do it on your own. So I don’t know, I’m a little on the fence about that.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. Yeah. I can understand then why you’d want to kind of give that some more thought. I know some of the folks that I mentioned that we’ve had on the show, they are represented. I think one of them in particular is represented by, like I think it’s either a Black agency or it’s one that is geared towards Black work, or Black or BIPOC work.

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, interesting.

Maurice Cherry:

I don’t know. I feel kind of like for illustrators, maybe it just makes sense because you don’t have to do that legwork define work. They kind of just come to you. But then if it’s a situation like you mentioned with your friend, that sucks because they’re getting a cut of money for not even really doing the work.

Carmelle Kendall:

So the one that I talked to, I asked that question, I was kind of like, “okay, so if somebody comes to me without you, like, if they see me on Instagram or whatever and hits me up, then do you get that percentage?” And she said, “yes, that’s the way her contracts work.” And so it made me hesitant. So I said no at that time because I was like, “well, let me do some more research because I don’t know about this.”

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, no, that’s fair. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So aside from the book, what else do you have planned for the summer?

Carmelle Kendall:

So, aside from the book, I’m working a lot on Neighborly Paper, which is my paper company, rolling out new products all through the summer and hoping to get into some more stores come fall so that everybody will be able to purchase Neighborly from a store near them.

Maurice Cherry:

I will make sure to link to the segment that I saw you on where you were featured on the TODAY show. That’s big. Talking about Neighborly. I think at the time, it was like, in 2020. Is that, right?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yes, February 2020.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, during Black History Month. I think it mentioned you were in, I think, twenty stores at the time.

Carmelle Kendall:

Was it only twenty? Oh, my gosh.

Maurice Cherry:

Look at you. “Only twenty. Was it only twenty?”

Carmelle Kendall:

Wow. I don’t even remember the number at that point, but wow! Yeah, it might have been twenty at that point, but we’ve definitely grown a lot since being on the TODAY Show, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, let’s talk about Neighborly. Let’s get into that. How did you sort of come up with the idea to start that?

Carmelle Kendall:

So it was actually my business partner’s idea. So at that point, we started it in 2016 in New York City. We were both living there in Harlem, and my business partner is actually a childhood friend of mine. We grew up as neighbors in Fayetteville, Georgia. We grew up as neighbors. We ended up living in Harlem together as neighbors again. And so she’s a writer, and she had the idea of coming up with a greeting card line at that time and asked me was I interested in doing some illustrations for the line. And so I said, well, let me see first what the lines are and what I can bring with the illustrations. I didn’t say yes immediately because I wanted to just make sure I could actually do this. And she sent me the lines. They were hilarious. I thought it was great, super cute. I spent the weekend just kind of drawing some images to the design, I mean, to the lines. She ended up loving it. And then she said, “well, I think we should call it Neighborly, since we grew up as neighbors and we’re neighbors again.” And I loved that idea, designed the logo and everything.

Initially, we started out our line with holiday starting in 2016. So we had Christmas. We ended up doing some little, at this point it was like October, sSo we did little Halloween postcards that we gave out as freebies so that people could just get our website out there. But yeah, we started out with eight cards for holiday. We completely sold out of those cards. We had a total of 800. We did like 100 each. Completely sold out of those cards. Unexpectedly, we were like, wow, people really love this. And then people were like, “when are the Valentine’s cards coming out? When are you going to have birthday cards?” Initially, I was like, wow. I thought it would just be like a little hobby. Like, I would draw a new card every few months, but now people are like, when are the next cards coming out? Yeah. Then we were like, okay, this is a viable business right now. We actually need to come out with more inventory. So that’s how it started.

Maurice Cherry:

I love the name Neighborly. I love that whole sort of concept of it coming from the fact that you and your business partner were neighbors. That’s really cute.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, so and now we’re actually both back in Atlanta. Neighbors again.

Maurice Cherry:

Look at that. Yeah, neighbors and business partners — that’s dope. So right now you’re working at an agency now, but before that work, you were at Dagger as an associate creative director and a senior art director. Tell me about that.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. So started at Dagger in 2020 as a senior art director, worked on Krystal, which is a fast food restaurant in the southeast; worked on Buffalo Wild Wings; and then got promoted to ACD, which is associate creative director, where I worked on Aflac and a brand called Rent. But, yeah, it was fun. Dagger was great. I learned so much. We did a huge rebranding for Krystal at that time, which was amazing. I got to lead that, which leading a rebrand of that size was just amazing. I loved it. That’s one of my favorite projects to date just because the client gave us so much freedom. We pretty much changed everything except for the logo, which is like a dream. Not a lot of brands let you do that; let you change the colors and let you explore typography and things like that. So, so much fun. I loved it.

Maurice Cherry:

There’s a couple of things I sort of know about Dagger. I’ve heard of it here as a local agency. One of the projects, I think it’s either from Dagger or maybe Dagger acquired it, I’m not 100% sure. But ButterATL…is it part of Dagger? Is it like just a project that they do? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yes. It started out as a part of Dagger, and then now they’ve kind of branched out, and Dagger, I think, is just known as, like, an investor at this point, but now it’s its own entity.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. Yeah. I know about Brandon Butler. Brandon’s been on the show before. He was actually one of the very first people I had on the show way back in 2013. He was working at Edelman at the time, but I had heard of him because…I don’t know if people know that Brandon Butler is kind of something of like an Atlanta like wunderkind. He had a website store in North DeKalb Mall. I want to say it was North DeKalb Mall, where you could literally go into a store in the mall and buy a website. This was well before I think he did Butter, but I remember hearing about Butter, and I know that Brandon was at Dagger, so I wasn’t sure sort of what that relationship was.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. Mmhmm. Yeah, Dagger, I guess, helped start it. It started at Dagger, but now it’s definitely its own.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, nice. I’m wondering, like…it probably was really cool to work on with Krystal kind of being such a…it’s not an Atlanta, I mean, I guess you could say it’s a known Atlanta brand. It’s founded in Tennessee, but it’s headquartered now here in Atlanta. I bet that was something kind of working on such a well-known Atlanta/Southern brand.

Carmelle Kendall:

When I was interviewing and they said that Krystal wanted to do a rebrand — and they never really done a rebrand, like, ever in history — that is what made me want to take the job, because what brands have been around that have just never done a rebrand and are just kind of like, we want you to lead this project. It’s like, wow, that was a dream come true and something that doesn’t happen very often. And so I definitely took the job for that project because I just was really excited to do a rebrand of that scale.

Maurice Cherry:

Let’s dive a little bit into that project because you said it was such a grand redesign like that. What did that entail? Like, what did the team look like? How did that process even go?

Carmelle Kendall:

The team was so small, it literally was me and another designer. We ended up getting some freelance help because it just was massive. But it didn’t happen all at once. It happened over the course of, like, a year, I would say. So, yeah. It wasn’t crazy where we did it in, like, a month or so. We really did take our time with it. But, yeah, like I said, the only rule was don’t change the logo. So everything else was pretty much sky’s the limit. So they knew they wanted something more modern, more fresh, just more current. I just feel like everything was kind of looking a little outdated just because they hadn’t had a rebrand in forever. So we updated the colors. We made it more just popping. Like, we wanted everything to pop. Redid product photography for all of the menu items, which was one of my favorite parts. We wanted the food to look more realistic, you know. We wanted sauce dripping down, some of the ingredients might have fallen onto the plate, things like that. We thought of every little detail that you could think of. Typography, colors, design elements. We did some illustrations for it. We had all new photography, all new models, just everything from start to finish. We did everything.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. And like you said, it took over, like, a year to sort of pull it all together.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, when you started out at Dagger, you were an art director, right? And then when you left, you were an associate creative director. Tell me kind of, I guess, one — and I know this because I hear this either from a lot of freelancers or just from a lot of people — they kind of use art director and creative director rather interchangeably. Like, to you, what is the difference between the two, and how did you shift from becoming an art director to a creative director?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, I see people using them interchangeably as well, and I definitely don’t think they should be using them interchangeably. For me, art director, you’re way more in the weeds of the work. You’re working under the creative director. So for me, the creative director is more so leading the charge. But the art director is kind of implementing what the creative director sets in motion is kind of how I see it. So when I first started at Dagger as a senior art director, I definitely was more in the weeds. And then when I left as associate creative director, I was more so overseeing, like, you’re managing the teams, you’re managing the day to day of the teams. You’re more so delegating the work. You’re making sure everything is cohesive, of course, and everything kind of fits together. But as art director, you’re definitely doing the day to day, whereas creative director, you’re leading the way.

Maurice Cherry:

I got you. That makes sense. Now that you kind of put it that way, it does seem like something you would sort of organically level up to, because if you’re in the weeds, then of course you’re able to be an effective creative director because you know what it’s like to be at that level where you’re kind of hands on with the work in that way.

Carmelle Kendall:

And you definitely, as a creative director, need to understand what it takes to make the vision come alive. And I feel like understanding what it takes, you have to be as the art director, you have to be as the designer so you can understand, okay, this is going to take this amount of time. This may not be possible, but this is…you kind of need to know those things, and the only way to know those things is to be in the weeds of the work.

Maurice Cherry:

That makes sense. I got you. Now I kind of want to shift gears here a little bit. Of course, we’ve talked a good bit about your work, but I’m curious to kind of know more about your journey leading up to all of this. Now, you are one of the rare Atlanta natives I think I’ve had on this show, which is great, over ten years. Tell me about growing up here.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. So initially, my family is from the southwest of Atlanta. Like, our first house was on Cascade Road.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Carmelle Kendall:

And then ended up moving to Fayetteville when I was little, and that’s mainly where I grew up. I went to private school. I went to Woodward Academy for a long time before transferring, going to public school and high school, where I transferred to Sandy Creek. So that’s where I graduated from, which is a Fayette County School, and then moved away, where I went to Howard for undergrad.

Maurice Cherry:

How was Howard?

Carmelle Kendall:

Howard was amazing. I mean, best four years of my life. I’m pretty sure that’s what all the Howard grads say from at least the ones I know. But, yeah, Howard was amazing. I mean, I highly suggest everybody go there.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, when you went there, you were studying marketing. Did you kind of already have that in mind when you went? Like when you graduated high school, you knew you wanted to get into marketing?

Carmelle Kendall:

No, absolutely not. I didn’t know what I wanted. I honestly didn’t think about it. I wasn’t the type of person to like…I don’t know. When I was growing up, my goal in life, I wanted to be a background dancer. I didn’t take school and stuff that seriously. And so when I graduated from high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to be at all. I just wanted to go out and party and have a good time. So I just picked it randomly because I just was like, “oh, business, that sounds cool. Let’s do it.”

Maurice Cherry:

I’m laughing not at the choice, but I’m laughing at the fact that there’s so much pressure, I think, especially when you’re in high school and about to graduate on, like, you need to pick the one thing that you’re going to do for the rest of your life. There’s a lot of pressure to have that forward thinking in mind. I 100% get what you’re saying. When I graduated, I wanted to do something with web design, actually, but at the time, it wasn’t, like, in the curriculum. I graduated in 1999, and so the web was still kind of becoming a thing. The Internet was still becoming a thing. And when you went to school, the closest thing that there was was, like, computer science or computer engineering. There wasn’t any sort of, like, UX or anything. I don’t think those terms, at least not in the general knowledge of design, really existed back then. And I took my first semester. It was all this programming stuff. Didn’t like it at all. I was like, “I don’t like this.” Went to my advisor, told him I wanted to do websites and build stuff for the Internet, and he was like, “the Internet’s a fad. You’re not going to stick around if this is what you want to do. You should change your major.” And so I changed my major to Math. And I mean, this is partially true, but it’s also what I tell people. I just changed my major to Math because I liked Math. I didn’t have any sort of idea of, like, I’m going to be a mathematician. I’m going to be a Math teacher. I had no clue what to do with a Math degree. I just liked Math. But also when I did the math on my credits that I had so far, like, stuff I had transferred from high school, I was like, “wait a minute. I could graduate a semester early if I switch over to Math, and I could still stay at my scholarship program.” So that’s what I did.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, that’s important.

Maurice Cherry:

Because later, as a working designer, I always get people that are just baffled that I have a Math degree. Like, why? I just…I like Math. I didn’t really have any career plans. Also because the scholarship program that I was in was set up where you did two internships at NASA facilities.

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh!

Maurice Cherry:

And so the goal was, like, you do those two internships, and then when you graduate, you have a job at NASA. And I was like, “well, I don’t have to really think about what I have to do. All I have to do is just graduate college, and I got a job waiting for me.”

Carmelle Kendall:

Right.

Maurice Cherry:

But 9/11 happened when I was in my junior year, and they changed stuff with the program where the seniors that were graduating in 2002 would still get to go to their NASA assignment or whatever, but not the ones after that. And so I was working at the High Museum at the time, selling tickets at the High. That was the job I had when I graduated because I had nothing lined up at all. I had no sort of career plans even coming out of college because I thought, like, “oh, I’m set.” So I get it. I completely understand not having an idea of what you really want to do. I sort of fell into design because I had it as a hobby. I was still doing it on the side, and then now it’s what I do. But I had no plan at all. I was just like rolling with the punches.

Carmelle Kendall:

But I mean, it’s absurd to ask somebody that’s 18 years old what is their plan? You know what I mean? Like, you’re 18. If you think about it, in high school, you’re not exploring all these different career paths. You’re taking geometry and English. I don’t know. I just feel like to have your whole career planned out as a freshman in college is wild. That’s bonkers to me.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Carmelle Kendall:

I think everybody should kind of start out undecided, or I think maybe college, your first year, everybody takes classes in all kinds of different things so that sophomore year, maybe you can have some inkling of what you want to do. But freshman year, that’s crazy. So I didn’t know. Basically, I just chose it randomly. I was like, yeah, businesswoman. I can be a businesswoman. Sure.

Maurice Cherry:

Or do, like, a gap year or something. Just something to kind of give yourself at that time frame, like, more of an idea of what it is that you want to do. Because also, look, as a freshman, I was out partying, too.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

The clubs used to send buses to campus to pick us up and take us to the club and then bring us back to campus. I told this story on the show before I almost flunked out freshman year because I was partying, almost lost my scholarship. I had to pull it together. I really did.

Carmelle Kendall:

I mean…but you’re living life. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, absolutely.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. So that’s what I picked just at random. I mean, Howard was amazing, though. I wouldn’t change that for the world. But yes, if I could go back now, I would do graphic design or be an art major or something that pertains to what I do now. But at the time, it was random.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. I mean, hindsight is 20/20, right? You can always kind of look back and know, “yeah, this is what I should do, because it will make sense for what I’m doing now.” So I get that.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

So when you graduated, what kind of work were you doing right after you graduated?

Carmelle Kendall:

So, right after I graduated, I had an internship because I knew that I hated marketing, and I knew I didn’t want to do anything in marketing. And at that time, a friend of mine worked at a fashion PR place in L.A. And so she said, you know, “I don’t know what your plans are after graduation, but you can come intern with us if you want.” And at that point, I had no other plans. That was the only thing on the table. So I said, “yes, I will do that.” So I lived in L.A. for, like, nine months, I believe, and I interned there. And during that time, I was kind of like, “okay, I don’t know what I’m working towards. Do I want to do fashion? What am I doing?” Basically, I started realizing that I really like graphic design. I really like art direction. I want to see what this path has to offer. And I remember senior year before graduation, I remember I set up a meeting with my career advisor, and I said, “who are the people that make ads?” And she said, “that’s called an art director.” And I remember going home and googling how to be an art director and came up with these schools where you could get a degree in art direction. And so while I was interning in L.A., I just was applying to all of these art direction programs and ended up getting into SCAD. Or no, I ended up getting into Miami Ad [School] and those ad school type places. But it’s just like a certificate of completion. Like, it’s not a degree in any way.

Maurice Cherry:

Right.

Carmelle Kendall:

And so I realized I wanted to go to SCAD because I could get a degree. And so I applied to SCAD for their grad program, and I ended up not getting in because I didn’t have an advertising portfolio which is needed for the grad program. I ended up moving back to Atlanta and taking classes at SCAD. Not in the grad program, but just as a regular student. And I took, like, Photoshop, Illustrator, I learned all the programs and then got my professors to write me letters of recommendation for the grad program and then ended up reapplying and getting in the second time.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. I think that’s really something that you still kind of had this vision, but you just sort of found different ways to kind of get to it. I mean, one, taking these courses and getting these certificates, at least you got your feet wet with what it would entail without sort of fully getting in first. But also you use that to help build your portfolio, then you can apply and get into SCAD. Yeah, I like that approach.

Carmelle Kendall:

And all of the people in my program, they had had art direction as their majors, as undergrads. They all had been working towards this grad program for years, whereas I had just heard about it my senior year right before graduation on what an art director even was. So I was very much behind everybody. Like, I was just now learning Photoshop, whereas these people knew Photoshop all through college and were designers and things like that. So I definitely felt behind. I will say. But yeah, I mean, my goal was to get into this program and kind of just hunkered down and just learned what I needed to learn and reapplied.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, aside from the curriculum focus, like, how was SCAD different from Howard?

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, it’s different in every way possible, I think. I remember my very first day at SCAD, I walked into the cafeteria, and there was, like, a classic pianist playing classical music on the piano, and I was just like, “oh, my God, where am I?” Because at Howard, you’re like, twerking while you’re eating the lunch with a DJ. You know what I mean? Like, it’s a party, and I go to SCAD, and it was like a person playing classical music on the piano, and everybody kind of eating in silence, and I was just like, “what did I do?” It was very different, very different. And also, I think art school is just way more competitive. Art is so subjective, and so it’s just a way more competitive environment, I think, than Howard was.

Maurice Cherry:

Aside from, I guess that competitivenes, did you find community there? Did you sort of make friends there? Because one thing I’ve heard from folks that are on the show that will go know, like a SCAD or a MICA or something like that, is that it can be a bit difficult sometimes to kind of find community.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, I can see that for sure. Because it’s so competitive. Like, your classmates are not your friends. You know what I mean? You’re going against them a lot of times at SCAD; you do group projects because I don’t know, you just do a lot of group projects. At least in my major, we did a lot of group projects. And it was so competitive because after graduation, you don’t want the same portfolio as your classmates because you’re all applying to the same jobs, right? So you want to stand out. So I think in that sense of it, I don’t know, you’re just not as friendly, you’re not as welcoming, because you want to distance yourself from your classmates so that you stand out come graduation time. So I can understand how people say it’s hard to make friends. I did make one of my best friends at SCAD, and I think I had a handful of friends that are still really close to me that I see all the time. So for me that wasn’t the case, but I definitely can see how people feel that way. For sure.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Now did you go to SCAD here in Atlanta or the one in Savannah?

Carmelle Kendall:

I went to the Atlanta campus.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay, all right, well, you’re right there in Midtown then, and you’re from the city, so I think that probably was a big advantage, at least socially, because you didn’t have to stay in that bubble of SCAD. Like, you could go see your parents or whatever. You could break out of that and still be in a city that you’re familiar with.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, but if I was to do it again, I’d go to Savannah, though.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, really? Why is that?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. Because I would have loved to just live in a new city, a different city than one that I was already so familiar with. Like, when I go to visit Savannah, I always think, like, why didn’t I come? Like, it’s such a cool city. If I could do it again, I definitely would go to Savannah rather than Atlanta.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. Now, with Neighborly that you mentioned earlier, did you start Neighborly while you were at SCAD or was it before then?

Carmelle Kendall:

No, I started Neighborly in New York when I lived in New York. So right after SCAD’s graduation, I got hired in New York.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, nice. Yeah, I know. As I did my research, of course. I see that you’ve worked for quite a few agencies. You did four years at Y&R, which is now as VMLY&R. You did a year at The Integer Group. You did a little over a year at Havas. You were at…when you were in New York, you were at Havas, right?

Carmelle Kendall:

When I was in New York, I was at VMLY&R.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. VMLY&R. When you look back at those experiences collectively, how do you think they really help prepare you for the kind of work that you do now?

Carmelle Kendall:

I think starting out as a junior art director in New York probably was the most enlightening experience as far as learnings. New York has a different work ethic, in my opinion. Like, starting out my career in New York, I was working till 10:00 p.m. every night, and this was pre-COVID, so there’s no remote working. There’s no “I’m going to take this call from home.” You know what I mean? You’re in the office until ten [or] eleven o’clock at night. I remember there was one time, and this is with hard drives and things like that, so I remember there was one time I had to physically go take a hard drive to one of my boss’s apartment at like two in the morning.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Carmelle Kendall:

Because they needed this hard drive for a client presentation the next day. It was grueling. You just learn so much. You learn how to talk to clients. It was my first time going on set. It was my first time traveling. Like, I traveled to Uruguay for shooting and things like that. It was like a crash course in advertising, pretty much.

Maurice Cherry:

You mentioned the hard drive at 2:00 a.m. That, for some reason, that reminded me of The Devil Wears Prada where Andy has to take the magazine to Miranda’s apartment, and she’s like, “put it on the desk. Don’t talk to anyone, just put it on the desk.”

Carmelle Kendall:

Yes. And as a junior art director, I mean, you’re the one that’s going to have to do it you know? Who else is going to do it? Not a senior person. That was the life for four years in New York. It was grueling, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:

What brought you back down to Atlanta? Just wanted to break out of that.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. I mean, I was kind of at the point, you know, I love New York. Let me just say that I love New York, but it’s expensive. I was at the point where I was, you know, I’m tired of being broke, I’m tired of not being able to save any money. I’m tired of working to death, basically, like, just working into the night and things like that. And so to the point where I was just like, “you know what, I want to come back to Atlanta.” I put in my notice and I came back to Atlanta, where I freelanced for about a year before moving to Chicago. That year ended up being great. I got to be with my family, be with my friends. But freelance, you have your own struggles with freelance. But at the time, to me, it was better. It was what I needed to do. I needed to just…yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

And I’d say good on you for recognizing that, because I think sometimes, especially when you’re really locked into a particular job or a particular pattern, a lot of the popular advice — I guess you could say it’s popular advice — but a lot of the stuff you’ll hear is that you have to sort of stick with it. You got to pay your dues, et cetera. But if it’s really weighing on you and it’s really affecting your day to day, it takes a lot to break out of that.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. I also think now is just a totally different climate than back then. Now I think just a lot of things have slowed down since COVID and now it’s like hybrid work models or people working from home, and I just think it’s a lot more laid back than back then.

Maurice Cherry:

Do you think it’s starting to ramp up again?

Carmelle Kendall:

I think it’s starting to ramp up again, but hopefully not to the point where it was then. I was working around the clock.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. It sort of feels like now with companies, we’re at…what’s a good analogy for this? It’s almost like when you’re trying to learn how to drive a stick shift and you can’t sort of get the rhythm between the brake and the clutch and trying to get all that together, and it’s kind of jerky back and forth. I feel that sort of like feeling is happening right now with companies that are still trying to decide how they’re going to operate with employees, quote unquote, post pandemic. The country said the pandemic is over. The government’s like, we’re not funding, you know, whatever, but COVID is still out there. Some places that have went remote are either continuing to go remote or they’re deciding on remote or hybrid. They’re still trying to sort of figure out what the rhythm is. Because before the pandemic, the rhythm kind of was, as you said, kind of just go go go. This is how it is. Now that people see that as another way to work and another way to live and still be able to get work done, companies are like, we still have all this office space. Like, what are we going to do with that? We want people to come in the office two days a week, three days a week. They’re still trying to figure it out, I think.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, it’s definitely a silent battle right now between the employers and the employees as far as like hybrid versus remote versus two days, three days a week. It’s definitely a back and forth going on right now. Some agencies are like, we’re fully remote or work from anywhere. And then some people are like, no, we’re in the office. Come in the office every day.

Maurice Cherry:

The last place where I worked was fully remote. And I think one of the people who worked there really took advantage of that a lot by just traveling to different countries. I mean, we would meet with her and she’s like, well, this week I’m in London and this other week I’m in Paraguay or whatever. And the company eventually had to say, “okay, you need to stay in one place.”

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, really? Well was she getting her work done?

Maurice Cherry:

She was getting her work done. But the problem is, or I guess the problem that arose, at least that’s how I heard it was that because she was jumping from country to country with different time zones and stuff, there’s just certain countries that the business can’t do business from. So — and I mean, not like political dissident countries, like she wasn’t in North Korea or anything like that — but there were just certain places she was at where they were like, “OK, we’re not sure that you can work from there. We need you to kind of stay in one place for a while because it’s making paying you difficult” because she’d be in one place one month, one place somewhere else, just kind of jetsetting around. Because in my mind I was like, she can’t be getting paid that much to be doing all this jet setting between countries. Maybe she was, I don’t know. But yeah, eventually they told her, “okay, you need to stay somewhere for a while.” And then I think once she did that, she was somewhere maybe for about a month or so. They laid her off.

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, no.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, they laid all of us off, so we all were kind of in the same boat. But it was so weird because I know that that’s something that people have done during the pandemic is just take advantage of the fact that you could work remotely. Why not work from anywhere? But the company was like, no, you need to stay somewhere for a while because we can’t keep track of where you’re at. And it’s messing up, I guess, business operations with how we pay you or something like that.

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, interesting. I wonder if it’s because of like taxes or something.

Maurice Cherry:

I also think they just didn’t like her. I think that could have been part of it too. We’re all working, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re working hard and then someone else is working hard, but this person is like jetsetting between all these places, I think it might have been a little bit of jealousy. They were like, “okay, you need to stay your ass in one place and stop doing all this traveling around because I can’t travel, so why do you get to travel?” That’s what I think it was. But they had a more friendly, corporate friendly excuse.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, because if she’s getting her work done and she’s…you know what I mean? That should be what counts. And if she’s working the hours of everybody else, I don’t know.

Maurice Cherry:

I don’t know. But again, it’s sort of like what I talked about before. Companies are just trying to figure out how to sort of work now in this new environment because this is such a new thing. Like, before you went to the office, you worked your eight hours or whatever and you went home.

Carmelle Kendall:

Right.

Maurice Cherry:

Work was that sort of “other place.” And now that your work can also be where you live and if you can do that from anywhere, why stay at the place that you’re at?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

Now with the work that you do with Neighborly, you’ve got a full time gig and the book…how do you balance all of that?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, I don’t think I’m good at it, to be honest. The book was a labor of love. There were nights that I stayed up to like two, three in the morning finishing those drawings because you’re on a timeline and that timeline generally isn’t going to move because of you, you know what I mean? Especially if the book comes out on a certain day, that’s it. You can’t just say, “oh, I need another month.” You have to be on somebody else’s timeline. So there were nights that I stayed up to like two, three in the morning and then literally woke up at like seven to start my normal workday. So, yeah, not fun. But I knew that doing the book was a long term goal of mine, and not every day you have this opportunity for something that you basically been dreaming about, and the opportunity presents itself. You kind of have to just buckle down and do it. So, yeah. Not fun, but I did it. Neighborly. Right now, we’re at the point where we fulfill orders, obviously from the orders that come in on our website. But it’s a lot of just negotiating with buyers right now for those larger wholesale orders. So we have Valentine’s cards and Urban Outfitters this past Valentine’s Day. So those orders are the gigantic orders. And if that’s the case, if we have a big order like for TJ Maxx or Marshall’s or whatever. That’s when we hire people to help us out, because those orders could be like, 20,000 cards.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Carmelle Kendall:

And if that’s the case, we hire packagers. We hire people to help us fulfill the order, like put them in boxes and things like that. Ship them out. So those come. Obviously those aren’t, like, every day that we’re fulfilling those large orders. So it’s more manageable. Every once in a while, we get these big orders, and then we hire helpers. So it makes it way more easier for us.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. I was saying freelance, and not in a pejorative way, but it’s a business.

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, yeah. Since the TODAY show, we have gotten these huge wholesale orders. We’ve been in paper stores. We’ve been in Urban Outfitters. We’ve been in Marshall’s, TJ Maxx, Home Goods. So, yeah, with those big orders, you definitely need help. It’s way more than just me and my business partner can fulfill because they’re just so large. So, yeah, we have a list of packagers that we hit up that just kind of help out when needed.

Maurice Cherry:

So it sounds like the TODAY show was, like, a really big boost for you.

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, 100,000% for sure. I don’t remember. If you’re saying that we’re in 20 stores, which could be right. I just don’t remember before the TODAY show. Now we’re in thousands because of these large wholesale orders. Like with Home Goods. That was like 800 stores right there with the Home Goods order. So. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of stores, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:

It’s so interesting how creatives that I’ve had on the show, and it’s usually ones that do some kind of digital, creative work, like full time, in some capacity, tThey always have a side project or a side business or something that is tactile. Like…it’s cards. It’s home goods. It’s ceramics. It’s always something tactile. Is that on purpose, I wonder? I don’t know. I find that to be interesting.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. I mean, you don’t have clients.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s true.

Carmelle Kendall:

When it’s tactile. Nobody telling me what I need to do with the design or the artwork. It’s no client. You’re doing it for yourself. Yeah. At least that’s what I would think it will be. That’s what it is for me. I knew that if I’m going to do something on the side, I don’t want any clients. I want to do what I want to do, do what I like. Do what my business partner likes and that’s it. We’re doing what we want to do and that’s it. I mean, we do do custom cars, which in that case we’ll have a client, but for the most part it’s what we want for the line, what we envision for the line, what we want to put out, whether it be notepads or journals or calendars or whatever. We’re doing what we want to do, pretty much. I mean, we take into account what our audience likes and what our audience wants to see, but there’s nobody saying “no, make that blue purple,” like no, that’s all me and my business partner.

Maurice Cherry:

I got you. That makes a lot of sense then when you put it that way, I like that.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

For the retailers, are you normally just shooting for these larger big box stores or are smaller boutiques also a target?

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh yeah, we’re in boutique stores all across the world actually. Now we have some international too, but with the smaller boutique stores, they’re smaller orders just because they’re mom and pop shops. So we definitely do reach out to the big box stores as well because that’s the huge orders that span for 800 stores like in the TJX case or Urban Outfitters and things like that. That’s where the huge orders come from.

Maurice Cherry:

Got you. That makes sense. So with everything that you’re working on, what do you want to try to accomplish for the rest of the year?

Carmelle Kendall:

So, at the beginning of this year I had some goals and I can’t believe it’s already summer and I feel like I haven’t done many of my goals that I set out to do. One of the goals was to learn 3D software. So I actually start my 3D class tomorrow, so I’m really excited about that. I’m going to be learning Cinema 4D which I have been wanting to learn for a while. And then other than that, I want to start working on these other children’s books ideas that I have. I have so many ideas, so I want to start putting those to pen, to paper. And then with Neighborly, we have a lot of ideas for products, new products that we want to roll out so want to start getting those into stores and on the website so that people can start purchasing those and then just doing know with advertising I want to build up my portfolio more and go on some more shoots and productions. Looking forward to that too.

Maurice Cherry:

Now for someone that is listening to what you’ve accomplished, they’re hearing about all your success and they want to kind of follow in that same vein. What kind of advice would you give them?

Carmelle Kendall:

I would say to start freelancing, start doing things on the side. A lot of times if you do what you want to do on the side, a lot of times it can become your full time. So if you’re not getting the work that you want to do in your full time job, just start creating it on the side. I’ve had side hustles and side projects pretty much since I started in advertising. I realized that I just wanted to spread my wings and not have to do everything for a client. I wanted to sometimes just create for myself. And so I’ve always just had things going on on the side, whether it be for freelance or just because I wanted to do it. And that has helped me so much in just growing my portfolio and getting other business. So I would say, always just do things on the side. Just do things for yourself, do things just to stay creative because you want to. And it always lead to something. It always will lead to bigger things.

Maurice Cherry:

If you could go back and give teenage Carmelle that wanted to be in the video, if you could give her some advice, knowing what you know now, what would you tell her?

Carmelle Kendall:

I will probably say, don’t be afraid to explore. Just art, the art world and things that you think are unattainable. Because when I was growing up, I didn’t have artists around me. My mom is a doctor and my dad is a lawyer, and so I wasn’t in the art space. I didn’t know an artist, I didn’t know anybody in advertising. This is all something I found out late in life. I always drew and painted and things like that, but I didn’t think it was attainable. I didn’t think being an artist was you can make a living off of it. So I would tell myself, just explore those things, like explore what makes me happy without having that fear of am I going to make it in the art world? Just be fearless and explore what makes me happy, basically.

Maurice Cherry:

Where do you see yourself in the next five years? Like, what’s the next chapter for Carmelle Kendall?

Carmelle Kendall:

I see myself doing more books, having books on the shelves, in stores everywhere, having Neighborly on the shelves in stores everywhere. I see myself just learning new things. I believe that I’m a student for life, so learning new programs, learning new software. I always just want to stay experimenting with my craft. Hopefully my artwork has evolved in five years. Hopefully it doesn’t look like it does now. I want to always be continuing to evolve and just being a better artist and designer is what I see for myself.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work, about Neighborly? Where can they find that information online?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, well, they can always go to my website, which is Carmelle.com. The book is called “Your Freedom, Your Power”, which is available everywhere books are sold. And then for Neighborly, they can go to neighborlypaper.com and find a list of all the stores that we are in. Or they can just purchase directly from neighborlypaper.com.

Maurice Cherry:

All right, sounds good. Carmelle Kendall, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the know. As I was kind of pulling my research together for this, I kind of always have a thought in my mind about who the person is before I talk to them and what the interview might come to be like. And the main thing I’m getting from this is like, hometown hero from the a left, did your own thing, came back, you’ve got this great business, it’s a fun business, but you’re also still kind of working in the advertising world as well. And from what I can tell just from talking with you, you’re keeping it humble. You’re certainly super proud of the work that you’ve done and the success that you’ve accomplished, but you’re also super humble about it. That’s a really good quality to have, especially in this world where there’s just so much like, posturing and clout chasing and all that kind of stuff. I’m like, I get from you that you are like, the genuine real deal, and I’m really excited to see where your work goes in the future. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Maurice Cherry:

I appreciate it.

Carmelle Kendall:

Thank you so much for having me. Like I said, I’ve been following you since 2020 when I listened to you on a podcast, so I was very honored.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world. They are always looking to expand their roster of freelance design consultants in the U.S., particularly brand strategists, copywriters, graphic designers and Web developers.

If you know how to deliver excellent creative work reliably, and enjoy the autonomy of a virtual-based, freelance life (with no non-competes), check them out at brevityandwit.com.

Chris Dudley

Chris Dudley is an artistic powerhouse. He’s been a working artist for over 25 years, creating everything from children’s books to commissioned drawings (and he teaches art as well). His latest book, Lil’ Boogaloo Shrimp and the Clean Sweep is inspired by the iconic 80’s movie Breakin’, and features the OG Boogaloo Shrimp himself, Michael Chambers!

Chris gave me the rundown on the new book, and we talked about his creative process and what draws him to illustrating portraits and children’s books. He also spoke about growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the benefits on staying there for his career, the keys to his longevity, his work with Hudson Dawn Publishing, and dropped some great advice on work/life balance and staying inspired. You’ll definitely be a fan of Chris after you hear his story — I know I am!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Chris Dudley:
Well, my name is Chris Dudley and I am the creative director for Chris Dudley Art. I really focus on art and illustration.

Maurice Cherry:
How has 2023 been going for you so far?

Chris Dudley:
Actually, it has been going amazing. The scope and range of projects that I’ve been working on have been just straight fun. The recent project has been Lil’ Boogaloo Shrimp and the Clean Sweep, which is with Michael Chambers, who’s famous from the breakdancing movies franchises, and it’s been amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, tell me some more about the book.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah. Well, it’s, I think, the first book of its kind. Scoured the internet, and I haven’t seen a book like this. One of the first books I’ve ever seen that focuses on breakdancing. The premise behind the book is that it teaches kids responsibility and priority using breakdancing. And also, it highlights, there’s a shout-out of a lot of the actors from the Breakin’ movies, Adolfo Quiñones, Bruno Falcon, and sadly, we lost both of them recently, and just all of the main characters from the breaking movie, but also a lot of other individuals.

And in addition to having that subject matter about breakdancing, because a lot of people think it went by the wayside, but it’s still hugely popular and also, it will debut in the Olympics in 2024. And so, it’s still a huge thing. There’s a shout-out to the Olympics in the book. Actually, the final spread, everybody’s breakdancing in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, I haven’t seen a book like this yet.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Congratulations on that.

Chris Dudley:
Thank you. It also, if I could add, it’s more than just a children’s book, it gives kids a little bit of history about the background of breaking, its roots in New York. Also, gives some terminology of breaking, like what a freeze is, what a go down is. So, it’s a little bit more than just the story.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I remember this was back in 2005. When was I working there? Yeah, 2005, I was working for the State of Georgia here in Atlanta, working at the Georgia World Congress Center. And I remember we had just hired this white girl as a PR rep or something. And I mean cute, short, bubbly white girl. I was like, “Oh, she seems really nice.” And the weird thing, well, not the weird thing, but as I was talking to her and I asked her what her hobbies was and she was like, “Breakdancing.” And I’m like, “You’re a breakdancer? You look like a UGA sorority grad. Come on, you’re not a breakdancer.” And sure enough, it would be in a sort of weird way, but sometimes she would do moves just in the office just to show us that, “Yeah, I am a breakdancer.”

Chris Dudley:
Gotcha.

Maurice Cherry:
She invited me to a few events that she was breaking at and-

Chris Dudley:
Oh, nice.

Maurice Cherry:
It was so weird because sometimes we’d be in these board meetings, in a legit boardroom with chairman and stuff, and then someone’s like, “Oh, you’re a breakdancer. Why don’t you bust a move for us?” And I’m like, in a way, this is so embarrassing, but also, it’s like, well, at least you’re not asking the Black person to do it, so I’m not… Let me sit back and watch the show.

Chris Dudley:
Gotcha. That’s awesome.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And I think you told me that part of what you’re doing with the book involves a crew or something here in Atlanta.

Chris Dudley:
Yes, they’re in Georgia. I think they’re near Acworth, the Rockwell Dance Academy. And it’s interesting that you mentioned that the young lady there was a breakdancer, but the Rockwell Dance Academy is led by Honey Rockwell and Orko. Honey Rockwell is a staple name as a B-girl. Actually, just last year, they were both inducted into the Breaking Hall of Fame. And so, B-girls definitely have a place as well. I mean, she’s one of the most well-known. She was with the original Rock Steady Crew in South Bronx, New York.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah. We partnered with them and we’ve got some things in the works. So, it’s really exciting to have that Georgia connection going.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, we’ll make sure to put a link to the book also in the show notes, so people can check that out. Aside from this new project, how are things different for you this year than they were last year?

Chris Dudley:
It has been just ramping up with projects. Last year, obviously, we had a steady flow of projects, variety. This year, the children’s books have just been packed. I mean, I’m booked out with children’s books, booked out away. So, it’s fun where you complete one project and then you can look forward to the next one. But I’ve got, I think, four or five that are already in the queue, confirmed. And so, I look forward to working with each of those authors as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I mean, with everything that you’ve got going on now, what does the summer look like? Is it more work or you got any plans?

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, a little vacation, a little relaxation I would do with the family for the summer. I’ve got three girls and my wife, so we’ll get a little relaxation in, but some work too. Especially with the release of this book, Lil’ Boogaloo Shrimp and the Clean Sweep, we’ve got some events planned this summer as well. Some here in Michigan with the Children’s Museum and another bookstore, and actually, a local breakdancing crew.

Actually, Michael Chambers there in Los Angeles, July 29th, I believe, he’s got an event with Barnes & Noble. So, I may be flying out there to support him on that. But yeah, we’ve got a lot going on this summer. Then coming out of summer, we look to get in, we’re going to be partnering with some schools to get the books into schools as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Very nice. So, you got a lot planned coming up.

Chris Dudley:
Yes, sir.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s dive into Chris Dudley Art. I mean, you just mentioned you’ve got a bunch of these projects that are lined up. What does your creative process look like when you’re working on a new project?

Chris Dudley:
Yeah. Well, they all start similarly because we do a little bit of design work. We’ve designed some logos and so forth. We’ve got a team that does that. But also with the illustration, I like to start out old school with sketching. That’s how I learned to draw. So, that’s part of my creative process with every project, is starting out with sketching. I mean, I can go into the meat of doing a children’s book, if you like.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Chris Dudley:
Okay. It’s basically we get a manuscript and it goes through an approval process. We don’t just take any manuscript. It’s got to… Just to be real with you, when I read the manuscript, if images start popping into my head, it’s a go. If they don’t, it’s probably not a go. And that’s just nothing against the author, but it has to resonate with me because it’s got to be a fun project that I’m looking forward to doing.

And so, from there, the manuscript checks out and we want to bid on that. From there, we will establish the illustration description. So, that’s what imagery is going to go along with what portions of the text, especially if it’s a children’s picture book. And once we nail that down, I’ll do sketches. And that’s where you establish the composition. Well, actually, prior to that, we design the characters, the main characters, and see exactly what they’re going to look like. Is it a eight-year-old African American boy, or does it have to be a little girl who’s three years old and she has a puppy?

So, we have to figure out the dynamics of the characters. What are they going to look like? What time period are we in? Are we in the 2000s? Are we in the ’80s, like with our recent book here? And so, we establish a character and then we do composition sketches of establishing what each scene is going to look like. And those get approved by the author along the way. So, they’re heavily involved with the creative process, so that I don’t just come up with the finished project and then hope they like it. They’re involved along the way so that there’s no surprises on either end.

Then from there, we go to final sketches. We start to flesh out this is exactly what this spot illustration or this full page or this spread is exactly going to look like and the details of it, if there’s need to be background and so forth. And from there, after the client approves that, we do the line work. That’s where we finalize it almost… Well, you’re familiar with how a coloring book looks where you have the simple black lines.

Maurice Cherry:
Yup.

Chris Dudley:
We finish out the book looking like that. That way the client gets to see, okay, this is exactly how things are going to look before we add color. In that way, any adjustments can be made along the way, if need be. So, they approve each process, and then we get into the color theory, because you can’t just throw colors onto the imagery. It has to make sense visually. Also, colors such as red is going to attract attention. So, you wouldn’t just arbitrarily use that just because you want it red. And sometimes, that has to be explained to the client as well, because they may think, “I want to paint this in a blue.” That, well, based on color theory, those won’t work with the composition.

Then we just move toward the formatting process, and then the text is added. And I take the text into consideration as well though when I’m designing the composition, so it doesn’t look forced later. I make sure I allow spacing for that. But yeah, that’s how we move through a project. Then from there, it goes to post-production, and then we have a book.

Maurice Cherry:
So, it’s way more than just art and illustration.

Chris Dudley:
Oh, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
You’re really seeing it through the entire process, entire publishing process.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, from concept to completion is what we’d call it. Yeah, from the initial idea to a finished book.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned getting the clients involved with it. I’m pretty sure this is probably maybe not an exhaustive process for them, but how is it for them being able to see the book come together step by step like this?

Chris Dudley:
It’s amazing because it’s no secret most people haven’t learned the skill of being able to draw, let alone to illustrate, which is there’s a difference because with illustration, you’re telling a story with the imagery. And so, when you flesh out a character for a client, it’s so satisfying because they have it in their head, but they can’t see it. And so, when you can present that to them, it’s like, “Yes, that’s exactly what I want.” It’s just so gratifying for them. Then to see that character then doing things throughout the book, their eyes just light up. So, it’s a pleasure working with them and again, keeping them involved in the process.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, it looks like you do a lot of children’s book illustrations. What draws you to this genre?

Chris Dudley:
Well, having kids. Like I said, I got three girls. They’re a little bit older now into late teens, mid and late teens. But I actually spent, and actually people can go look at my website at chrisdudleyart.com, I spent about 15, 20 years doing almost exclusively realism. I mean very detailed graphite drawings. I did art shows and juried exhibitions and all of that. And so, I used that knowledge actually as I segued into, I still do some of that, but the children’s books, reading books to my girls. And I actually had to learn how to illustrate better. I knew it a little bit, but I had to really dive into it. So, I’ve been doing that for the past 10 years now, and it’s taken over really.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you stay organized with a lot of these projects? Because I would imagine as you’re saying this whole process, do you do just one book at a time? Are you juggling multiple books? How do you keep all of that managed effectively?

Chris Dudley:
Well, some of them will overlap a little bit, but it depends on what phase of the process. Honestly, for me personally, the most challenging part is the initial part, coming up with the concept of what the imagery is going to look like. Because once you’ve established that, you then created a roadmap for yourself, and then it’s just following the roadmap. It’s almost like plotting out your course somewhere. That’s the hardest part, where am I going to go with this? But then once you plot out the course, okay, now, it’s just following this path that I’ve laid out.

And there may be some tweaks along the way. And with that, it’s important obviously not to overbook. We’ve all heard the same under promise, over deliver. And so, really, we really focus on with my team, especially my assistant, not making promises that would be too difficult to even try to make happen. Then you’re disappointing clients. So, books, I won’t work on two or three at the same time, but they may overlap. Like okay, if I finish this portion, now I can maybe bring in, but they’ll have different deadlines. I don’t have it where they’re all due at the same time. Keeping it balanced, yeah.

Then we filter in some other relatively smaller projects in there while I may be working on a book, like a one-off illustration or a design project. But I like to really focus on that client’s project, so they get the attention that it needs.

Maurice Cherry:
And it’s important to note, as you’ve alluded to, you have a team. So, this isn’t a one-man operation.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly. I could not do it by myself. I did in the past. Obviously, it was just me. I started, well, way, way back before it was Chris Dudley Art when I was 18, 19. And it was just me, invoicing and trying to figure all this stuff out. But I realized later is that it stifled creativity, doing all of those other administrative tasks. Now, I still do some, but by and large, I want to save my brain for the project.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I think, as you said, starting out on your own, you want to try to do everything or try to tackle everything because you’re just starting out. You want to establish yourself. But eventually after a while, in order for you to really be able to go further, you have to give up some control. You have to build a team. It’s just a necessary part of being able to scale the work that you do.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it’s necessary.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s switch gears a little bit here and learn more about you. You talked a bit about starting out. You were born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tell me about what that was like.

Chris Dudley:
Yes, it was fun. My interest in art started very young. I had a couple of cousins that drew a little bit. One was just phenomenal, phenomenal artist, and it amazed me that he could do that with a pencil. And it wasn’t daunting like it may be to some people. And in school, I always drew. I remember back in, I think I was maybe in kindergarten or first grade, and a little weed of mine, it was like a stalk of grain or something that I drew, it got accepted in the children’s exhibition at the Grand Rapids Art Museum.

And so, it’s like that was a “first juried show” and it was accepted. And so, it’s going to be on display Downtown Grand Rapids at the Art Museum. And so, when my mom took me down there to see it and to see it displayed, it was just awe-inspiring. They had the artwork separated by grade level. So, mine was in the first, second-graders. And I remember walking and seeing, I remember the stuff like it’s yesterday, seeing the 12th graders. Obviously, their art advancement was far beyond my level, but it was so amazing that it was possible, and it just sparked that that’s possible. I didn’t have the skill to do it, but it didn’t deter me. It made me understand that’s possible. I can get to that level. And so, that’s where it began.

Maurice Cherry:
And it sounds like your family also really supported you in this too.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, family has always supported me. Even teachers, I joke about it now, they would let me draw in class as long as I did my work, obviously. But yeah, I’ve had a lot of support over the years.

Maurice Cherry:
How has it been working and cultivating your career in the same place where you grew up? I feel like a lot of folks we have on the show may have, of course, started out one place and then ended up moving somewhere else, and that was where their career or their work flourished. What does it mean for you to still be in your hometown doing this work?

Chris Dudley:
Well, it’s taken some time. I started out with, it was Dudley Graphics actually, when I was 18, 19. And I was doing T-shirt designs and it was all by hand. I didn’t know graphic design or how to use a computer or anything. So, I was drawing things and even drawing lettering and so forth, and later rebranded. Actually, when I improved my drawing ability, I was okay, but I wanted to learn how to draw much, much better. And so, in my 20s, I said I want to learn this and really buckled down and improved my skill, but had obviously some success with that, dealing with some businesses and so forth.

But later, that’s when I started doing juried art shows. And I felt that if I could get into a juried art show, that somewhat vetted my skillset. Then some of these were hard to get into. They were hard to get into. So, that gave me a little boost of confidence. Then figuring out how to make it sustainable, like you said, in your hometown and doing projects with companies. I actually did a whiteboard animation with a pharma, very large, I can’t say the name, but pharmaceutical company. And so, finding avenues then how to make it sustainable.

And I was able to explore a lot of different avenues of art. I mean, it was design. It was drawing. There was a little bit of animation work with some of that, but to make it more sustainable even here locally. But then things did branch out where I started getting a little attention from those outside of Michigan. I worked with an author actually in Georgia, and just some throughout the States. And that’s when it’s like, whoa, it opens you up to that global market.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Do you think it’s been a benefit to you to still do this work in Grand Rapids? Have you thought about, “Oh, well, what if I was in New York?” Or even in Detroit, if you stayed in Michigan?

Chris Dudley:
Yes. I found it as a benefit because it puts me in a position to, it sounds cliche, but to give back, if you will, to the community versus when you move away, you’re not in touch with that local community anymore. So, I’ve been able to be in contact with local artists that I know and local authors, because I work with a lot of authors here in Michigan. So, to be able to meet them in some instances face to face, you can’t replace that. It’s worked out. It’s just worked out for me to stay here in Michigan and still have some of those connects outside.

Maurice Cherry:
How big is Grand Rapids? I’m trying to think population wise, how big.

Chris Dudley:
Ooh, offhand, I guess I should know this, right?

Maurice Cherry:
No, no.

Chris Dudley:
Actually, it’s the second… I didn’t know I was getting a geography lesson here. It’s the second-largest city, obviously, behind Detroit. I mean, it’s growing too. It’s continuing to grow. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
No, I mean, I’m curious about that because I’ve had folks that are on the show before that aren’t in these big metropolises. They’re in smaller cities like Raleigh or Grand Rapids, like you mentioned. I think I talked to another illustrator in Detroit. Oh, his name escapes. I think it’s Sean Bell or something like that. But talking about the benefit or one inherent benefit of being able to do this work in a smaller community, I won’t say small, but smaller than a big city, is that in a way, because you grew up there, people know you, so there’s that sort of reputation. But also, you help serve as a beacon for the next generation to see that what you’re doing is possible where they are. They don’t have to move somewhere else or go somewhere else to achieve-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… the kind of success that you’ve achieved.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, exactly. That is the key. And a lot of it is about developing your skillset, really getting your work seen. And so, with the internet and so forth, I’m not old, but I grew up without the internet. But now, you have these different vehicles that you can use to have your work seen really all over the world.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Before we get into that, I want to stay a little bit in the pocket of Dudley Graphics because I think it’s important for our audience to really hear about what it was like to design really before personal computers and Photoshop and all that sort of stuff was really a thing. Tell me about your early career of Dudley Graphics because that was roughly between what, ’96 and 2005, 2006, something like that.

Chris Dudley:
Yep, exactly. Yeah. I started out, man, I was 18 and I became a broker with a T-shirt company and I was doing the designing. And like you said, it was all by hand. I mean, it was freehand drawing. Then I would ink it and I would take actual ink drawings to my screen printer to get the camera ready, iron it and so forth. And so, if I had to make an adjustment, it was all by hand and cutting and pasting and whiteout. I did not know how to use a computer. I didn’t have one. So, it was the early days.

I remember when I first got a computer and trying to learn it, but I didn’t really have the correct software. Then had thought, “Okay, how do I input something in my computer?” So, I had to try to learn a scanner and it was crazy. One thing that really helped, I actually worked at a Kinko’s, which later became FedEx Kinko’s, and which is now FedEx office. And I got a lot of training actually in graphic design and just how those things worked. And that really helped me with launching Dudley Graphics.

Again, it was just in the design and T-shirt realm because my drawing ability honestly was, I would say, above average, but above average was to be average person who doesn’t draw. So, I had a ways to go as far as learning how to draw better. And that’s what prompted the rebrand, is I felt, “Okay, my skills are way better than they were. So, I can go with this art thing.”

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, you took me back there with talking about Kinko’s. I remember that fondly.

Chris Dudley:
Okay, yeah. Yep. Yep.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, during that time, I was in high school, right around that time. I was 18 in ’99. So, a little bit later than you were, but I did come up also in that time of life before the internet. I mean, computers actually when I was a kid were almost like a toy.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
At least that’s how they were marketed or pushed. It was like, oh, this is the fun thing you do at school in your free period or-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
It would be VTech. The company VTech had all these personal computer things. I had this big thing called a Precomputer 1000 that had a one-line screen on it. It had a full keyboard, but had a one-line screen and it had a handle on it so you could carry it with you. I think my mom wanted to throw that thing out the window because it could also make sound. And so, I was learning sound because I also grew up playing music, being a musician. So, I’m learning how to play sound and code on this thing. And I know she wanted to launch that thing out the window most days.

But I say all that to say it’s so different now when you look at schools. And even, I think, just the general conversation around technology for children and designs. It’s certainly something that people try to push their kids into as a viable career field or a moneymaking thing or something like that. Really back then, especially for Black folks, there was not a lot of examples. You had, what, Dwayne Wayne on A Different World. Maybe somebody that was featured in Black enterprise if you had a subscription. So, there wasn’t a lot around, oh, computers are a thing that you can use to build your career. It wasn’t a thing. And I feel like for listeners they should, especially younger listeners, it just wasn’t a thing.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, it wasn’t. It wasn’t. I think, what is it? What would you say? 2000s before, I think, when the internet came out for everyday people and people still didn’t have a computer in their home. Whereas now, most people do. But you think about to have grown up or have grown up at a time where that you didn’t have internet at home, you didn’t have a computer at home even. So, totally, it was a different era.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Or if you had an internet at home, it was via mail order CD.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, AOL.

Maurice Cherry:
You get a AOL CD. You get a NetZero disc in the mail or something like that. And that’s what you use-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… to get on for like… I remember getting those things and it’s like a thousand free minutes.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly. Oh, my gosh. Yes, I remember that too. Then you’re waiting five minutes to connect, just listening to that dial-up sound.

Maurice Cherry:
And it ties up the phone. So, if someone’s on the internet, someone also can’t be on the phone in the house.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it was a whole thing. So, I used the computers at school and I learned it at school. I designed my high school newspaper, for example, and we used PageMaker. We’d use a double PageMaker.

Chris Dudley:
PageMaker.

Maurice Cherry:
And I know we started off trying to use Quark and those-

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, QuarkXPress.

Maurice Cherry:
That software would come with these big… I mean, these instruction manuals could choke a horse. It would be so thick, and it’s like a textbook. How am I supposed to read through all this to figure out how to use this software on this thing? And eventually, we’re just like, “We’ll just do it by hand.” It’s just easier to print and cut-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… and copy and all that sort of stuff. So, I know what you mean about having that not necessarily on the job training, but you learned through application. You didn’t necessarily go to school for. You learned by doing or you learned by working almost like an apprenticeship in a way.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, definitely, definitely. And along with that, just to add briefly, is that in that manner, you learn what you need because all these programs, obviously Adobe Photoshop, it’s so deep that even the experts don’t use everything, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

Chris Dudley:
But I think a lot of us artists and entrepreneurs may… It can be daunting, but you may realize that I only need five functions from this program to run my business. I don’t need to know all 5,000 and shortcuts and all that. And so, it’s really finding what you need, and okay, that’s all I need from this program. Then it’s worth it for me to have it to run my business.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. And the chokehold that Adobe and Macromedia back then as well, the chokehold that those products had on the burgeoning digital design industry cannot be understated. I never thought I’d see a day where Photoshop is almost not derided, but I know a lot of designers now will use Figma over Photoshop. There was a time when they would use Sketch over Photoshop. I never thought I’d see a time when Photoshop would fall out of favor because it was everywhere.

Chris Dudley:
Yep, yep. And also, I think a lot of people are still upset about the subscription model. But I guess I get it. You get the updates. You don’t have to come up off of $900, which a lot of people couldn’t back in the day anyway. Or they’re working on old versions of Photoshop and there’s, like you said, a lot of options now. I do a lot of illustration in Procreate on the iPad Pro.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I think Adobe knew that their software was being pirated left and right. I didn’t buy Photoshop until the subscription came out. Everything before them was some cracked version off of LimeWire or Kazaa or whatever that I hoped would not give my computer a virus. And sometimes, it would. But that’s how I ended up learning because I was like, “I can’t afford.” Even when I had my business, I was like, “I can’t afford the cost of this. I’ll still use this cracked version because it works. It does what I need it to do.” Like you said, it does the five things-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… I need it to do. Why would I pay this astronomical amount of money for this piece of software if I can’t use every single part of it?

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, you’ve been a working illustrator in this industry now for over 25 years. For you, what have been the keys to sustain that longevity? We’ve talked just now about how technology has really changed the game. How do you still keep current and maintain yourself in this industry?

Chris Dudley:
First thing is skillset. When it comes to art, you have to have the skillset and it’s not… Obviously, no disrespect to anyone, but a lot of times people think about art as it’s just a feeling and you just express yourself. And there are some aspects of art that are that way, but there are rules and fundamentals that you learn. Composition, you have to know anatomy. There’s so many things and you have to learn that stuff before you can just venture off and draw your feelings if you want to say. And so, I really focus on that skillset, learning those things.

Also, art is a different pursuit in that everyone else has to be… They understand that I got to be good at it first before someone’s going to hire me. If you were a baker, I got to be able to bake cookies good first. So, you’re going to be baking a lot. If you’re a singer, you have to show that you can sing. If you’re a writer, you have to write the book. But oftentimes, artists, some artists, new ones anyway, feel, “Well, I want someone to hire me to draw something.” Well, you have to show them that you can draw.

And so, I think a lot of artists don’t have enough of a body of work to show for someone to hire them, so that’s what I… I didn’t want to do that. And early stages I went through were, okay, you want someone. Then I realized that, no, you have to be drawing and producing things so people can see that you know how to do this thing. And when I took that approach, things really just really started to take off. And it can’t just be your practicing. You need to do a project from start to finish. People can see that you can do that, the highest level you can do at that time. And so, that’s what’s really helped me.

Maurice Cherry:
So, working in public. Like they say in math class, show your work. That’s what’s really been a big key for you.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, yeah, and being able to show that you can. It’s not waiting to be asked to do it or waiting to be hired to do it. And that’s what a lot of artists do. Again, no other industry is that way. You know that you have to have this skill at a high level before someone’s going to ask you to do it for pay. But sometimes, artists just wait. I’m waiting for someone to hire me. I’m just sketching in my sketchbook. Well, no, do a project. Even if you “hire yourself” to do a project, show that you have the chops to do it.

Maurice Cherry:
How has tech impacted your work? Of course, we’ve talked about Photoshop and things like that, but lately, over the past almost nine to 10 months now, the conversation has largely been around generative art and Midjourney and DALL-E and all this stuff. Yes. How does that, if at all, incorporate into your work?

Chris Dudley:
I have switched over. I’m almost… Well, I still draw because I love the tactile aspect of just traditional media. Actually, I’m going to be teaching a paint class this week, but the majority of the bulk of my work is digital now. So, I’m drawing on a tablet. And with regard to art, that’s… Well, if I could add, one funny thing to me is, in the art community, drawing hands because of their nature is difficult for just about every artist starting out. And so, one hilarious thing to me is that AI art can’t draw hands either, and that’s something…

I knew someone who, well, just recently they produced a book. And I said, I’ve looked at it like, “Wow, that’s a nice image.” But then I started, just from my trained eye, started to break away. No, this is AI. Again, not to discredit it, but I could tell right away it was AI produced. Then I looked at the hands and they looked atrocious, like claws. And I was like, “Oh, yep, I was right. That’s definitely AI.”

And so, I don’t think, I don’t see it as a battle per se, but I use digital aids, if you will. Sometimes, I’ll even create a scene with poseable characters if I’m looking for a certain pose. And I might take a picture of that and then use that as a reference. So, I’d use some different aids, but I think you have to have the skillset. The tools can’t make you an artist. So, you got to have the skillset behind it. People can’t think, “Oh, hey, I’ve got Midjourney now. I’m an artist all of a sudden.” No, you still need a certain base of knowledge and ability to be able to then use those tools to actually create art.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I was watching some video. I think it was from Wired, and it was an AI artist detailing their steps. And it’s all writing for the most part because you have to get the prompts specific in order for the thing to generate and all that sort of stuff. And it was fascinating to see it come together, but it didn’t feel like art. It didn’t feel like the creative process, especially with something as I think intimate as hand drawing something. There’s more that goes into it than, I think, just a technical skill. I mean it’s creativity. It’s emotion. There’s a lot of specifically, individually, intrinsically, fundamentally human things that go into the creation that the computer just can’t do. It can maybe-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… try to replicate it from other sources. And of course, there’s been talk about how these engines crib from other artists, but it’s not the same. I find a lot of AI art has a specific look. It’s like heavily shadowed and it’s a very specific look where I’m like, “Yeah, that’s AI.” It doesn’t feel like it’s from a person because people’s art styles are so varied and different.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly. And it’s very static as well, and some of it’s… I mean, obviously, you’ve got a trained eye to be able to see that but not to, I don’t want to sound condescending, but to a person that just says, “Oh, I like pretty things,” but they’re not into art or know, they don’t know art, they could just see an image and, “Wow, it’s a pretty image.” But if you’ve got a little bit of a trained eye, you can realize, “Oh, it’s okay. It’s nice. But it’s a static image. There’s no emotion.” Like you said, you could feel that it doesn’t have that human element to it. It’s just produced. It’s like a mass-produced restaurant versus a high-end restaurant or that little mom-and-pop shop that puts love into the meal. So, you can tell the difference.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, like a McDonald’s hamburger is going to be different from-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… the Smashburger place or something like that.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly. And there’s a reason that there’s always going to be that Smashburger. Yeah, you have the McDonald’s customers, but there’s a lot of people that says, “No, I don’t go to McDonald’s. I rather pay a few more dollars for a real burger.”

Maurice Cherry:
And I think, for you, because the work that you do involves the clients in the process from start to finish, it would almost feel like introducing AI into it, one, sort of cheapens it in a way, but then two, I could see how it could make the client think, “Wait a minute, I could do this myself.”

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, exactly. Definitely could, definitely. And I don’t think it’s going to… Who knows with technology, but there’s just what I see certain elements that AI just can’t do. You have to be able to, just with what I do with illustration, you have to be able to change the POV. Am I going to go with a bird’s eye view or worm’s eye view? What about the expression on their face? And AI can’t do that now. They can’t take a character and then put it through all these emotions and all these angles and add these other el-… You can’t replace the human element, like you said.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, AI can’t get inspired.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
It can’t get inspired from a work or a piece of music or a feeling. It just tries to recopy and regenerate from whatever it’s been fed into their model.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
So, we spoke about just social media and these platforms and stuff. How do you approach marketing and promoting your work? Are there specific strategies that you found to be pretty effective?

Chris Dudley:
I really try to let the work speak, but also letting yourself be known as well. Because people do, that’s something I realized, they do like to know the artists behind the work. So, periodically posting a picture of yourself with the art and so forth, or even doing a little video or something. Everybody wants, I want a million followers and so forth. But then I started realizing I don’t need a million followers. I’m booked out with work, and I don’t know how many I had on Instagram. I don’t even think a thousand, but I’m booked with work. I have more work than I can do.

And so, that really changed my whole thought process of… Then I don’t want to be putting all my energies or time just into social media when I want to put that into the creative process, and it has worked for me. It has worked. I focus on my skillset and focus on putting projects out and more work comes. And so, I think having the presence though, obviously, is so crucial. Having a website, I think, is very valuable because it really gives a place where this is your work and you’re not competing for attention on social media platform, but then you could have those platforms that direct people to your site as well.

So, I think it’s necessary in today’s age, especially with the visual aspect of doing art, but focus on the work though. Don’t spend all of your time social media marketing, and then you forget to actually be producing artwork.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. Because the followers don’t necessarily translate into work. It may translate into visibility.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Into more eyes on it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that… And also, you may be attracting the wrong type of clients or the wrong type of people.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
The tire kickers and the low ballers and stuff. They see what you do and they don’t get the value in it. They just see it and think it’s something that could be potentially easily replicated.

Actually, going back a little bit to the AI conversation, one thing I thought that was super interesting is when people started getting those AI art, AI generated avatars out, how many people were, I guess complaining, but they were like, “Wait a minute, you paid for that? You paid for that? You paid how much for that?” Some people. Well, the cost wasn’t what it would cost you to actually commission an artist. It was much, much, much cheaper, maybe $5, $8.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
$20.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
For several images, not just one image. And it was so funny seeing people like, “You paid for that? You paid money for that?” I’m like, “If you were to pay an artist to do it-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… you would pay the artist. Do you expect it to be free?”

Chris Dudley:
Yeah. Oh, man, that’s a whole other story too, because art is no other industry, well, maybe photography possibly, but no other industry do people expect you to work for free because people think it’s just maybe some God given talent so you’re supposed to share it for free. And there’s times, obviously, where you’ll be giving with your skillset. But you don’t go to a mechanic and say, “Hey, if you fix my car, I will tell all of my friends that you’re a great mechanic and that’s going to get you some more work.” But people do that to artists all the time. It’s hilarious, man. It’s hilarious.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ll tell you from doing this show, they do it to podcasters too. They’re like-

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
“Oh, you’re just talking to a mic. All you’re doing is just press and record. That’s it.” No.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s so much more that goes into it.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, they don’t see the art behind it.

Maurice Cherry:
Then when you try to show them, they feel like, “Oh, well, this is too much.” Once they get an idea of what the process is and how it is a skilled thing, then it turns them off. From then, it’s like, “Well, now you know.”

Chris Dudley:
Yep, exactly. And to speak to what we’re touching on, that’s what, again, versus just I want to become a social media marketer, that’s what has gotten more work, focusing on the work and then the relationships that I build with my clients. And when we onboard a new author and they see what’s involved, they see what you’re doing to bring their vision to life, that has gotten me more work than marketing on social media.

And so, that’s when it’s that shift of, “Hey, I’ll post and I’ll talk about stuff.” Plus, I’m not a salesman per se, so I’m not trying to hard sell, “Hey, come buy my book.” No. Here’s we created this book. It was a fun project. You can look at it a little bit. And people have bought from that versus me trying to hard sell them. And with regard to more work because then that author speaks highly of the experience they had working with you. That has gotten me so much more work where I have other authors call so and so.

I just finished up a book with Erica Flores, first time author. It’s been an amazing process. That has led to more work. And so, focusing on the skillset, and obviously, your working with clients far exceeds just trying to beg people to buy your products online.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I 100% agree with that. And also, because if you’re focusing on social media, as we’ve seen fairly recently, these platforms can change at the drop of a hat. If you’re busy trying to chase the algorithm, if you’re busy trying to market or make your work fit into whatever this opaque algorithm is in terms of visibility or something like that, it takes away from the work. I think we certainly see it with people that create content for video, like YouTubers, TikTokers. It’s a lot to try to figure it out. And even on maybe non-video platforms like Twitter or Instagram, Instagram is still pictures, but a lot of Instagram now is video.

Chris Dudley:
Yes, it is. It is.

Maurice Cherry:
Then with Twitter and this Twitter Blue, they’ve changed the weighting of how people see your work unless you pay for a subscription. The platforms have gotten so, I don’t want to say unreliable, but they certainly have gotten so caustic and to the point where you can’t really depend on those to get the word out or to get the work out.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
It helps. It still is a megaphone, but you can’t depend on just that to be the thing that propels your work or propels you into whatever the next level is.

Chris Dudley:
Definitely. And that’s why, like I mentioned, having your own website is so crucial. And again, I started before the internet. Well, not just before the internet, but when the internet was starting out, it was before all of the social media platforms. And so, I had a website even way back then. Whereas I see a lot of artists now that pretty good work, but they don’t have a website, and it’s just shocking to me. And they think, “I’m just going to get all kinds of work from Instagram.” Maybe if you were in the inception, but if you’re starting out right now and thinking, “I’m going to start an Instagram and get all kinds of work” and you don’t have a website, it’s not going to happen.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I know even from just trying to reach artists or folks to have on the show, it’s always tough to get them on if they don’t have a site, because even if I send them a DM, the way that the filtering is, they may not ever see it, if I send them something on Instagram, if I send them something on Twitter.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
If they even allow you to send them a message, and it’s like, “Well, do you want people to contact you or not?”

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
What’s the point? Yeah.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you balance your artistic pursuits with your personal life and responsibilities? You mentioned your marriage. You’ve got three kids. How do you balance all of that?

Chris Dudley:
Well, again, with booking, I don’t just accept any and all projects. I’d be with a privilege to be in that position where I don’t have to take all work that comes my way. I can be a little choosy and making sure that I’m prioritizing that time with my wife. We just hit 25 years.

Maurice Cherry:
Congratulations.

Chris Dudley:
So, that’s a huge milestone, and with our three girls and prioritizing that time. I love doing this. Obviously, there’s a monetary component to take care of my family and so forth. But I often think about too is that there’s time that I can’t sell a client. That’s for my wife and for my family, but then often think, but the time that I do sell you, if you will, you’re not paying just for that project. You’re paying for the time I’m not being with them.

And so, when that clicked in my brain many years ago, that changes your margin, that changes the value of what you’re offering. And time to ask me to not be with my wife and my girls, like I said, some time I can give you, but the time you’re going to take from them, it’s worth something to me. So, it’s got to be important. That’s why the project has to resonate with me. So, that’s how I really keep that balance.

Maurice Cherry:
That is so deep. That is probably one of the deepest things I’ve heard on this show, and I’ve been doing this for 10 years.

Chris Dudley:
Wow. Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
No, seriously. It’s like you’re not just paying for my expertise and time; you’re paying for time away from the people that I care about. That’s deep. Wow. That resonated with me. Thank you. Wow.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah. And with that, if I could just compound on top of that, it’s where, obviously with projects, you’re not paid in hourly sense, but a lot of people understand the concept of getting paid hourly. So, if you ask the person that, would you not spend time with your family for five bucks an hour? Most people would say no. And so, if you just keep going up the ladder with the amount, there may be a threshold where people would think about it. But that starts to help you to appreciate that there’s a value add there. That I’m not just going to not spend time with my family and exclusively give mental and emotional energy to your project for any amount. No, there’s a value thing to that.

Also, like we touched on earlier, I forget the book that I read, but they said that don’t spend time doing something that you could pay someone else minimum wage to do. Obviously, when we’re starting out, and that’s what has almost changed my brain. And that’s what made me, like we talked about earlier, we put together a team. And I’ve got assistants and people that handle that because it just doesn’t make sense for me to do something that I could pay someone 10, 15, 20, 30 bucks an hour to do when, my time, I could be doing something that makes way more than that. You get what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, it doesn’t add up. But a lot of people think, “Well, I’m giving away money. I can keep that.” Yeah, but your time is a non-renewable resource, so you got the time that you do sell, it’s got to be at the right price.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and I think that becomes even more important, especially when you have a family, when you start getting older, when other members of your family start getting older. There’s no amount of money that can buy that time back.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look back at your career, is there a particular moment or a particular experience that stands out to you the most?

Chris Dudley:
Man, I have a few. And one, I would say, is when I get an award at a juried art exhibition here at Downtown Grand Rapids. That was a very nice privilege. And like I mentioned, starting out with Dudley Graphics, and my drawing ability was not up to par by any means, any stretch. And so, to work hard to improve my understanding of light and shadow and composition and all of that, to get to the point where to be accepted into the juried exhibition again. And you’re paying to have your artwork reviewed and they can just send a no. To get accepted, to get the award, to have my work purchased and so forth, that was a milestone where I felt, “Okay, I’m pretty good at this.” Then it really gave me the confidence that I can take this to other levels.

Maurice Cherry:
What’s the most important lesson you say you’ve learned throughout your career as an artist?

Chris Dudley:
Again, sounds cliche, but to truly stay humble. Humility is something that can slip away. And that’s why I say it’s stay humble because it can be a constant fight for all of us. You’re this imperfect person, but to really strive to maintain humility and never stop learning in your craft. And so, even when I meet with clients now, I tell them, I say, “Yes, you’re hiring me because I have a skillset that you don’t have, but I want to do what’s in the best interest of the project, not what’s in my best interest.”

So, if you have an idea, even though you can’t draw, please tell me. If you can defend your idea, because I’m looking at as an illustrator, I need to be able to defend my choices that I make artistically that, oh, the composition is this way because of that, that way because of this. But if someone shoots an idea to me and I realize that your idea is better than the one I had, hey, let’s make the change to make the project better.

So, that humility, even the face of you have a skillset that someone else doesn’t have, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t suggest something that’s better. So, that’s what I really strive for. And never stop learning. I feel like I’m decent at drawing and I’ve been learning this craft since I was a little kid. And some days, it feels like I can’t draw. Like, “Man, what are you doing?” And other days it’s like, “Oh, you’re pretty good. You got this.” But yeah, never stop learning and never think you just got it down.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, all of your daughters can draw too. Is that right?

Chris Dudley:
Yes. I jokingly what they say, joking but not joking. I made them learn how to draw, and there were times with each one of them. My oldest is almost 20, almost 20, 16 and 15. And they would see me drawing and I would teach them how to draw. I didn’t tell them that it looked good when it didn’t when they were young. I didn’t crush their feelings, but if something was off, I told them. I didn’t just put it on the refrigerator just because they drew it type of thing.

There were times with all of them that there were tears. And I would ask them, “Do you really want to learn how to do this?” And with tears in their eyes, each one of them, it’s like, “Yes, I do, daddy.” And it’s like, “Okay, you see that the eye is crooked. How do we fix it?” And it’s helped them to really grow. And if I could share just a brief story with that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Chris Dudley:
When I was teaching my oldest how to read, it dawned on me that this is hard because if you can picture this, you know how we write, the kid learns how to write the alphabet. What I did was, so to make an A, there’s three lines that you use to make an A, right? Then there’s one line and two bumps to make a B. And this curve line to make a C. So, what I did was I wrote an A, but I kept all the lines. Just imagine doing the first line on this part of the page. Second line over here. And I did the whole alphabet that way on a piece of paper and it looked like a jumbled mess.

But then I thought that I’m asking my daughter to figure this out, learn how to put the lines together, so that they can make all the letters. Then we asked them to learn the name of the letters, the sound of the letters, how to put them together to make a word, how to put those together to make a sentence, a paragraph, and then you got to do it with math. And I thought, “Man, learning how to draw is easier.” Then the thing, Maurice, is that there’s no reference for that. They have to learn it though.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, you have to.

Chris Dudley:
And so, when it hit me that, okay, if you can learn how to read, how to write and how to do math, you can learn how to draw. Then this is a soapbox of mine, but I won’t belabor it. But when I realized that, I realized, okay, my girls can learn how to draw. They’re going to learn how to draw at least the basics.

And another thing, at a class that I got to teach, and I’ll keep this short, is that I told someone, they said, “Well, no, it’s just a talent.” I said, “Well, yeah, you can have a little bit of ability, but it gives you maybe a one to three out of a 10.” But I said, “We make kids for 13 plus years learn how to read, learn how to write and learn how to do math. Everything else is optional. If we made you from kindergarten to 12th grade, you had to draw every year and you were tested on it, everybody would leave school knowing how to draw at least decently.”

But if your kid said, “Ah, it’s hard.” You say, “Okay, quit. Let’s try and play saxophone or try soccer.” But if your kid says, “I’m struggling with reading,” you’re going to learn how to read and we make them do it. And so, that dawned on me. I was like, “Okay, my girls will learn how to draw.”

Maurice Cherry:
I really like that way of looking at it. And you’re right. I mean, as kids we start off with, I think, a lot of applied art education. In kindergarten and whatever, there’s finger painting, there’s drawing and there’s coloring. I remember being in elementary school and we would get these sheets of paper that have it’s blank at the top, and then there’s lined rules at the bottom for writing. And you had to draw something at the top and then tell the story at the bottom of it.

I actually still have them. I still kept all of my mine from being a kid. But the older I got, I remember art stuff just kept getting phased out, phased out, phased out. I had taken gifted courses. I think they called it enrichment back then, but they were gifted courses. And it felt like those were the only times when I got to do something that felt creative because everything else was towards some specific application. Like you’re learning English to learn how to read and how to write. You’re learning math for those applications and stuff like that.

And just the older you get, even if you are really into art and drawing and stuff like that, it’s increasingly treated as a hobby and not as also a fundamental thing to understand. It’s just the world that we live in because as you alluded to, well, you didn’t allude to this really in the interview, but before that we talked about this, everything is designed. Everything that we use in the modern world has went through some lens or filter of design in some capacity. The chair we sit in, the clothes we wear, the picture we write with.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
All of those are designed. And because we interact with these designed things on such a regular basis, almost on a subconscious basis, we know when something is not designed well.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
We know when this pen is bad or this shirt doesn’t feel right. We know that. We may not have the language for it, sort of speaking what we talked about with English and math and stuff, because that’s not really taught to us as we get older.

Chris Dudley:
So true. So true. And I remember someone asked me, “Oh, what do you do?” I said, “I draw and do illustration.” And the look on her face. And she said this to me, man. She said, “You might as well have told me you could fly. You can draw?” And she was just so shocked. And I’m like, “Yeah, I’ve been drawing and learning this for decades.” But what I’ve found is that artists, well, specifically with visual artists, we’ve done it before there was any incentive to do it. And so, that’s what I think makes it so amazing.

It’s like when someone sees someone that can do back flips and do all this stuff, but they’re not in the Olympics, they’re not getting paid. It’s like, “Wow, how did you learn how to do all that?” They did it because they loved it. And another point I’ll make is that it shows that, if you’re given the right incentive and you can do it because of the right incentive, that shows that you could do it all along.

I’ll use the example sometime. Usain Bolt, fastest man. He’s run the 100 meters in 9.58, I think it was. Now, if someone says, “Hey, I need you to do that in a year. You need to be able to run a sub-10 100 meters. I can’t do it. Right? There’s no amount of money. I can’t do it. But if someone says, “Okay, I need you to learn how to draw by next year decently and I’m going to give you $10 million.” What happens? You start practicing every single day. And guess what? At the end of the year, you’re going to be pretty decent at drawing and get that $10 million, which means you could do it all along, but you didn’t have the incentive.

Yeah, so as artists, we learn. We love it, so you learn how to do it and then later, you make a few dollars from it. And it seems amazing because most people, like you said, they veer off that creative path. Then you get older where you need money, and then I haven’t learned how to draw, so no one’s going to pay me with the skillset I have now. So, I got to go work over here and make some money. But yeah, it’s a awesome thing. Everybody can learn how to draw, but it’s cool being one of the few in the world that can.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you have a dream project or something that you love to do one day?

Chris Dudley:
Dream project? Well, actually, one of my dream projects is a book that I wrote. The book that I just finished up, I’m the author and illustrator and the collaborator with Michael Chambers. He’s featured in the book, but I’m actually the author and the illustrator of the book. So, it’s my book per se. But my dream book, actually, I wrote a couple of years ago, and I have just got around to illustrating my own work. This one is called Duddles and the Big Dilemma, and it is a book about that very thing we just discussed about learning to draw and how everybody thinks it’s magical, but it’s more work than just talent.

And it’s amazing to me is that in the book and it explains it, no one says you’re just an amazing gifted plumber or an amazing gifted carpenter or you just naturally know how to whatever. But when it comes to the arts, people want to put this fairy dust on it. Whereas, what is it, I think Malcolm Gladwell is in his book Outliers, he said that you’ve never seen someone who is good, but they haven’t put into practice, in the work, deliberate practice.

And so, that’s one of my dream projects is to finish that, the illustrations for it and really get that book out there. It’s called Duddles and the Dilemma. Well, I won’t want to give a lot away. I’m going to finish this project probably within the next year or so, and there’s a series to the book as well. But it’s about him realizing that it’s not all fairy dust. You got to put in work to learn to draw. It’s not a magical thing, and that’s just the truth of it. And a lot of people don’t want to believe that, but I wish there was just a download that gave me all this knowledge that I’ve learned over the last 30 plus years. I wish it was that easy, but yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So, to that end, what do you see as the next chapter of your career? What do you want to do in the next five years or so? What do you see yourself?

Chris Dudley:
Yeah. Well, more books. Right now, as I mentioned, we just launched the book with Michael Chambers, Lil’ Boogaloo Shrimp and the Clean Sweep. And so, I see the direction of doing more art talks and events with kids. We are actually partnering with a nonprofit here locally. I mentioned about the breakdancing school there in Georgia, but there’s one in Colorado that we’re going to be touching base with. And so, I think that’s going to really be exploding. We’ve already talked to Rockwell Dance Academy about a book project, and so, that’s on the horizon. And in the next couple of years, just more books. More books, man.

Maurice Cherry:
More books. Well, just to wrap things up here, Chris, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work, about the books? Where can they find that information online?

Chris Dudley:
Well, my website is chrisdudleyart.com and that’s where you can see my portfolio, my body of work and anybody can reach out and contact me directly through that. But my books are available through hudsondawnpublishing.com that I’m connected with, hudsondawnpublishing.com. And that’s where all of the books that I’ve illustrated are available. And that’s been awesome being connected with them. I actually designed the logo. And my oldest daughter, she launched the publishing company. She put a team together. I was joking around about it, designed a logo. She launched it during the pandemic. Got with an artist and made a book and got it out. And I was like, “Wow.”

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Chris Dudley:
And so, since then she has worked with, wow, probably 10 authors. I’ve illustrated a lot of the books, but she’s working with, I think, five new authors right now and that’ll be on that site. So, yeah, it’s been awesome. She has printeries. It’s established printeries locally in Michigan actually, in the west and east side of the state. Got warehousing. So, she’s taken that to the next level beyond what I ever thought that could be.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s amazing. It’s a whole family operation. It’s a family affair.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, definitely, definitely. Yeah, hudsondawnpublishing.com.

Maurice Cherry:
Awesome.

Chris Dudley:
And actually, the recent book, you can read the intro of the book right there online.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Yeah, we’ll definitely put a link to that in the show notes.

Chris Dudley, I want to thank you so, so much for taking time out and coming on the show. I mean, it always warms my heart to talk to people that have been doing this kind of work for years on years on years because the longevity in just this industry is something that you don’t really see from Black creatives. You can get burned out. We can get discouraged, et cetera. And it really feels like you have found a method and a calling and a passion in this work, and you found a way to not only sustain it for yourself, but also for your family and for the community that you’re in.

I think that is something that is super inspiring. I think any artist wants to make sure that their work has an impact in the world. And most certainly, I can tell just from your passion about it and how you talk about it and just the quality of the work, that you’re making an impact in the world with everything that you do. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Chris Dudley:
Well, thank you for having me. It’s been such a privilege. I truly appreciate and look forward to touching base with you soon.

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Chris Burnett

I think my conversation with this week’s guest — artist, musician, and designer Chris Burnett — is probably the most chill interview I’ve done this year. Don’t be fooled though — Chris is a creative dynamo, and someone you should definitely keep your eyes out for in the future.

We start off with a quick talk about the creative scene in Los Angeles, and from there he talks about being an artist at heart and how his current editorial design projects have been keeping him active. Chris also talked about growing up as a skate kid, attending Cal Arts, and scoring lucrative gigs including a stint with Nike, as well as designing for Odd Future. Chris calls himself a creative superhero, and if you trust your heart and spirit, so can you!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Chris Burnett:
Hi, my name is Chris Burnett. I’m an artist, designer, musician, pretty much all around creative soul. It’s hard to peg me down.

Maurice Cherry:
How’s the year been going for you so far?

Chris Burnett:
This year and probably for most people, it’s been a very much transition year, buckling down on the things that I really want to be focusing on and being more selective with my time and my energy and my creative focus. So, it’s been good to narrow down the path of where I’m headed. It also coincides with me turning 30 in two weeks.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, it’s the beginning of a new decade, a new chapter. So, things have been shifting, but in a good way.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s good. What would you say you’ve learned about yourself since last year?

Chris Burnett:
I’ve learned that I’m an artist at heart. That’s ultimately what I really want to do with my life and my creativity. I’ve been doing graphic design at this point for maybe eight years professionally. As much as I enjoy working with clients and collaborating on projects, there’s this burning desire in me to just be the artist that I want to be, have gallery shows, release albums, have more maybe design collaborations with companies and do things like that. So, yeah, things are in the works, things are in the works. It feels good to head towards the ultimate dream.

Maurice Cherry:
Is L.A. a good city for that kind of creative collaboration? I feel like it is.

Chris Burnett:
Well, yeah, I mean, L.A. is such an interesting creative scene, because you get people who come here from all over the world to pursue what they want to pursue. So, I’m constantly meeting people from all different walks of life, different types of creatives, whether that be musicians, other designers, other artists. So, it is pretty good for that. Although a lot of my work does come from people just reaching out to me by email and the collaboration happens more in a digital space, but I’m opening myself up more to relationships that I’m developing in the city. So, I have people that I can actually meet with in person and maybe visit their studios and see what they’re doing. So, yeah, if you wanted to find it in L.A., you could, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. We just had a fine artist on the show a few weeks ago in L.A. His name is Gabe Gault. I don’t know if that name sounds familiar.

Chris Burnett:
I haven’t heard of him.

Maurice Cherry:
He painted the world’s largest mural in Toledo, Ohio. I think it’s like an ongoing project, but he does a lot of fine art work. I don’t know if you’re familiar with football, but his dad is Willie Gault-

Chris Burnett:
Oh, wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… who played for the Rams. Don’t get me talking about sports. I don’t know that much, but I do know that. It’s funny because I interviewed him and he kept throwing out like, “Yeah, my dad does sports. He’s in NFL and won a few Super Bowls.” I was like, “Okay.” It didn’t click to me after the interview to be like, “Wait a minute, who is his dad? Oh, it makes sense, because they have the same last name.” Yeah, I can imagine that L.A. is a really great place for that creative collaboration. We’ve been seeing so much Black creativity come out of L.A., I think largely, due to Issa Rae and Kendrick Lamar and folks like that. We’ve seen a lot of what feels like specifically Black L.A. creativity.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, I’m loving every bit of it. I was just watching Insecure yesterday. I think I caught up on the latest episode, but just to see that creativity coming out of the neighborhoods that I grew up in feels like finally we’re getting the recognition that is well-deserved.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So, talk to me about Colibri Studios. That’s a studio that you began last year. Is that right?

Chris Burnett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, I started Colibri Studios in the middle of last year. It was right when everything went into lockdown, actually, which seems like it would be the least opportune moment to do it, but there’s an interesting story to how I went about it. I was in New York. I was visiting a friend of mine, and I’ve been working on a necklace design. I found this charm that I really liked to go in the end of the necklace, and it had a hummingbird in it. It was the first time I was designing a chain and I was really excited about it.

Chris Burnett:
The hummingbird has special significance to me, because of the way that the animal moves throughout its life. It’s not really in your face. It’s secretive. But when you do see a hummingbird, it’s like this moment for you to be present with it and admire it. That’s how I feel about myself. I’m not really in the public eye per se. I’m not too show-offy. But when I do come around people, I make my presence felt. Honestly, I always see them, which is the weirdest thing. I’ll just be walking down the street and one will fly right in front of me. I’m like, “All right, there’s some weird connection here.” So yeah, I was designing this necklace.

Chris Burnett:
I get back from New York and the necklace is ready to be picked up. I get it and I’m so happy with the design that I thought, “That’s the logo. That’s the logo for the studio.” This was before I even really conceived of starting a studio. But once I had the necklace done, that was the moment where it was like, “Okay, this is a step in a new direction that you need to take.”

Chris Burnett:
It became more clear to me over time that I wanted to create a studio that really just was an umbrella for all of my creative endeavors, whether that be music, fine art, design. I found an office space in West Hollywood. I woke up one morning. It was on Craigslist, found the space. The first one I clicked on was the one that I’m actually in now. It all came together step by step. So, there wasn’t really a big plan that I was conscious of. It was more these little moments that led to the establishment of the studio. So, that’s what it is right now at this point.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, you mentioned it being this umbrella. I went on your website. You’re doing art direction, you’re doing graphic design, you’re doing collage and mixed media work. Again, you mentioned music being part of that as well. What made you decide to do such a broad range of services, as opposed to just graphic design?

Chris Burnett:
Well, I’ve always had this desire to really just be into one thing, but that’s just not how my life works. There’s so many creative outlets, and I’ve never felt limited to stick to just one. So, anything that I pursue, I want to do it to the best of my ability. If I can provide those services for other people, whether that’s producing music for people or working on an ad campaign for someone or just creating my own artwork that will eventually show in a gallery, I just wanted it to feel like it was a part of one family. So, that’s why I wanted to include all these different artistic mediums in it.

Maurice Cherry:
Talk to me about how you approach a new project. What does your process look like?

Chris Burnett:
Well, it really depends on the context of the project. So, if we can start with a typical design project, I’ll get an email from a random person. I’m always amazed by how people find me because I’m not on Instagram or social media. I’m hidden, right? So, I’ll just get an email out of the blue. Someone’s saying, “Hey, we think you might be great for this project we’re working on.” We move forward with a brief, which is them giving me a document of what they’re looking for and maybe the end deliverables and the goals that they want to hit. And then I get to work.

Chris Burnett:
The process of me actually getting to work is not really standardized in the sense that I don’t have a list of things that I do every time I start a project. It’s really based on feeling and it’s more intuitive, because it allows me to be a bit more spontaneous with the end product. If I had the same process every time, I feel like it might be too stale for me and I might come up with the same thing too much. So, I allow for space in between projects for me to just sit and think about new directions or think about things I want to explore and then try to align those new things with what a client might be asking. Typically, it works out.

Chris Burnett:
For the most part, a client will ask for what I’m already good at. They don’t really ask for things that are completely outside of my wheelhouse. That allows me to use the skills that I already have, but then push it in a little bit of a new direction. Sometimes that creates a back and forth where there’s notes and there’s feedback, of course. And then sometimes I hit it right on the head and people are happy with what I create first try. So, it really depends on the project that I’m being asked to work on.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I would also imagine, because like you said, you’re not on social media and folks have to go to your website and look through your work. By the time they’ve done that, hopefully, that’s a pretty good metric for you to see that this is someone that you would possibly want to work with. I’m pretty sure you have, but I don’t know. Have you ever gotten the client that has just been completely not a fit?

Chris Burnett:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yes. It’s funny, because me and one of my designer buddies, we always have this joke that what we show on our website is typically the type of work that we want to receive, which is why we put it there. But there definitely will be times where someone will hit me up and just be like, “Hey, I need you to design just a simple logo.” It’s not that I can’t design a logo, but that’s not really where my skillset lies and my strengths are.

Chris Burnett:
So, I can do it, but then the process becomes a little muddied when it’s not something that I’m too passionate about. They’re maybe expecting the crazy, colorful collage type stuff, but it’s a logo. So, I can’t really do that for a logo. Yeah, there have been moments where it doesn’t work, but I’m learning which projects to say yes and no to now that I’ve been doing this for so long.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. What are some of the projects that you’re working on now?

Chris Burnett:
So, a lot of the things that I’ve been doing now is a lot of editorial illustration, which I’ve found that that really suits my strengths really well. It’s mostly image making, which is my favorite thing in the world to do is just create a compelling image to look at. So, when you pair that with an article for, say, The New York Times or the Guardian, that’s where I get to really flex my abilities. Over the past year, I’d probably gotten the most editorial illustration work than I ever have.

Chris Burnett:
There’s also a lot of merch design, merchandise design for artists in the music industry. That’s always ongoing. There’s always artists who need things to sell on the road or sell on their website. I help with a lot of that stuff. Some of its like under wraps because people don’t want to release info about music projects that they might be doing. But yeah, most stuff in the music industry and editorial illustration, I’d say, are my two big ones.

Maurice Cherry:
Is there a specific type of client that you prefer to work with?

Chris Burnett:
I’m always open to new types of clients, people that I haven’t worked with before just to be able to stretch myself and see, “What industries can I adapt my creativity towards?” But I think I do love working in the music industry. It’s fun to work with artists that you admire. It’s fun to work with artists that you’re playing their music in your car when you’re driving around and you get to work on something that’s for their project. It’s fun to be a part of things like that. I love editorial. I don’t know what it is about it. It’s just the pairing of an image with an article is like a dream project. It’s like they’re little, tiny dream projects, because they’re really quick and the turnaround time is super-fast, usually within a week or a couple days.

Chris Burnett:
It’s typically within those industries like editorial that there’s a little more room for creative freedom, because they’re trying to see how you would interpret the article and how that article maybe is reflected in your style and your own sensibility. So, that’s why I like it a lot, because there’s not too many notes. There’s not too much canceling of ideas. It’s very open ended, which I love.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. I don’t know why for some reason, I would imagine working with musicians might be temperamental, but I guess like you said, if it’s an artist that you really like, it probably makes it a bit of an easier match.

Chris Burnett:
Well, that’s a good point. I mean, they’re definitely artists I’ve worked with in the past who are artists. An artist comes in mind a lot. There’s a certain temperament like you said that goes along with it. But I think the reason that I enjoy it and the reason I think I’m able to do it is because I am also an artist, so I understand that sensibility. It allows me to be as flexible as I need to be when working with them. It also informs my own practice of how I go about my music or my art as well. So, it’s fun. It’s a double-edged sword for sure, but I do like it.

Maurice Cherry:
I just want to say to the audience, I don’t know if Chris is being a little humble now, but his music is really good. It’s really good.

Chris Burnett:
Thank you, thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
With your permission, I’d like to link to your SoundCloud because I was doing research for the interview and I just put the music on. I was like, “This is good. This is good.” I was like, “I can hear this on Insecure. I can hear this on Insecure. It’s pretty good.”

Chris Burnett:
Oh, man. I would love for that to happen, but this is their final season. I’m so sad. Yeah, but thank you. I really appreciate that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, no, I guess to that end, talking about Black art and things like that, we started to see over the past few years that with this influx in Black television shows and movies and stuff, we’re really starting to see a much wider range of artists, not just musical artists, but visual artists and stuff portrayed through these works. We had Gabe Gault who I mentioned before on the show, and he’s mentioned that his work has been in a television show. We had Dawn Okoro, who’s an artist in Austin. Her work has been on a BT show.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m wondering, because we hear so much about this Black creative renaissance and you hear about it through these visual artists, does that exposure help you in any way? I don’t know. Has your work been out there in that way where you feel like you’ve got an exposure because it’s been amplified through, say, a musical artist or something like that?

Chris Burnett:
Not necessarily. I guess this is a little hard to explain and this is the whole point of the studio, which is funny, is that because I think the hummingbird is such a secretive animal and it’s very hidden, because it’s so small and it moves really fast, I’ve settled into the idea that my work doesn’t necessarily exist in a public space as much as it could and I’m okay with that. I think when the time comes, some more visibility might help. But in the meantime, I still get to work with the people I love working with. Whether I’m publicly associated with them or not is not really what I’m focusing on. It’s just, “How do we make the best possible thing for this person? Or if it’s for me, how do I make the best possible thing for myself and share it?”

Chris Burnett:
I mean, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t had moments where my work was recognized and especially recognized for the culture. There was an article in The New York Times Magazine, I think this was last year, I’m not too sure, but by Isabel Wilkerson. She just wrote a book called Caste that explores the idea of racism, but not through a racist ideology. It’s through a caste system, which is a whole another way of looking at it. I did these two collage pieces for the article in The Times. It was heavily centered around Black imagery and police brutality. That was the first time that I actually incorporated imagery into my work.

Chris Burnett:
It was a very enlightening moment, because I did the collages by hand. I was cutting out images of MLK hanging out with Mahatma Gandhi. I was cutting out images of African American men on the floor with police pointing guns at their heads. It was the first time that I started to have my work speak in a way that was relevant to what was actually happening. That was really eye-opening for me and that led me down a whole new trajectory with my art. But in those instances, I really enjoy when I can speak to what’s happening in the now and speak to the culture.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve just always been really curious about that, because I want to make sure… I mean, I’m saying this like I’m the singular person that can make this happen, but I want to see that Black artists, visual artists, graphic artists, particularly with their work being featured in entertainment get just as much shine as the show that the artists featured on or the actor that might be in front of the art and the piece. I don’t know. Something like that, it’s making me think of… Are you familiar with Brent Rollins? Does that name sound familiar?

Chris Burnett:
No. Who’s Brent Rollins?

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, my God. So, Brent Rollins, so he was on episode 400, but Brent Rollins is like… I forget the moniker that I saw when I was researching, but it was like your favorite hip-hop artist’s favorite designer or something like. He designed the logo for Boys in the Hood when he was, I think, 19. He designed the logo for Poetic Justice when he was 20. He was rolling in that crew with Ice Cube and John Singleton back in the day. He did a bunch of work in the ’90s and 2000s Ego Trip. God, I can’t remember the name of the magazine. It’s escaping me but it’s episode 400 if people are listening. Go back and listen to it.

Chris Burnett:
Hell yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
There were these shows on VH1. One was called Race-O-Rama. One was called… I think it was White rapper showcase or something or a reality show or something like that. He had his hand in all these really interesting things around hip hop culture, but it was through his design and eye. So, a lot of stuff that you see in Vibe Magazine and stuff for the ’90s and 2000s was heavily influenced by him and his work. He is such a cool ass, behind-the-scenes dude.

Maurice Cherry:
Him and I were talking. He was like, “Yeah, man, I did this and did this. I exhibited here and there.” I was like, “Do you understand, I grew up on your work, watching your stuff, looking at your stuff at Vibe magazine, be like I want to design like that?”, and was just being so humble about it. I knew who he was because I ended up doing the research on it, but I don’t think the average hip hop fan knows who Brent Rollins is. That’s not to say that diminishes Brent’s work in any way, but why is he not as recognized as artists from that time?

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, well, I think there’s a couple of levels to it. I think, on a larger scale, typically, designers are in the background, because the work is what speaks to the public, right? So, if I’m designing a logo for a company, my face isn’t going to be the face of the company, but the logo will, right? So, there’s never really been a need for the designer to be in the public eye as much as maybe the person who runs the company, or say, if you’re working for an artist, the artist is the one who is getting all the focus. So, the designer falls to the background.

Chris Burnett:
I think we’re starting to see a shift in that, especially in Black culture, with people like Virgil Abloh, who became almost like designer of the year for every year for a long time at this point. But he came from Kanye’s group, and he started to create the idea that designer can be the public figure also and not just be the one that sits in the background. So, I think that tide is starting to shift and we’re starting to see it. It also happens in music too. Back then, producers were always just behind the boards and you never really knew who was producing the music, but now, the producers are just as big as some of the artists. So, we’re seeing that shift take place and I think that’s really cool. I don’t know if it’ll happen to me, but it’s all right. I don’t mind being in the shadows.

Maurice Cherry:
No, that’s true. I do hope to see that day where the designers and the visual artists get that same level of recognition or at least name recognition, where folks know. They look at something. You’re like, “Oh, that’s a Chris Burnett,” if they see a collage or something like that, that thing.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, I mean, I’m definitely developing a visual language and a style that feels really specific to me. So, there are certain recognizable aspects of my work. As I’ve ventured more into music, I’m definitely going to be presenting myself and my person out there. So, maybe the moment where the tide turns and this all becomes more public is right around the corner.

Maurice Cherry:
There you go.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
So, tell me what it was like growing up in L.A.

Chris Burnett:
Growing up in L.A., yeah, I grew up in South Central, specifically Manchester and Vermont for anyone who knows that area. It wasn’t really the best neighborhood at the time. There was a lot of gang violence, a lot of drugs. Police relations with the community were not great. Growing up, there definitely had an impact on me, although my parents were very, very careful in what they allowed me and my older brother to do. We weren’t really allowed to go outside after certain time. I didn’t really have many friends in the neighborhood, because that was the way that I could get caught up in some of the wrong stuff.

Chris Burnett:
So, a lot of my time was spent creating indoors, whether that was drawing or painting or my parents would put me in art classes at a pretty young age just to keep me occupied and doing something that I enjoyed versus running around my neighborhood, getting into trouble, like a lot of the kids who were there probably did. It wasn’t until I went to high school that I was taking the bus to high school to public transport. That was the first time I got a little taste of freedom. I started skateboarding at the same time. So, I would take the bus to skate parks and start to explore a little bit. That was when I really started to understand the neighborhood a little bit better.

Chris Burnett:
It wasn’t as dangerous as it was when I was a little kid, but yeah, it definitely influenced my practice and my behavior in terms of I like the area I grew up in, because to me, it feels real. It feels very honest. Where I live now is actually a completely different environment. At this point, I’m not sure that I want to stay there as much, because every time I go home to visit my folks, it’s like, “Oh, I actually really liked this neighborhood.”

Chris Burnett:
Maybe I was scared of it when I was a kid, but now I’m an adult and I know how to move. Certain things become illuminated when you’re in different stages of your life. So, back then, it was a little intimidating, but now it’s more enticing, especially they just built the big stadium in Inglewood. That’s 10 minutes from where I grew up. So, there are things that are happening in that area that wouldn’t necessarily happen. Resources are coming back down there, which I think is great. So, I might move down. Who knows? We’ll see.

Maurice Cherry:
L.A. is so big.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, man.

Maurice Cherry:
I was there actually, for the first time last year. We were set to do a live tour throughout 2020 last year. We started off in L.A. and did our first live show out there.

Chris Burnett:
Nice.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I live in Atlanta, which is pretty spread out, but L.A. is gargantuan in terms of scale. I was in the Korea Town neighborhood initially and then we did the live show. We did that down in Leimert Park, but I didn’t really get to see L.A. I saw a couple of neighborhoods.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, yeah, there’s always the pockets that people go to, but there’s a lot of hidden treasures in this city. It takes time. It takes time of living here or just having the time to explore. You got to have a car. You got to drive everywhere. But yeah, it’s massive. It’s massive, massive, massive, massive.

Maurice Cherry:
So, you grew up studying art. You were taking art classes and everything. Eventually, you went to college. You went to CalArts. What was that experience like?

Chris Burnett:
CalArts, for me, was extremely transformative. At this point, I was coming out of high school. I took a graphic design course in high school. So, that’s how I knew that’s what I wanted to study in college. So, I applied to a couple different art schools in California. I didn’t really want to leave the state. The minute I stepped on the CalArts Campus for a tour is the minute that I knew that was the place I needed to be. I didn’t really even do that much research, I’ll be honest, but the feeling I got when I arrived there, it felt like I definitely made the right decision.

Chris Burnett:
The thing that I loved about that school was that there were so many disciplines in one roof. There was acting, there was costume design, there was character animation, there’s graphic design, there’s fine arts, there was music, there was set design. There was all kinds of creative people who come from all over the world to study and perfect their craft. So, that period of time really opened my eyes to all the things that maybe I didn’t get to experience growing up, especially because my parents were really careful about what I was exposed to. Once I got to CalArts, it was like, “Oh, I’m an individual now. I’m going to do it or what. I can explore. I can see what life really has to offer.”

Chris Burnett:
It was in a bubble of CalArts, but still, within that bubble, there were so many different pockets to explore. A lot of the friends I have now are people from that school. A lot of the people that I try to keep in touch with creatively are people from that school. It was just a really transformative time. I think it really allowed me to grow up. I’ve always been the youngest one in my friend circles. I have funny stories.

Chris Burnett:
When I got to CalArts, I still maybe looked like a 13-year-old or 14-year-old. It was very strange. People would walk up to me and say, “Do you go here? Are you lost?” I’m like, “No, man, I’m headed to the movie class right now.” It was really interesting. It was that time for me to grow up and grow into myself. I wouldn’t trade those four years for the world. Even though I picked up some student debt from it, we all have a little bit of that.

Maurice Cherry:
Is that where you met Bijan?

Chris Burnett:
That’s where I met Bijan, yeah. So, Bijan was my classmate all four years. What happens at CalArts in the design program is that you share a studio. In the graphic design program, you share a studio with your entire year level. So, there were about 19 to maybe 21 of us in our first year, which was pretty large for an incoming class. Bijan was in that class with me. We actually met the day we had a portfolio review. We didn’t know each other. We were just both coming from our high schools and trying to show our work to get accepted. He was literally standing in line right in front of me. Lo and behold, we both got accepted and ended up in the same class.

Chris Burnett:
Bijan was and still is one of my best friends. He became this creative rival, but in the best way possible, where if he was doing something, I would see what he’s doing and be like, “Oh, that’s really good. Okay, now I got to do something that’s really good.” And then he would see what I was doing and it would level him up and then he would level me up. We ping pong off each other like that until we graduated.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. It’s good to have that creative tension in a way, I guess.

Chris Burnett:
For sure. I’m really competitive. So, whether it’s in sports or in making a cool poster, I feel that edge or that desire to want to be the best and bring the best out of myself and others. So, we really thrived on that with each other.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. For folks that are listening, who are like, “Who is Bijan?” Bijan Berahimi founded… Actually, YouTube co-founded FISK together. Is that right?

Chris Burnett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Maurice Cherry:
A studio called FISK, like the HBCU but not the HBCU.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, not the college. Everybody knows. So, this came about in our first year. It’s actually a collaboration between a bunch of our classmates. We wanted to create a website where we could showcase student work and just have a digital space for us to talk about design as students. A lot of us contributed to the website. We had a thing called Things We’ve Stolen, which was posters that we stole from the walls of CalArts. We would feature them on the website. There’s a large poster culture at that school. We would interview other designers who were working professionally and ask them questions about the transition from student life to professional life.

Chris Burnett:
We would have zines, where we asked students in the program to submit artwork, and then we would throw a party for the zine release. It was a myriad of things when we were in school. After we all graduated, we settled into our own pockets and practices. Bijan decided to resurrect FISK in Portland, and that’s when it became the studio. I wasn’t a part of inauguration of the studio per se, but the initial idea was a very collaborative thing. It still is to this day. He runs it out of Portland and has a couple employees and they’re doing great.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Speaking of Portland, after you graduated, you did eventually head to Portland, because you had an opportunity with Nike, which we’ll get to, but you had another opportunity that happened to you senior year where you got to work with a pretty well-known music group. Can you talk about that?

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, it’s actually a crazy story about how that happens. So, my third year of college, we had a project that was to design a magazine of a subculture, any subculture of our choice. I decided at that point, I wanted to focus on Odd Future because they had just started to gain a little traction. I think they were doing most of their stuff independently. It was something that I really resonated with, because of that DIY spirit and because they were from where I was from. It was just cool to see kids like me doing cool stuff. So, I decided to make my magazine about Odd Future.

Chris Burnett:
I designed the whole thing, printed the whole thing. I gave it to my brother, who was friends with Travis, who used to go by Taco, just so they could see it and be aware of me. I don’t know if Travis ever got the magazine. I have no idea where the magazine was. I would love to see it because it’s been so long. But I did that in hopes that that would be my connection point with them. So, they can know that I’m over here doing my thing. They’re over there doing their thing. Nothing really came of that. So, by the time fourth year came around, I was setting my sights on other jobs and other opportunities.

Chris Burnett:
Randomly, on a trip to Joshua Tree with Bijan, I get an email in the car from a guy who’s running an agency that’s handling all of Odd Future’s merchandising and branding and things like that. He goes, “Hey, Chris, I saw your work. Would you love to come work for Odd Future?” I was like, “What, a year later, what?” It was so random and I was not expecting it, but immediately, I said yes. So, that was midway through the end of my time at CalArts. I started interning there. So, I would have class. After class, I would get in my car and drive all the way back down to L.A. to work with them for a couple of hours, come back to school, do my schoolwork.

Chris Burnett:
That was a balance that I struck at the end of my fourth year until I graduated and then I just started working for them full time. That was a crazy experience for me. It was one of those dream moments where these are artists that I really respect and admire. They’re doing really cool things musically, visually. Just the fact that I got to be a part of it for that span in my life was pretty amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a dope story. I mean, when you think of Odd Future and of course, Tyler the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt and-

Chris Burnett:
Jasper Dolphin.

Maurice Cherry:
Jasper Dolphin.

Chris Burnett:
Hodgy Beats, Left Brain, yeah, all the OGs.

Maurice Cherry:
When you think of their whole persona, it’s so hard to pin down. I feel like you could just say, “Oh, Black Skater,” or whatever, but it’s so much more than that. I think particularly Tyler, I remember Tyler had this show on Vice a few years ago called Nuts and Bolts.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, I love that show.

Maurice Cherry:
He was doing all these different design things. He’s like, “Oh, I’m designing apparel, I’m designing a shoe or something like that. I’m designing furniture.” He was doing all this interesting design stuff. This was going on, I think, right around the time there was also this reality show on YouTube that I’ve mentioned on the show before called Lace Up, which is basically, a sneaker design reality show contest thing. Because you know, there’s a PENSOLE Academy in Portland.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, yeah, definitely familiar.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So, Dr. D’Wayne Edwards, by the way, but he runs that school. He did this reality show on YouTube, where he was bringing in designers to design shoes and stuff. I remember, I would watch that and I would watch Nuts and Bolts and be like, “Why is nobody talking about these design shows?” I mean, their style is so hard for me to pinpoint. I think most people know Odd Future because of their donut logo. But what stuff were you doing? How did that creative process look like?

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, that was definitely wild for sure. I mean, by the time I started helping with a lot of the merchandise and the clothing, there was definitely a visual aesthetic that was already established. That was primarily Tyler’s ideas and the group’s ideas. When I hopped on board, there was definitely a lane to work within. There was definitely visuals that I could reference, things that I knew they liked, things that I knew they didn’t like to stay away from. So, a lot of the times, what would happen is I’d be in the office with… There was me. There’s another designer named Aaron Martinez, shout out to Aaron.

Chris Burnett:
There’s another designer named Phil, who handled mostly the Golf Wang stuff, which was separate from the Odd Future stuff at the time. So, they were the two creative directors, for me, at least. They would pinpoint where I should take things and what directions I should go in. But a lot of the time, the guys, the group of artists and the music makers and the whole clique would just show up at the office. We would have these meetings where they would just pitch ideas to us. I remember Jasper one time saying, “I want a dolphin on the Empire State Building smoking a blunt.” I just graduated with a design degree. I was like, “How am I going to do this weird photo manipulated illustration and pull this off and then put it on a T-shirt? This is wild. It’s so weird.” But I ended up doing it.

Chris Burnett:
It actually became one of my favorite pieces, even those one of the strangest things in the world. Yeah, they would just come in. We would print everything out, have these just big jam sessions of getting everyone’s thoughts and ideas and opinions. If they liked what we did, they would rock with it. If not, they would exit immediately and say, “Do this differently,” or “Do a different thing over here and maybe change the color of this and tweak this a little bit.” So, it was a super, super collaborative process and really wild to just hang out with them, because this was really at the peak of their stardom as a group. Super interesting, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Did you have an Odd Future name? Did they give you a name or something?

Chris Burnett:
No, this is another thing that contributes to me being in the shadows. I didn’t really try to infiltrate into the group like that. I knew that they were already so tight knit and close friends. I’ve never really been the type to try to eat off of someone else’s success. So, I purposefully was like, “It’s cool. I enjoy working with you guys. I enjoy creating these things for you, but I’m just going to take my place in the backseat and watch you guys do your thing.” It was so fun for me just to do that. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I can’t imagine how some of those design sessions might have went. Just the ideas and the crazy shit that they come up with I imagine is… I mean, I think for any really strong visual designer, that’s a dream to have a client or to have someone that has that creative capacity to just do whatever.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, it was definitely really freeing, especially to come from CalArts, which was a similar environment in terms of the freedom of creativity that we had in school and to have that as my first full time gig, I couldn’t ask for anything better. It was great.

Maurice Cherry:
So, after working with them, you got an opportunity to work with Nike, which then eventually had you go to Portland. If you could sum up your time at Nike in one phrase, what would it be?

Chris Burnett:
Oh, man. One phrase, working at Nike, you put me on the spot. I would say high level hierarchy.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Chris Burnett:
I mean, I might have to explain that a little bit. When I say high level, I guess I mean, the quality of work that was being produced and the scale of work, the amount of people that would see it, the amount of reach that it had, that’s what I mean by high level. When I say hierarchy, there’s such a system in play. It’s such a large corporate company like that, that sometimes creativity and new ideas are not necessarily accepted, because it doesn’t fall within the framework of what has been successful for them as a company. So, I’ve always understood that before I started working there, so I wasn’t going in thinking that it would be another Odd Future.

Chris Burnett:
I went in knowing that, okay, this is going to be a big place where there’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of things that I can’t control. There’s a lot of things that I don’t have any impact over. So, it was a humbling experience to be able to contribute my ideas to such a large and fast moving company, but then it also, for me, told me that that environment wasn’t necessarily the one that I wanted to be in for a long time in terms of work in the design world. But it was definitely a great learning experience to get my feet wet. Being a professional was cool.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, we’ve had a few designers on the show before that have worked at Nike and I don’t know if they all liked it. In a way, it’s good, because it’s like, “Oh, this is Nike.” Like you said, there is this high level reach, but each person we’ve had on has said, it’s not a great place to work.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, I mean, there’s certain aspects of it that are really difficult to stomach if you’re not capable of grinding it out. I think one of the bigger things that I had to do when I was there was just work a lot. When we needed to get a project done, we were up very late working on it on campus until it was done. It really instilled a good work ethic for me, but as far as being a sane human being, it did not contribute to that at all. So, yeah, that was a really difficult part of it, especially coming in as a young designer, who had new ideas and maybe I wanted to bring new innovations to the way they were thinking about design. It’s not that they didn’t want to listen. It’s that they already understood what works for them.

Chris Burnett:
So, for a group of young designers to come in and just shake everything up and try all these new things, it’s not really something they were looking for at the time. Now that Virgil cracked open the door with his initial The Ten collaboration, the shoes, where he was messing with the swoosh and change the game, putting it in different locations where they would never do that, it’s really opened the door for them to expand their creativity to a whole new level, which we’ve been seeing lately. But when I was there, it was still very much you play by the book, because this is the recipe that has worked for them.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, if they know that it’s going to work all these different times, we’re not really looking for any variations on that. They just need you to do the same thing.

Chris Burnett:
Right. At the end of the day, if we’re being honest, they’re a company, they’re a business, and they need to make money. So, if they’re experimenting too much and it messes with their stock price or some of the shareholders get upset, it’s going to trickle down. That’s what I mean by hierarchy is that there’s so many layers to it, that it’s really impossible as one designer to go in there and really have your voice heard, but to each their own.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. But I mean, like you say, because of the crucible that that design environment is, like you say, it’s strengthened your work ethic and I’m sure probably has helped you out in some way now as a designer, just having that experience working there.

Chris Burnett:
Oh, yeah, for sure. So, there were two stints that I did at Nike. The first one was in brand design for sportswear and that was my first experience there. Honestly, all of my co-workers were amazing people. I had a great time working with them. It was, like I said, grinding out a lot, just working hard on campaigns. We were doing the overarching branding system that would then be sent out to all the different categories around the world. They would apply what we designed to whatever product was being released. So, that was really cool to see that.

Chris Burnett:
And then the second stint was for the Olympics, for Rio ’16. That was wow. If I thought the first stint was crazy, the second one was… I don’t even know how I lasted, but it definitely helped put a work ethic into my brain. So, if I need to work on something, I will get it done. There’s no excuses. They always said at Nike, there’s no finish line. That’s one of the taglines. The reason I say that is work just keeps on going and innovation keeps on happening. Things don’t really stop. Even though we’re running, we’re putting our all in, things just keep moving and keep going and keep evolving. It’s a tough environment to be in if you’re not used to that type of pace of work. But if you’re down for it, it can really instill a good work ethic in you.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s how I was when I worked at AT&T. AT&T was one of these places, you walk in and they have this huge banner over their big marble reception desk that says, “Shaping human capital,” or something. You’d go and there would be this never-ending firehose of work. I think when we go in, we were always six months behind on something. Salespeople just kept selling and the work just kept coming in. So, you’re never caught up. We had, I think, roughly about 36 designers that were working there in teams of 12. They had this floor to ceiling LED board. So, everything that you design had a point value to it.

Chris Burnett:
No way.

Maurice Cherry:
As a designer, I think when I started, you have to hit 36 points at the end of the week and then eventually up to the 40. But everything you design had a point value. So, if you design a banner, that’s point nine points. If you design a three-page website, that’s five points. If you design a 10-pager, that’s nine points. So, you could hit your total pretty easily if you just design four websites in a week or something like that. I mean, this was 2006. You would pull the order from the system.

Maurice Cherry:
They have this system called Ice Blue. I don’t work there anymore. So, even if all this stuff is proprietary, I don’t care, but they have this thing called Ice Blue and you pull your rec. So, you have to go to a file cabinet, fish out the envelopes, this is my paper, fish out the envelopes that had all the assets in it. It was usually printed out Word files, scraps that the salespeople got from the company of their logo drawn on a napkin or something. You have to go to the scanner. I’m dating myself, you have to go to the scanner. There was one computer with the scanner for 36 designers.

Chris Burnett:
Oh, my God.

Maurice Cherry:
So, you had to go to the scanner, scan your stuff in, mail it to yourself, because we didn’t have Dropbox because it didn’t exist then. You mail it to yourself, you get back to your station, and then you have to trace it out. We were using Dreamweaver because it’s 2006. You basically had to build a website, retype all the information and everything. Eventually, you got faster because it’s one thing to do the actual coding and the design work and Photoshop and Illustrator, whatever, but then you’ve got all this other operational stuff you have to do like pull the rec and scan and do this and return the folder and walk it over to QA, physically walk it over to QA and all this stuff.

Maurice Cherry:
Eventually, you get better just in terms of speed. So, I could knock out four or five websites in a week. If I got the packet in the morning, I could finish it by lunch. And then I could pick up on that lunch and then finish it by the time I was ready to go home. Again, this was 2006. So, this was right around the time when table-based layout was being phased out and CSS layouts were being phased in. I mean, we fired some people because they couldn’t get it. They did not know how to convert the tables to CSS, so they weren’t getting it. We fired people.

Maurice Cherry:
God, this was a long, long time ago. But eventually, I like made a little CSS work template or something that I could easily just plop in and change the value so I could get quicker with it. I still use that to this day, principles from that. But it’s one of those things where if I wasn’t in that type of design environment, would I even know to do something like that? You know what I mean?

Chris Burnett:
Exactly, exactly. So, do you think that having the point system actually helped people stay on track in terms of what they needed to get done? Because I mean, that’s almost public accountability for the work that you have to do.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, yes and no. For some people, it really freaked them out. Because if you didn’t hit your number, because you could see how everyone on the team was doing at any given point in time. So, you could see what your number was and who was above you and who was below you. So, it was one thing for you to know the number but now everyone else knows your number. So, you’ll be sitting at lunch and someone will come and be like, “You got to get the numbers up.” Keep in mind, we only could take a 15-minute lunch. So, you have to wolf down your sandwich or whatever that you brought from home.

Maurice Cherry:
And there would just be random people, random supervisors that don’t even work on your team will just come by you. Points look a little low this week. I don’t need that kind of pressure. I’m trying to try to get the work done. I don’t know if it helped. I mean, certainly, it’s one of those things where you either cut it or you don’t, but you definitely knew at any given point in time where you stood. Eventually, it got to the point where they upped the amount of points you have to get and then they lowered the point value of the items. So, you have to crank out more work to get to a higher target. It was a mess. I left there and said, “I have to do my own thing.” I didn’t want to work for another place after that. I think similarly, when you left Nike, you started freelancing too. Is that right?

Chris Burnett:
Yes. So, between those two stints that I just mentioned, after the first one was when I decided to leave. I just had a nine-month contract, so I never actually took full time at Nike. I was what was called ETW, it’s like a temporary worker. My contract was up after nine months. I decided that I wanted to try my hand at freelancing, which is something I had never done before. The funny thing is even coming off of the new work ethic that I just developed, all the skills and connections that I had made, freelancing did not really work for me. I think it was because I lacked motivation to do so just because I was coming off of nine months of very, very grueling work. Having this time to set hours for myself, it made me not really want to do that much work and almost like take a vacation.

Chris Burnett:
So, in that period of time, I was focusing a lot on my music and a lot of my artwork, but I wasn’t really successful at the freelance thing. So, by the time the Rio Olympics had come around, the guy who wanted me to work with him on his team, Ibrahim Hassan, shout out to Ibrahim, he became my mentor in that moment. He wanted me to come back and work on the Olympics. So, that’s when I went back. That was even more grueling than the first time, but I learned so much more by working with him and working with our team that it was very much worth it for me to do it.

Chris Burnett:
But after that, I knew that that was it, that I couldn’t keep doing it. That’s when I went freelance. The second time around it, it clicked for me. I’m not necessarily sure what I changed. I think I was just more hungry to make it work, because it didn’t work the first time.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. I mean, I think, with freelancing, for me, when I first started out, I left in late 2008, I just quit my job. I was like, “I can’t do this anymore,” and started my studio. I’d say maybe those first three or four months were rough, because even though I was like, “I got all the skills, I know people XYZ,” finding the work ended up being difficult. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t do it. It was just finding the right clients.

Maurice Cherry:
And then eventually, I did end up working for a client. It was a political client. And then working on that campaign kickstarted my studio and kept me going. If I wouldn’t have gotten into that, I don’t know if I would have continued freelancing. I don’t want to say I have to link up with someone. But once you got the right client and it clicked, then you’re like, “Okay, I can keep doing this.” It makes sense. You had worked with an agency called Ceremony of Roses when you were freelancing, right?

Chris Burnett:
Right. So, after I left Nike the second time, I think there was a stint in between where I went overseas, just to travel around for a little bit. That was maybe three months in Southeast Asia, which was really fun. By the time I came back, I did another short contract at Jordan, which was still on Nike campus, so in that world, but just for the Jordan Brand instead. And then after that, it was like, “All right, I think I’m going to move home to L.A.” At the time, that agency, Ceremony of Roses had reached out to me and was like, “We have a position open at our agency down in L.A.” It was literally perfect timing because I was already moving back home.

Chris Burnett:
That’s when I decided that I was going to take that job down in L.A. when I got back. They were heavily focused on music, so a completely different world than sports and branding. They had a lot of clients in the music industry. Their main bread and butter was merchandising and creating the brand that surrounded the artists, whether that’s from tour announcements and flyers and posters to actual merchandising to websites to things for them to post on social media. So, in a similar way to the agency that I worked with for Odd Future, who was just handling a lot of the creativity, that’s what Ceremony of Roses was, but in a updated and more efficient way, I’d like to say. I stayed there for about two years.

Chris Burnett:
My timelines are always a little foggy, but I stayed there for around two years in L.A., just doing a lot of work with artists in the music industry. Janelle Monáe had released her album, Dirty Computer. That was one of the bigger projects that I got to work on. Her and her team were fantastic just because they really trusted me and they gave me a lot of creative freedom to create pieces that worked with her album and with the whole concept of what she was doing. That was one of the highlights of that job for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Wonderland Studios has a great team.

Chris Burnett:
Oh, yeah, yeah, fantastic people to work with. So, I made a lot of good connections from that, from working with that agency. Yeah, we still work together today.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, cool. I know George 2.0. We went to Morehouse together.

Chris Burnett:
Oh, nice. Yeah, 2.0.

Maurice Cherry:
We went to Morehouse together. Now, this was back before she was doing the whole Android thing. She had the CD called The Audition, I think. I remember buying it off The Strip one day in the late 2000s, not late 2000s, way earlier than that. This was early 2000s. I’m not that young. But I remember getting her CD and being like, “Oh, this is really good.” Of course, they have the Atlanta connection, because she’s lived and worked here before and stuff. But their whole crew, their whole studio is doing great work.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, I’ve always admired them because they operate in a way that’s different to a lot of artists. I think just their tight knit community of people that they work with, it was a real family vibe when I would connect with their team and we would talk and discuss work. It just felt really good to be around them, great people.

Maurice Cherry:
Who are some of the people that have really helped you out as mentors throughout the years?

Chris Burnett:
I wouldn’t say that I’ve had specific mentors, where their role was to mentor me through the stage of life that I was in, but I think a lot of the times, the supervisors that I had at the companies I worked with took on that role in maybe a subconscious way. The first being a guy named Michael Spoljaric, who was the… I think, he was brand director or creative director. There’s so many titles at Nike that I forget what he was doing, but he was the head of sportswear brand design when I was there.

Chris Burnett:
So, when I got hired to work with them, he was the introduction into that world of professional corporate design. So, really, in terms of design and creativity, he really helped me to understand good typography, good layouts, how to design a book properly, what images to choose for a campaign, stuff like that.

Chris Burnett:
The next when I was working on the Rio Olympics, I already mentioned Ibrahim. He really became that mentor figure for me. He already saw that I had potential, but he fine-tuned it. That’s what I really appreciated about him was that he really got down to the nitty gritty and the specifics of things, the details of things, because every little detail counts if you’re trying to make something that is impactful. If you leave one little thing out, then it might ruin the whole trajectory of the story. So, he was really a figure like that for me.

Chris Burnett:
When I came to Ceremony of Roses, the two people who really stuck out to me was Brad Scoffern, who’s the owner of the company. He’s the one who brought me on board. I met him when I was working at Odd Future. He always remembered me. So, by the time he started his own agency, he immediately reached out to me and wanted to work with me. And then another guy at that company named Jared Hankey, who became my pseudo mentor at that time when I was working there, too. So, I haven’t really had specific people outside of work environments that have done that for me, but it’s always been supervisors or bosses or those who are in higher positions than me who can show me the ropes and keep me on track.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you call yourself a creative superhero. What does that mean to you?

Chris Burnett:
It means that I have a lot of superpowers. It’s always been really difficult for me specifically to classify what I am or who I am in terms of my creativity, because I can say one day that I’m an artist and then another day, I can say I’m a musician. One day, I can say I’m a designer. I can wear all these hats, and I try to wear them really well. I was always thinking of, “What’s just a cool umbrella term that I could use that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but does speak to the idea that I can do all of these different things?” I came up with that when I was designing the website for Colibri and it just stuck. So, that’s the moniker that I like to use if it’ll be on business cards or any little bios, but yeah, that’s what that means.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Now, I’ve read where you talked about your ultimate dream project, which was back when you were working with Odd Future. It was this collaboration with their brand, with Golf Wang and Hello Kitty. That was years and years ago. Is that still your ultimate dream project or do you have another dream project you want to do one day?

Chris Burnett:
I think I have a bunch of dream projects. That one specifically came about, my older brother, who’s also a designer, artist, musician, just like me, his name is Jordan. He was really into A Bathing Ape. This was before I was really knowledgeable about these brands at this time. He had this one shirt, which featured a character named Baby Milo, which was a very cute drawing of a little monkey. It was really simple and it had really thick lines. I was just obsessed with that illustration style for the longest time. I remember when I was working for Odd Future, Tyler had created a character called Shark Cat. He was really into cats. We used them a lot, a lot of the merchandise. I decided that I wanted to create a Shark Cat version of almost a Baby Milo-like character.

Chris Burnett:
So, I took this cat head that Tyler had come up with, and I placed it onto a very simplified body with the bold strokes and just really a cute little character. I wanted to use it for something but I didn’t really know what we would use it for. And then my boss at the time told me that Sanrio, which is the company that owns Hello Kitty, they were looking to do a collaboration with Odd Future. That was the moment that I was like, “Okay, Hello kitty is definitely in the same style of Baby Milo, and this is the moment where I can combine those two worlds. So, I can take this little Shark Cat character and I can take the Hello Kitty character. I can put them in one.” I must have created an entire capsule collection for them.

Chris Burnett:
And then I don’t really know what happened. I was told that the executives at Sanrio saw some of our futures videos and were like, “Maybe not, it’s not really in line with our brand aesthetic.” So, it never went through, but that was definitely just a dream project because I really was into the aesthetic of Hello Kitty and Baby Milo and wish that I could have combined those two worlds, but that never really came to fruition.

Chris Burnett:
But fast forward to now, my biggest dream project is more self-focused. I want to have a gallery show with… I’m working on a new body of work right now, some of the biggest canvases I’ve ever worked on. I want to have a gallery show where all of that new work is there. I want to create a couple of sculptures to go in there. I also want to perform my music at the gallery show. So, then it can be a full representation of my artistic abilities. That’s really what I’ve been spending a lot of my time in the past couple of months. So, that’s where my brain goes when you ask, “What would a dream project be?”

Chris Burnett:
If I could work with a client, it might be Tame Impala. He’s my favorite band. Kevin Parker, the guy who writes and records all the music, is the reason that I started making music. That happened at the end of CalArts, but we can get into that a little later. So, if I could work on some album packaging for him or do some tour visuals or just anything, even if I could just meet them and have a conversation, I’d be happy. But yeah, he’s a big influence on me.

Chris Burnett:
And then I also love the brand Fucking Awesome. It’s a skate brand. Here out of Hollywood, they have a store here. Jason Dill is the creative genius behind that brand. The reason I love it is because his artwork as an artist, as an individual artist, is the aesthetic of the brand. So, I don’t know if it’s still like this, but at a certain point, he was designing all the graphics. He was making all the skateboards that people would ride. That’s always just been a huge dream of mine is to either work with him or create a brand that follows in his footsteps, because I love skateboarding, too. I’ve been skateboarding for 15 years at this point. So, combining those worlds would be amazing to me.

Maurice Cherry:
I could really see that gallery show. I could even see a gallery show that combines all of this. You’ve got that, you’ve got the music. I don’t know. Maybe you have a small halfpipe in there doing some skateboard or something. I could see all of this taking place. It’s interesting now even looking at exhibitions and stuff like that, because we’ve had a few Black artists on the show, exhibitions now are so much more than just a painting on a wall. They’re really these immersive 360 creative experiences.

Maurice Cherry:
I mentioned Dawn Okoro before, and she did a show that had a punk band in it. So, she’s doing her art and has her art on the wall, but then also has a punk man performing. Wow. So, it’s like a whole environment that’s being created with exhibitions. Especially in L.A., I could see all of that really coming together.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, I mean, that would definitely be a dream of mine to have this multi-hyphenate experience for people to enjoy. A big thing for me is the more that I look at art, the more that I want it to not exist in just a white walled space.

Chris Burnett:
I understand that that allows the art to speak volumes when there’s nothing else to look at except the piece that’s on the wall, but I’ve also had this dream of having a gallery that’s outside and maybe an old, abandoned warehouse and seeing how the art that’s on the wall in the warehouse communicates with the actual aesthetic of a rusted-out building. I think that could create an interesting tension too, but a lot of these things that I feel like I’ll pursue once I established my footing in the art world and then I can maybe expand on some of these ideas. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, are you still pursuing your music?

Chris Burnett:
So, music for me has been really interesting in terms of my dedication to it. Honestly, this happens with a lot of the facets of my creativity. There are moments where I’m really into making music, and I’ll write a new song every day. And then there are moments where I just want to collage and I don’t even pick up the guitar or play the piano at all. Right now, I’m in a down on the music and I’m really focused on the artwork. So, it tends to fluctuate and I like that. Because if I was too obsessed over one thing all the time, then I think all my other things would suffer. I just can’t let anything go.

Chris Burnett:
So, I can’t ever stop collaging. I can’t ever stop making music, but they ebb and flow in ways that support each other, whether I know it or not. That’s how I feel about it. So, I am planning to release a project next year, but there’s not much in my mind that’s happening with it yet. But I know that it’s going to be released early next year. I’m sitting on a lot of music that no one’s heard. So, it was definitely enough to create a project and give it to the world.

Maurice Cherry:
All in due time.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you feel like you’re living your life’s purpose or do you think you’re still figuring it out?

Chris Burnett:
Wow. It’s funny that you asked that, because I would say that I learned what that was this year, specifically. It’s been a long journey to get to this point. I’ve always known that I wanted to do art. I’ve always known that I wanted to be creative. I’ve always known that I wanted to do music. But for some reason, recently within the past couple months, the specific focus has been on I’m an artist and telling myself that and believing it and moving towards it. As I moved towards it, the more it feels natural to me, which also tells me that hey, this is probably what you’re supposed to be doing. Because for a long time, I was in the design world. I was a graphic designer, and I would call myself that.

Chris Burnett:
I think the artist’s part of me was really sad that I wasn’t allowing myself to embrace that. I think at heart, I’m an artist. I can do graphic design, but I think at heart, my purpose is to create art and share it with the world. So, yeah, I think I’m getting there. It’s baby steps for me in terms of establishing who I am as an artist and sharing that with the world and being a bit more open with what I’m doing creatively, because I tend to sequester myself a little bit, but that’s all starting to change. So, I’m pretty happy about it.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want the next chapter of your career to look like?

Chris Burnett:
Next five years, definitely doing more art shows. I think the ultimate goal for me is to have a bunch of solo shows and really focus in on creating work that challenges the way we think about life, that challenges the way that we interact with each other. Yeah, I see myself really settling into the art world and becoming the artists that I know I can be. It’s been so long, because when I graduated with a degree in graphic design, to me, that felt like, “This is who I am now, and this is what I have to do.” After working so long and reaching a certain amount of success that I am satisfied with, I realized that there was just something missing.

Chris Burnett:
So, this year really marks that transition that I mentioned earlier into me fully embracing me as an artist and maybe moving away from a lot of the client work and focusing in on the work that I want to be doing for myself. So, in five years, I’ll be 35. So, hopefully, by then, I’ll have a couple solo shows under my belt. I’m definitely getting better at playing guitar. That’s one of the things I’m focusing on too. I want to put a band together so that I can play shows in Los Angeles, eventually tour around the world if that’s a reality that presents itself. Yeah, but really focusing in on the artist’s aspects of me and myself. That’s where I see myself in five years.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more about you and your work and everything you’re doing online?

Chris Burnett:
So, you can go to colibristudios.com to pretty much see everything that I’m doing. I’m not on social media, and I don’t really like Instagram. We could have a whole another conversation about social media. As much as I understand that it’s something that allows you to connect with people that may have never seen your work before, something about it just doesn’t feel right with me.

Chris Burnett:
Especially given the past couple years that we’ve all experienced in America, we’re starting to realize and understand the effects that these platforms can have on our mental health and our well-being as individuals and our relationships with other people. I’ve decided to remove myself from it. So, I can have a different type of perspective. I think it served me pretty well. So, I only have a website. That’s why I’m saying that. It’s colibristudios.com. That’s where all my music is, photography, artwork, design work, everything. That’s me.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well, Chris Burnett, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. One, for just telling your story and really given some insight into the work that you’ve done, but I think also, it’s important when we hear your story and hear you talk about the passion behind your work to know that creativity is something that we all in some way can tap into.

Maurice Cherry:
I think it’s one of those things where as a kid, we have finger painting and all this stuff. But then as you get older, doing things in art design tend to be looked at as more of a hobby and less of a profession. It really seems like you were able to really lean into a lot of creative work, work with a lot of really interesting and creative companies and people. I’m excited to see what you’re going to do in the next five years, because I think it’s definitely going to be something worth talking about. So, thank you so much for coming on the show, man. I appreciate it.

Chris Burnett:
Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

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We accomplish this through graphic design, presentations and workshops around I-D-E-A: inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.

If you’re curious to learn how to combine a passion for I-D-E-A with design, check us out at brevityandwit.com.

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Gabe Gault

I’ve been getting into TikTok a lot lately — don’t judge! — and that’s where I stumbled across the work of this week’s guest: Gabe Gault! Gabe’s brilliant portraiture blends the work of the Renaissance masters with Black culture in a brilliant and beautiful way. Not only that, he painted the largest mural in the world — the Glass City River Wall in Toledo, Ohio. I mean…talk about impressive!

Gabe talked about how he landed this massive project, and talked about growing up an artist in a big sports family. We also discussed Black fine artists being exhibited through this new wave of Black-created media, lessons he’s learned throughout his creative journeys, and even talk a bit about NFTs and the metaverse. If you’re looking for a creative pep talk, just follow Gabe’s advice: “Go out there and create on any scale!”

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right. So tell us who you are and what you do.

Gabe Gault:
Hi, my name is Gabe Gault, and I’m an artist from Los Angeles, California.

Maurice Cherry:
So Gabe, what’s on your mind? How’s the year been going for you so far?

Gabe Gault:
Oh, man, it’s been an amazing year. It’s kind of been ups and downs. Obviously COVID has happened and is here still. But on the bright side of things, I’ve been working on a pretty big project myself that’s been kind of keeping my morale up. But there’s been other pretty cool projects going on.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. What is kind of a typical day like for you as an artist in LA?

Gabe Gault:
So I wake up. I make sure I kind of get a good start in the morning if I’m heading to the studio. So I’ll wake up, I’ll make some breakfast. I’m trying to go on a smoothie kind of diet right now because I am getting married in about three weeks or so, four weeks.

Maurice Cherry:
Congratulations. So by the time this comes out, you’ll be a married man.

Gabe Gault:
I will be a married man. That’s a new life journey for me. Yeah. So it’s pretty simple, I feel like, my mornings. I usually get to the studio when it feels right, but it’s usually around 11AM. And I’ll have everything kind of prepped out and ready to go. I’ll get there and I’ll just have a jam session for the rest of the day until I feel like it’s time to leave really. But it’s kind of all flow for me, I would say.

Maurice Cherry:
So you kind of just get in the zone once you get to your studio and then see where the day takes you pretty much.

Gabe Gault:
Definitely. Besides that, I’m usually running errands about my manager. He lives on the west side of town. So sometimes we’ll drop off paintings or go to meetings and stuff. I try to keep it pretty relaxed. I don’t want to stress over my work anymore. That’s kind of been a big thing coming up as an artist, is there’s a lot of stress sometimes, only if you let it. But I feel like every day is a pretty good day because I get to wake up and do this.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, we talked about this a little bit before we started recording, but you’re one of several black artists that I discovered via TikTok.

Gabe Gault:
Dude, insane. It still blows my mind. When anybody tells me they found me through TikTok, I’m just like, “I wouldn’t imagine this a year ago.”

Maurice Cherry:
How does social media help out with what you do?

Gabe Gault:
Social media is a powerful tool for the better or for worse, and TikTok specifically is one of those things that really twisted my mind because it changed the way I thought about social media. I was on Instagram for a number of years. It took me a certain amount to get a certain amount of followers. Not that that’s like an end all be all. But that’s what I was kind of working up on there and getting a decent views on my work. And then I went to TikTok.

Gabe Gault:
And I think in the course of a couple months, I’m almost about to surpass my other social media platforms and all the hard work I put into those kind of seem irrelevant now compared to TikTok. It’s a great tool because you get to interact with people and you get to talk to people in a way you just couldn’t really do in real life. You get to show people a little bit of your life, or whatever you want to show them, really. It doesn’t have to be your real life, I guess, as most of you will know. Yeah, it’s an amazing, powerful tool. But it is, at the end of the day, just a tool you can use to better yourself.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing about TikTok, and I’ve been on there now for, I don’t know, maybe a few weeks now, just kind of casually observing, is one, it really has the spirit to me of like the old way of… I’ve been around on the internet for a long time. I remember the early web and how really just sort of wide open it was. You really could just go down these deep rabbit holes of information and find all kinds of weird things.

Maurice Cherry:
And I think what’s interesting with TikTok that platforms like say maybe Instagram or twitter don’t do is how they take your one piece of content that you make and it almost like splinters it out into these different ways that people can discover you. Of course, say you do a video. There’s the video that people can see if you come up on your ‘for you’ page. But the video also has audio. And the audio can be your own audio, or it can be like pre recorded audio that you select from their database or whatever.

Maurice Cherry:
And then as you type up the description on the video, you can have hashtags. all of that stuff is also its own like search portal in a way. People searching for that sound can now come across your video or people searching for that hashtag now come across your video. And so you get people discovering your work in all these kind of weird and interesting ways that maybe they wouldn’t before on another platform because it’s only funneled into one mode of discovery.

Gabe Gault:
Yeah. And I feel like it’s just so different from everybody else’s. You can have a completely different TikTok from the person sitting right next to you, just like the algorithm and what videos you see. I’ll be sitting next to my fiancee and she’ll be like, “How have you never seen this video?” Her videos are all pumpkin, spice lattes and witches and astrology. I’m on the completely other side with people dabbing and doing art and doing murals. Everything is just completely different. Mine is like video games. It really makes you see how big the internet is just only on TikTok, but it’s an insane space and platform.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and the creativity is just out of this world. I mean, of course, the tool itself has all these different kind of features that you can edit video and change the duration and the speed and all that sort of stuff. The trend that I’ve been seeing recently that is really dope is… And I don’t know if you’ve seen this. And it’s funny because by the time this comes out, it may have already passed.

Maurice Cherry:
But there is this trend now of like, you remember like fighting games like Tekken? There’s like the ‘you lose’ screen where the opponent talks smack. And so you’ve got all these different people doing these different versions of what that looks like, but to the same sound. If you search that sound, there’s like hundreds of videos of people. You’re the like vaguely weird character with the random move set or you’re the sleepy character with all the power. It’s crazy. It’s so wild.

Gabe Gault:
I love those so much. I’ll be on there for hours on end. It’s just unhealthy. But at the same time, it gives me so much joy, so I think it is healthy. But yeah, it’s a crazy platform. I think the Glass City River Wall video I did of my Ohio project, it did like 1.3 million views. But I remember shooting it and I was like, “Oh, I’ll just take a picture of this, just some random clips and put it together.”

Gabe Gault:
And then that was the biggest view count I had on that page. But it’s just crazy. You never know what’s going to hit or what’s not going to hit. I feel like you put together just something random and somebody is going to appreciate it. It’s just like putting that stuff out there.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, you mentioned this mural, the Glass City River Wall project. Talk to me about what it is and how you got involved with it.

Gabe Gault:
That’s a whole project that had a global call for artists. They had about 500 or so submissions. They narrowed it down and I was the artist chosen for it. It’s a giant grain silos in Toledo, Ohio. There’s about 28 silos in total and it’s about three football fields long and 134 feet high, I believe. So they’re pretty massive. By the end of the thing, it should be the largest mural in the nation.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. Please talk about it. What was that process even like?

Gabe Gault:
So it was a pretty lengthy process. This is where we had to put together all our resources we ever had and really figure out how to get this thing done. Because it’s one of those things where nobody has done anything on this scale. So you have to figure it out and get the right team. And luckily, what I love about Toledo, it’s this big, small city, and everybody’s just super hard working there.

Gabe Gault:
I had so many people reach out to me and offer their skill set for the project, whether it’s like donating coffee or juice or doing footage, drone footage. Actually, two of the guys who reached out, this guy, Nick, reached out, and he was a videographer. He shot documentaries and stuff. So he reached out. And another guy, we call him Dino, he also reached out, and he’s a local artist in Toledo.

Gabe Gault:
And it’s at the point where I couldn’t see this project going the way it’s going without those guys because they’re just such a huge asset to the project. So it’s like a little bit of knowing what to expect and then expecting the unexpected and taking whatever wins you can. But it’s a good project. I feel like we’ll be done by end of November, possibly.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. What is your creative process like when it comes to starting a new project? I mean, I’d imagine something as big as the Glass City River Wall project, that happens on a massive scale. But say it’s just a regular painting or something, what does that creative process look like?

Gabe Gault:
I always try to put some kind of meaning. I like coming up with conceptual concepts. I sometimes do a lot of portraits, which are pretty straightforward, depending on the subject. But sometimes I get to mess around and paint people who are inspiring to me. So that’s usually the subjects that I choose, are people who inspire me and so shape our way. I want to talk about the background as well.

Gabe Gault:
I do a camouflage background, which represents blending in and standing out. People who blend into your everyday life and stand out by doing something that impacted you in a positive way. And that’s usually how I like to choose my subjects, is somebody who has changed me forever.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I’ve seen some of the ones that you have on your website, and they kind of range. You’ve got Nipsey Hussle, but then you’ve also got Yayoi Kusama. You have a big range of portraits that you’ve done.

Gabe Gault:
Yeah. I feel like there’s been a kind of gradual change as well throughout my whole, I guess, timeline of painting. Because I started out painting a lot of pop figures I looked up to or I liked or somebody I knew loved them. And now they’re changing slowly into pop figures and they change to people I would interact with daily, every week and learn something from them or learn a lesson or love their story and want to paint them.

Gabe Gault:
And now I’m kind of leaning into a conceptual phase of painting different… I’m working on this project called Afro-Rama, which is like African Rome. The first piece I did is Romulus and Remus, which is like twists on the foundation of Rome. Then I’m working on like a Medussa kind of piece and so on and so forth. But more to come from that.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, interesting. So kind of like a play on some Greek mythology kind of stuff.

Gabe Gault:
Exactly. Yeah, a play on that and some Renaissance age. It’s kind of like rebirth of the black Renaissance, really. You have a lot of black artists doing some amazing traditional pieces.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I want to go kind of more into your background. Like you mentioned, of course, you’re now in Los Angeles. Is that where you grew up also?

Gabe Gault:
Yeah. So I grew up in Venice Beach, California. And me and my family, we kind of migrated to the valley eventually. Now I’m in the valley. I’ve been here the past… Geez. I think I moved to the valley in 2006 or something like that. So it’s been a while. I mean, I love it here. It’s my home and it’s kind of like the central point for me to get anywhere to get downtown, to get to Los Angeles or Hollywood or the Palisades or Malibu.

Gabe Gault:
So it’s been a pretty nice run out here. It just gets like super hot. So that’s kind of a big problem. When it comes time to paint in the summertime, my studio is outdoor, so it kind of like limits me. But I can’t complain. It’s a great spot.

Maurice Cherry:
Growing up, did you have a lot of exposure to art and everything?

Gabe Gault:
I would say I did in some senses. I was actually inspired by… I remember this very clearly. When I was about four years old, I think my parents turned on the TV and Dragon Ball Z was on. And then I was just inspired by anime and manga and all that kind of culture. I feel like a lot of creators actually kind of came from that era of like early days of Toonami and anime and stuff back in the day.

Gabe Gault:
And that was later in high school, like translated to me just kind of drawing that stuff and getting more acquainted with that. And drawing portraits of friends, whether they were good or bad. I was a pretty big sports player. I come from a pretty big sports family. My dad played pro ball for the Super Bowl Bears and the Los Angeles Raiders, hence why I moved out here or why I was born out here.

Gabe Gault:
So that was like a little bit of a conflict of interest, where it’s like, I was a artist, but my dad wanted me to play sports from time to time. Of course, at the moment, he’s super into me being an artist and he’s been one of my best supporters for the past years. And interesting journey, like going from high school, drawing, to getting more serious about it in college.

Gabe Gault:
And then I took SMC art course for about two years. I ended up dropping out. I did an internship with my mentor, Rob Pryor. We did that for about six or seven years. And from there, we were actually working on like a fully hand painted comic book. We did a bunch of cool jobs throughout those years of training. We did stuff for Heavy Metal magazine. He was like a part owner of that.

Gabe Gault:
So I did a lot of comic book stuff. I did a lot of concept art for video games and movies and all sorts of weird, odd jobs. And we were actually working out of this building in Burbank, where we ended up kind of getting laid off of the comic book job. I ended up pursuing ‘fine arts.’ That’s where I wasn’t making any money. Then I was breaking even. Then I was like, okay, I can do this for a living.

Maurice Cherry:
How did you get connected with Rob?

Gabe Gault:
He was a friend of my dad’s, actually. I don’t know how they met exactly. I think they met through like a photoshoot or something. Rob is a pretty strict guy. He doesn’t take any bull. He’s like a pretty heavy metal dude as well. So you get in there, it’s pretty extreme. He’s blasting music. He’s a hooligan, for sure. But he’s my hooligan. He’s a super talented guy, Rob Pryor on platforms. But he does stuff for all kinds of different music groups. He does conventions. He’s an interesting dude.

Maurice Cherry:
Just to go back briefly to what you said about your dad kind of wanting you to go into sports, and then you were kind of more artistic, was there a point where he finally saw you as an artist?

Gabe Gault:
Yeah. Actually, kind of leading into the internship, I think around the time I was doing that, that’s when he started to recognize that this is like a career choice and path. Maybe it wasn’t as smart as going into sports at the time, which they’re both kind of pipe dreams, to be honest. Yeah, I think that he got on board when he saw that I could make a living doing it.

Maurice Cherry:
That seems to be the case for parents, I think especially for black parents. Your artistic and they see that you do this, but it doesn’t really click that like, oh, this can be a profession. It’s kind of always just like a hobby. And it seems like there’s always this point where hopefully they finally sort of see you as like, okay, you’re an artist. This is work that you can do. And it usually comes around money.

Gabe Gault:
Yeah. I think money is the revolving factor right there. There’s a lot of different jobs that have happened in the past 20 years that just weren’t available to us, I think as well. So before, they had no idea. I was like, “Dad, check out these guys. They’re making millions of dollars playing Call of Duty or video games or whatever.” He’s like, “What? Oh, my God. What is going on? What do you mean? You should have been playing that. What are you doing?”

Gabe Gault:
And it’s just like, “Dad, I couldn’t. There was no option.” There’s just different avenues that have popped up that blow my mind. It’s like, if I knew you can make money doing videos and YouTube and stuff like that before, I mean, I just wouldn’t have been so worrisome of like, what am I going to do? There are so many options nowadays, in my opinion.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s so interesting. My best friend, Chris, who’s been on the show before, if people want to check him out. I think he’s episode 40, Dr. Chris Stewart. But he’s got two daughters, and his oldest daughter kind of wants to be a YouTuber. I think she’s probably, I don’t know, maybe about eight or nine years old. She wants to be a YouTuber. And he’s sort of like adamantly against it, like, “No. Go to school and learn STEM stuff and all that sort of stuff.”

Maurice Cherry:
And I kind of had to tell him, you got to think about it. Back when we were kids, even working in computers and the internet was like an impossibility because it barely existed. What we do now back then made no sense. So if what she’s doing now doesn’t make sense, congratulations, you’re old. But also, this is where career trends are going. Things are going now towards doing things online and being a content creator.

Gabe Gault:
Exactly. I would say, kids, just stick to TikTok. There’s going to be some probably big money in it too if you want to turn that into a career. I would also recommend to artists starting out that have some kind of money income. It doesn’t have to be glamorous or anything, but it would have helped me, for sure. Doing this full time without some kind of like financial stability was pretty rough.

Gabe Gault:
My dad was pretty rough on me already financially growing up, which was good. I’m glad he was. But yeah, it’s rougher to just not have any kind of money coming in, and you got to worry about making a painting or whatever to sell it or to get some kind of comic book job. That stuff is pretty hard to do as a creative. Whatever creative job you’re doing, I would always say, if you can, have some kind of like financial support from yourself, if possible.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. You don’t want to fall into that like starving artists trope.

Gabe Gault:
Yeah, that’s the worst. I do not miss those days at all. That’s one thing that I would go back and change, is maybe I should just get a part time job or something right here and figure it out. But yeah, it’s all been good. Everything kind of works itself out at the end.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, back in 2017, you had your first solo exhibition. Take us back to that time. What was going on then?

Gabe Gault:
Oh, man. That was a huge, huge year for me. A couple things happened within that year and a half lifespan or timeframe. That was my first big show in 2017 at MRG Gallery. There was a guy, Michael, I met, and we’re still pretty good friends. I actually saw him pretty recently, like about a week ago. But that was my first gallery and solo show that I ever had. I had maybe about 15 pieces in there that I worked on throughout that year.

Gabe Gault:
I think I finished seven of them in the last month of that. So yeah, that was like a big turning point of how I thought about creating art and selling art and how to get people there, how to get people engaged, what kind of steps you should make, what people were gravitating towards, as well, what they liked. I remember correctly, we didn’t sell any pieces at this show, but I think we sold some following the show, which was pretty good, I guess, for my first show. I had no exposure in that world at all. That was a fun experience. It’s just one of those things that twist your brand and changes your life forever.

Maurice Cherry:
I can imagine it’s probably like the culmination of so many things. I mean, of course, you’re working to create this sort of singular body of work for this exhibition, but also it’s kind of like your aha moment in a way, like, “Oh, not only am I an artist, but I am in like capital A artists with like an exhibition and a gallery. I’m an artist.”

Gabe Gault:
Yeah. I think it was maybe the first time where I really had something centered around me. That was very important and that helped me move forward and get me used to people wanting to see my work and I’m an important person. I am who I make myself to be. And that kind of helped me move forward a little bit more in my career.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I asked this question to Dawn Okoro, who I had on the show a couple weeks ago. She’s another artist actually, I mentioned to you I discovered her on TikTok. We’re starting to see a lot more black fine artists and their work being just exhibited in general to the mainstream over the past probably 10 years or so. I mentioned the Dawn Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald. I mentioned those two specifically because they did the Obama portraits, but also those portraits are now on tour in the country.

Maurice Cherry:
Now they’re going around to different cities, so everyone that maybe couldn’t make it to the National Portrait Gallery in DC can now see it in their city. But also we’re starting to see more black artists and their work being exhibited through black media, movies, television shows, etc. And you had even mentioned before we started recording that some of your work has been included in some media like that. What are your thoughts about that kind of exposure? Does that really help you out as an artist?

Gabe Gault:
I think it does and it doesn’t. I think if you’re on some of those… I was in a show, I think Big Trouble. I think I was in like a documentary on Netflix, somewhere on there. I’m sure somebody can find me somewhere. I feel like exposure wise, it does help kind of build your credit and credentials. But I think more importantly, it’s great because black shows and black media can pay black artists. And I think that’s an important part to move forward for any black artist because that can fuel their next six months or whatever.

Gabe Gault:
That kind of bit of breaking point where after that six months, they had to stop producing work, and then it kind of slows down. But all those little things are wins, in my opinion. Because every time you’re hiring a black artist or you buy from a black artist, it helps that kind of community grow and it helps that black renaissance movement that’s kind of happening right now with Kehinde and everybody. It’s all upgrade.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And certainly now, what I would love to see, because through this show, I’ve been very fortunate to talk to a lot of people and now see their work out in the world, my hope is that the black artists kind of get that same level of recognition as say like, I don’t know, Jordan Peele or Issa Rae, just in terms of like you are also someone that is also creating these visual representations of the world and they’re out there for people to see. People need to know that black contemporary artists exists, period.

Gabe Gault:
I a hundred percent couldn’t agree more. For me, personally, I’m an artist, and I want to branch out. I want to do in a similar fashion what Jordan Peele or Issa Rae do. They’re kind of entrepreneurs in general. Black entrepreneurship is very fresh and it’s popping right now and I feel like it’s a good time to be one and express different avenues of creativity. If you’re an artist and you want to get into fashion, I think people are now supporting that more than ever.

Gabe Gault:
If you’re into fashion and you want to get into making movies, there’s no stopping you, really. I feel like there’s Donald Glover’s of the world who want to just be an actor, be a comedy writer, be whatever they want to be. You can kind of make it all come together. I feel like you don’t have to necessarily be one thing anymore. It’s just like, how hard do you want to work?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Being the kind of black creative, multihyphen it. I don’t want to say it seems like it’s necessarily the norm, but I think we’re certainly starting to see it, or rather, I think it’s starting to be normalized. We’re mentioning Issa and Jordan. Of course, there are several others that fall into this camp that do multiple kinds of creative work, or they do multiple modes of creative work within one thing. Like Jordan, I think we know from comedy first, but then also is clearly this horror buff also that can really flourish in that realm also.

Gabe Gault:
Yeah. I just saw Candyman, not super recently, but whenever it came out. But that was an amazing movie where it kind of reminded me of a black Blade Runner, like the shots of it. And then it had its horror elements. I love his stuff because you always forget that you’re watching a horror movie till something pops off and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, this is Candyman. I forgot what I was watching for a second.” Honestly, I just get inspired all the time by people like that and Issa Rae and everybody who’s doing something remarkable.

Maurice Cherry:
Where else do you pull inspiration from?

Gabe Gault:
Man, I pull inspiration from a little bit of… God, what do I pull inspiration from? I feel like I get inspiration from a little bit of everything. I’m into comic books, I’m into games, I’m into mythology. I feel like there’s bits and pieces that I’ll deep dive into and I’ll get on kicks of. I was kind of like going to Roman kick lately of the artwork over there and kind of wanting to replicate what was created back in those times of ancient Rome and what kind of stories were coming out of there.

Gabe Gault:
Then I also remember old stories, African stories that my mom used to tell me back in the day, and I’m starting to kind of research those in the past week. So it’s a little bit of whatever I’m feeling in the moment and I think makes sense and is close to me, or makes sense for me, then I’ll kind of draw inspiration from that.

Maurice Cherry:
Are there any other artists out there that you admire?

Gabe Gault:
There are a ton of artists, I feel like. Actually, to get my art style, I think I took my five favorite artists. And this is something I tell younger artists as well. Take your five favorite artists who are still living or dead. Take one element from each artist, mix them together, but making your own. And then you kind of have your style right there. And that’s something that I used personally and it kind of made up to figure out what was me and what did I like and what did I enjoy that I won’t get burned out on?

Gabe Gault:
But yeah, some of those artists I grabbed from were Shepard Fairey, Kehinde Wiley, Retna. Andy Warhol, of course. I feel like you got to at least give him some credit on some aspects of your life. There’s a couple of them that are pretty mainstream that I draw from that I really liked growing up. I’ll usually draw from one piece of theirs and then be like, okay, why do I really like this piece? What makes me want to create more pieces similar to this? What’s the element that is affecting me like that?

Maurice Cherry:
What is it that you kind of want people to see when they look at your work?

Gabe Gault:
I want them to like there’s a little bit of that person who I’m painting in them. There’s a piece I did, I think it was for We Rise show in downtown LA. They had those yearly. I think maybe the last one was Into Action. No, it was We Rise, and they do this other show, Into Action. But they do these amazing kind of museum pop ups that they were doing yearly. I think they took a break during COVID because of regulations and it’s pretty hard.

Gabe Gault:
But there is a couple pieces I did during that show. One was the first camouflage piece I did, which was a piece of Tupac and he was wearing a Kaepernick jersey. That was my first camo piece I did. That actually didn’t even make it on the wall. It was a funny story. That didn’t make it on the wall. That was put behind like a DJ booth almost. That was like a whole bummer. Everybody there is super cool.

Gabe Gault:
They really tried to make it work, but there were so many artists and very little space left on the walls. But that ended up being one of the biggest pieces of the show. Everybody kind of like went over there and they were like, “Oh, what’s that piece over there?” It kind of made it mysterious a little bit. I was just behind the DJ booth, which I thought was funny. But not on purpose or for any specific reason.

Gabe Gault:
But I think during that time, that was a big piece. I have people sending like paragraphs to me on Instagram how much that meant to them, how much they appreciated it. It was a big time because that was right after I think Kap took a knee for that. I think it was just impactful for a lot of people to see that. It almost meant, what would this person do today? Where would this person stand politically? So I had Tupac, I had MLK and Cesar Chavez all in Kaepernick jerseys.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it’s amazing. Let’s just kind of talk about Tupac for a minute. I mean, he was 25 when he died. He was a kid.

Gabe Gault:
He was a baby. 25 is like a decade now.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s amazing because I would think of folks digging in Tupac and others, even MLK, as you mentioned. They were really young when they were killed. It is kind of part of just, I don’t know, creative imagination to think about, what would they have believed at this time? Who would they have been as artists or as activists or whomever?

Gabe Gault:
Yeah, it is crazy. I just wonder sometimes how our history would have changed if it wasn’t… What if they didn’t die? Would it be better? Would’ve anything changed? Would it be worse? It’s a crazy concept to think about what happened. If MLK was still here, would we have gone further? Did that happen for a reason? I don’t know. It’s just nuts.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, also, just what they managed to accomplish in just that short time. When I was 25, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I was just trying to make it. At 25, I was four years out of college. I think I had just got fired from a job. I remember vividly now. I just got fired. I was working at Autotrader and I got fired. I was answering phones or whatever. I didn’t know what I was going to do.

Maurice Cherry:
My mom was like, “You need to get it together. What are you going to do with your life.” I was always designing and doing websites and stuff on the side as like a hobby. Because this was like 2005, 2006. There wasn’t really a market for this really yet. And certainly it wasn’t something you could just like go to school and learn. And so I had just found a one ad in the back of our local weekly newspaper here in Atlanta and just applied on a whim. And that ended up being the start of my design career. But I can’t imagine like as a celebrity with that kind of cultural impact that you’ve had at that age. That’s amazing.

Gabe Gault:
You have to be making some moves back then, for sure. That’s also insane to think about just how, nowadays, you can jump on social media and just become an internet superstar, whatever. But back then you had to really be, I feel like, pushed by everybody. Everybody had to really know who you are, know your name or know your craft. Not that they don’t nowadays, but you know what I mean.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s a whole new ballgame.

Gabe Gault:
A whole new ball game.

Maurice Cherry:
And the internet has made it that way now, where you can really kind of make a name for yourself. And not to say you can make a name for yourself without any sort of discernible talent, although we have seen that. But the internet at least sort of I think in a way democratizes how people can become influencers because the barriers to get to that level of influence have kind of been flattened.

Gabe Gault:
Yes. It’s definitely more open to the public, for sure, as like who can be seen and who can be heard the loudest, in a sense. I feel like you could be a kid from nothing. I think that’s like my favorite part of the internet, is when you get somebody who really had no opportunities or no kind of way of getting out of a bad situation. And then they started to put themselves out there on the internet.

Gabe Gault:
And now they’re just like mega successful in their own right. So I think that’s kind of a better version of the area that I like to see the most. Obviously, you have all sorts of variables of that. They could be super crappy people and get that same situation. But that’s kind of how the game works.

Maurice Cherry:
In recent years, what would you say is the biggest lesson that you’ve learned about yourself?

Gabe Gault:
I feel like I need to trust my intuition more. That’s been helpful, trusting that people will accept me for who I am and what I want to create and make and paint and will support me. I think that’s been a huge, huge influence throughout the past couple years and it has really changed my life and impacted me because I didn’t always have that. I didn’t really always believe in myself to get this far or get where I am or get in the position I want to be in. So I think if I knew that a little bit earlier, it would have saved a lot of stress.

Maurice Cherry:
Who would you have been if you didn’t become an artist?

Gabe Gault:
I was never fit for like an office job. I would’ve either been a scientist or a bum. I don’t know. It’s either/or. It’s no middle ground. I feel like I always had to be an artist. I had no choice because I can’t really do anything else in whatever field I wanted to be in. I wasn’t too great at math growing up in high school and stuff. I was like, “Oh, I want to be a scientist.” But there’s all these equations and stuff. So screw that

Gabe Gault:
But funny enough, I think the true answer to that probably would have been like sports probably in some shape or form. And it’s just funny because I don’t keep up with sports at all nowadays. And that’s like kind of what I grew up off of. That’s like my dad’s bread and butter. But it probably would have been sports are something in video games, some kind of analyst or something. I don’t know. I really couldn’t answer, but something along those lines that is just completely different, I think, in some way.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you kind of mentioned video games. You’ve mentioned that as kind of a through line throughout this interview. Is that like a dream project that you’d love to do one day?

Gabe Gault:
Yes, games will be a cool kind of way to be integrated into my current career. I’m actually creating NFT right now. I’m kind of getting into that whole space of digitally sold artwork. And I feel like it’s all kind of leading to that, in a sense, in some shape or form. If I never do that, that’s totally fine. And it’s not like a dream killer, because I feel like I’m living my dream right now just doing art and making a living off of that.

Gabe Gault:
But there are certain things that it’s kind of crazy when it happens and it comes full circle. I did a project for Madden, where I had to paint Aaron Donald for like the 99 club. And that was like weird and kind of full circle, because it’s like, with my pop’s background, it’s like, I never thought that it would kind of end up back at football in such a profound way. It’d be cool, I think, if that happened, for sure.

Gabe Gault:
There’s been a couple opportunities where I have gotten into like a video game world and worked with some pro gamers and stuff. But sometimes those are pretty weird deals to make happen with like fine art. I also have to stay on brand sometimes. I don’t want to do something completely out of pocket and go south of what’s me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, I can see that. I mean, certainly when it comes to tips, and even that with video games, that’s another medium that has really grown and changed a lot, thanks to technology. I mean, the games back in the day really were pretty one node in terms of what they could be. And now, especially on the indie game kind of community, video games can look so many different ways, they can be so many different things.

Maurice Cherry:
I do wonder if that does afford more opportunities for artists to get involved in that way. There’s this one person in particular who I really want to try to get her on the show, but her name, she goes by Momo Pixel. She made this game. Goodness, I think she was working at Wieden+Kennedy at the time, but made this game called… Actually, I forget what the name of the game was called.

Maurice Cherry:
But the premise of it was this black woman going about her day and people trying to touch her hair. And you as the black woman had to like swat all the hands away. She’s on the plane, she’s in a taxi, she’s on the bus and people are trying to touch her hair. And you just swat all the hands away to get to like the end goal or whatever. I played it at XOXO, which is just internet conference that takes place in Portland.

Maurice Cherry:
I remember playing it there back in 2018 And being like, “This is the coolest shit I’ve ever seen.” There’s no way I would be playing this on Nintendo. But she just made the game. And it’s like, yeah, this sort of stuff is wild. I can imagine there are so many opportunities like that.

Gabe Gault:
Yeah, that’s no joke. I feel like I have a couple friends who’ve been in the indie game space. It’s no easy feat to just make that stuff. It’s kind of like years of understanding how to code and make the art in game design. It’s always something I’ve just been interested in throughout my whole life. So if you find a game, you got to send that to me.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah. I’m looking on that. It’s called Hair Nah, H-A-I-R N-A-H, and it’s at hairnah.com. She’s on Twitter at MomoUhOh. M-O-M-O U-H-O-H.

Gabe Gault:
Shout out.

Maurice Cherry:
She’s an artist, indie game developer, creator of Hair Nah. Final NFT in Origin Story drops soon. She’s even on the NFT route too. Interesting.

Gabe Gault:
Yeah. That’s another another crazy space that’s kind of popped up in the past year and a half on a bigger scale. I know it’s been around for a couple years now, six or seven years really. But that’s also an element of being an artist, that you have to adapt. There’s a lot of different things that come up over the decades and I feel like always shoot for what’s next. Have that open as an option.

Gabe Gault:
Because if you kind of look at artists of the past or yesteryear, they’ve always kind of adapted to what’s the newest trend or what’s the newest adaptation. Not that you always have to make something that’s trendy or whatever, but it’s always cool to keep an eye out for something to help yourself and your work.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Do you feel creatively satisfied?

Gabe Gault:
I feel like when there’s big projects like the Ohio project, yeah. There’s always, what’s the next big thing? Or, where do I go from here? And I think for me, there’s a couple of bucket list goals of art career choices that I want to kind of check off. So I feel like I’m never quite satisfied. I think the day that I am, I’ve hopefully kind of completed that bucket list.

Maurice Cherry:
So that ends. Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work would you love to be doing?

Gabe Gault:
I mean, I guess a longer goal for me is hopefully in the next five years, my work is different. I wouldn’t say completely different. Hopefully, by the end of my career, it’s completely different. But hopefully, in five years, my work is different from it is now and there’s different platforms and different mediums that I’m working in.

Gabe Gault:
You can always kind of elevate yourself a little bit and I’m trying to branch out from just painting on canvas. I want to get into the sculptures. I want to get into painting cars, whatever it may be, doing more NFT stuff, doing some 3D work. So I think that’s where I see myself in five years is kind of completing all those goals and making a living doing it.

Maurice Cherry:
I feel like the big thing now that we’ve talked about NFT’s, but I’m starting to see platforms start to go towards the metaverse, which is… I mean, honestly, it sounds even weird for me to say it because that sounds like some shit that came on like a ’90s Power Rangers, VR Troopers, we’re going to the metaverse kind of thing. I’m starting to see platforms think about what it is to be in the metaverse, Facebook most specifically.

Maurice Cherry:
But there’s also artists that are starting to work in that medium or starting to do things in that whole medium. I know NFT’s are part of that like NFT’s, generative art, digital art, all that sort of plays into it. I mean, I think even Sotheby’s did like a virtual gallery in the metaverse.

Gabe Gault:
It’s insane. The metaverse is an interesting place where kind of anything goes. The whole crypto space is the wild west right now, and I think it’s going to be that way for a while. You can make anything, you can create anything you want to create. I wish I knew 3D better so I can kind of jump in there a little bit more. But there’s always opportunity, I think, for anybody.

Gabe Gault:
I have a friend who made like a metaverse thing, Frank Wilder. He’s on IG. But he did a whole metaverse kind of reality where he’s making cars and planes and get your NFT Lambo or Rolls Royce or whatever you want, making art and also in that space. So it’s a crazy thing that’s, I think, going to be pretty popping in the next 5 to 10 years. It’s going to be I think the future, really?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Well, just kind of wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more about you and about your work online?

Gabe Gault:
You can find out more about me on TikTok, first and foremost, at Gabe Gault. I’m on Instagram at Gabe Gault and I also have gabegault.com. I’m sure I’m like on other platforms as well. I’m on Twitter and other things. But I think mostly you can get a good idea of my work on those.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well, Gabe Gault, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. One, thank you for just sharing kind of the process about your work and really talking about some of the projects that you’ve done. But also I think it’s always great when you have an artist that’s really kind of doing these things that are, I don’t know, kind of a mix of classic imagery, like what you do with your portraits, but then also you’re putting your own kind of interesting twist on it.

Maurice Cherry:
I think the work that you’re doing is completely sublime. It’s really dope work. I can’t wait to see what stuff you’re doing the next few years, and hopefully more of the world will be able to see what you’ve done from this interview. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Gabe Gault:
No, thank you so much. That keeps me going. So I appreciate being on here.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

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Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world.

We accomplish this through graphic design, presentations and workshops around I-D-E-A: inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.

If you’re curious to learn how to combine a passion for I-D-E-A with design, check us out at brevityandwit.com.

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Dawn Okoro

I discover new guests for Revision Path in the most interesting ways. Take this week’s guest — artist Dawn Okoro, for example. I learned about her work from the back of a bottle of LIFEWTR! Talk about refreshing! (And I don’t mean the water.)

Dawn gave an update on how 2021 has been going, including becoming a full-time artist and working on a new set of drawings using a surprising material — Kool-Aid. We talked a bit about one of Dawn’s past exhibits, “Burden of Respectability”, how she’s been connecting with a new audience over social media, and spoke on some of her artistic inspirations. It’s amazing that artists like Dawn can share their work with the world in all kinds of ways!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right. So tell us who you are and what you do.

Dawn Okoro:
My name is Dawn Okoro, and I’m an artist. Most of my art has been painting. I paint people, mostly Black women in bright vivid colors. And I also, really influence a lot by fashion. So I like to incorporate fashion into my art and just have fashion as art, and I also do some video work as well as art. So I like to experiment with different mediums of art.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. How has the year been going for you so far? How’s 2021 been?

Dawn Okoro:
2021 was currently a year of transition for me. When it comes to art last year for me in 2020, things just got really busy, things were slow when the pandemic first hit, but then things got busier with some different projects coming up and then I’ve been able to reach more people in the past year and I’ve sold a lot more paintings than before. And so, I left my day job that I’ve been working for nine years and just focusing on art full time. And yeah, a lot of things are changing for me in 2021.

Maurice Cherry:
Congratulations on leaving the job and becoming a full-time artist.

Dawn Okoro:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
Is there anything that you want to try to accomplish before the end of the year? I mean, it sounds like it’s been going pretty well so far.

Dawn Okoro:
Really the biggest thing that I’d like to accomplish is just finish a couple of projects that I have going on. One of the changes that happened for me this year is that I signed with… well, I started working with a couple of galleries where they represent my work, and one of the galleries that I signed with is based in London. They also have a gallery in LA.

Dawn Okoro:
Next year I’m going to have a solo show with them at their London location, but I need to get all those works finished as soon as possible, or, well, probably won’t be till the end of the year, but my goal is to get all those pieces finished and then I can breathe a sigh of relief.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice. London is really nice, I need to get back to London when all this pandemic stuff is over with. But no, that’s great. I mean, so you just got the representation this year, you just became represented?

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. This year, the gallery in London called Maddox Gallery, and then there’s also a gallery in Seattle called Koplin Del Rio, which I have a solo show with them right now of some small drawings that made with the Kool-Aid this summer.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh yeah. I saw on Instagram, this new drawing you’re doing called Red 40 with Kool-Aid. That’s really cool.

Dawn Okoro:
Thanks. Yeah, it’s been fun to work with. I just figured… thinking about… just over the past year, how I’ve been reaching more towards things that are comforting and I was trying to think of a way to incorporate that into my art. And for me, Kool-Aid is something that we grew up having with, I don’t know, probably most meals growing up here in Lubbock, Texas.

Dawn Okoro:
Is something, I guess once I moved out of the house, it’s not something that I just sit and make, but I guess you could say just the smell of it just brings back a nostalgic feeling. And so I got several packets of different colors and decided, well, why don’t I try to use that as a watercolor. And so I experimented with that a few months ago and it’s interesting.

Dawn Okoro:
It doesn’t really act like watercolor, it’s definitely different, but it’s interesting and you can really play with the textures and the powder as well, so you end up doing a whole series of those drawings.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m curious. Does it smell?

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. Well, it smells, when you first open up the packet, of course, the powder gets under your nose and it’s strong, and then… but then when I paint with it… I do the drawings in color pencil, but then I painted the Kool-Aid on and around the drawing. And so when I paint with the Kool-Aid, I mix it with water and depending on how much water you mix it with it, that’ll determine how dark it is.

Dawn Okoro:
So I did a few of these with the Kool-Aid, and then I came into my studio the next day and you could really smell the Kool-Aid strong. I like the way Kool-Aid smells, if my mother is making it, before a meal and we’re having it with a meal, but to have the smell of the powder just in the studio was just like, “Ah, it’s too much.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Dawn Okoro:
But what I do to protect the drawing is I spray it with an acrylic coating, and once I spray that, then you can’t smell it anymore.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I was just thinking, I was like, I wonder if that holds up over transport, will people try to get close to try to smell the Kool-Aid or something. But no, that’s really interesting.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. That’s unfortunately.

Maurice Cherry:
So what do your days look like now that you’re a full-time artist?

Dawn Okoro:
Well, first I’ll tell you what my days looked like before. So, I had my job that I would go to, it’s about at least nine hours a day to do that. So when it came to my art, I just had to find a way to just fit it around that no matter what I had going on. So, I would work and then ideally come home and then get right to work on my painting, which ideally maybe for a few hours, that didn’t always happen, of course.

Dawn Okoro:
And then, sometimes if I have a big project coming up, I would take a vacation from my day job to then go work on art. It was just really hard to balance it, especially if I had a really big project where it involved a lot of painting, and I just really wanted to just dedicate that time to making my art.

Dawn Okoro:
So now that I’m able to focus on my art, I will say that those hours that I’ve worked in my day job, those immediately got filled up with plenty to do, it still feels like there aren’t enough hours in a day. But my days look like… I get up, make some coffee, on the perfect day I would get up and maybe work out for 30 minutes, which for me might mean skateboarding or go for a walk or something. And then when I get home shower, freshen up and then get into the art studio.

Dawn Okoro:
So when I’m in the studio, I try to divide my days up so that I have at least a couple days a week where I deal with business related stuff, that is not making art. And then I try to have at least three days a week where I just focus on actually making stuff. It doesn’t always work out that way, but just spend my day in the studio, either by computer doing paperwork or doing stuff like that, or working on a canvas or a drawing, but definitely much happier now for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I can imagine trying to juggle a full-time job while also having these side responsibilities is always tough balance because… I mean, you would hope that you land at a job that understands that outside of work you’re a totally different person, you have your own other things that you have to do. Well, did you find that your job was sympathetic to that?

Dawn Okoro:
My bosses were sympathetic to that, but at the same time there’s really not much they could really do, not much they could really to help because the way I felt I wish that… I don’t know, I wish I could maybe… I don’t know, have a schedule like the 4/10s or just a schedule where you have more days off or something. I don’t know. But they weren’t able to do that at least in my department.

Dawn Okoro:
They were sympathetic and they, I guess supported me as an artist, but that’s about… but there’s really not much they could do because it’s just a big corporate job and you just have to work with whatever they provide. So

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And you were working at a news station, right?

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. I was a journalist. At that station I was a… well, I was a producer for several years there, but that was really stressful because you’re the producer that handles writing for the shows, when the anchor comes on and talks and then you also have to sit in the booth and booth the show too. And to me that’s nerve ranking when you have live shots and just so many moving parts and things can go wrong.

Dawn Okoro:
And I think that I probably wasn’t best suited for that position, in the first place is because I get so anxious, but I really hated that part of the job. There were some good things about being a TV news producer, but eventually there was an opportunity to join the web team, so I jumped on that and I was definitely a lot happier, at least that was more tolerable to work on the web team because the pace is different.

Dawn Okoro:
A story breaks, so you get all the information and you post it, and then you do updates and that’s pretty much all you can really do on that, and post on social media. So I definitely enjoyed that better, but still I wanted to have those hours for myself and my art.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And again congratulations, I see you’re making that jump. I know, we’re recording this right now at a time where there’s this big thing going on, at least what the media is calling, the great resignation of people deciding they’re going to leave their jobs and pursue other things.

Maurice Cherry:
And not saying that what you’re doing is wrapped up in that, but I think it certainly speaks to this overall wave right now of people discovering there’s more out there than just a 9:00 to 5:00, you’d have the permission and the capacity to pursue your passions which is great for anyone that has an artistic soul like that.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. And I definitely agree with that and I think being able to work… a lot of people that weren’t allowed to work from home were suddenly allowed to work from home. And I think that made a difference as well. At my job we worked in an office, and me as their producer or web producer or digital, whatever you want to call it, I really didn’t have any need to physically be in the office.

Dawn Okoro:
And before the pandemic, some of us were like, “Hey, could we work from home?” Or at least have just some days a week where we could work from home, and the company is like, “No.” And then the pandemic happens and then they allowed, suddenly pretty much everyone was allowed to work from home unless if you’re the anchor in the studio, that’s hard to do from home.

Dawn Okoro:
So they had to have some people in the control room and all that, but this whole time I was able to work from home and that was nice just to… even if I had to focus on my day job from home, it was nice just to at least be near my art. So as soon as I was done working, then I could just… well, I’m already here, at least I don’t have to go through the commute and all that.

Dawn Okoro:
But then I heard… this isn’t why I quit, but shortly after I quit I learned that, I think starting soon everybody that was working from home, get ready to get back in the office. And I was like, “Oh God, I’m so glad that I’m not there anymore because I would not want to have to go back to the office every single day.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. To get back to your artwork again, you mentioned earlier, you’re working across a bunch of different medium in terms of inspiration. Some of it is fashion based, some of it is more fine arts based like you mentioned with this painting, how do you approach creating a new piece of art? Where does that start?

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah, it starts off with just how do I feel from there? What work do I want to create? Or what is it for? And usually that’s going to be I want to do some paintings or I want to do a painting and then I paint people. So then from there it’s, who will I paint?

Dawn Okoro:
A lot during the past year and a half, I’ve been doing self portraits because that’s just been a lot easier during the pandemic, and I’ve just slowly started to get back into having people photograph for me so that I can use that image as a reference. So then it’s just deciding, who will I paint? What will this painting look like? How do I want people to feel?

Dawn Okoro:
And then I photograph the person and then I will later go look at the photographs, from there I decide. I look and see what touches me the most emotionally, and then I use that, that image is the reference image, so then I get painting. The colors are also very feeling based, based on this person, what are they wearing? Then I just go from there. And then when it’s finished, I hope that I create something that can move people in some way.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I saw from looking at, like I said, some of the past work that you’ve done, and even looking at the process around it, it seems like it’s collaborative in that way. You are working with a model or working with someone to conjure up the emotion that you want to eventually put forth in the piece.

Dawn Okoro:
Yes. I like to be able to capture the essence of the person that’s modeling whenever I’m… well, at least lately the past few years, whenever I’m going to bring someone in to shoot reference photos with, I’ll tell them just wear whatever you want to wear, or you can bring a couple of outfits if you want. And then when they get here, then I’ll see what they’re wearing and so it’s a surprise for me.

Dawn Okoro:
And so, some people it might be t-shirt and jeans, others might have more of an elaborate type of get up. It’s fun for me to be surprised by what they’re wearing, and then just for me to just spin off from that.

Maurice Cherry:
I saw, I think it was your Punk Noir exhibit where you also had a band there. So it’s exhibiting your work, but then you also have this live media component too.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. So the Punk Noir show started here in Austin. I was thinking, okay, so when they said, “Okay, you can do a solo show here. What do you want to do?” And at that time I was just really just getting back into being an artist again. And through that process, I was starting to meet more artists around town, some of them who didn’t even live here maybe a few years ago, but I was just starting to get more involved and meet other creatives.

Dawn Okoro:
And I just wanted to just capture a snapshot of the way things felt here in Austin at that time for me and the Black creative community. So for the show I wanted to paint these life size portraits of people, the Black people that have a punk spirit, and then I envisioned at least for the opening, you have a Black fronted punk band there and just really making an immersive night.

Dawn Okoro:
And so it really was like I was saying, it was probably about 400 people at the opening and you’ve got lots of video and everyone moshed into the punk band, and the part where the paintings were, I guess that’s… I was a few steps away from where the band performed, but you could hear it coming into the gallery area. So that was such a good experience, I wanted to recreate that.

Dawn Okoro:
So I had some opportunities to show… and a few other locations around that time. So I was like, “Well, let me bring Punk Noir to these locations. So I was able to do the show in Dallas, and there I was able to have a band as well. In Dallas, I had Wanz Dover, and then in Austin Blaxploitation was the band.

Dawn Okoro:
But the thing is this all takes funding. So I had another version of Punk Noir show in San Antonio, Texas, and also in Seattle. But I wasn’t able to bring the bands to those, unfortunately, because the beach didn’t have the funding and resources there.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, when you’re thinking about creating these exhibits, do you always want to have that, I guess, live component to it? Or was it just specific for that one?

Dawn Okoro:
I would say it’s specific to that one, but that was so fun that in the future, when I’m able to, again, I could definitely see myself doing that again, but it just all comes down to having the support to be able to do that. But I would definitely do something like that again.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I would think some London musicians in the show that would be dope.

Dawn Okoro:
That would be awesome. Yeah. I have to see about that.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’re originally from Texas. You also are currently… I mean, you live in Texas now too. Tell me about what it was like growing up there.

Dawn Okoro:
So Texas it’s a very big state, very vast, different areas are different from each other. So I live in Austin now, which is the capital of Texas. Austin is a very… well Texas is a red state, very conservative. Austin is a very blue area. I guess the major cities are blue, but then the rest of Texas is rural and very red.

Dawn Okoro:
I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, which is about… it’s in what we call the Texas panhandle, but it’s up north, in the panhandle part that sticks out in Texas. And it’s about a six hour drive from Austin. Lubbock is a lot different from Austin and it’s very flat, very conservative, and now I guess it’s Trump country. Austin is very white, Lubbock it’s very white to.

Dawn Okoro:
I guess it just has such a conservative attitude overall. I think a lot of my upbringing was influenced by that and I just wanted to just get away as soon as I could, because I was already someone that… because of just how I am, very introverted, very shy, I think that didn’t help, but I just didn’t feel like I fit in really anywhere. So I just got out of Lubbock as soon as I could.

Maurice Cherry:
I know that feeling, I grew up in a small town in Alabama and two weeks after I graduated, I was out, I was like, “I’m done.”

Dawn Okoro:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
“This was fun. Thanks. I’m out.” Yeah.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. But I hear you. I hear you. So I moved to Austin for college. I’m so really glad that I did, just to see something else, even if Austin was not a huge city or anything, it was just good to just experience something else.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Were you exposed to a lot of art and everything growing up in Lubbock? Was there an art scene there?

Dawn Okoro:
I don’t know if there was an art scene really. I mean, as far as art, the only museum that I went to was… we have Texas Tech in Lubbock. So I would go to the Texas Tech museum whenever we go for a field trip at school. But other than that, yeah, that’s pretty much. That’s pretty much it. I mean, Lubbock at that time may have had a few, maybe a few galleries, but I will say one memory I have is being in high school and I’m not sure how I met this artist, but I met an artist who was a… he was an older Hispanic artist who had a studio in downtown Lubbock, but not far from my high school.

Dawn Okoro:
And I remember I visited there one time and he had all his artwork up and he was working on stuff in his studio, and that was really inspiring for me, even though at that time I still didn’t feel like for sure I could be a successful artist, but now looking back, that’s a good memory, one of the rare times that I got to be around someone that had an art studio there in Lubbock.

Maurice Cherry:
And now once you left and went to University of Texas in Austin, I mean, was that a big culture shift?

Dawn Okoro:
Not really. Given the timing, being 18 and finally moving off on my own, I think it was just a shift in my life of just learning how to just be an adult, but I’m glad that I got to spend those years in Austin as opposed to Lubbock. But mainly pretty much I kept myself confined to campus, than here in Austin, we have the entertainment area, it’s called Sixth Street.

Dawn Okoro:
So I would go to Sixth Street with some of my classmates and all that, but it wasn’t too much of a culture change because Austin was at the time especially, it was more of a just a sleepy college town. So it was a good place to start off, I guess, although we didn’t love it.

Maurice Cherry:
What was your time like there at UT?

Dawn Okoro:
Looking back, I wish, I hate to say it should, could, or would, but I wish that I had taken advantage of the resources that they would have for someone that wants to be an artist. I knew when I initially started going to college, I knew that I wanted to be an artist or something creative, but I was like, “Nah, I’ll just put that off till later.” And expectations of myself and expectations from family, it was pretty much expected that I would be a doctor, or a lawyer, or engineer or something like that.

Dawn Okoro:
And so I was like, “Well, I couldn’t do that all. I’ll just pick another major that sounds legit.” And I picked psychology and then I minored in fashion design. I took a whole lot of fashion design classes, the most fun on the fashion design side of things.

Dawn Okoro:
So I don’t know, I just feel like, I wish… if I could go back and change things, I probably would’ve just maybe study art and fashion design instead, but I would just not as focused on what I would do as so much so as some other people I know that knew what they wanted to do, had everything lined up, had their internships and then a job or something right out of college. But that wasn’t me.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I mean, I think we all have… there’s non-traditional path to get into the arts or into design or things like that. But I see what you mean about looking back at college and wishing or wondering if you pursued things in a different manner where you might be now.

Maurice Cherry:
For example, I’m a designer, I also work as a strategist, but in undergrad I majored in math. Now I love math, don’t get me wrong. I was a huge math nerd in high school, I was captain of the math, mathletes and everything. But I wanted to… I was also a writer, I wrote all through grade school or whatever. And I remember wanting to go off to college and major in English and my mom was like, “Nope, Mm-mm (negative) you need to major in something that’s going to make some money.”

Maurice Cherry:
And she knew that I was into computers and everything. And so initially I started off doing computer engineering, computer science, and then I didn’t like that for a semester, and then switched over to math. Now the school that I went to, didn’t have an arts program, really. It had an art class and you could take some of the… if you wanted to pursue art, I think you could take some of them at a nearby college.

Maurice Cherry:
So I went to Morehouse, but you could take art classes at Spelman, because Spelman had, or they still have, I should say, a museum, but they have a very rigorous art program. If you wanted to pursue that, you could just take all your classes at Spelman. And I didn’t even really think about that because I knew that if I did that, I would lose my scholarship because my scholarship was in STEM fields.

Maurice Cherry:
And so math was the compromise for me because I really liked math, and I mean, truth be told there actually is a good bit of design in math when you’re drawing and doing 3d curves and stuff, but I didn’t really get to that until much later in the major. But I do wonder sometimes if I would’ve just pursued art and went that way, what would be different? I don’t begrudge the path that I’ve taken now, but I do wonder, would that be different in that way?

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. Same here. Same here because I feel like as someone that’s mostly a painter… at some point I felt like, and I felt the vibe I was getting is that an MFA is so important and you’re expected to have an MFA, and by that time I’d already… I didn’t have money to get an MFA because I had already bounced on my loans on these other side.

Dawn Okoro:
And so that wasn’t going to happen. But over time, I’m seeing there are very few things that I want to do where not having an MFA is a barrier to that. So I’m glad that at least the experiences that I have, had in my career just help make me who I am and I’m able to still continue forward in doing what I want to do with art.

Maurice Cherry:
And I mean, continuing along the education path, later you ended up going to law school also. Was that part of your interest back then?

Dawn Okoro:
No, it was never my interest. It was more so, in college I majored in psychology, just buying my time, because I don’t know, I guess… well, at some point I was pre-med in my undergrad and then I started taking those chemistry classes and I was like, “Okay, this isn’t going to work.” So I got my psychology degree.

Dawn Okoro:
And then after that it was like, “Okay, so now I have my bachelor’s degree. I know I want to be self creative, but for now I need to have something going on in my life, or I don’t have a career or anything.” And so I was like, “Okay, well, I’ll just go to law school, you just take the LSAT and you can go to law school with any degree.” And so I was like, “Okay, I’ll just do that.”

Dawn Okoro:
So basically I applied, I was like, “Okay, I’ll just take the LSAT, apply to one school and leave it at that. I got that down, I’ll get in.” And then I applied, then got the acceptance letter, crap. So I got the acceptance letter and I was like, “just oh, crap. I just cannot do this. I wanted to be an artist.”

Dawn Okoro:
So I wrote the school and asked them if they could defer my acceptance. They said, “Okay, we can defer it for a year.” And so I was like, “Okay, I’ll take that year to just finally make myself successful as an artist and then I don’t need to go to law school.” So that year I really did work on my art and that’s when I really started pursuing it professionally.

Dawn Okoro:
That’s when I just put on my own art show and it did go well considering, but then the year went by and my expectations were not realistic either, but I still wasn’t able to make a living from arts, so I was like, “Okay, I’ll just go ahead and go to law school.” And that’s what I did, I was like, “Well, let me just do that so I can just become a lawyer and then I’ll just be an artist on the side.”

Dawn Okoro:
So in law school, I mean, law school is very demanding, especially if it’s not your passion to be a lawyer, I think that makes it harder and less fun to do. I mean, it is interesting and you’ll learn somethings, and that was a cool experience, and I met some good people that I’m still in touch with, but law school itself, I mean, it was just not the most fun experience, but there is something about going to law school that was a positive impact on my art.

Dawn Okoro:
Going to law school, I went to Texas Southern in Houston, and Houston at the time, I felt like Houston had a really vibrant art scene, more than Austin, I guess. The Houston art scene was, I don’t know, it’s more culturally rich and there were just stronger representation of Black artists and artists of color being seen and shown. And so there, I was able to get involved in the art scene and I was showing my work there and I met a couple artists who are still mentors for me today.

Dawn Okoro:
So the best part about law school was just, I guess it made me move to Houston temporarily, but I graduated from law school and at that time I was just like, “Okay, I know want to do this time, I have nothing to lose.” And so I just decided at that time, I’m not going to pursue law, I’m just going to now be an artist.

Dawn Okoro:
So right after I graduated from law school, me along with my boyfriend, we just moved to New York. We didn’t really have anything to lose. That was an interesting experience too, but we did end up back in Texas and that’s when I ended up becoming a journalist for many years. So it’s a rollercoaster doing art and then stopping art, doing art, stopping art.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I’m curious, and this feeds into my next question, but do you feel like once you went through this, went through law school and being in Houston, do you feel like this gave you permission now to be an artist?

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah, I do. Especially at that time, because I mean, after just going through law school, I figure, okay, at least I did it, I finished, hopefully my family will be proud of that. But now it’s like, okay, at this point I’m 29 years old. I was just like, okay, now I’m just going to do my own thing, which is art. But then I just felt like, well, I’m just still not getting to where I want to be fast, that’s how I felt at that time.

Dawn Okoro:
Now looking back, I should have had more patience. But I just decided, okay, well, I just want to get my life together and just harsh some stability. So that’s when I got a job as a journalist and then just… and that was after moving back from New York. And so I was feeling discouraged being back in Texas.

Dawn Okoro:
And let me tell you when I lived in New York, we ended up having to come back to Texas. It was just a bad time to really move to New York, economic recession and all that. But coming back to Texas it meant I move right back to Lubbock, at least for a while. So that was a huge culture shift going from New York to Lubbock, where my life just felt like it came to a screeching halt.

Dawn Okoro:
And so we were just really upset about it and we’re depressed at the time, and I was just like, “I’m just going to give up on art, and I just focus on my journalism career.” And I started doing more in that. And there was some good times working as a journalist and somethings I enjoyed, and yeah, and so I was just focusing on my 9:00 tO 5:00. And then when I would get off of work, instead of making art, then it’s like, “Okay, I have the free time to just chill and decompress or whatever.”

Dawn Okoro:
But over time I just realized I was just going through the motions and just watching my life pass me by and I wasn’t really happy. And that’s when I decided, okay, I need to get back into art and just continue to do that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And like you’re saying, it sounds like this also took place right around the time you were leaving your 20s, entering your 30s, wondering is this right? Is this the path that I’m supposed to be taking?

Dawn Okoro:
Exactly. It was just like, “Okay, damn, I’m 30, what do I…” And it’s easier for me to look at it differently now, yeah I was just feeling frantic and I just didn’t have, I guess a career really and all that. And so I was just trying to just get some, at least some financial stability, which we were at that time just working and just building up.

Dawn Okoro:
I can’t really say that, that was not the right way to go about things, I could have gone about it differently, but it’s nice just to have at least your basic needs taken care of and then it’s you easier for me to be creative?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. The reason that I was saying that this might feed into my next question is because I wanted to ask you about this solo exhibition that you did last year called Burden of Respectabilit, because as you’ve described all of this, the word respectability or the concept of respectability politics popped into my head. And I’m wondering as you did the solo exhibition, did that conjure up these past feelings of feeling like you had to go along this certain path in your life and in your career, instead of becoming an artist earlier on?

Dawn Okoro:
When I was putting together that show, I don’t remember thinking specifically about my situation with my path to being an artist. But now that you say that, deep down, that probably had some impact on that. I mean, I was thinking about myself and just Black people in America in general, how you’re just in some segments, I guess, of society you’re expected to act or behave a certain way so that you can show that you’re good, you’re one of the good ones.

Dawn Okoro:
So when I did this show, and this was this fall of 2020, so we had the pandemic, I had an opportunity to do a show in a window, so it would just be a window display. So I thought, okay, that’s a great idea with the pandemic, anyone could just come by and see the work without having to be close to anybody or even go indoors. And I always love seeing the window displays in New York, like on fifth avenue and all that.

Dawn Okoro:
And just watching how that as an art in itself doing a merchandising display, so I figured I wanted to do something like that with my art. And so I’d been wearing these head pieces because I just like them for fashion, and so I decided to make some head pieces that would sit on top of mannequin heads for the display and then they would also be lighting where there’d be a purple light that shines on the mannequins and then splashes onto the background.

Dawn Okoro:
So I made these head chains, well out of copper chains, and then I used different gemstones and they were heavy. So when I finished each head piece and then each head piece was heavy, and so it weighs down on the mannequins head, but that’s to show that the weight of that Burden of Respectability. And so just trying to show the weight, but also trying to praise something that’s aesthetically appealing to who ever might be walking by and viewing that window.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, it’s a strong metaphor. I mean, I think historically when people think about… to give you a sense, we’ll put a link to it in the show notes, so people can see the window and see what I’m talking about. But it’s these heads on pikes, essentially, which historically have meant a warning in a way.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
So when I was looking at the images, I’m thinking, oh, this is an Oman, the Burden of Respectability is you end up like this.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. I had to think, okay, how will I display these head pieces? And so I got these styrofoam heads and they’re really light weight and I painted them black. And then on some of the faces of the heads I put bits of copper leaf over the eyes and things like that. Yeah. The thing I had to display on was this metal pole or steak and then, the styrofoam is so lightweight that you can just smash the styrofoam on there.

Dawn Okoro:
And I noticed when I did that it looked like a chopped off head that’s just dangling there. So yeah, I could definitely see where you’re coming from on that.

Maurice Cherry:
And now those head pieces that you were creating, are those similar to the one that you wear now? The one that I’ve seen in recent photos?

Dawn Okoro:
The one that I’ve been wearing in most photos is one that I bought a while back, and I liked it so much, I decided I wanted to start making my own, which I still have some more ideas that I want to work on. But I use this headpiece as a pattern, just how the crown is made, and so I make something similar and then I looped the metal on in a similar way. But then from there I could play with how much chain or how long, or if you want to attach any other materials and things like that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. The ones that you’re wearing, I love those. It gives a very rockstar feel to your image. I don’t know, I was describing it to a friend of mine earlier. I was like, “It’s like a medieval circlet, but then it’s also giving me Rick James.” I love it. It’s great.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. I put on, I was like, “I like this.” And it end up becoming… it’s like my wig. I had it on today. I didn’t know if this… I thought this was going to be on video, so I had it ready for you.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, we’ll have your image for the cover art, so people can see that.

Dawn Okoro:
Okay, cool.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. Speaking to what we were talking about before, and I’ve mentioned this before we started recording. I love that you really use social media to give a glimpse into just your artistic world. You’re on Twitter, you’re on Instagram, you’re on TikTok, which I’ve recently been getting into TikTok. That’s a very interesting place, TikTok.

Maurice Cherry:
And then of course, YouTube, you have a series that you have called Life in Art, where you have all these videos, there’s a video of your first museum solo show, there’s a recent video you did around anxiety and being an artist. How does social media really help out with what you do?

Dawn Okoro:
Well, for me, social media has been a huge help, even going way back to before I went to law school. Back then my space was the thing, and so I would get out of my space, post my artwork. And even with that… I guess maybe my space wasn’t as bad at that time with algorithms and all that. I’m thinking the reach was probably more organic because it was just easier to… I don’t know, it seemed like it was easier to meet other people through that platform, especially meeting other artists.

Dawn Okoro:
And even back then on my space, I was meeting collectors, other artists who became mentors, curators, and then looking at present day, I do post on Instagram a lot. That’s really my main one because it’s the more visual one I guess, good for posting photos, I guess.

Dawn Okoro:
But when I did my Punk Noir show, the first version of it in Austin, I started just documenting the process, about six months before, not every day, but several days a week, just post, here’s what I’m working on today, here’s what’s going on now, or here’s this challenge that I’m going through.

Dawn Okoro:
But then six months later, then when the show opened up, a lot of people had been following that whole process and they felt… I guess they felt like, okay, they felt that they were with me in a way. And I’ve heard some collectors say that they really enjoyed just seeing the process of me making a specific painting.

Dawn Okoro:
And also just when I show what I have going on, other artists can see what I’m doing and what I’m dealing with, and they can relate and helps them feel less alone as well. But really even still today, Instagram is where I still meet collectors, curators, people that run museums or that run galleries. The initial connection might be Instagram, they have an account too, and they’re following and they’re like, “I like this person.”

Dawn Okoro:
And so maybe they may reach out through a DM or through email, but it’s still been a great way to just meet people in the world that are interested in my art.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I know that there are certainly listeners that have written us and have asked like, “We want to see from more people that are using, I think, more social platforms.” And that’s not to say that Instagram is not a social platform, it totally is. But I’m really intrigued by how you use TikTok.

Maurice Cherry:
Because like I alluded to, it is a very interesting platform. I just started really exploring it. I don’t know, maybe about a month or so ago. There’s a spirit about TikTok that reminds me very much of the early, early, early web, late 90s, early 2000s, where it’s unfettered in terms of what you can talk about and everything, but in the same vein, it’s also weirdly regulated.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, of course heavily so in terms of certain things you would mention in terms of topics. But I’ll hear about people getting banned if their account reaches a certain amount of followers and they have to start a second account or a third account, and I don’t really understand the… it seems very volatile as a platform.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. I mean, the account I have now is my second account, because the first account I started, I guess maybe a year and a half ago when you initially registered, you can use your Instagram account as your registration, so I’m like, “That’s easy, I’ll do that.” And then I joined and I didn’t really use it that much, and then more recently I started wanting to use it again, but they said, “Oh, sorry, we don’t work with Instagram anymore, so if you registered through that, then you’re just screwed and you lost your username and everything.” And so-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Dawn Okoro:
Okay. And then I’ve been having trouble trying to get that fixed. So yeah, I just started another account. And so I’ve just been posting from that. So, with TikTok, I gave it a try because it seems like it’s… not that I want to go viral or anything, but it seems like it’s easier to go viral on TikTok or just… it’s easier to just randomly get a lot of views for a post, whereas opposed to others like Instagram or Twitter, is just so buried in the algorithm that’s so hard just for anyone to even see the post, with TikTok, it’s just more random like that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. TikTok is a lot buzzier in that respect. Even your For You page, to me it’s very much akin to… as I’m scrolling on my phone, it feels like I’m channel surfing with a remote. You just go from video to video, here’s the next one, here’s the next one, here’s the next one. And of course the algorithm changes up, so you may be watching cleaning videos and then all of a sudden now it’s on thirst traps, and then now of a sudden it’s doing poor extractions.

Maurice Cherry:
I don’t know, my For You page is all over the place, because you will like a video and then I guess the algorithm thinks, oh, well you must want to see more of this. I’m like, “Not really.”

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:
But I liked that video, not all of these other videos.

Dawn Okoro:
I have a hard time… I’ve been using TikTok because I feel like, well, let me at least be on there and see what happens. But yeah, I have a hard time consuming on TikTok because yeah, it’s just too much for me because I mean, you need to have the sound on and then… it’s a lot.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Dawn Okoro:
It feel just like, “Okay, just shut up.”

Maurice Cherry:
And then talking about their regulation, sometimes you’ll make a video and then the sound, TikTok will decide to just mute the sound. So okay, so now your video’s up, but it doesn’t have sound, and what it seems to be like, I don’t know, I mean, I’ve been on the web for 20 plus years, so I’ve seen bad comments.

Maurice Cherry:
TikTok has the worst comment section I have ever seen anywhere across any platform, probably similar to 4chan in terms of how much people try to get a rise out of you. Because what I see from TikTok is certainly you have people that are creating videos, but then you have an equal amount of people creating reactions to bad comment videos.

Dawn Okoro:
Oh wow.

Maurice Cherry:
Someone will leave some really shitty comment, and then now the response to that has gone viral, and it seems like going viral on TikTok is a nightmare because of course, that video will get shared out on other platforms and stuff like that and just invites all kind of stuff. But TikTok is a very interesting place. I’m strictly a consumer, I don’t know if I want to put anything on TikTok. I’ll just watch it.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. We’ll see. I’ll post occasionally, I’ll post some of my art process videos. But one day, a few months ago I was like, “Let me…” I’ve got a new pair of Jordan 6, I was like, “Let me post it on TikTok.” And that did better than any of my art videos. So I don’t know.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s weird about the stuff that will go viral. It’s hard to predict that. On that concept around exposure, I think we’re starting to see a lot more Black fine artists and their work being exhibited to the mainstream, I’d say probably over the past decade or so.

Maurice Cherry:
We’ve got Kehinde Wiley who did Barack Obama’s official portrait that’s in the national portrait gallery, Amy Sherald also did Michelle Obama’s portrait that’s in the national portrait gallery. You’ve got of course, a lot more Black run television shows and movies and things like that, that are also utilizing the work of Black artists.

Maurice Cherry:
The one that sticks out to me, just off the top of my head is Lina. I think her name is Lina Viktor Iris, who did all this intricate gold work stuff that Kendrick Lamar used in his video with SZA. This was years and years ago.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
But we’re also seeing television shows like Empire did a lot with showcasing Black artists. Your art has even been shown on a television show on the First Wives Club on BET. What do you think about that kind of exposure? Does it really help you out as an artist?

Dawn Okoro:
I don’t know. I did have some of my work in a scene on the First Wife’s Club initially. I mean, that was just cool to just have that happen. It’s cool to see your work on a show. As far as exposure from that, I don’t know, I definitely… because honestly I didn’t get credit for it as far as… I don’t get a credit at the end of the show or anything, so there’s really no… my art was not mentioned in the script or anything, so really for a viewer, they wouldn’t have no idea whose art it was if I hadn’t posted about it on my social media.

Dawn Okoro:
So, I don’t know if in my situation, if it helped with exposure. I don’t know if it had been something different, if it would’ve helped. I have something coming up for another project in the future where my art will be on something again. But this will be with an… this will be a movie through Sony. I don’t know, with that we’ll know again, if it provide any exposure for me or if this was just decoration for the background.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. I don’t know. I definitely don’t. I don’t think I’ve gotten any direct exposure or opportunities from that. So I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s different for other artists, but I can just say hopefully in those situations, the artists is always treated fairly. Because you mentioned the Black Panther situation. I don’t have all the facts in front of me, but I remember reading a while back, the artist was asked to, like, “Hey, could we use your visuals for this?”

Dawn Okoro:
And I think she was open to them, but I’m not sure that the negotiations was it wasn’t… I guess the terms weren’t what she wanted so she said no. And then, so they decided just to go ahead and have another artist make work just as similar to hers and just use it anyway. And I think she filed a lawsuit, but I don’t think she came out on top of the lawsuit. I think they said, well, it’s not the same so they can do this. So that sucked. So hopefully that doesn’t ever happened to me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, no, I’m looking at it up now and I misspoke her name earlier it’s Lina Iris Viktor, and yeah, it was Kendrick Lamar and SZA had the video that was, I think it was All the Stars, I think that was the song that was on the Black Panther soundtrack. But to point out what you said earlier around attribution, I mean, I think that’s the most important part, because you see these visuals and they’re in the background, and unless there’s something in the script or in the credits that’s like, “Artwork done by Blank.” You don’t really know unless you know the artist.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
You could look at… because different artists have their own unique styles, we’ve had fine artists on the show before like Dr. Fahamu Pecou, et cetera. And so, if you know the art, then you know the style, but does the average person watching the show know that? And it’s clear that it doesn’t feel like the show has a responsibility, or maybe the movie or whatever, doesn’t have a responsibility to even illuminate that, which is pretty sad, especially from Black works.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. A while back and that was… Beverly Hills Cop came on and there was a scene where they’re in a gallery. And then I noticed in the credits of the movie they listed all the artists whose work was shown in that gallery scene. So I was like, “See that, that’s what I would rather have happened.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Dawn Okoro:
But I guess it’s just really up to the artists if they’re comfortable with the terms that are presented there.

Maurice Cherry:
Because I mean certainly if a television show or something ran and the actors didn’t get any attribution, people will be raising hell. So.

Dawn Okoro:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Maybe it’s a thing where more artists need to speak up. I don’t know. I mean, I’m pointing this out as a problem that artists need to solve because clearly if the production companies and such are seeking out and using the art, then it should be up to them to then go the extra step of making sure that, that artist gets credited.

Maurice Cherry:
But I hope that more, especially from Black creatives, I hope to see more of that… I don’t even want to say reaching back, that feels weird to even say, but when I look at say Issa Rae what she’s doing with Insecure, or what other show runners are doing with other shows like that, it’s clear that representation matters, having these images matters. And that’s whether it’s the image of a person or the image of artwork.

Maurice Cherry:
It should be at least attributed so people know that it’s not just Black folks behind the scenes and Black folks that are acting, but this is Black art on the walls and these are the artists that you should know who they are and support them and stuff like that.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. I definitely agree with that. That’s something that I hadn’t really thought about much. I don’t think I’ve really gotten anything directly from that. So.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you want people to see when they look at your work?

Dawn Okoro:
I want people to feel inspired, I want them to see strength, I want them to see power. The other day I did… you mentioned the YouTube video I did about anxiety. Someone had made a comment that they were surprised to hear that I felt that way, because when they saw my work, they felt they saw someone that was empowered. And so I was thinking, yeah, I guess that is the case, but I mean, I always feel empowered myself, but I would like that to come through in my art.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s an article that I saw that was about… it was the same one that we’re going to link in the show notes that was regarding your Burden of Respectability exhibit. But in that article, your work is described as a pursuit to the expansion of herself. How has your work changed as you’ve grown just as a woman?

Dawn Okoro:
For me, when I initially started doing portraits when I was younger, for me and I wanted to be at least somewhat realistic, so I needed a reference image to look at. So initially I started just drawing from images and magazines, changing it to my own… changing this photo to other drawing or painting that’s in my own vision.

Dawn Okoro:
And at one point, just for example, I would go through a fashion magazine because I love looking at fashion, and I would take this painting of a photo of a White model and then make it into a whole new painting of a Black woman. And then over time I started being able to get my own reference photos and just learn how to shoot and be able to create from that.

Dawn Okoro:
So then I started just painting these portraits of different people in different colors that felt were right for the image. But then over time, giving myself permission to be an artist and this, and I think I’ve also started to give myself permission to experiment more and try new materials. As I grow, I’m going to be just trying new things and just filling out what works and what doesn’t, and just continue to evolve, for example, even using the Kool-Aid as a medium, in the past, I never would’ve thought about using a food related item as an art medium.

Dawn Okoro:
So, ultimately I just want to be able to just be somewhat playful with some of what I do, because it makes it more fun and experimentation is a very big part of growing for me.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you get your creativity back if you’re feeling uninspired?

Dawn Okoro:
So, yeah, when I’m uninspired if just sink into that and do nothing, then it just leads to more of doing nothing and then just feeling worse. So really the best thing for me to do is when I’m feeling uninspired, is to just work on something, just even if it’s small, just something low pressure, because I may not feel inspired, but then once I get into whatever I’m working on, it feels like it activates a part of my brain where I start to get a little bit more inspired, and even with what I’m working on, I may think of a new idea and try something new.

Dawn Okoro:
And then at the end of the day, I’ve worked on something, I’ve worked through this creative slump, even if I didn’t come out with a whole great brand new idea, at least I was working towards it, and so I feel better about myself overall. But sometimes it’s been easier said than done, but I’ve been better about that lately, just trying to work through those moments of low inspiration.

Maurice Cherry:
Are there any artists out there that you really like that help inspire you? And they don’t have to be visual artists? It could be any artist.

Dawn Okoro:
One of my first artists inspirations was Andy Warhol. And that’s because he’s one of the first artists I learned about when I was in high school and I was drawn to how he was, I guess, eccentric and I like the way he used color and the way that he did the solid background. So that’s initially what got me started on doing my work the way that I do.

Dawn Okoro:
Another artist that I find inspiration on or from is Wangechi Mutu, her work is so earthy. A couple of years ago she had a solo show here in Austin at a museum and she had these high heels that were covered in mud, but it was just so beautiful and so organic at the same time. So for my own art, ideally it would be cool to combine bright, unnatural colors but with also an organic look or feel as well. So yeah, those are two of my inspirations.

Maurice Cherry:
Who have been some of the mentors that have helped you out along your artistic career?

Dawn Okoro:
One of the mentors, William Cordova, he’s a visual artist. He’s really the first person from the art world that really, I guess validated me in saying, just letting me know that I don’t have to have that MFA, and then what I’m doing is good enough, as an artist I could actually do this and be taken seriously.

Dawn Okoro:
And then he introduced me to Robert Pruitt who is from Houston. Robert has been a mentor, he encouraged me early on. And then I think he moved to New York, but I think every now and then if he’ll see something good, he’ll apply for you, send it my way. And then last year he curated a show at the gallery that he works with in Seattle, Koplin Del Rio, and he brought some of my work into that show.

Dawn Okoro:
And that went really well, the work sold and the gallery was like, “You got me more.” And like, “Sure.” A sense of more. And then finally it got to where I’m working with that gallery and that’s why I have the solo show with them now. And so that’s thanks to the help of fellow artists, Robert Pruitt.

Maurice Cherry:
What are you obsessed with right now?

Dawn Okoro:
What am I obsessed with right now? I would say, right now I’m obsessed with this Kool-Aid, because I’m really having fun with playing with the textures, and there’s so much you can do with that to where you can make it when it dries, it still has a bumpy texture to it and a little bit of a glimmer from the chemical crystals that they put in there. And so, I still want to explore that some more and just see what else can be done with that as a medium.

Maurice Cherry:
With the red Kool-Aid that you’re using, is it cherry or tropical punch?

Dawn Okoro:
The red has been… I’ve actually used both the red… I’ve used tropical punch and cherry. And then the watermelon is more of a pinkish red.

Maurice Cherry:
I didn’t even think about watermelon. Okay. That makes sense. Do you have a dream project that you love to do one day?

Dawn Okoro:
One that I’ve always wanted to do and is be able to, just travel to different parts of the world and just meet and work amongst the artists there, for example, Lagos, I would love to be able to go there and spend some time and work with the artists there and also, maybe even meet people who are part of the punk community there and maybe create images, create paintings of those people.

Dawn Okoro:
And [inaudible 00:58:55] it’s always envision going to different parts of the world and painting porches of some of the people I meet there.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you see this next chapter of your career going? Say it’s the next five years from now? What work do you want to be doing?

Dawn Okoro:
That’s something that I’m currently trying to figure out, because I love having paintings out there in the world and having shows with that work. And I definitely want to continue having the shows, but I think I could see myself maybe having a show of paintings maybe once a year, and then the rest of the year just working on just different projects that I might be interested in.

Dawn Okoro:
I’m not sure what that would be or what that would look like, but it would definitely be less… just getting ready for the next show which is how things are for me right now.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more about you and your work and follow and support you and everything online?

Dawn Okoro:
Yes. I’m most active on Instagram, and there I’m at dawn okoro, on Twitter I’m also at Dawn Okoro, and then TikTok I’m dawnokoro_official. And I also have a blog on YouTube called Life in Art, and that’s where I share just some of the stuff I have going on, just working as an artist.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Well, Dawn Okoro, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I mean, of course, one for sharing your story and talking about the themes of things behind the work that you do, but also showing that it’s possible to be a successful working artist. I think, as I alluded to earlier in the conversation around this great resignation period that’s going on right now, I think people need to see more success stories of folks getting out there and making it on their own, and certainly with the powerful work that you’re creating.

Maurice Cherry:
And now that you’re going to have the capacity to do this full time, I’m just really excited to see what you’ll have coming up next. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Dawn Okoro:
Yeah. Thanks for having me. And yeah, I’m looking forward to the future.

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