Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton

I first learned about Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton way back in 2015 when I interviewed Silas Munro. Since then, Tasheka has gone on to become one of the leading voices behind discovering Black people omitted from the graphic design history canon. Even design legend Dr. Cheryl D. Miller has sung her praises, so I knew I had to sit down with Tasheka and learn more about her remarkable journey.

Tasheka spoke to me about her experience as an educator and researcher, including an examination of her teaching philosophy. She also talked about growing up in New Orleans, her shift into design, working for the Navy Reservists, and even starting her own studio, Blacvoice Design. Lastly, she discussed her upcoming book Black Design in America, and shared how the different aspects of her work keep her motivated and inspired.

If there’s any lesson you learn from Tasheka, it should be this one: you have control over your own path as a designer, so work hard and you can make your dreams come true!

Interview Transcript

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

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Hi, and first, I want to say Maurice, thanks for having me here on Revision Path. I’ve been a listener for a long time now, so I feel really grateful and honored to be here. My name is Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton. I’m a designer, design educator. I run a design studio called Blacvoice. I also am a researcher, I guess, or design historian in regards to Black designers, as well as design writer.

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

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Very busy, but good for the most part. It’s been a really, really good year with lots of new projects on the horizon. Exciting and exhausting, all at the same time.

Maurice Cherry:
Any plans for the summer?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yes, family vacation is one of the plans. I will be attending Typographics, and I’ll be a speaker there. So it’s exciting because I’ve never been to the conference before, and it’s kind of strange to have that my first attendance there would be me actually giving a talk, so I’m excited about that. I’m going to be teaching, I guess, this summer. I don’t normally teach in the summer, but I’m co-running a design residency program at the University of Texas, Austin where I teach. So I’m looking forward to that as well. And I have a couple of writing projects that I’ll be working on over the summer, and some design stuff as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Sounds like you’re going to have a busy summer ahead.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yes, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, speaking of teaching, you are teaching at two universities right now. You’re at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and you’re at the University of Texas at Austin, which is pretty new. You’ve been at VCFA what, for 10, 11 years now?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, it’s been 10 years in April. 10 years. I started there in 2013.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
It’s kind of crazy to think that I’ve been there that long, actually.

Maurice Cherry:
Congratulations.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
What has the experience been like there?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Wow. The experience at VCFA has been truly amazing and transformative, and I think a lot of it has to do with the amazing faculty that’s there, that I teach with, who are not only colleagues but longtime friends now. It has to do with the sort of non-traditional structure of the program. We don’t have any classes or any courses. The program is, if you think about it as a two-year-long independent study, basically it’s a self-directed program where students decide on what they want to study and what they’re interested in. And the faculty is there basically, to sort of guide them and offer them resources, but it’s a self-directed program.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, that’s really interesting. No classes or courses?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
No.

Maurice Cherry:
So you don’t have to put any curriculum together. That’s great.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
No. So yeah, it’s definitely a different experience. So you do work with the students during the residency to come up with a semester plan on what they’re going to be working on throughout the semester. So as a faculty, you are there to help guide them and shape that semester plan. But again, it starts with what they’re interested in. We meet once a month. Students send their work via email, and then we have an hour conversation through, usually Zoom, and to talk about the work and sort of reflect on it, and kind of give feedback on how to move forward over the next month.

Maurice Cherry:
I love how sort of open that is, especially I think during this time when I know we’re not out of the pandemic, but certainly, I think it’s still a time where some schools are trying hybrid models or things. That sounds like the way that it’s set up at VCFA, it allows you to really still be able to learn in that type of environment.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yes. I think the one thing that at the core of the program is, first of all, it’s really tailored to, working professionals are people. You don’t have to quit your job for two years to get an MFA. You can still work or run your business, or whatever it is you’re doing and still go to school. And this is something that we’ve been doing prior to the pandemic.

So when the pandemic happened, not saying that it didn’t change the program and how we teach, but we were already sort of interfacing in that way. So the only thing it stopped was having the week long residencies that we would have twice a year in person. Then that programming got moved to Zoom. But as far as the interaction between the student and the teacher, or we say the student and the advisor, that was already happening.

Maurice Cherry:
Now one of the professors that’s also there, we’ve had on the show. Oh God, that was a long time ago. We had Silas Munro on the show. This was I think, episode 85, 86, something like that. But he’s also a professor there, I believe.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah. So Silas, so you brought Silas up. Silas is one of the reasons, that’s how I ended up at VCFA actually.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
He’s one of the founding members of the program and Silas and I, we overlap by a year at CalArts. And so yeah, when the program was starting up, he sent me an email and asked me to join the faculty. And I wasn’t able to join at the time because of obligations with teaching. But then the following semester in April of 2013, I was able to come on board as a visiting, as a guest. Sort of a preliminary or, I wouldn’t say probationary period, but just to test to see if it would work out for me and if it would work out for the program.

So yeah, I credit Silas to bringing me in to a community in the program that’s, like I said, it’s been really transformative. Especially, the sort of approach to design pedagogy, this openness and not having this one idea of what design is. That sort of shift and change and marks according to the students, and the type of work that they’re interested in, and the type of diversity and the faculty and what we study and research, and type of work we’re engaged in. So that’s the thing that I really like, and it’s probably one of the few places that I’ve worked where I really felt a sense of family with my coworkers. Not that I didn’t have that relationship with other places, but there it’s really genuine. It’s not forced, it’s not fake. We actually truly do like and love each other.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, first of all, props to Silas for bringing you in, but it sounds like it is a great environment because you’ve been there for 10 years. Nobody’s going to stay there for 10 years if it’s not good.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, no, that’s true. Actually, you saying it, it’s technically the longest job I’ve ever had.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
When I think about it, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you’re also teaching at University of Texas at Austin, which is fairly new. Tell me more about that. How’s that experience?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Wow, it’s been great, to be honest. I haven’t been there that long. I just moved to Austin, so I’m new to Austin and I’m new to UT. It’s been a really good experience as far as working in an environment with, I guess kind of similar to VCFA, where you don’t feel like there’s this sort of one way that the faculty or the program is trying to teach design. It’s a little bit more flexible, it’s a little bit more nuanced where students get to dabble in a lot of different areas of design. Graphic design, industrial design, interactive design, design history, product design. So it’s really sort of flexible in that way and that’s one of the things that sort of drawed me in into UT.

The program itself was revamped around 2017, 2018. So the program as it is today, design, it’s the Department of Design and Creative Technology, is fairly new in a sense compared to a lot of other programs that are out there. So I think there’s something about that sort of newness. There’s a lot of vulnerability and a lot of questioning about the direction of the program. So it’s kind of exciting to be somewhere where we’re constantly thinking about ways to evolve and improve the experience for the students.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What is your teaching philosophy? I would imagine, between the work you’ve done at VCFA and are currently doing, and now with teaching at UT. And you’ve taught at some other places as well. What’s your overall teaching philosophy?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Well, one is, I try to approach teaching, one of the things that probably on the first day of class, I let my students know that, “Hey, I’m interested. I’m more interested in what you’re interested in learning, and what you’re interested in general out there in the world.” Not that I don’t have anything to impart or to give to them, but it’s less about me walking into the classroom saying, “Hey, listen up, I’m the expert here. You all need to learn what I have to offer.” Obviously, there is an important exchange that’s sort of happening, but I’m not interested in the hierarchies that traditionally plagues, I think, academia. So that’s the first thing is, to let my students know, “Hey, I’m curious about you, who you are as a person, and what you’re interested in.”

The other part of my teaching philosophy is, so how do I nurture that? How do I give them assignments, and give them projects and things to learn, to help nurture those interests? So often, I give projects and things that are about to help students investigate their community, and their environment and their identity. I think it’s really important for students to feel a connection to the project brief, to what they’re working on. And to figure out how to sort of channel their life’s experiences, as well as who they are into their projects. There are some practical exercises that are given to topography to talk about kerning and leading and that kind of stuff. But the start of bigger projects, I really try to figure out how to give assignments to help them sort of explore who they are in their environment and their community. Also, really, I think it’s important, one of my other goals is to make sure that I’m giving them projects or I’m giving them things to read and write about, and to consider about what’s going on in the world.

I like having discussions and I don’t shy away from, I won’t say controversial conversations, but I don’t like to shy away from, there’s always a group of students that have a certain perspective about another thing, and then you might have another group that have a different perspective. So I like having those type of conversations so we can learn from each other, because too many times that we all are always listening to and engaging in conversation with people who have the same perspective as we do. So, I always often give reading assignments, or articles or essays, or just come up with topics or things that might make some of them feel uncomfortable sometimes, where they have to talk about things that they don’t know how it’s going to be received by their classmates. And also, try to give them a sort of sense of agency and responsibility when it comes to their own learning, and not just take everything at face value to question, even question me, right? But obviously with the mutual respect, I guess.

Maurice Cherry:
I’d love to hear an example of something you would cover in class with your students.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Sometimes, it’s as simple as, I think this project isn’t something kind of, out of the park, but giving them … One time I had students design sort of protest signage. So they could approach it with whatever topic, anything that they felt really strongly about. Some people feels really strongly about, you should have solar panels on your house. Some people still feel really strongly about abortion, which sometimes for me, some of these topics that are still surfacing are kind of surprising. And some people feel strongly about police rights and things like that.

So any type of way I can give them some kind of assignment that addresses these issues, usually I try to get them to think about stuff that’s relevant in the media. Things that people are on opposite sides or sort of butting heads about, just to see, how do you handle that in the design context? Even, how do you handle as a designer having conversations about, “Well, if you have a very specific social or political agenda, what does it means to do design? Or could you do design for somebody to have a different perspective than you do?” So those type of conversations I think, are important to have.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I totally think that’s important because at any point throughout your design career, you’re going to encounter some conflict. I mean, I think we know the goal is to try to not have this sort of conflicts with clients or prospective clients or anything like that, but it’s going to happen. I mean sometimes you’ll have a client, you think they’re one way, and then you start working with them and it’s completely different. And even as you’ve said about personal views and such like that, it can get really tricky because the world is not just, I mean, not to use this as a racial thing, but it’s not a black and white place. There’s all sorts of ambiguity and things in there. So the fact that you’re able to work out those scenarios and issues with students in a learning environment is really important, because then they don’t get out there in the real world and have greater consequences for those sorts of scenarios.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah. So that’s one of the reasons why I do it, because I feel like if we can’t have these open discussions and conversation and academic space, then what’s the point of education or school in that environment? At least, that’s how I look at it.

Another project that I did when I was working at NC State last year was, I tasked my students with doing some design research in their hometown. So if they were from Charlotte, if they were from, I don’t know, somewhere in Germany, it didn’t really matter where they were from, but they had to do research about design in their particular community, where they were from. It was up to them if they wanted to pick where they live presently or somewhere where they were raised. And I gave them some sort of guidelines or places to start, I would say, because obviously if you said, “Okay, go research Charlotte, they may not know where to start.”

So I gave them four different areas to start. So I said, “Hey, why don’t you research the educational institutions, find out what schools offer design programs and research their faculty to see who’s working there? What type of design work or research that they do? Research the history publications in your particular area,” because I think newspapers and those type of print media is a good place to find the history of a place, sort of like the pulse, right? Design studios, talk to people there, make a list of all the ones that exist, maybe find out information about ones that used to exist. And I think the last place was printers. If they’re like print shops, go talk to those people. So those were the different areas as far as starting points that I gave them to start their research.

And then they had to interview people to help fill in the gaps of trying to create that sort of storyline. Because part of what they had to actually design was some kind of information design, but this wasn’t about charts and graphs. It was more like a storytelling or narrative sort of based research project, if you will. And then it was all the data, information was sort of collected in this zine that each student sort of designed together, and got it professionally printed at the end of the semester.

And I think it was a really good project. They learned a lot about design from where they were from, that they didn’t know, that they probably wouldn’t have even thought about if they didn’t have this project. And they learned something about themselves. I think for some of them, it was confidence boost. If you’re from somewhere or you come from an area where maybe design isn’t talked about or there are not a lot of people you see in design that look like you, and I think this project sort of helped them do some research and some discovery in those areas.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, what do you learn from your students? I mean, you mentioned earlier that you tell them at the beginning of the courses that you’re interested in learning from them. What kind of things do you learn?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I learn a lot from them. I think I can admit as a seasoned educator professional, but sometimes I go into the classroom with certain types of assumptions or misconceptions. So a lots of times, I might have assumptions what I think they might be interested in or what they should be. But then I learn actually, what they’re actually more interested in, and that sort of shifts and change sometimes. So for instance, a lot of students, now what I’m seeing, maybe something that’s trending because of technology is that, this sort of longing for tactile things, this longing to create and print things. Lots of times I think that students wouldn’t be interested in learning about letterpress, or screen printing or these sort of, or electroset. Electroset is something I love, doing electroset exercises with my students. And I really enjoy being able to talk to them about the history behind these all ways of printing.

But I find they’re really interested in these things. And I mean, you do have some that are like, “Okay, I’m really more comfortable in a digital space, and that’s fine.” Again, I’m not there to try to not nurture what their interests are. But, I feel like I’m also there for to say, “Hey, look over here. There are these other ways of making and approaching design that sort of outside of maybe what you think you should be doing.” Or lots of times, I feel what I have learned is there are very specific things that sometimes students think, “Okay, design should be this way or look this way.” And a lot of it has to do with the tools that they’re using, because everybody’s using Adobe Sweden, everybody’s using Illustrator or whatever. And I try to tell them, “Well, if we’re all using the same tools, then everything starts to look the same. But why not take your ideas, and have your ideas and the content have to dictate what type of tool you use.”

So a lot of times I learn a lot that I shouldn’t make assumptions, about technology or different ways in which how they’re interested in making, or what they actually want to make. Sometimes I assume, “Oh, they’re probably interested in developing an app,” and they do have those type of interests, or they’re interested in AI. But then I find so many of them when it comes to technology, they’re like, “No, I don’t even want to touch that stuff over there. I want to get my hands dirty.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. That is so fascinating to hear that students want to do kind of tactile things. I do a lot of different types of judging throughout the year. I’ll judge design competitions. I look at portfolios and things like that from students. And I have started to see more actual tactile work books, or pamphlets or zines or something like that. It’s such a stark contrast to 20 years ago. Now, I didn’t go to design school, but I knew people that were in design school at the time that I was also in school and everybody wanted a piece of digital. I guess it’s because it was just coming about at that time. I mean, when I went to college, there were computers. I remember vividly wanting to, I majored in computer science, computer engineering, and then switching my major over to math. Because I told my advisor I wanted to learn web design, and he’s like, “Yeah, that’s a fad. No one’s going to be into that sort of stuff.” And the school that I went to didn’t have an arts program, didn’t have a design program, so I just switched over to math.

But I knew people that were at the Atlanta College of Art, which existed back then, and the Art Institute of Atlanta. And everybody was just clamoring to try to do something with digital because they were tired of print. They were tired of, I guess, I don’t want to say they were doing maybe more traditional things like electroset or things like that. But everybody wanted to get in on the newness. And now, 20 years from then when technology is everywhere, now students want to get tactile, they want to make stuff. Yeah, I think that’s pretty cool.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, I think the thing that I have to keep in mind is that the way they’re growing up and how they’re entering these spaces in this world is very different from how I entered it, where I was there prior to computers and then post. Not that, to be honest, I don’t have the pay stop experience. I mean, I was in school at the advent of, Adobe was already there, Photoshop was already there. The Mac computer was already there in the early two thousands. So I was sort of a little bit post the desktop publishing area. But I think the thing that I forget is that, well, they’re so consumed, this is all they know. So for them they need a break. They are exhausted from the screen is what they tell me. So they’re kind of exhausted from it. And so when you show these other analog processes, they really light up. It’s really nice and encouraging to see that they still have these interests.

But again, there are some that are really interested in the technology. A lot of them are interested in the 3D sort of space and the digital space, but also the physical space. There are sort of a range. But I think that’s what I learn. The more I teach, the more I learn about what the sort of dynamics to what they’re interested in. And they have various interests and it’s not good to even put them into a box and assume what they’re interested in because, it’s a lot of different things that are out there.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I love that. I love that. Students are tired of screens. I’m loving hearing that. Now, let’s learn more about you. Let’s hear your origin story. You’re originally from New Orleans. Is that right?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yes, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me about what it was growing up there.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, I grew up in the inner city, not on the outskirts. I grew up in New Orleans, we sort of identified with the wards, which are actually voting wards. So I grew up in the seven ward, New Orleans, which the time that I grew up was predominantly Black or all Black maybe, don’t know the statistics on that, but a very urban inner city. Grew up poor, single mom, family. I’m the oldest of four siblings. Had a good childhood. I remember going outside and play, making games up as we go, just started using resources and things that we had around to play different sports, so to do different things. My mom was always really supportive in whatever it was I wanted to do. So when I was younger, I wanted to go to law school. Actually, I wanted to be an attorney. And so, I actually approached going to college, thinking that I was going to go to law school and practice law, actually.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow. What interested you about law?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
To be honest, Maurice, it was, the part of it that was probably really superficial, meaning I watched a lot of court shows growing up, and I got sucked into the drama of the investigations. And this aha moment when the real person, suspect was revealed. And the banter in the court and the back and forth between the attorneys, all the drama. So that seemed exciting because I always felt like, I’ve always had a strong voice, I guess, and a strong personality and perspective in that way. I can be very argumentative about things that I’m super passionate about. So I just thought I would be a good attorney. Why not? I was a good student, usually brought home good grades. So yeah, I could do this law school thing, and I can go to law school and do that.

The other side of it is, I also saw law as something that oppressed us as a people for a long time, and I wanted to understand it better to help us. So that was the sort of flip side of my interest in going to law school. But yeah, that faded when I actually, I mean I was really, up until my last year in college, I was still pursuing going to law school, to be honest.

Now, I was at Loyola, I was an English writing major. And the reason I picked that major was because I was told … I can’t remember if it was a job fair or a college fair when I was in high school and somebody said, “Oh, people who do really well in law school, they major in English because of all the writing and research you have to do,” whatever. So that’s really how that came about. And I did a lot of reading growing up. So the idea of having to read and write was kind of made sense, something I was sort of interested in. So yeah, that’s how that came about was because I wanted to be a good law student, to be honest.

Maurice Cherry:
So you had been on this path, I mean, to the point where you went to school, you were studying in it, you were getting all the way up to your senior year. Was there a deciding incident that kind of changed your trajectory?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
The incident was preparing to take the LSAT, I would say. So it was more like a process. So I want to say the first semester of my senior year, I was preparing to take the LSAT, researching what schools to go to. And all of that became extremely overwhelming and stressful, but it wasn’t exciting in a way, how things could be really overwhelming, but you’re still sort of excited about it, and if it’s you’re anxious. And so then I did some soul-searching and it was like, “Well, why do you want to do this Tasheka? Why do you want to go to law school?” And so, one of the things that is at the time it was really hard for me to admit, was that I honestly didn’t think I was good at anything, or I didn’t know what I was really good at. So because I was always sort of a good student, I just kind of looked at it as that way. I can go to law school, I’m going to be a good student, and then I’ll get a decent job.

I have always been a very goal driven oriented person. And so for me, it was always just sort of scratching things off the list. So go to school, major in English writing, do well, go to law school, take the LSAT, get a high grade, study. It’s just this constant thing. But when I actually really looked within, I realized that, well, I didn’t want to do it for the right reasons. You shouldn’t choose a career path just because it’s sort of checking off the list. I can accomplish this thing, but it’s not something that, I mean, I had a genuine interest in the law, but when I look back, yeah, it definitely wasn’t the right path for me.

So I just remember there was this one day, I used to do work study in the library. I just started going online and doing research about what do creative people do. So copywriter came about because I’m getting a degree in English, but at the time I didn’t feel too confident about my writing skills. So I was like, “Eh, I don’t really want to do that.” And then I remember, topography kept popping up, and this isn’t a time where in the early two thousands, when they had a lot of portfolio schools, like Miami AD and those type of schools.

So I was doing research and those type of schools kept popping up, and then I kept seeing topography and I’m like, “What is topography? I don’t even know what that is.” So I looked in the school course catalog and I saw topography one and two, and then it was graphic design and I didn’t know what any of these, I wasn’t aware of any of this stuff, or what that meant as far as a career. And so the more I read and the more I did my research, I was like, “Oh, this design thing sounds really interesting.”

So the next semester, I just went head first. I signed up to take a type one and a design one class, the year, the semester I was supposed to graduate. And then I fell in love with it. And then I pushed my graduation back about a year so I could get a minor in graphic design. And I didn’t get a true minor. I kind of had a relationship with the director of the art department at the time, because throughout my time in college, I took drawing and painting classes as my elective, because I’ve always had an affection for art and drawing. So I talked to her at the time and about getting a minor, and so they sort of told me that, just take the main classes. I didn’t have to take the foundations and stuff like that. So they sort of fast tracked me into design one and however many classes I could take within a year, because Loyola is a private Jesuit liberal university, just very expensive. And I was on a scholarship, so that extra year, I could only go to school those two extra semesters.

So I did that. After that year, it was like, “Okay, I’m a graphic designer now. That’s it. This is what I want to do.” Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a really interesting turn. I mean, you were already set to go along this way, and then you kind of just had another idea and there you go.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah. It wasn’t something that was obviously planned out in that way, but I’ve never looked back. I can’t honestly imagine being in any other field than design, to be honest.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that’s really awesome that it sort of came about that way. I’m curious now on what Tasheka the lawyer would be like, if you would’ve went there.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I think about it, too. I don’t know, honestly. I mean, I think there’s a way that I would’ve found my niche. I would’ve found an area of law that would’ve been good for me. I don’t know how lucrative that would’ve been, especially if you think about going to a private undergraduate school, and then law school and then student … It’s just sort of the bills and student loans to pile up when you think about it. So yeah, I don’t know. I think I would’ve found my way, but I think that it definitely wasn’t the right path for me. And I think the sort of activist in me, I would’ve found whatever I guess sort of industry I would’ve ended up, I think I would’ve found that sort of angle.

But I do remember this one conversation I had with a lady at a job fair my senior year, and she said that her husband was an attorney and that he had a studio in their attic and he was a painter. And she said that, but once he started really getting into law, he stopped painting as much as he used to. And so I started thinking that I never wanted art to not be a part of my life. So that was sort of a reality check where I was, “Oh, I don’t want to go into law if this is going to prevent me from being creative or being a maker,” I guess.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So you graduated from Loyola, and I know later you went and got your MFA from CalArts. Between then, did you get out in the working world and experience a little bit of what it was like to not be a student for a while?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yes. It was a very short time. It was exactly a year and four months to date. So yeah, after I graduated, I end up working as a designer at the Navy, which was such a strange thing for me personally, to end up working for the military. But yeah, I worked for the Navy Reservist Public Affairs Office, and they hired me because they saw my resume, that I took topography classes, which is kind of funny when I think about it. Because it’s like, well, when you go to, you study design, you take topography. It wasn’t nothing special. But anyway, but one of the other reasons they hired me was because they wanted somebody young with fresh ideas. And at the time, they were publishing and producing a tabloid newspaper. And so they wanted me on board to help transition that newspaper into a monthly magazine.
I actually stayed there long enough just to do that, basically. We had a few firsts. I guess half the time I was there, we were publishing the newspaper. Then the second half, we transitioned over to a magazine, and that’s my first job. I will say that it was a really great learning experience in school, as far as print production and that kind of stuff. You don’t necessarily learn. So the Navy, I would drive to Panama City to go see the publication on press, that kind of stuff. So I learned all the production there. So yeah, it was a really good experience for me, as far as my first professional design job.

Maurice Cherry:
And you were able to get that, I mean, one right out of school because you had this small amount of design experience just from studying, and they were like, “Yeah, we’ll go with that.” Nowadays, for entry level position, they already want you to have three years experience somewhere. So it’s good that they kind of took a chance and said, “Yeah, we’ll move forward and see what you have.”

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, I will say it was actually a head hunter that found me, or like a temp agency, I would say. And they put me in contact with the Navy. And I think that they were, because they were producing a publication, it was probably a time crunch. And so, I don’t know if I was the first person they referred them to. I don’t know if they had interviewed a bunch of other people. I have no idea. But I just knew that, oh, they were also impressed that I studied abroad. I’m trying to think of the things that they said to me during the interview or that made them sort of intrigued or want me to come in. They liked that I had spent some time abroad and that I took topography courses, to be honest.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Where did you study abroad?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I studied abroad in Prague, in the Czech Republic. And it was mainly, it was more of a printmaking study abroad than graphic design. I mean, the graphic design aspect of it, was it that there was this workshop or this class that we took to set up design posters by hand. All analog, which was great, but it was really for printmaking, like lithography, learning to do aquatints and that kind of stuff.

And it was interesting, because it was actually with a program that was through NC State, and one of my professors at Loyola at the time was the person who was in charge. I had started that study abroad program. So it was kind of weird last year when I worked at NC State, it was like, “Oh, I did a study abroad program at this place and now I’m teaching here.” So I don’t know, it’s just kind of funny how things kind of happen that way in life.

Maurice Cherry:
So tell me how your experience was getting your MFA at Cal Arts.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
That in of itself was an experience. CalArts was tough. I mean, I definitely went there knowing that it was going to be difficult, that it wasn’t going to be easy. Actually, I was there for three years. I got accepted for the three-year track. So a lot of schools now have a three year and a two-year track, and normally the three-year track is reserved for students who don’t have a traditional graphic design background. And so since my degree wasn’t in design, it was in English. And then, I had that limited experience, that year and a half working for the Navy. So I actually did three years instead of two. So the first year was, I guess an adjustment and challenging, in and of itself. For one, I was the only Black student there in the graduate and the undergraduate program, which for me was pretty shocking.

And the reason it was surprising is because I think, to be honest, at the time I was just starting, right before grad school and doing my first year of grad school. I was just starting to notice how there was a lack of visibility of Black people in design, or how the design profession didn’t seem to, or the lack of diversity that existed. Honestly, I don’t know why it took that long for me to actually realize that, but it wasn’t until, I think it was the 2004 AIGA conference that I realized that, where I saw maybe four or five other Black people at the conference. It was in Vancouver, I remember that. And then that’s when, that was not long before I actually started school at CalArts.

So that experience, and that was the thing that I think started me on this kind of trajectory, or the path into doing the research that I do, was looking around, not seeing anybody like me. Not learning anything about anybody who looked like me with the history class, or so, yeah, that’s sort of where I started. And me being at CalArts as a student, sort of asking the question, talking to faculty or just saying. Even sometimes it was in my work, I was questioning, where are the Black designers? When was the last time CalArts had a Black student in the MFA program? Nobody can answer that question. Or can you tell me something about Black people in design history? Nobody can answer that question.

So it became this thing where, and I know we’ve done similar sort of scavenger hunts. It’s like, “Where the hell are all the Black people?” So anyway, that is where my research started. So because I couldn’t find anything out there that was tangible to hold onto, I just started doing my own research and investigation. Because I was like, “There’s nobody who’s here to tell me or give me that information. I have to discover it from myself.”

But I will say the faculty there was all, for the most part, it was, I felt supported. Although it was tough. It was like bootcamp, going to CalArts. It was a really, really tough, intense program. But I did feel encouraged most of the time for the type of projects that I had. And some of them was filled with a lot of emotion and anger, and aggression and frustration, and a lot of times that came out. But I will say that they sort of helped me nurture and cultivate my voice, and they also always encouraged me to be true, to keep that investigation and then that energy, and to being inquisitive about my design, Black design history, and culture and identity.

Maurice Cherry:
I think it’s such a good thing now that it almost feels like, I’d say maybe within the past, I don’t know, 10, 15 years perhaps, we’ll say that. But we’ve started to see more Black design educators out there, and we’ve also started to see community efforts. I mean, Revision Path is one of them, but we’ve started to also see community efforts with making sure that Black people, and I would say Black and brown, I mean, I would kind of widen that lens a bit. But we’ve started to see now more people of color in general, being talked about, recognized, showcased, researched as it comes to design. I mean, I don’t know if we’ll get to a point where there’s full equity with regards to that, but I think within the past 10 years, we’ve seen a lot of headway in that direction, where we’re starting to now see more Black students, or at least more talk about Black designers throughout history. You know what I mean?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yes, I would agree with that. There is definitely some sort of shift. I mean, if I’m honest, I’m not seeing it enough or as much as I would like to see it. But I’m also aware that things do take time, and especially when you have things that are so systemic and that’s a part of system that’s been there for so long that it’s not, it takes a long time to sort of dismantle it.

If I’m honest, I do believe that it doesn’t have to, or it shouldn’t take it as long, but I understand it. I try to understand it. I do think that things can happen a lot quicker, but I do realize that there are still certain structures that are there, that’s way more difficult to dismantle to where it takes a lot longer. But I am happy to have colleagues. I didn’t think that I would see a day where I could name at least three other Black women that are doing similar type of work or things like that. So I am happy to see that there’s a change, and there’s a lot of work and way more work that needs to be done. But yeah, I agree. There are more efforts, I guess, and more initiatives that are happening at different places.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I think with schools, it’s just always going to take longer because schools are just such, these large institutions. Of course, they get funds from different philanthropists and foundations and stuff like that. But I agree with you, in that I think the change could be happening a lot quicker. I a hundred percent agree with you there.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah. I just think that one of the things that I liked about UT was they started changing their admissions process. I think there are still more work to be done, but they have done away with the traditional portfolio. And so, their admission process is more a design prompt, so a student could … So the design program looks at just that one particular piece that they’re doing, and then they submit a 60-minute video that sort of talks about their process and their ideas, alongside the piece that they made for admissions.

So I think that, that takes a lot of pressure off because you still have so many students that, they don’t have the resources in their high schools to submit even a fine arts portfolio, let alone something that’s specific to design. Where you need all these different, you need a computer, you need the Adobe software, you need all these digital tools that a lot of high schools still don’t have those type of resources. So it’s nice to see that they’re at least trying to change that process a little bit, to make it more equitable for students of color to have access to the program.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, along with you being a design educator, and you mentioned this a bit earlier, you have your own design studio called Blacvoice Design. Tell me more about that. What are some of the projects or other work that you’ve done through your studio?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Well, a lot of projects I would say, first start off with the type of clients that I work with. So most of my clients are educational institutions like universities, colleges and things like that, nonprofit organizations, as well as kind of start up or small businesses. And I actually like the work that I do within those spaces. The type of projects that I do, format wise, most of them are books. I design a lot of books, but I don’t like to just consider myself a book designer because I do do identity projects and things like that. But a lot of the books that I do design, because a lot of my clients have modest budgets, usually I’m given texts and that’s it.

And so, I think that’s why I wear this hat of an image maker, because a lot of projects might call for me to take photos and I’ll take my own photographs for a particular project, or I do my own illustrations and create my own imagery for them. And so that I actually like. I like that whole process of generating the imagery, and doing the type setting, and doing the layout and the design. I really do enjoy being a part of that process from the beginning to the end. I thought at this point in my career that I would want to be in a more creative director sort of role, but I actually like and still enjoy being hands on.

So some projects that I’ve worked on in the past that are really kind of dear to my heart is, I used to do some work for a nonprofit organization. They’re now called 826 New Orleans, but they used to be called Big Class. And Big Class is a nonprofit organization. They started off basically sort of reaching out to the inner city public schools. And so, they would have writing prompts or writing projects for students to engage in after school. And so they would come up with themes, the students would come up with themes or topics that they wanted to write about. Usually it had to do with their feelings around their culture and their community.

And so, what I would do is basically, I would come in, talk to the student editorial board, find out what ideas they have about the design and the design process, and basically use that as information or inspiration and design a book for these individual projects. And so Big Class would take those books, they would have these readings, they would get people, they had their own press and their own imprint. And so they would publish and sell the books, and then they would just feed and go back into the sort of program. And I really like that program, because it not only gets students excited about writing, and writing is a form of expression, writing can be creative, right? Writing, I think gave them a sense of agency because they get to write, they get to publish, they get to put it out there, they get to have open mic and spoken words.

And so, I really love to see the sort of confidence that it gave these students, that maybe in their school, they may not ever have that type of experience. So for me to provide a platform for them to express themselves through words, through writing, I really did enjoy working with them. But now they’re part of this larger, more national collection of programs, that’s like 826 New Orleans, you have 826 Valencia. So 826 sort of exists in a lot of different cities. And my hope is to, there isn’t an 826 in Austin. Honestly, have no idea how to even start one. And it’s not that I even want to be in charge of one, but I would love to try to figure out how to create a rapport with some of the schools, some of the public schools here in Austin to try to get one started here. And then that way, it’s something that I would like my students at UT to be involved in that process, of helping those students design and get their work printed and published.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m a big advocate of designers needing to do more writing. A hundred percent. We had at one point in time, kind of design anthology called Recognize that we were doing through Revision Path, where we had designers just like, we would give a particular prompt or theme. I think the one we did before we shut it down was reset. I think reset was the theme. And so based off of that, we wanted people to submit essays up to 3000 words, centered around reset in whatever way that they wanted to. But it had to be design focused, like design writing. We didn’t get great ones. I’ll be completely honest. I think a lot of people rather wanted to design something than write something.

And even the first year that we did it, we would get some pushback from people, “Well, why do I have to write something?” I’m like, “It’s a essay.” I mean, you have to write something because that’s the structure of it. I do want to bring it back one day if Revision Path can get the right funding and all of that. Because, I’m still a big proponent and believer of designers, I think, need to be, they need to know how to write because of course, it just helps you get your ideas out there. But it’s just so helpful for, and I think this probably ties into your research focus. It ties into your work being part of the cannon. If you can write down what you did, the work you did, case studies, et cetera, if it gets put out there in some way, if it gets preserved in some way, you’re now part of the cannon.

One thing with me, when I try to find guests for the show, it’s very hard for me to book a guest when I can’t find anything on them. I could maybe find-

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, you could maybe do some research.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, yeah, because I can maybe find a website or there’s maybe a blog post or something somewhere, but I need to be able to see what you’ve done so I can get a sense of who you are as a designer, if this is going to be a good fit, that sort of thing. But I say all of that to say that I’m a big, just huge fan of designers being writers, and write it down, write down your work, show your work.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I agree with that too, Maurice. And even as a person, I still think I have a very strange or uncomfortable, I think it’s a better word, relationship with writing. It’s something that with my teaching, I always make sure that there’s some writing component in a project for students, whether it’s a reflection to something they read or something they saw. I think it’s really important. I see a lot of similarities in the writing, in the design process. So for me, it’s been, although it’s still a place where I’m super uncomfortable in lots of times, a few years ago, to be honest, I think it was back in 2017 when I was teaching at Southeastern Louisiana University, and I had just gotten tenured there. And I didn’t realize at the time that until I was at NC State during that interview process, that up until that point, I had got tenured because of my creative work, because of doing exhibitions and things like that.

And at that point, I realized that with the research that I was doing, and then at that time, my research was startup, sporadic, how I was engaged with it. I started this research in graduate school, and then I would start to engage with it from time to time when somebody would ask me to give a lecture. And at some point, going back to what you were saying about the importance of the canon and sort of writing things down, that became a real turning point for me because at that point, I wanted to change my practice a little bit, and have it more focused on writing and publishing. Because in my mind, I’m like, “Well, I can continue to do these lectures and talk about this stuff, but then what?”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
What do you with it? And so I knew at some point I always wanted to write a book about Black design history. I knew, even from grad school back at CalArts, that’s something I wanted to do. I think, not until that point, I became more intentional about it. I was like, “Okay, if I want to shift,” not do away with making, not do away with freelance, not doing away with that work, but I wanted to be more intentional about the scholarly part of me, I guess, in that work. And sort of getting it out there and not have it just be through lectures. And I think, oral history and that stuff is valuable. I’m not trying to devalue that at all, but I do think there’s something about having something written and on a page, and printed and sort of documented. Right? I mean, I think it’s really important for our work and stuff to be documented, so it can be passed on.

Maurice Cherry:
Exactly. I mean, the oral storytelling, and I realize we’re saying this on a podcast, but is mean that is important. But being able to write it down, pass it on, put it in a book, have it stored somewhere, that is what is really, that is the canon. That’s what you end up preserving. Speaking of books, I mean, we’re both working on books, but part of the research that I find is trying to find these writings and trying to find where people have talked about stuff. And you know what we’re doing now? Interviews. We’re having to talk to people because we can’t find where folks have written stuff down. So to that end, about books, as I mentioned that just now, you’re working on a book called Black Design in America. Talk to me about that.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, so I’m a co-author of Black Design America, African-Americans, and African Diaspora and Graphic Design, 19th to 21st Century. My co-authors are Silas Munro and Pierre Bowins. And how this book came about is not a linear kind of trajectory of story. So back in 2020, when George Floyd was murdered and you had the protests going on, and a lot of things were sort of happening online, VCFA had started this sort of virtual programming. I believe they contacted me and asked me if I was interested in doing a lecture or something about my research. And so at the time, I want to say around that time, I can’t remember exactly, but I know at some point, me, Pierre, and Silas had created a Google Doc, and we just started populating it with our research. And some of our focus on our research was slightly different. There was some overlap, but we started this Google Doc, and I think we started it with the intent of writing a book someday.

So the idea was that, “Okay, we want to have this document populated to start working on the outline.” So VCFA came to me. I decided that I didn’t want to just be the only voice talking about Black design history. So I invited Pierre and Silas to also give a lecture. So they call it these micro lectures. So still had the same amount of time that I had to give my lecture, but instead of me talking for an hour or 45 minutes, we each had 15 minutes to do a micro lecture, a mini presentation about our specific research.

So again, around that time, I met Dr. Cheryl Miller, and she was just starting, or had already started her archive for Stanford, a Black design history archive. And somebody gave her my name. And so, I met with her about sending my work there. And something that I still feel weird about saying was that was my first time hearing about her and her work, but I’m glad I did. I’m glad that we had that opportunity to talk and connect. And now she’s a huge mentor and influence, inspiration in my life. But that conversation with her sort of gave me a little focus. So I was like, “Oh, I’m really interested in the history of Black women in graphic design too.” So my portion of the lecture was about that.

So we’re in the midst of the pandemic, and Silas had this idea. And so we all talked about how this information needs to get out there. I don’t know if we have time to go through the process of writing a book and getting published, and trying to do all the stuff that you have to go through, as you you’re working on one yourself. It’s a huge timeline. You don’t just do it overnight. It takes a lot of time. So Silas and his studio, that’s how they came up, and they put together the BIPOC Design History Classes, went live January of 2021. And so again, it wasn’t the intent to have the classes. And that sort of happened first. That idea, we thought, prior to the pandemic and whatnot, that we would be working on a book first. So that happened. That was the success. And so then after the chorus, then we felt like, “Okay, now we have to write this book now, because we kind of already have a structure. We have content.” But little did we know, Maurice, that it was not that easy.

These small classes. Okay. Yeah. There are chapters in the book, but I don’t know. It’s just, yeah, they’re still talking to people. There’s still more research to be done. There’s still more archives to visit. So it wasn’t just that simple to just make that transition from the series of classes, and then to make it into a book. So we’re still in the process of writing now. We have a hard, hard deadline coming up on June 1st, where we have to really turn over the manuscript. And we’re all also collaborating on the design of the book, too. So yeah, it’s been an interesting process.

And I think the thing that, I know for me, and I think from my co-authors as well, the thing that’s been most difficult is that it’s a design history book, but we’re not approaching it like a Meg’s book in a way, or this book came out a few years ago, it’s called Graphic Design Pioneers, or Pioneers in Design, where it’s focused on individuals. So we do talk about individual designers and sort of their impact, but it’s more about the diaspora, it’s more about Black experience in a way, and what we had to go through and deal with. It’s more about how we’ve been represented through visual culture, and who’s responsible for that and that kind of stuff. So it’s not necessarily about a clothesline of designers, although we do talk about individual people, because you can’t write a history book without acknowledging individuals. But, it’s not just about highlighting people, I guess in that way. It’s more about the different movements that happened, throughout time and throughout history.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, because I mean-

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
And we’ve been affected by it, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Because you’re, like you said, it’s set up with, it’s in the context of America during that time, and so there’s been wars, there’s been civil rights movements, there’s been other sorts of radical movements. And so, being able to talk about how Black design has been a through line with all of that in this country, we don’t learn it in school, in K through 12 schools. And based on what you’re saying, and probably from others, it’s probably not even something that’s really readily learned in colleges.

So having a book like this is super important, I think, not just to the design canon, but just like to American history in general. Because everything that we go through in this country has been designed in some capacity. That don’t necessarily mean that it’s been done with a pen and paper or in some visual aspect, but the systems of oppression that are in this country and many other things that sort of hold people back or push others forward, these are designed constructs. And so being able to talk about Black design in this country is super important to, I think, informing that for a lot of people. So, I’m excited to see the book when it comes out. Congratulations to you, because I know it’s a lot. I know all too well. Yeah.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I mean, I think writing a book is a challenge, in and of itself, but I think history, and I think we have a special challenge in the type of history that we’re trying to bring to light, because it hasn’t been well documented or readily available. So it’s a lot of things you have to do to discover these stories. That’s definitely been a challenge. I think, one thing that I want to say I’m proud of about how we approach the writing in this book is that we sort of try to do away with … we’re being ourselves. We feel like using I, then we use I. If we want to throw in a little snarky, something that maybe a long time ago would be unorthodox for a history book, but we are just throwing it and putting it all out there. We’re not sort of concerned about our voices being the same, and we like that our voices are fluid and they’re sort of interchangeable.

We collaborated and wrote the introduction together, and there are parts of it, it’s like, I don’t even remember what I wrote. And we do have our chapters that the three of us have been responsible for, and we have contributors to certain chapters as well, but we’re not sort of concerned with the more traditional approach to this type of book. We don’t even call it a textbook. We’re not really approaching it in that same traditional way, I guess, if you will.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So you’re teaching, you’re running your own design studio, you are working on a book, you’re doing this research and your research focuses on, as we’ve talked about throughout this interview, Black people being omitted from the graphic design history canon. Given all the different spaces that you occupy, designer, educator, et cetera, what does the path forward look like for you?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I think about that a lot. I think it’s going to continue in this realm of writing and publishing, and designing. I think I like the idea of being a content generator and being the one to design that content. So I see more books around the same topic, but in different iterations. So for instance, I’m completely obsessed with Louise E. Jefferson. She is a Black woman who was one of the first art directors in the publishing industry at Friendship Press. She started working in the mid, late 1930s, and she was a designer, a calligrapher, a cartographer, an illustrator, a researcher. I mean, she was a real true renaissance woman, and she rubbed shoulders with all kinds of people during the Harlem Renaissance. But I’ve been doing research on her for a really long time. And so, I envision writing and designing a book about Louise E. Jefferson. And right now, I’ve been in touch with Friendship Press where she worked at as an art director for 20 years, and they’re interested in me writing a book about Louise and her work.

So those type of projects I see still continuing. The past few years have been great. The writing, the lecturing have been amazing, meeting amazing people, and have been great with giving me more opportunities to write into research. But I would like to hopefully, have more of a balance between that and my making, especially maybe even more so personal projects. I really enjoy doing small collaborations with other designers, whether it be zines or just random, creating compositions and giving files, going back and forth between digital files and things like that. Well, not really knowing what the outcome is. I think I just miss making and playing, and having fun.

Not that the design work that I do isn’t enjoyable, but it’s just a different type of making, I guess it’s different. You’re doing research and you’re writing. That’s a lot different than like, “Okay, I have this idea for making this thing using these materials, or even this tool or this technology. Am I making?” I’m really interested in this sort of synthesis, and analog and digital tools and how they sort of come together, and how to expand our uses in ways that they weren’t actually meant to be used. So I would like moving forward to be able to engage more, and just being a maker and not thinking about what I’m making so much.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, being a designer and an educator and all these things, you’ve talked now about how you want your path to go forward, but in your current work, how do you balance these different aspects? Do these different roles inform each other in some way?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, I mean, I definitely see there are so much overlap in … For a long time, I actually didn’t know how to bring all these things together, especially in the classroom because it took a while before I started teaching design history, and actually I’m not teaching it right now. I haven’t taught it in maybe three years. But I think, that doesn’t mean that I can’t still bring that into the classroom. So to me, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care that I’m not teaching design history. Whatever I’m teaching, you’re going to learn something about Black design. Some kind of way I’m going to insert my agenda, because I know that these are things that are, in part, it’s not just Black design history. I talk about queer history. I talk about other areas of design where people are marginalized or we don’t know a lot about, and I know a little something. I still try to impart that to my students, so I make sure that I’m trying to be equitable in that sense.

But yeah, I’m just starting to see where these roads and where these things are starting to overlap. So am I making? Now I think about, well, how could, besides designing books about Black design history or whatever, and the publishing aspect, but I start thinking about, well, what are other things that you can make that sort of has to do with your research? So I’m starting to think more about that, like timelines and things like that. So to me, the crossover is starting to happen. It’s slow and maybe not as fast as I would have liked them to be. And then I see them in the projects that I give to my students too. So it sort of reverts back to the classroom in that way.

Maurice Cherry:
So, I like that it all feeds into each other then. That’s good.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Kind of makes less work for me in a way, as opposed to try to compartmentalize everything. So for a long time, everything used to be in these separate buckets. Black design studio, freelance here is writing and lecture. But now, they’re just starting to morph together, and that has been good, and that’s how I would like things to continue in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
Hey, look, work smarter, not harder. I get it.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give to someone out here that’s hearing your story, that’s hearing about all these different things that you’re interested in, and they want to follow in your footsteps? What would you tell them?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I would say, learn how to be comfortable in your voice, in your skin, and how to … I didn’t always feel comfortable being Tasheka, being authentically me, because sometimes I had moments where I didn’t want to step on people’s toes, but I noticed moments where I did do that, and I was just kind of myself and just kind of put it out there. Those have been the best experiences.

And I would say that we all have control. You have some kind of control over your path, and so if there’s a certain direction that you want your practice, or your craft, or your skill or whatever it is you are into to take, that you can kind of plan for. Talk to people who are doing the thing that you want to do, align yourself. Reach out to them. I know sometimes, we think and we look at people that we admire and we put them on this pedestal, but if they’re the right people, they’ll talk to you and they’re not full of themselves. And lots of times, people are more than happy to talk to you about your path, and this is especially to younger designers. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people who you admire, and have conversations with them about what they do and how they got to where they are. But yeah, I just say be bold.

Maurice Cherry:
Be bold.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Be bold and intentional about how you move through this world.

Maurice Cherry:
I love that. Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want the next chapter of your story to be?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I do see myself still teaching. I do see myself still being at UT, and I’m hoping, my hope is that in five years, I have a couple of books under my belt by then. Maybe, I’m just going to throw it out there, Maurice. I would say at least three of them, because I have a list of projects that I’m really like. It’s kind of like these have to be done before I die. No, maybe they don’t have to be done in five years. That’s pretty ambitious of me, but I’m already working on one, so I can get the other two at least in the works by that time, that would be great.

I do have sort of a passion project that I’ve been sitting on on for a while. I have a collection of drawings, maybe it’s like 200 and something drawings, that I would like in five years to have their own sort of brand, where it’s a collection of, whether it’s greeting cards or home decor or apparel. Not or. I should say and. So I’ve been procrastinated on this project for a really long time, and I hope in five years that that project sort of sees the light of day.

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

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I’m probably most active on Instagram and Facebook. So Facebook is Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton. On Instagram, it’s Blacvoice. I am on Twitter under Blacvoice, but I’m not that engaged with that platform as much. But, I’m on there and I tweet every now and then. I’m on LinkedIn, which is, you can find me under Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton. Again, that’s not a platform that I’m super engaged in, but I’m there, and you’ll probably find me multiple times under LinkedIn, but I’m there. But Instagram, I would say, it’s probably the place to see me. I’m more active there. I would hate to throw out my crappy Adobe Portfolio website. That’s just a bunch of stuff that’s thrown on there right now. But hey, why not? Blacvoicedesign.portfolio.com. That’s just something that’s there right now, just to have an online presence, until I have time to do something else with it.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. You and your work have been on my radar for many years, I think probably, maybe since 2015? For a while now. And it wasn’t until recently, I had spoken with Cheryl, had Cheryl on the show for 500th episode, and she sung your praises to the high heavens. And I was like, “I feel like I reached out to her before. Let me reach out again just to see if she might be interested.”

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Actually, you did, Maurice. I thought about that. I was actually just telling my sister right before, and I was like, I feel weird because you did reach out to me a long time ago, and I think at the time I was just not ready, and something that had nothing to do with you or the show. I love the show and listen to it, and I think that was just like, “I’m still in my boldness. I’m kind of shy too, and more of an introvert.” So I think that, yeah, it just took a while, but you did. You did, but I’m glad you reached back out again.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, but I mean, I also just want to say from hearing your story and hearing about everything that you’re working on, I think it’s evident that you have a passion for design. You have a passion for honestly getting the story right, whether it’s through writing, through education, through your visual design work. I’m really excited to see and hear more from you in the future. I feel like you’re one of our bright shining stars that are really going to help represent us, as we move forward in this crazy world that we’re in right now. I feel like the work that you’re doing is really going to stand out and help showcase what Black designers are doing everywhere, so thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Thanks again for having me, Maurice.

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Dr. Cheryl D. Miller

What can I say about Dr. Cheryl D. Miller that hasn’t already been said? Her groundbreaking work as a designer in the 1980s and 1990s has paved the way for Black designers in this industry. Her first-hand knowledge and experience is sought after by colleges and universities all over the country. And now, in this season of her life, she is being celebrated and awarded as a pioneering figure in the field of contemporary graphic design by AIGA, The One Club, Cooper Hewitt, IBM, and many others. Honestly, I couldn’t think of a better guest to have for this episode!

Cheryl and I talked about her recent work as a design educator, and she shared her newfound dedication to writing and why it’s so important to transition from oral tradition to scholarship. She also shared her interest in new tech, and spoke about mentoring younger designers who are blazing their own trails in the industry. Lastly, we explored what success looks like for her now, and she talked about what’s coming up next as her passions for art, writing, and design intersect. Sit back and enjoy this thought-provoking conversation with a true design legend.

(And thank you all for 500 episodes of the podcast!)

Interview Transcript

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

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Maurice, I am Cheryl D. Miller.

Maurice Cherry:
No introduction needed.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
No. No, I barely have a website, and now it’s come down to just, “Google that, okay? And I’m not the basketball player.” There are three of us, and I think there’s a psychologist and a basketball player. “Just put in Cheryl D. Miller, and that’s it.” That’s it in a nutshell. “Just Google, Cheryl D. Miller.”

Maurice Cherry:
How is 2023 going so far?

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
2023 is going really, really well. And I say that I’ve been granted much favor and grace through the pandemic, and it’s continuing. And 2023 has just expanded with new platforms, new vision, new sharing, that really all has been birthed from our pandemic season. It’s going really well. My projects… I’ve been a professor at several universities, I’m now with three. And that’s a unique experience, because everyone that’s working with me is developing this hybrid pedagogy. And I say the only thing that’s left for me to explore with this is that I’ll hologram into my classrooms next. So somebody has that figured out next. I’ll be lecturing via hologram in the Metaverse. I don’t… I would say soon.

Maurice Cherry:
So you’re at Howard, you’re at UT Austin, ad ArtCenter, right? ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena?

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Yes. All three.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Yeah. And I’m crossing my fingers. I’ve been talking with University of Connecticut UConn, because it’s in my geography. I’ve wanted to do something locally. I might be with them in the fall as well. Since pandemic, I have carried four universities at a time.

Maurice Cherry:
Light work for Cheryl Miller.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, outside of that, do you have any big goals or projects that you are working on now?

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Well, yeah. I’ve dedicated myself to writing the rest of way out. I have a lot of things to write, Maurice. And I don’t want to talk too much about the writing, but I’m writing crazy. And one of the things that I do pride myself on, I do pride myself on a few things, that is, I don’t compile footnotes. My work, I make footnotes. So my revelation, my development of scholarship, I am creating conversation that I’m hoping they will be, my footnotes and the things I write, finding proof for my revelations, I’m leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. I will never write as many books as footnotes that I will leave to my scholarship.

That’s one of the things that I really, really believe in that our community, which I represent the BIPOC, indigenous community with being African-American, but a woman of many, many colors. And we must write, we must publish, but we can’t do that if we don’t have content. So my work is, I want to make sure that I leave as many footnotes and content as possible. And that doesn’t always mean that it’s in the form of a book. So I’m putting up my YouTubes, my lectures, recordings, all these things that if you study the things that I’m leaving behind, those that are really writing and researching have footnotes that they can create and compile for their books and so forth. We can’t write if we don’t have content.

And one of the things that I always contend is that I think Bond House is a hundred and a few years old. I’ve lived two thirds of that history. So my lived experience must be documented, which is much different than compiling footnotes out of the library. But you can’t do that if you don’t have content. I’m leaving content. Valuable, I know what’s in the card catalogs, I know what I’ve experienced, I know what I’ve lived through. I don’t compile footnotes in my work. I create them. So my lived experience, my lived history, I’ve been an eyewitness to a lot of things, I’ve known a lot of people. So writing that out in different forms, which is really my scholarship and revelation, I’m creating footnotes. And then I’m documenting those notes in places where if you’re going to really going to do the work, you’ll find Cheryl Miller. You’ll find Cheryl Miller found this out. You’re going to find Cheryl Miller’s research.

So I’ll be lucky if I get maybe three books out. But making sure the ingredients for you all to write, that’s been a big part of my work, which is… I’m in a sacred project of collecting Black graphic design history that’s in collections with Stanford University and Cooper Union Herb Lubalin Center. It’s sacred work, because I find deceased Black designers and estates. I’m working with families that know that their loved one had some crazy kind of career, and it’s all in a box in the attic or in the basement, and they don’t know what to do with that ephemeral. And usually, I show up giving them a place to have their work preserved and cataloged. So with that, that’s really important, because we can’t write a history if it’s all oral tradition and lost and dry rotting in somebody’s attic or basement.

And I’m meeting so many families. I have a daughter, I won’t call her name. I have one I’m meeting this afternoon. I’ve worked with Sheldon Dixon’s daughter, I’ve worked with Dorothy Hayes’s niece. They all tell me these incredible stories and trust these sacred boxes that I will take care of them. And thus far, Stanford has received the concept of this without charge. That’s what they do. They bring in collections, they preserve art. I think they have MLK papers. This is what they do. And some people say, “Well, why didn’t you take it to HBCU,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Stanford will preserve the work freely for us.

So I’ve given everyone an invitation. Some people have wondered my motive. My motive is, “Okay. Well, you keep that stuff in your attic if you want. Or you have an opportunity for somebody to come by, pick it up, and you have a name and a catalog annotation. You have your own numbers. You don’t come underneath Cheryl Miller. This is not the umbrella. You have your own note. You have your own archive. You have your own collection. And it’s being preserved.” So we started with, I don’t know, somewhere between 40 and 60 invitations. And it is sincere, and it’s real. And I think the ones that are really moving me are the ones of estates where the designer is dead.

And I can’t tell you. Like my conversation with Dorothy Hayes’s niece, she says, “Thank God for you. I inherited everything. My aunt left me everything. And I haven’t had a clue what to do with it.” It’s sacred, because I listened to estate members, those who have inherited. I hear the stories of, “my dad,” “my aunt,” “Thank God it’s not going to be lost. I don’t have to toss it out. I have no idea what I was going to do with this.”

So it’s really an honor to work with the families who tell me their oral traditions and give me their boxes of goodies. And there’s all kinds of things. There are all kinds of things that we have a culture of. See, I’ve been at this since I was 17. And we have this culture of saving things in case something big happens. Okay?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
In case somebody gets discovered, or it’s hidden or lost. Who knew footnote on the back of a match cover, right? And these boxes are full of these things for a rainy day. Oh my God, you talking about the Black designers, they’re full of, “Oh my God, I got to save this for a rainy day in case… Just in case.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
I’ve had the privilege of talking to families, working with Stanford to pick up the collections, sampling the collections. They come in, they come into a holding area, they have special buildings, and it’s a process to bring these boxes in from everybody’s attic. And I’ve been telling you all, the ones that I’ve invited down to land of the living, “Open your file, open your collection.” Maurice, open your collection. You have an invitation. Open it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
So that means fill out the papers, go through it, and start it. Meaning you’ve got transcripts, you’ve got all kinds of notes from when you started this, and you remain an archivist to your collection. You don’t have to put anything new in it. You own all your rights and all of that. So it’s an honor. I’m telling all of my younger scholars, “If I’ve invited you, fill out the papers and start. You don’t have to put your current work in, because you’re working with it. Put your stuff in from college. Put your thoughts in. What did you write? Where are your diaries? That kind of thing. It’s not for me, and it’s not for you. It’s for the next generation that’ll come and needs to write about Revision Path.” Well, if Revision Path doesn’t have a record of that and hasn’t left footnotes, or you don’t pay the website bill, it’s all gone.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
It’s gone. So preserving our stories so that we have content for the next future generations to do the scholarship that’s required, that’s really important before I die. And if you get a book or two out of me, well, good. Good. You’ll get a book or two out of me. All right? They’re forthcoming. But collecting content so that we move this out of oral traditions and storytelling into scholarship and into history books, you can’t do it if you don’t have the ingredients, Maurice. So that’s a big portion of my work. And writing the most intriguing research I discover, and don’t ask me, just wait, but I have found some intriguing research that answers my primary questions for us all. So I’m writing that and working out where that will be published and how that will be published. I’m not anxious for publishing. I’m anxious to make sure that we have what’s necessary to publish.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
There’s no agenda to that. And nobody’s making any money on that, so we don’t worry about that. Yeah. Look, yeah, I have friends and foes, and friends and foes worry, “Is Cheryl Miller making anything?” Cheryl Miller… Listen, I’m waiting for the MacArthur, man.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, I hear you. Yeah.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
I haven’t received a dime, you hear me? Not a dime for over 50 years of work.

Maurice Cherry:
Waiting on that Genius Grant.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Yeah, I’m waiting on the… I pray on it every day. I do, because… And these things are for the young at heart, all these awards and things. It’s like, “Oh, well, we are going to get this award, because it’s like art collecting.” I’ve learned some stuff about fine art too. “Well, we’ll collect, buy low.” When they’re young, they’ve got performance. We collect and buy cheap now, because we know that they’re going to be producing for 30, 40 years. We are not going to give her that. She’s going to be good for 10 years. This should be going to glory.

No, but I haven’t monetized. There isn’t anything. There isn’t anything. Monetization, if you will, of this advocacy, man, I don’t even have a T-shirt. I don’t have a baseball hat, no merch, no nothing. Okay? It’s been 100% advocacy, because scholarship, I’ve learned, and in your work, statistics, the two together, the two signs of a coin, just marching and picketing, and I’m a civil rights girl. All of that brings awareness. But what has moved the needle in my life is one thesis, one document of footnotes.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Cheryl Miller’s a footnote lady. And I wrote one piece, and here we are. So I believe in designers who write, I believe in scholarship. And there were years that I wondered how and why I went to seminary. I’m a theologian. And I was running the studio in New York, and Union Theological became my client. And I started part-time, and oh, that’s a whole nother story. Me in seminary is a whole nother story. But I got led into theological work. And when I got led… Theological work is not religious work.

So when I got into the process, I learned things that I use now. And I would say that I’ve created a genre of design social justice. Oh, you study with Delores Williams and the works and likes of Cornel West in and out of the alcoves, and James Cohen. You walk through some liberation theology, you walk through some social justice and change, pedagogy. Your tools will sharpen to slay the dragon. And then Union does not pride itself on making ministers. I mean, you can walk out and be a minister if you want with an MDF, but you are trained in dynamic levels of critical thinking, research development of scholarship in the recording of history.

And I got led in to be trained. And I did not need… When I wanted to go to grad school again, I went. Of course it makes sense, so you got a Master’s, go get a PhD. Well, PhD in art, unless you’re doing art history, the Master’s from Pratt was terminal for anything I needed to do, even to teach. And Union wouldn’t let me get a PhD in any form of any branch of what they had theologically, because I didn’t come up that route of a BA, a graduate degree, all of that.

So getting a Master’s of Divinity yet put me into what it is that is dynamic for me now. I see things that people don’t see. I answer questions that people don’t even think to answer. And that comes, and I document create footnotes and scholarship. My work is sound. And that came from being theologically trained. They train you, sharpen your knife to be able to cut prime rib with your eyes closed. And there were days like, “Why in the world am I doing this?” I’m running Cheryl Miller Design downtown, “What am I doing up here with all these intellects?” But I had learned the importance. I had leaned into my academic coach with the thesis.

Leslie King-Hammond, she was a PhD from Johns Hopkins. And I met her when… You know my life story, my dad died, I couldn’t go back to RSID, and I ended up with MICA. She was an adjunct African history, what, if not the first Black professor at MICA 50 some odd years ago. I was grieving, and the Dean put her in my care, put me in her care. “Here, take care of this child. She’s supposed to be in Providence. Her father died, and now she’s in Baltimore. Take care of her.” And she was a newly minted PhD, and now claimed emeritus in her own right, of course.

Dr. Leslie King-Hammond, she was my coach. Everybody asked me, “Cheryl, you got a mentor?” No, I had no design mentor. Nobody took interest. I’ve always had Leslie, I’ve had writing coaches. I’ve had some of the best editors to take care of my work, to take care of my writing. Leslie inspired me to be a scrum. I said, “Oh, this is more than doing a book report.” She guided me. It was rigorous. And she guided me through the infamous Pratt thesis. And we all know what that thesis has done in our lives. I was charged with Cheryl, the chair of the design department of Pratt says, “You can’t do a design project to graduate out of this program.” I don’t know what he told anybody else. All I know is Anton Minasi had a studio in Lincoln Plaza, and we all had senior reviews. “What are you doing for your thesis?” We all had appointments.

I’ll never forget it. I went upstairs. He was in a loft across the street from Lincoln Center. And God rest his soul, he said, “Cheryl, we’ve talked about you. You can’t do a design project for your thesis.” I said, “I’m in design school, I’m in graduate school, and I can’t do a thesis. Come on.” “No.” And he gave me a charge. He said, “We want you to make a contribution to the industry.” Well, I just took a deep breath, and I knew what it meant. I knew exactly what it meant. I left his office. I got down, and this is back in the day, there was no cell phone. I went over to the… And he used to have little calling cards. I went over to the payphone on the corner, and I called Leslie. I said, “Dr. King. Pratt’s not letting me graduate with a design project. I got to write my way through this. Will you be my coach?” Thus, brought Transcending the Problems of the Black Graphic Designer to Success in the Marketplace, starting with Cheryl Miller. How about that? Starting with Cheryl Miller.

So I’ve always been a writer. People don’t know I was recruited to RISD, and I was also invited to Wellesley. So I had a choice go to RISD… When I graduated high school, after Martin Luther King was assassinated, we were in a season of reparation, and all the Ivy League schools and New England schools came down to all of the urban towns. And they came to New York, they came to Philadelphia, they came to DC. They scooped up most likely to succeed SAT scores. We all got… Everybody got invited to go to college, or at least to apply. So I was invited to RISD, and I was invited to Wellesley, English Lit and writing.

And I always say now, “Well, I went to RISD, ended up a writer, I got something to write about.” So I got trained. I got trained in scholarship and design and art and design, and its equalities and inequalities is my topic of conversation. So graduate degree number one gives me me something to write about. And graduate degree number two has given me the skillset to do it.

So we lean into that, and that’s how this has happened. Because I will tell you, what I’m doing now, the only thing that being a designer and having gone to all the design schools and all of that, just Google it. The only thing that has done for me in my work has identified a problem and gives me my content for my purpose, for what I write for. So I lean theological work as being trained as a scholar. It has equipped me in ways that design school could never.

And I just think about those years of, “Oh my God, what am I doing? Why am I here? Why am I here? Why am I in seminary?” And I got Cheryl Miller downtown going, I got AIGA, I got all this stuff that’s now in articles, and so forth and so on. And I’m like, “Why I was there was to prepare me for this moment that keeps me relevant and pertinent. I write the solutions to the injustices that I see, and I create scholarship.” And the only other thing that turns the needle like that is statistics. When you back it up with your type of work, well, 2% of this and 3% of this and 4% of this, and oh, back that up with some footnotes, this, that, and the other, then it’s like you got your deposition for your court case. Short of that, it’s like a whole bunch of people complaining and making noise.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, first of all, you mentioned a couple of things I’d love to touch on. One thing that you said about Stanford and Cooper Union, which I thought was interesting, because I got a similar criticism when some of the Revision Path episodes got inducted into the Smithsonian. People were writing, and they were like, “Well, why didn’t you go to HBCU? You went to Morehouse. Why did Morehouse take it?” I was like, “Well, Morehouse, first of all, I don’t think they even have an archive or something like that with design. And I already had a relationship with one of the curators at the Smithsonian.” It was a four-year sort of thing. That’s interesting though that you would get that sort of criticism about that. I mean, when you first came on Revision Path, I remember, I saw the pictures of you boxing up the stuff, and the folks from Stanford coming over and taking pictures and everything.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a weird criticism to have gotten.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
But it’s not a lot, but it sits in the back of people’s like, “Do I dare ask her?” Well, the thing about it is, preserving art costs money. It costs money, the archival process. So if someone is going to say, “We’re going to care in perpetuity for all the artwork that you bring in and make sure it’s annotated and credited and made available,” listen, you go work with that. I’m grateful. I’m grateful.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, speaking of those five years or so, since you were first on Revision Path, a lot has happened. I mean, you’ve had… I don’t think I’ve ever seen a designer have such an award tour, a victory lap, I don’t know what to call it. But you have had a number of accolades since then. Of course, you mentioned your professorships. You mentioned the collections at Stanford, at Cooper Union. There’s also your AIGA medal, your honorary doctorates, one from VCFA in 2021, one from MICA and RISD, from both of those in 2022. I mean, this has to be a tremendous validation of your work and your career. How does that make you feel?

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
I’m humbled, and I’m honored. And honestly, I’m grateful that I’m alive to see it happen. Like the gospel song, I’m alive to see it happen, Maurice. And to have achieved three design awards of our industry, the Cooper Hewitt, Visionary, the AIGA. And the one that touched me in an interesting spot, and maybe it’s because I’m a New York designer, was being inducted into, it’s the one club, but it’s the old school advertising Madison Avenue Club, being inducted into the Hall of Fame.

I’m like, I have delayed, but not denied. And God’s been faithful that in the midnight hour how much work I’ve done for our community that no one knows. I’m appreciative that I’m alive, Maurice. And I’m still vibrant, so that I can use it. So all of these awards and things, I’m not retiring and I’m not expiring. I’m on the other side of this history, but it’s opening up doors for me to continue to do my work and to correct the wrongs that I see. And it’s opening doors that otherwise would’ve remained shut. So they’re honors hard, hard-earned. Someone posted that on a LinkedIn. I was just being peppered with acknowledgements and well-deserved, long overdue, but somebody said hard-earned on LinkedIn, and I said, “Glory.”

And the first one, I was with [inaudible 00:29:21] Debbie Allen. And if you heard my reflection remarks, receiving AIGA, the night before, she’d earned the revered award, and she was wearing red, and I decided I was going to wear red to stand with her. And these are lifetime hard-earned acknowledgements. And I always tell folks, “Don’t get it twisted. I’m not an overnight success.” Overnight success that took 50 years, Maurice. And I’m not above the law. I don’t want anybody to go through what I’ve been through. So you can’t do this if you haven’t had your own measure. You can’t work like I work if you haven’t had your own measure of challenge, pain, suffering, disappointment at the hand of this industry. And I couldn’t lay my life down like this if it hadn’t touched my door, that’s ridiculous.

I’ve had my measure, I’m not above the law, and it’s been hard earned. And what it does now is, it gives me for those who want me. I’m on invitation only now. Invitation only is, there are a lot of things that are going on now that I’m not invited to the table. Well, I don’t have to be invited to everything, but the ones who invite me really want transformation and not performance. You don’t call me if you really don’t want to change your situation. So that’s a design model, less is more. I don’t have to be everywhere because I don’t trust everywhere to take care of my heart.

And with that said, every place that’s acknowledging, everyone that’s inviting me, they really want me. And for what I’ve been through, all of the horror of disappointment and rejection, why would I want to beat my head against performative projects where you just want my name? I don’t need that, Maurice. And especially on this side of history, I can get more done, I can get more done with people that want me, that really want transformation. I can get more done in one year than most people can get done in 10. You call Cheryl Miller. You want to get it done? Call Cheryl Miller. You want to look like you’re getting it done, she’s not the one. Because I’m really going to do it. So don’t call me unless you really want to hear it, you really want to do it, because I’ve always been truthful to this.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I would wager your years of experience definitely has given you a sharp eye for discerning that.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Oh God, yes. I can tell performative requests a mile away. It starts with the ones that don’t ask me. I’m like, “Oh, I see you. I see you. I’m not even on that distribution list. Okay. All right.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I feel like we’re sharing an inside joke with that, but I know exactly what you mean.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Yeah. So it doesn’t mean I have to be everywhere, it doesn’t, it’s just that where I am are in genuine places that want growth. I shout out University of Texas Austin Design. Listen, I have to shout out to them. They had just three alumni write a letter, just three. And they’ve been transforming. They didn’t have to have board meetings, and this, that, and the other. I came for a residency and they invited me to stay and, “Would you like to create a class?” And I said, “Yep, I would be honored.” You’ll have to ask them what’s it been like inviting Cheryl Miller to the faculty? Same thing. And I honor that, they really mean business. It’s a good school, it’s a great design school, heading up the ranks. And a part of it is, it’s reaching, and embracing, and being sincere to a diverse design community. And they said, Cheryl Miller, you got something you’d like to share?” And I said, “You better believe it.” And I got this crazy class that keeps me crazy busy.

Decolonizing graphic design from a Black perspective. It’s not Black history, Cheryl Miller’s not doing Black history, not like that. This is, I have decolonized the entire canon. And I’m like, “Oh my God.” And the point of the class is that a Black perspective is my perspective. I set the example of how to do it, how to take a one, number one, week one, and the basic canonical history goes all the way down until you get to Christmas, depending on your school. I go through each era and I show you how I decolonize the modernist perspective, but the prompts and the rehearsal back is, well, where do you come from? What’s beyond this modernist canon?

So this one class, I won an award from Howard with it. I’ve taught it at Roger Williams, I teach it at Howard, I teach it at University of Texas. And it’s the platform. I say platform because it’s the lectures that undergird two classes that I’m teaching at ArtCenter. And so ArtCenter, I teach communication design, I’m a co-professor, we teach publication design. But the prompts for the course, I’m a publication designer, so we’re teaching the craft of publication design, but the books that are being produced are not modernist solutions. It’s like, “Okay, so where do you come from? What are you bringing to the conversation of the book you’re designing?” And it’s intriguing. And I’ve been co-teacher, I also teach grad school there. And what I’m finding, I teach the capstone thesis graduate course, I’m a co-professor there, and I did that also at Leslie. People are asking me to teach capstone thesis. Well, who better knows how to write a thesis than Cheryl Miller? So to be a professor of thesis capstone books.

And I come and partner with those professors that are well oiled machines. The crit that we go through, it’s my training, how to do a thesis. I’m like, “I’ve got to renowned thesis, it’s crazy. One thesis, and here we are. Cheryl Miller can do a thesis, and so Cheryl Miller can teach you how to do a thesis.” I’m teaching Senior and graduate capstone thesis research and development. Now at Howard, which is exciting, is that they wanted me to teach that class. And so I think it’s two years, have I been with them two or three years? I’m not sure. Either two or three, whichever one. The first two, I’ve taught that basic class two semesters. And then they asked me, “Can you do a part two?” I’m like, “Apart two of the part one?”

And then I won an award last year, I was so honored. I got adjunct award, Phylicia Rashad, one of her first awards as Dean, for this course. I’m like, “Here goes my work again.” So the course is unique and it’s transformative, and so they asked me what I do part two. And so part two at Howard is I do believe it’s one of a kind, I never say I’m the only, I will always say one of the first. But I’m teaching the history of Black graphic design at Howard University, part two of the design one that I teach in the Fall. So part one is decolonizing graphic design from a Black perspective, which is how to rework the canon base, how do we get new stories? That’s part one. And part two is strictly the history of Black graphic design. And I follow the canonical errors, but I don’t talk about any White designers at all.

And without a textbook, how about that? Because we’re still waiting for textbooks. And it’s the first university college, three credit class, strictly the history of Black graphic design. And so I’ve created my syllabus, I’ve got my lectures, I’ve got my content. The first class is extremely popular, and we are working with University of Texas to make it e-learning. So we prototyped it with a few professors last Summer, and I’m hoping that it will help as continued education for my colleagues. It’s inspiration of how I expand the traditional modernist canonical syllabus. And it’s a popular class, and it’s the basis for everything I’m doing. The only way that you can get the class is, either you take it from me, or we wait on University of Texas to make it. I’ve got to keep it in an academic environment, so I’m not doing it streaming and all that kind of thing. It’s going to be fully accredited and you can get a badge and all that.

So we’re working on getting it so that people can take it. But if we’ve been fortunate enough to have one another in a class, then you’ve taken it with me. And I’m taking as many university engagements that will work with me this way, and I’m very busy during the day. Mondays are my hardest days. And inviting me to do this means that you are also working out what’s happening in design pedagogy, and curriculum, and education. So I have to shout out to Howard, UT, and ArtCenter. They are Zooming me in, and they’re working with it. So working with Canvas, and Blackboard, and Zooming me into the classroom, and these hybrid tech situations is opening up a world of knowledge-based wisdom.

Not only Cheryl Miller, but the pandemic has put us into this place, and I have grown in this space. And so are institutions that are willing to work that out. We’re not only but content experts from around the world, and it’s exciting. And I would say that schools should not frustrate themselves. And when we talk about looking at how we’re coming out of pandemic, listen, I tell my students, the ones that I teach at my other class at UT, is branding for diversity, I tell them all the time and the graduates preparing their portfolios and things, I said, Put some Zoom screenshots on.” These are aggressive design classes, Maurice. “And when you’re presenting, this means that you can design globally, you can be a design leader globally. You can manage how to be virtual, how to be remote, how to be global.” I said, it’s a skillset now.” We’re just not landlocked to walking around New York with black portfolios from corner to corner.

So Cheryl Miller has taken advantage of the pandemic and those that have heard the crying to diversify. And so these schools have wanted me and I want them, and they have blessed me and taken care of me in these years of mine now. And I have space for a couple more universities, but they have to be patient with me. Like I said, I’ve got my fingers crossed. I know that I’ve reached out. We have a campus here where I live, University of Connecticut, and so we’re looking at that. But I will work with this with whoever will work with me, and the two places that you want me. I don’t have to teach typography and this, that, and the other. I don’t have to do all that. You want me for one I do.

So the decolonizing of graphic design from a Black perspective, you want me to teach that. It’s a writing class, the prompts are writing. But I’ll tell you one thing that has stirred my heart is, when I teach this class of Howard, the way my scholars write the papers to the same prompts. Maurice, they help me get up every day because they are appalled that our history is not included in the main canonical story of North American graphic design. Their papers are unapologetic, and they keep me going like, “Oh my God my dear, I won’t labor through this one more year just to make sure you have a history.” So my hardest day, you asked me what’s a day like for Cheryl Miller?

Let’s take the first day, Monday is my hardest. I teach 12 hours straight. I get up, I’m online with Howard at 9:00 for three hours, I take a break. Then I move across the time zone, across the country, so I’m Eastern Standard Time. I start at 9:00, I’m with them for three hours. We lecture, we dialogue, we work out. We really work out on the content. Then my Texas class starts their time, 2:00, 3:00, and I’m there until 6:00, three hours with them. So 2:00 to 5:00 Central Time, 3:00 to 6:00 my time. I take a little break, then I head to California. There 2:00 is my 5:00, I have some transition time. Sometimes I’m early or late, depending on which way my Texas class goes. And I’m online, that’s a five hour class. My class starts all over again. My day starts all over day, all over again. It’s a five hour class that they go to at 2:00 and it’s over at 7:00.

And so I really have to shout out to the team there, the tech team. I Zoom in, review the work. We’re teaching publication design with a different spin. We’re working that Zoom in design, I’m telling you, it’s really an aggressive ArtCenter class for five hours. I start again. They come in fresh at 2:00, from 2:00 to 7:00, and I clock in 5:00 or 6:00, and I work until 10:00. I put in another five hours. So my family helps me, and everybody makes sure that I get water. I get water Maurice, I get water. I get a glass of water, I get a bio break, I get dinner, and I just keep moving. I keep moving. So my Mondays are my hardest things. The rest of my schedule, I write. I allow interviews, I do interviews. My door is still open. I’m here today with any popularity or notoriety because I never say no to the young designers.

So if you catch me, I do portfolio reviews. People want to stop by my LinkedIn Messenger, or my Instagram Messenger all the time. Ms. Miller, thank you for everything, can I talk to you? I talk to everybody, Maurice. I still do, I can’t not. I’m totally accessible all the time, which I think is the secret ingredient. I would say if there’s any secret potion to Cheryl Miller, I’ve been accessible. I don’t care who you are, you want to talk to me, I’ll talk to you. Because nobody ever wanted talk to me, Maurice, and that’s it. Nobody ever wanted to talk to me, not really. And so I’m like, “Well, if you want to talk to me, I’ll talk to you.” And so young scholars, young designers, I have a motto, if you see me on Instagram, or you see me on LinkedIn, and the green light is on, that means I have time to talk to you. I said “Don’t even make an appointment.

I said, “The way pandemic and strange diseases and everything gets us, I might not be here. If you see my green light, you better catch me right now.” I’m a right now, lady. Let’s do it, do it now. And so every day somebody text me, “Ms. Miller, can you talk?” I’m like, “Yep, I surely can.” So I still do portfolio, I still do portfolio reviews, interviews. Everybody wants a little quote or something for their thesis. I’m still at it, and I don’t burn out within this, I’m built for this. So this is my training, so I know when to stop, I know when to rest. I do not work on the weekends, I do not work on Sundays. So to run a marathon, you have to know where to take your Gatorade breaks. And I’ve never been in a situation where I have burned out or lost my way emotionally, spiritually, break down, nothing. I’ve learned early my capacity, my boundaries. I rest a lot.

On Tuesdays I don’t do anything. After a Monday like that, I don’t do it. I go to the gym, leave me alone. I got a couch corner. And then I’m back up. I can get more done in two days than most people get done in two weeks. The key is rest and pacing yourself. The key is rest. Don’t go past being tired, stop. And so I learned that. Running a business in New York, client’s crazy. But I guess I learned to run the race there in New York. I learned how to take care of myself, and glory to God, I’ve got divine health, except for a left cranky knee. I’m on no medicine, nothing. Antacid it every now and again. But no pills, nothing. And so I’ve learned the art of self-care in running destiny’s journey. And my family plays a big part of that. My family plays a big part of that. I have a blessed marriage. Phil is enjoying all of this with me. We started when we were teenagers.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I see the pictures on Instagram. You all are living it up.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Yeah. He’s like, “Cheryl, when’s the next gala award? I’ll take you. Cheryl, I’ll take you.” And I’m like, “Okay.” So the invitation comes with Phillip. And he comes with Philip. And what’s interesting, I’ve got some interesting photos that I will release. When I went to RISD Freshman year, there was a young lady, Freshman, I don’t know what happened with her because I left out after Freshman year. But she came up there to study photography, and he came up to visit me one weekend. And we had these, Civil Rights kids, I had this bush. And she took these love affair photos of Phil and myself, and we both had these well cropped precision bushes. It’s like, “Cheryl, how’d you do that?” I’m like, “Listen, I vinegared up my hair. Listen, I did what I had to do to be in the notice.” I’m like, “I’m not going to be left.”

So I worked that out. And so when we got invited to come to RISD, I said, “You know what? I’m going to entertain my community.” I said, “Let me show me post some militant Angela Davis freshman shots of Cheryl going to RISD Freshman year. And so he’s been with me the whole way, and it is a pleasure. We just did a cameo last week. A week before I woke up and I said, “RISD was inviting folks to come up to their Senior show.” And we live two hours from Providence, that’s nothing. So I said, “Phil, I want to go up to the Senior show, a cameo. Can you drive me up to Providence?” He said, “Really?” I said, “Well, what else are we going to do? We were just going to sit here and watch CNN and these crazy people on television.” So he says, “Sure.”

So we jumped in the truck, and he took me to Providence, and saw the show, which is, oh my God, RISD design. Oh my God, just go to Instagram and look it up. Oh my God. Eye candy. If I say something is design candy, trust me, eye candy, design candy. Oh my God. Oh my God. And so it just warmed my heart. We were up there with Gary Manchin, is where the gallery is, and there’s a patio, when you walk out it overlooks Providence. And I sat there and took a familiar picture with him. I’m like, “You remember when we were kids we took this picture from this venue, not knowing where life would leave us?” So he’s been with me. And the kids, it was a good decision for me to leave New York City with the practice and concentrate on them. I have good kids. Oh my God, they’re such a blessing.

And it’s so funny, as they were coming along when if they misbehaved or anything, I would always say, “I want you to know I was a famous designer, and now I’m on this pickup line with you people.” I said, “I’m a famous designer, and now I’m in kindergarten.” So I chuckled with them over the course of raising them. And so now with all the awards, we have a group text and I said, “I told you I was a famous designer, but more than anything in the whole wide world, I wanted to be with you all.” So I’m a soccer mom, I’m a basketball mom, I’m a baseball mom, and never looked back about the design business. But I always wrote, the phone rang constantly. You called me, oh my God, can I have a copy of the thesis? Can I have a copy of the thesis? Can I have a copy of the thesis?

Oh my God, my phone has never stopped ringing because of the thesis. Now I’m with the awards, they come with me, they went to RISD with me. Got a chance, I’m so proud, they treated us so well. I’m so proud of President Crystal Williams, the 18th President of Rhode Island School of Design, first African American president of a top ranked art school. They just treated us so well, and the kids were so proud. And they go like, “Yeah mom, we know, you are a famous designer.” So what I have wanted to missed all of that for the sake of these crazy people in the industry slaying dragons? No. I have my teenage prom date is my husband, and we have two kids that have grown up to do their thing, and well, and they know that I was telling the truth. “Your mother was a famous designer and now she’s in kindergarten with you.”

It’s a blessing to be here. So it’s a blessing to be alive because a lot of these peers of mine, dead and gone, they’re getting these awards posthumously. That’s no fun. Thank you for the acknowledgement, but they’re dead and gone. I gave Nicole, she doesn’t have to do it anymore, but I gave her, that’s my daughter. I said, “Nicole, if anybody from New York calls you and wants to give your mother an award and I’m dead, don’t go get it unless it’s monetized. Say you had a chance to do it when she was alive and you didn’t. I’m not coming to New York unless there’s money assigned to it for her estate.” So we joke about it, but I’m proud of them, they’re proud of me, and I balanced it. But I work hard. When I work, I work hard. And when I play, I play hard. So there you go. You got another question?

Maurice Cherry:
You’re everywhere, you’re super active on social media, I see you even have a collection of NFTs. I want to ask you about two things. One, where do you see the future of design with all these new technological advances? And then secondly, what impact do you think social media is going to have on design?

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Okay. Well, first and foremost, a lot of what I see tomorrow that is happening today comes from the experience of something very simple. I started in this business at the age of 17, 18 years old, and they invented the Magic Marker. Listen to me carefully, I say this all the time. I entered into this business when they discovered the Magic Marker. They were eight in a box, and the name of it was Magic Marker. Up until then, which was transitional, I was trained doing layouts with guash, a wooden teeth square, and charcoal, and speed balling. If I resisted Magic Markers and said, “Oh my God, I got to have my guash.” I wouldn’t be here today. I entered the television industry, when everybody interviews me about BET and all of that, and I always put these markers so people can locate time in history.

Gayle King, I worked in a television station, WTOP-TV, post Newsweek channel nine, was my first design job when I graduated from MICA and moved back to Washington. And Phil and I had just gotten married. Gayle King was a news trainee, news program upstairs in the news department, and Oprah was in Baltimore. And everything was done in film. And in the art department we did old school art cards in color, and the art department, we’d have to make the news graphics, the promo titling, the whole thing. And we had stands where the cameras would roll up onto the art. The station had its first animation camera was filmed.

And then they brought in videotape, this new, oh my god, videotape. And so what happened in that transition period in Washington, they started putting production companies around the area of the television stations, right over the key bridge. They had some colored video production houses because everything was film. So to make the 5:00 or 6:00 news, all the film had to be developed, and edited, and cut, and whatever’s going to happen. The whole place was filmed Maurice, in the New technology. So when I met Bob Johnson, he was trying to figure out BET, which you hear me in that prototype story. I love it. But he asked me would I work at the BET star and prototype TV cards? And after we’ve had this one conversation about his idea, it’s a crazy story. And I’m like, “All right.”

This is before he incorporated, he was working out the idea. And I met him in the prototype stage. So he was at the station and trying to sell this concept. And he says, “Any black designers around here?” And they send them down to me. All I can say in that conversation, I don’t want to go over that conversation because it’s all over the internet. He said, “Will you art direct my prototype show? Take the BET logo card and what we call lower thirds and all of that, because we’re going to do it in video, we’re not going to do it in film.” And so my conversation here is that, well, if I stayed there figuring out how to do lower thirds and graphics with film and didn’t learn kyron, and digital, and video, I wouldn’t be here today. Video, and that production, and those production houses that were lined up in Virginia, and if the TV stations were holding on the film, where would we be today?

And so I’ve always been in this transitional, one foot in and one foot out. Well, let me tell you, by the time I got to New York, just look at your history of the McIntosh. New York City, the Macintosh wiped out God knows how many businesses. I don’t do small businesses, genre of business. So the first thing that really impacted the business at large, the design industry in New York City, was they began to bundle Page Maker on HP computers. And people started, “Well, I can do my own brochure.” And I’m saying, “Oh Jesus, look at this. What’s happening?”

Then I had Danita and [inaudible 00:59:27], you’ll see them on these award tapes. Danita Albert, one of my art directors. I said, “Listen, I got to keep up with this. Whatever this is, we got to do it.” And I said, “I bring the machines in. In other words, I sign my name to the leases, buy all the programs and stuff. I don’t have time to go figure this stuff out, go figure it out. And we got to pull up these drafting tables.” And the speedball turned into the rapidograph, into the uniball. Man, I have been through some technology.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Man, I have been through some technology. But when this Macintosh QuarkXPress one and Adobe and Photoshop, when they bundled this stuff, well they didn’t bundle, you had to buy it. The stuff was expensive and I had to buy… I had my own staff camera because I had a firm, it wasn’t freelance. I had a firm and that’s why I have logo sheets and stuff. If you didn’t have a camera, you couldn’t do this stuff.

So that’s why I have crafted logo sheets that are flying all over because I don’t know about anybody else but Cheryl Miller had, unless you were on a job and you were freelancing and hustling stats after you worked, you know, needed a camera. There was no Adobe Illustrator skewing and all of that. This is Herb Lubalin, Tom Carnase, Tony DiSpigna crafting by hand.

So there were whole businesses for this. And type setting, my office was full of type catalogs. So you had type houses that only did headline type. You had type houses that did body type, you had retouch, retouching, retouchers. You had stack houses for negatives. Okay? So everything the computer did was a business inclusive of the deliveries.

So you had to move camera-ready art from uptown, midtown where the studios were, to the printers downtown. So the delivery services, this thing wiped out New York City. QuarkXPress, Macintosh, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. And those who were too cheap to figure it out – how to pay for all of that – took PageMaker on a HP and it went into DIY, do-it-yourself.

All those business folded and I just don’t mean they sea change. You know what sea change is? A sea change is different than a paradigm shift. A sea change is it’s gone. It’s gone. Never. To. Return.

And I saw this and I said, “Oh.” And the delivery service, AOL and the internet was flying, printing files, no more bikes running. The only thing moving now on bikes in New York City is Uber Eats.

I saw these businesses go if you could not keep up. And the resistance. Okay, well you can resist if you want. And listen, I used to visit Tony Dispena’s office downtown, and I was a regular go-by-and-visit.

And you can see, Douglas Davis has a retirement celebration documentary on Tony. You can find it on YouTube. And he shows you old school Tom Carnase, Herb Lubalin, and all of that crafting.

He had a well-tuned studio and you had to have equipment for that stuff. I still have that equipment, man. We had to have ellipses and drafting tools and… Oh Jesus, all that stuff by hand. I still have it all packed away. Okay, I’m looking for a museum’s installation. Cheryl Miller Design Studio still exists. Can you believe it?

I saw Tony’s shop pivot. He did not linger in holding onto speed balls. Speed ball pins and ink, and drafting to… See there was a process of how you did this stuff. You drew it out, you had your tissues and you had to have that camera. This thing hit New York City so fast. I went in there one day and he had a number Macintosh.

So what I’m sharing with you is University of Texas, I saw is starting a master’s program of AI. Next year it’s going to launch. MIT has a has a six week continue ed. Resist it if you want. Resist it and see where you’ll be. You’ll be right there with Uber Eats. You’ll be right there with Uber Eats. All right?

And I’ve been through too much technology to know, don’t resist. Learn it. And while you’re learning it, they will figure out the copyright stuff, they will figure out the legality, they will figure out… But it’s going to do you no good if this technology doesn’t have some content experts.

And so I’m like, learn it and figure out your code of ethics for using it and compete. Don’t resist. Or you’ll be on your bike riding around with Uber Eats, still looking for pay stub deliveries to printers downtown.

Yeah, this is it. I’m curious about NFTs. I have several collections on Foundation. Phillip is doing that part of my practice. I think there’s something there. You know, got to watch out for moving west for gold, because the only ones that make gold are the ones who make the shovels. The only ones who find gold out west are those who sell the shovels. Is there a there, there? But I won’t know if there’s a there, there, if I don’t jump in the game.

So we’ve got a Foundation collection, I’ve got a collection up now for women’s… He put up one for, there’s some women’s images. Yeah, I get it. Phil’s trained in blockchain for his business.

So we just keep it moving. We just keep it moving. I’m far from – well, I can’t say I’m just getting started – but I’m into Cheryl Miller 2.0. Or 3.0, 4.0, whatever it is. I’m curious. I have some entree, but I haven’t had time to work it out yet. But I’m curious about teaching in the metaverse and I do not jest when I think before it’s all said and done I can hologram into some space to teach.

The only proof of anything that I’ve said here that it’s important. You’ll always hear me say, “Design doesn’t change. Technology does.” There’s not a thing about design that changes. Technology changes. And I’m a designer. I’m a good designer. So if I want to be left behind, I’ll go back with my magic markers.

I told you all of that to show you how much technology I have grown through. And I was inspired as a kid. TV was brand new. George Olden moved down to Washington DC to be with CBS when I was born. And so I grew up on art cards. And I’ve always been able to be blessed enough to be able to keep up with the technology. When I say “keep up,” is to afford the computers, to afford the programs, to afford the training.

And so we’re just going to keep it going and inspiring young designers to compete. So the answer to the question is Star Trek. We’re on an odyssey. I can only tell you if you don’t want to get lost, you better get your little continuing head. Or go to YouTube University. I always love going to YouTube University. They’ll teach you anything. They’ll teach anything you want to know.

Maurice Cherry:
That is so true. That’s so true.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
I also like The Verve, Terrence Moline’s group. They throw up their tips and they keep it moving in that group. So you want to learn some technology and what’s going on, they’re really working those programs and talking about mid journey and all these dolly and rainbow this.

But you have to show up to these things. You have to participate. You have to always be inquisitive and be excellent. Like Oprah says, you got to do the work.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, you and I have talked about some young designers that you have been mentoring. You’ve talked about – or I’ve seen pictures at least I know – but you and I have talked about Simon Charway, Taeler Breathwaite.

How has your mentoring been going? I mean, I know you’re everywhere in terms of social media and of course like you said, you want to be on the metaverse. Like in the real world here, how’s your mentoring been going?

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Oh well, listen, apples don’t fall far from the tree. Everyone that’s in my tribe, they have their gifts. I think in my life I’ve inspired them to touch their gift. And the proof that they are of my tribe, they’re all winning awards too. The family that prays together stays together. So my tribe, they’re award-winning, they’re doing the same thing.

They stop by every now and again and say, “Auntie” – they know, don’t call me “Abuela” or “Nana” or anything – so everybody knows to call me “Auntie.” I just speak into their lives, hope and inspiration and to identify your gift.

And I do have some tips Maurice, and they have been kind enough to regard some of my wisdom. And when applied, they get the same results. So they are competitive designers. I’ve got so many of them. But what you can’t do is write me and say, “Cheryl, will you be my mentor?” That’s not the way that works.

Usually I see a giftedness. And I think one of my favorite, you mentioned Trรฉ [Seals] and Taeler. Trรฉ, I love Trรฉ. I love him dearly. And I love how he always remembers me. And he’s the man of the hour and he will be the man of the hour. On several occasions, his YouTubes and his articles, he will tell you that he ran into my article in 1987.

And most people run into the article 1987. And they find me, they do everything they can do to find me. And if you’ve gone through all that trouble to find a vintage, he said he paid 60 bucks. He found it on eBay. Somebody gave it to him, and then he found his own copy. I know I bought 200 of them, so I know 200 of them are around someplace.

He found it, someone gave it to him, he read it, he found me. I don’t know how he found me, but back when I was raising the kids I had a website. You could write me on the website. And he said, “Ms. Miller, I got an idea.” I said, “Mm-hmm.” I always listen. I said, “Mm-hmm, we all got ideas. Okay.”

He says, “I found your article. I read your article. I have an idea.” I said, “Mm-hmm.” And he says, “I want to make typefaces from the lettering on Civil Rights posters.” I said, “Mm-hmm.”

He says, “What do you think about that? Is that a good idea, Ms. Miller? I paused. And he quotes me pretty well, I remember it like it was yesterday. I said, “Trรฉ, do it now. If you don’t do it, somebody else will.” I didn’t have to tell him twice. And here we are.

See, this is what I tell everybody. You’re not going to be the only one, but could you try to be the first one? Try to be the first one. You’re not going to be the only one. Don’t you still go to McDonald’s and look up and say, “Can I have a Coke, please?” Well, we only have Pepsi, will you take Pepsi?” Don’t you go to FedEx and say, “Can I have a Xerox?” In the Canon machines back then.

First name recognition. I will never be the only one, but I’m going to be the first one, one of the first. I will never say “only.” You will always hear me say, “I’m one of the first.” Because just when I have the audacity to say I’m the first, somebody else comes up and says, “Well, I was there before you Miller.” I’m like, “Oh yeah, you were.”

So you got to stay humble with it. But you got to be the first one, one of the first to the application of your gift, your idea. That’s your brilliance. And so I see people now trying to do that, and they’re coming up with civil rights. And I said, “Man, don’t imitate. Don’t duplicate. Create.”

Taeler. Listen, that little baby can design. You hear me? She’s my youngest. I met her in Texas. Now, I don’t know the statistics, I don’t keep up with it, but she must be one of the first young black designers to have gotten as many grad school acceptances, top rank schools. And you’ll have to interview her to ask her where she got accepted.

But I’m not saying she’s the only one. I don’t know if she is the only one. She’s the only one I know out of University of Texas of Austin Design that got grad school acceptances, top rank schools and money. She’s selected prac. She’s got some intriguing work that she’s going to be doing and finishing out.

So you have to go interview her. And what was it like? I was one of her senior design teachers in Texas. And so, she was competitive. And boy, she was racking in those admissions and scholarships. I’m like, oh my God.

Simon. Oh listen, I love Simon Charway. I met Simon Charwey online. And one of the things that is so important to this work that I’m doing is that, and even there’s a segment in Dori Tunstall’s new book, Decolonizing Design. She’s got a piece in there that talks about the importance of the place to start is to understand your indigenous origins. It’s a requirement.

And I have researched, I had a family issue. I’m African American, but I’m also Filipino American and I’m West Indian. And I’m from DC. My backgrounds, my Zoom backgrounds, my story, everything. I’m what they call MGM: multi-generational mixed.

And I was raised African American. But culturally, I am Danish West Indian and I’m African American from D.C. I can hand dance. But I got four different grandparents, four different places.

I’m Filipino from Cavite. So I’ve got a Filipino family, I have a West Indian family, I have an African American family, and I have a Native American family. So my grandfather was white, an American Indian from Fauquier County.

So in this story I have one African-American grandmother, my father’s mother was African-American. And all of these people resolved at Howard and ended up in D.C. And I learned to hand dance. And that’s my story.

But in that richness is I’m Danish West Indies. My grandmother is indigenous Danish West Indian and Ghanaian. And my research led me to finding… Long story, but you can buy my book. Black Coral is my memoir. That work needed to be done in my life before I could even begin to do the scholarship on design.

And I have Ghanaian, DNA that I needed to process. I had a missing Filipino family that I needed to deal with. My mother came up looking a hundred percent Filipino on Howard’s campus. There was so much that needed to be dealt with in my origin, my heritage, my being born into this drama, that Black Coral – you can get it on Amazon – was a lifetime work that I ended up publishing in 2013. And with that, I found my tribe and origins of my Ghanaian DNA.

And with that comes the authenticity of my African aesthetic. You have to know the slave trade. So I know the Ghanaian slave trade is my history. The colonizers, the French and Martinique, the Dutch, the Portuguese. I know my colonizers are the Danes. And I know my history is with the Ghanaian Kings.

I traveled all through the West Indies for years. Census records, census projects, studied Danish census records, putting together and answering the question, “How in the world do I have Ghanaian DNA?” It’s from the slave trade.

And so with that, I found my tribe and where they are in Accra. I have a cousin, my great-grandmother’s nephew, who went back and became what they call “enstooled.” And he sojourned back to Ghana, and he’s a chief of the Virgin Islands. They enstooled him and met the lineage of all the tribal leaders.

So I have all of these records and pictures of the tribe, which is really genuine. I mean, it’s research. I’m hoping to go to Ghana. It’d be my second trip to Africa. But I’m hoping to go on a research trip to look at the decorative painting houses and things. I’m going looking at the Ghanaian aesthetic.

And I met Simon online. He wanted my advice on his African Design Matters project. We began a conversation on Instagram. And I saw him, and while everybody’s sleeping, I’d wake up and go to their conferences. They’re like 7, 12 hours.

So y’all sleeping. While y’all sleeping I’m with the Ghanaian designers and I’m hearing their agenda. I’m like, “Oh, these Pan-African brothers and sisters, they got a manifesto. And while we sleeping, they’re manifesto-ing.”

So I saw him interface online, working hard to integrate his research into a North American discussion. So he’s trying to meet us. He’s working with AIGA. And I was fascinated with his work because I would get up and listen to them lecture and their conferences. And I said, “Simon, the only way that you are going to break through with your research in North America, you got to get it ratified. And the only way that I know to get what you’re doing ratified is Yale.”

I did. I just said, “Simon, go to Yale.” I said, “I can’t tell you how to get to Yale, but you got Professor Mafundikwa, you know him. He’ll tell you how to get to Yale. Use your network to get where you’re going.”

All I can tell you is that I did what I had to do in that invitation of inspiring. I never say I’m anybody’s mentor. Let him say it. I inspired him to reach, you got to ratify this work. And the only place I kind of think this fits is Yale grad school.

And Mafundikwa can help you. I just live in Connecticut, so I can tell you the highway and the exit to get off. Yale isn’t my school, RISD and MICA, they’re my schools. I said, “I can just tell you the exit off of A 85. But you got enough that… Try.”

And I didn’t even say, “Try.” I said, “Do it.” And all the way up to the last moment he got accepted, we walked him through application, acceptance, the airplane ticket. We walked him through the whole thing. And so when he got here, it was the week after, two weeks maybe he’d been here and it was summertime. He finally got here.

I said, “Phil, would you take me up to Yale? “I want to meet Simon.” And I asked my son and I said, “He doesn’t know what’s going to hit him. We got some coats around here?” He’s in New England, he’s never seen snow. He’s going to wake up and it’s going to be, “Oh my God, where are the ancestors? Where are the outfits?”

So the guys put together a few sweaters because he didn’t know. So he is just going to wake up and it’s going to be frigid. But you wake up and it’s freezing, you know, what you going to do? So I said, “Brothers, give me some sweaters and some coats. And Phil, can you take me to Yale?”

I found him and he was so grateful to meet me. And then he touched my heart. He touched my heart, Maurice. He said, “Will you take a picture with me?” I took pictures out in front of where he was living. He said, “Ms. Miller, can you take a picture with me at the Yale sign, Welcome to Yale?” I said, “Well, do you know where it is? He said, “No. But I got to have a picture with you standing in front of Welcome to Yale.”

Oh my God. And Phillip was so patient. We drove around Yale’s campus looking for this one sign that Simon wanted. It’s one of these entranceway gate things to the campus, and he could not tell us on what corner, what street. And we drove all around Yale, which is a city school. Where’s the sign that says, Welcome to Yale? Well, we finally got it. He was so excited. You can see the picture on Instagram.

And he was so excited to meet me. We stood out and he kept taking pictures. He says, “The elders won’t believe it.” That’s what he kept saying. He says, “The elders won’t believe that I got here unless I take a picture of Welcome to Yale with you. And I’m like, “Okay, Simon.”

It took him three years to get here. It started pandemic. He started reaching out. Everybody’s online. He found me. I started going to their conferences. And I’m like, “Mm, I get it. I get what you’re doing. I see it.”

And Simon is just proclaiming and got his research. And I’m like, “Yeah, you trying to cross over into an international space. I got it. You need to go to Yale, brother.”

So from inspiring him, it took three years. The process of application, getting to work together, through the interviews, through the plane ticket, through the whole thing, through “Professor Miller, can you meet me and stand in front of the sign?” And forever grateful. And he knows I have Ghanaian DNA.

I’m like, “For the elders, Simon, I know I don’t look Ghanaian, but trust me, I know some Ghanaian art. I know Ghana. I know I got Ghana family. I got a chief. I know my chiefs. I know my story. We are craftsmen artisans. My tribe is, if you’ve seen the decorative coffin makers, the Sowa tribe, Accra Ghana, is my tribe. And so I come natural. We’re designers, we are wood cutters, ship makers, and we build the decorative coffins of Ghana.

And so when I start talking to you all about some African design, I know what I’m talking about. And that’s what I mean. That’s what mean about, I got stories to tell that nobody else can tell. I got footnotes to make that nobody else can make. I’m not compiling footnotes. I’m creating these footnotes and I’m leaving them in places for somebody to write something, whatever you’re writing.

And Cheryl Miller said, “Well, if I said it, it’s a footnote, and it’s a research and it’s a proof.” And my DNA says, I’m Ghanaian. And Simon and I connected. The ancestors connected us. Okay, so that’s the way the drum beats.

Maurice Cherry:
At this stage of your career, how do you measure success? I mean, what does it look like for you now with all of the accolades and the awards and the prestige? What’s success like now?

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Just remember me and acknowledge my friends. And when the ones that I’ve poured into make success on their own, that they remember. I do not talk about this famous thesis without acknowledging Dr. Leslie King Hammond. I refuse to talk about all these awards that stem from one thesis without celebrating Dr. Leslie King Hammond who was my academic coach and the scholar in my life that said, “Go get some skills.”

And I always tell y’all, well, when y’all have your big conferences and stuff, just make sure somebody got Ms. Miller. Is she is on the plane? Is she on the train? Somebody got her bag? Just remember me.

I went to AIGA, I met Teressa Moses from University of Minneapolis. We were walking out of the main theater at one of the breaks. And she and her friends were going to dinner and she turned to me and she said, “Professor Miller, you want to come and go to dinner with us?” And I kind of looked like, “Y’all don’t want me coming to dinner with y’all.” And she welcomed me. She said, “Come on, go to dinner with us. We’re skipping the rest of this. We going to go find dinner.”

And that meant more to me in the world that she included me. I can’t have gone through and have the passion for our community if I haven’t been through the pit of hell with this industry. The only reason I did this is so that you all, any measure of it, you don’t have to go through anything I went through. You don’t want to go through what I went through.

You don’t want to go through Jim Crow trying to steal my portfolio and not giving anybody a chance. I don’t want to bore you through the civil rights era. So the only reason I’m accessible at all…

Maurice, you don’t want to go through anything that I’ve gone through, not even a measure of it. So if there’s anything I can do to help you not go through it, I’m going to do it because I’m not above the law.

Maurice Cherry:
Is there something that you haven’t done yet that you want to do?

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
I’ve thought about that. And the answer is not really. I’ve thought about, do I want a branding project? Do I want a book? Do I want…? When I really was performing and servicing, I ran hard for my clients. There were projects I really wanted and I just knocked on those doors until I found the project. I worked for my portfolio. And I did the best, the absolute best I could do in the area and the era of performance that anyone could do.

And I say that because I came through pre-civil rights, civil rights, and post-civil rights era. And some of these anthologies and biographies and stuff I read online, I’m not far from Thomas Miller.

Thomas Miller has a clip I use in my lectures. You find them on history.org. I use them in my lecture when I’m talking about corporate designers A1, number 2. Week 2, symbols.

I got a YouTube university in him. He’s 80 some odd years old. He just got a posthumous AIGA medal, and I just met his daughter because he won the award the same year with me. But they got a clip on history.com and he’s 82 years old. And the pain in his eyes, I felt, and I knew. He said before Gold Shark Associates, his voice was frail, but you could see it in his eyes. “I just wanted to open a little place” – he’s talking about Chicago – “And I wanted to open a little place and do little brochures and logos, but no one would patronize me.” And I saw it in his eyes.

And he was awarded the medal for endurance or persistence or something like that. And when they were reading his bio and his daughter was there to accept posthumously, my mind flashed back to that history.org clip. And I saw the pain in his eyes and I said, “Mr. Miller, I get it.”

I’ll tell you on this other side of this story, I have so many answers to stuff I was going through when I was younger. I’m like, “Where’d that come from? Why am I doing this? Why is this so difficult?” This, that, and the other.

Here’s an example. I won’t call his name. Out of respect, because I don’t know whether he’s alive or not with us. But a gentleman on Dorothy Hayes’ list. See, I’m young enough and old enough to be in New York at the same time and many of those on the list, I knew personally. One in particular, I won’t call his name, had a studio downtown. And he called me one.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
… I had a studio downtown, and he called me one day. I knew him personally, and he said, “Cheryl, I want to give you my studio.” I’m like, “What?” He says, “Yeah.” He says, “I want to give you my studio.” I said, “Well, where you going?” He says, “I’m leaving New York.” He didn’t give me an explanation. I didn’t understand it. He said, “Have Philip run in a truck and come down and take it all out of here.” I said, “Are you sure?” And he said, “I want you to have this. In other words, maybe you can do something with this because I’m pulling out of New York,” and I’m like, “Wow. Okay.”

So, Philip rented the truck, we went down and I pulled out this guy’s studio. Sometimes, depending on where I zoom, I have two plants. They were loft plants. I have one in my living room and one in my office. They’re 40, 45 years old with these plants, I took out of this gentleman’s studio. Every time I see those plants, it reminds me of how difficult it was for us to make it in New York City, and I never understood why in the world he closed his business and pulled out in New York, until I started working with the history and working with systemic racist practices, and working on my research. I said, “Oh my god, none of us were scheduled to live.” One of my favorite questions I answered, why did Milton Glaser get all the black work? That thing was driving me nuts, so Cheryl, you’re going to figure that out. Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Hugh Masekela, all of these black… How’d he get all the black work? Dorothy Hayes’s people are hanging all around.

For me to realize, Cheryl, you were living in that. You were living in that era, and this is why your friend, who’s on Dorothy’s list, who was in the show, why he called you up. You’re a young kid, okay? Next likely to succeed, he’s just going to give you his stuff and pull out. I didn’t realize that till I saw his name on the list. And then, I dropped into history, and then I dropped into Jim Crow. I dropped into the cannon. I dropped in… I said, “And, now none of them could… How far could they get?” He gave me everything. Library books, equipment, chairs, drafting tables. I picked it all up. Two plants that remind me of the story. One is in my office here, it must be eight feet tall of… Yeah, one of those scheffleras, and then I have a ficus, it’s gorgeous. It’s very comfortable in my living room, about seven, eight feet tall, was in his loft.

See, this is the kind of stuff I live through. You’re not going to find a footnote unless I make it. I don’t have time to compile footnotes. I have time to make footnotes. I just made you a footnote. Okay? I just made your footnote. This whole conversation is a footnote. Anything I’ve, said recorded on this… You know The Chicago Style?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Yeah, the whole conversation’s footnote. So, success for me, is that I lived to see it happen. I lived to see you all prosper. Congratulations on your 10 years. I listened to your anniversary.

Maurice Cherry:
Thank you.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
You’re doing what someone should have done for you, which is the key to this. You interviewed yourself. Somebody should have interviewed you.

Maurice Cherry:
Yes, yes.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Maurice, tell me something about this. I don’t know. Okay, so this is at, you threw you all an anniversary party. I’m like, “No. Somebody, I won’t call names, should interviewed you.” I don’t do podcasts except, I fill up a studio room. Okay? That’s not what I do. I don’t make them, but I’ll talk. Don’t invite me if you don’t want me to talk. That’s not what I do, but I know who’s doing them.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
So, whoever’s listening to this one, y’all should have interviewed him and see, I’m crazy enough now I say that. Y’all should have interviewed… Maurice got to interview himself for 10 year victory. Okay, so guess what? I enjoyed your anniversary interview.

Maurice Cherry:
Thank you. Thank you.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
If I had a all that design show, I would’ve interviewed you. I would’ve known to interview you.

Maurice Cherry:
I appreciate hearing that. Thank you.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
I enjoyed the story, and I enjoyed… Thank you for having me for the 500, thank you for 248. I know my number. I’m 248 and I’m in the Smithsonian. I am proud of you. Okay? Apples don’t fall far from the tree, and listen, I just shouted out, somebody with all that podcast show, needs to interview you.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve been quoted as saying, “My motto is to live your life is your story, to live your life for others is your legacy. Leave a legacy.” I feel like so much of this conversation has been about your legacy. What do you want the next chapter of that to be? What do you want it to look like?

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
I just have… My writing needs to be done. Please don’t ask me about it. Okay? Don’t ask me, I’m not going to tell you. I need my writing to complete, and I have investigated places I should be, I mean, I could be. There’s no should, there ain’t no should in life. Places I could be. I want to just give my gift in the right place, for the rest of my time, and Maurice, I don’t know where that is, but I can feel it. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing right now. I’m supposed to be leaving the footnotes, collecting the archival work from dead designer estates. I was so touched. I met Reynold Ruffin’s son. He went out to Stanford to see his father’s collection. For the heirs, to say thank you is a blessing for me. I think being someplace high and mighty would take me off course.

High and mighty is… What? Don’t you want to be a dean of this or this, that, and then I’ll be doing so much administration, I wouldn’t be there for you. I can’t change what I’ve been doing, I’m just going to keep doing it. I’m there for you, Maurice. I’ve always been there for you. I’m leaving footnotes. I’m there for you, and if you all remember me, I’m touched, and all of the accolades helping my visibility so I can do more of that in places that want me. There are still places that do not want me, and when they don’t want me, they don’t want us collectively, they’re still there. But, like I said when we started, “Oh, I see you.”

But, there are plenty that want me in my community, and want to share this center stage of design and experience. That’s it. I want to finish my journey, and I think I’m also in a place, where the expectancy of surprise is, I don’t know where I’ll be led and where I’ll be invited, but my heart has been good about this for 50 years. So, I have an expectancy that God will reward openly, what I have done secretly, for the body of Christ in this, and for the body of designers, wherever they come from. I’m good, Maurice. I’m good. And by the way, I’m waiting on the MacArthur because… I’m waiting on the MacArthur.

Maurice Cherry:
That needs to be on the next chapter, for sure.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
The reason that I want it is, it will just help me finish. That’s it. It’ll help me finish. Because imagine doing all of what I’ve done with no payment. It is a heart’s desire because it will help me finish my work.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up, and I know, of course, people can Google you and find you in many, many places, but are there any places in particular, that you want to point people to, so they can keep track of what’s going on with Cheryl? Cheryl Miller everywhere.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Cheryl Miller, everywhere. No, I post every… I don’t like Twitter, so you don’t find me much over there. I’m on Instagram, I’m on LinkedIn, and if you want to support the NFTs, I’m on foundation. I’m painting, I paint in the summer. That was an empty nester, right before pandemic exploration. I left DC to go paint at RISD, and life’s pivot got me sophomore year signing up for graphic design at MICA. So, I always… In the empty nesting era, right before all of this took flight again, I said, “Charles, is anything left of your painting?” I paint in the summer and I paint during the break, and I would like a good gallery. I hate all these rules and regulations, Maurice, when it comes to art and design. You got to have this, you got to have that. I’m like, “Oh man, I can paint.” Really?

I can design with my eyes closed. Really? I would love a gallery to just get in relationship with me and let me just send you paintings, and you do what you do. If you ask me what I want, it’s like can’t this be a touch easier? That’s all. Because I’ll put in the hard work, man. I’ve done the work. This is not been an easy tour duty. I did all this with the design studio and my family, and all this, the advocacy, the legacy part, so I have worked some and I continue to work. So, anything that gives me grace and favor, I’m appreciative.

So, when the schools invite me, “Would you like a teach a class? We’ll figure out the tech.” I’m like, “Thank God. Thank God, University of Texas. Thank God, Howard. Thank God ArtCenter. Thank God, somebody…” “Miss Miller, we’ll make it easy for you. All you got to do is beam in with your lectures and grade and read, and do whatever you have to do. Come visit every now and again.” Just make my path a little easier. So, when I say the MacArthur, “Yeah, just make it a little easier, a gallery.” Oh, I’m not going all over New York, querying for a gallery for my paintings. Philip’s got a catalog. You want to see them? He’ll send you a catalog. You want to do business or what?

I’m not doing that. No. You want to do business? I’ll give you some paintings. I guarantee you, you take my paintings, you’re going to make money. This is what this is about. I know how to make money in art, but I just don’t have the patience for the hurdles, and the exclusion, and what the industry does something so simple. Kids just want to draw and paint and make a living. And so, it can’t be that difficult, so if you ask me anything that will make my life easier with what God gave me to do, from the time I was a kid, would be a blessing in my life, Maurice, and you guys just remember me when you go to the conference, “Does somebody get Miss Miller? Does she have a seat?” Do like Professor Teressa, “You want to go dinner?”

Yeah, I want to go dinner. I want to hear what y’all are doing the road ahead is, think about your retirement people. We can come back and talk about that. Think about it. Make decisions now, because your clients will get old with you, they won’t be there. Hiring managers are your age, they won’t be there, so you’ve got to plan that out, and we can come back and talk about that we need the industry, we need professors. Oh my god, we need professors. If I get a call once, I get a call a hundred times a day. “Cheryl Miller, you got any more Cheryl Millers?” I’m like, I got professors, associate professors that can get… Who can… Associate professors, not adjuncts, associates that can… Ready for tenure. We need them up the ranks terribly. The opportunities are there, but they’re not many of us. They’re not many of us. Silas, Pierre and Tasheka can only teach a couple places, at a time.

I’ve been like, get your paperwork. Let’s get going. We need professors. Integrate that with your practice. Figure out your retirement, live happily ever after. Stand up, show up on these teams. Don’t drift back. Be outstanding and stand out, Maurice. I’ll say that one again. Be outstanding and stand out from the rest. When you can, make your gift the first. You won’t be the only one, but you’ll be most memorable. Don’t imitate. Don’t duplicate. Create. Prosper the God-given gifts in you, and don’t take no for an answer. Sometimes you got to wait. Have some patience. God knows if I can wait 50 years for the wind of change, y’all can wait 50 weeks. You can wait 50 days. I still meet people today. Cheryl Miller, I didn’t know anything about it. I said, “Well, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you didn’t read the article 35, 40 years ago.”

You know why they didn’t read it? Because the books used to come in the mail, and if you didn’t see your picture in the front of the book with an award, you toss it to the side. But, I was right there writing. The article’s in the back of the book, and I shout out and thank everybody, and always thank. Thank you, thank you, thank you to my allies in this season. Both Ellen Lupton and Brian Collins have been a blessing for me, and I just want to make sure that I thank them openly and I thank them for their favor and their grace. I always thank everybody who’s helped me. Michelle Spellman, I acknowledge her in my lectures, she’s first black female art director, Time Inc. I didn’t know what I was doing. No Sports Illustrated. I didn’t know what I was doing. She gave me my first job for Time Inc, and next thing I knew Time Inc. Corporate was my client, and I had Cheryl Miller Design.

I thanked Michelle. I always thank Fo [Wilson]. Yeah, 50 years, Hip Hop graphics. Listen, Fo said Cheryl Miller to McDonald’s, one of the best jobs I had while she was art director of YSB. We helped each other. I was in seminary and Michele Washington remembered me, when they were doing those design before. They weren’t giving us any design medals and stuff, she wrote one of those profiles for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, Design Journeys. I remember that.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Yeah. So, we helped each other, we did what we could. I gave everybody work. Then, I’ve had some wonderful allies in this season. Professor Sansone, and all of my professors at UT, Doreen Lorenzo, and Kate Canales, and Kelsey Gray, and Sean Adams, and Bruce… I mean, I’m thanking everybody like I’m getting an Emmy here. When I met you with former president, Julie [inaudible 01:46:21], she said, “Come on out of here. Get out of the woods. I’m going to take you to Chicago.” Regina Roberts came all the way, and beautiful allies, brought me all the way, came all the way over here, get my boxes. Philip said, “Cheryl, how many times we got to move these boxes?” I said, “Until I figure out where to go.” I saved everything. The whole Cheryl Miller, I don’t dare put up all my work on the internet, y’all got a sample.

So many people, all of the awards people, all of the Smithsonian, and there’s so many people to thank, and so many people to remember, my allies and everybody who’s asked me for lectures, there’s so many people to thank. And so, I’ve had grace, in spite of, so expect the grace. Expect favor. Live well and life will be well to you. This is the last time we going to have this conversation. I want to shout out to Pratt. We’re keynoting their graduation and they’re honoring me with… I guess they’ll be announcing it soon, by April. I’m sure that by the time this runs, it’ll be announced. Yeah, they’re giving me an honorary degree. I’ll be keynoting at Radio City musical, for their graduation. And so, Maurice, it’s really simple. Whoever will love me, well, I will love well back, and when you love me, you love my community I represent.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, amen to that.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
And, I love you.

Maurice Cherry:
Amen to that.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
I love you and I’m proud of you. Congratulations for your 10 years. You’ve been a blessing for me. I wish you well in all of your endeavors, and all of your segues, victories, transitions, your writing, the podcast, God will smile on you.

Maurice Cherry:
Thank you. Thank you.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
We keep doing this and I’m honored to be number 500. I know for sure this will be, unless we’re doing this again, and I’m a hundred years old and you’re like… I expect a long life, but I don’t expect that you’ll interview me again, but maybe so. We don’t ever know. We don’t know yet. And so, I’m just listening. I think there’s some places where I’m yet to arrive. God doesn’t show it to you all, and He doesn’t give you everything that you want. When your gift, you get sent and you get placed. So, each and every day I pray, “Okay, lead me, guide me what you want me to do next.”

I think there are other schools, I think there are other projects. I think there are other kids and scholars, and I’m proud of everyone’s life that I’ve touched. I’m grateful for all my allies in this season, who’ve helped me, and they’ve helped me greatly. For everyone who’s supported me, over the years, clients and the stories are truthful. I pray a special prayer that God would thank you, because I can’t thank you better than when the God can touch your life and say, “Oh, well, that thank you came from Cheryl Miller. She prays for you.” So, that’s what you want. You want God to thank you for how your kindness and open door to me has blessed me.

Once again, I want to thank you for always supporting me and having interest in everything that I’ve been doing, and I’ve been thanking everybody, and I just want to make sure that I shout out to my universities that have accepted me and brought me into my new work. And, of course, we mentioned University of Texas, Austin Design with Doreen Lorenzo and Kate Canales, and everybody in Austin there, has been great to have me and my new scholarship. It all really started rolling with Nikki Juen at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, and Professor Kristina Sansone at Lesley Art and Design in Boston, and put me on the faculty there. I want to shout out and thank Bartley and Howard University, I was blessed to win an award for my new class there, and that’s been exciting and a real, real big shout out to ArtCenter, and Sean Adams had a vision to have me join out there.

And so, it’s crazy, but this new hybrid scenario is allowing me to reach all of the universities that would have me, and so I’m very, very grateful and thankful for that. Everyone that nominated me for all these great awards, Ashley over at AIGA and everyone at Cooper Hewitt and the One Club. Oh my goodness, everybody has just blessed me, all my friends at the Poster House keep remembering me. A special shout out to, not sure if I mentioned before, Regina Roberts over at Stanford has been helping me with our collections and making sure all those footnotes are in place for the next generation. And, the universities that have honored me with our honorary awards. And keynote speaking. I’m going to shout out to Vermont College of Fine Arts, MICA, RISD and I’m going to be keynote and receiving honorary from Pratt for this graduation 2023.

I think I’ve gotten everybody, there’s so many people to thank over the course of a 50-year career, and especially no one had to remember me, Maurice, and pull me out of the card catalog in this season of Renaissance and resurrection and restoration, or whatever we want to talk about Cheryl D. Miller 2.0 since the pandemic, it’s really been a blessing. Everyone who has had me write, speak, lecture, teach something, it’s all keeping me alive, and we’re moving. Especially you, Maurice, I’m so, so appreciative of everything that you’ve done and from remembering me from the very first, back when you were doing South by Southwest presentation, you came looking for me. I was definitely in the card catalogs of the decimal Dewey system and you brought me forward, so there’ve been a lot of people that have been instrumental. I don’t want to forget anybody, and if I have, please trust me, I remember every good will and wish toward me. I just am appreciative of the path of revision and vision that you have given us. I just want to say thank you.

And so, one more shout out to ArtCenter and Howard and UT, I’m just really grateful for the universities that are having me. Of course, all the clients that put up with me, and my designers that put up with me over the years, it’s been really… What a crazy journey. But, I’m living to see it happen, and in the next generation of those who seek this to embrace this career. So Maurice, thank you. God bless you, God keep you and keep revisioning the past, over and over again for us, and thank you. This is your buddy, Cheryl on [inaudible 01:53:37], and we thank you. So, with that, congratulations. Thank you for having me. Once again, you have my permission to make this one collectible. How about that?

Maurice Cherry:
Thank you for… I mean, I don’t really even know where to start. Just thank you for being you, for being an example, for being a trailblazer, for continuing to write and rewrite the canon, to show that we are here, we’ve done the work, we’ve existed, and we can continue to be here, and we have you as an example to show for that. So, thank you. Thank you again for coming on the show, for our 500th episode. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller:
Yes, Maurice. To everybody, just keep going and compete. Just compete. That’s all I have to say. And, don’t shy back. You have to be in it to win it, so go for it. There’s so many more now. There were only a few of us back in the day, Maurice. But now, the tribe is an army. All right? And so, we can move forward mightily, and I pray that blessing upon us all, and don’t resist AI, go get your certificate. Okay, my love.

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Kamar Thomas

Every designer or artist wants to be able to make a living from their work, and this week’s guest embodies that desire. Generally, Kamar Thomas splits his time between being a design educator at two institutions — Centennial College and VCAD — but outside the classroom, he’s a prolific artist who specializes in vibrant oil paintings filled with deep meaning. He also just finished his first book, The Artist’s Creative Vision, which publishes this winter. Very nice!

Kamar started off talking about his teaching career, which also includes stints in the U.S. and Jamaica, and he talked about getting into art and painting as a kid before attending college at Wesleyan. He also spoke on the themes of the Black figure, masks, and abstraction in his work, his first gallery show this year, and what he ultimately wants to convey in his paintings. For Kamar, you can make art from wherever, and also have a great career!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Kamar Thomas:
My name is Kamar Thomas. I am a fine art painter, primarily an artist. I’m also a professor at two colleges, Centennial College and Visual College of Art and Design. And lastly, because I have finished a manuscript, I will be an author of a book called The Artist’s Creative Vision.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Congratulations on the book.

Kamar Thomas:
Thank you, thank you. When it comes out, hopefully it does come out, I hope it makes an impact.

Maurice Cherry:
It will. I think every person’s book makes an impact, especially for the person who wrote it.

Kamar Thomas:
Especially for the person who wrote it.

Maurice Cherry:
Book aside, how has the summer been going so far?

Kamar Thomas:
The summer has been busy. I fill essentially three roles. I teach and I make and I write. And the summer is my season of making and writing, so I’ve had an exhibition in the summer. I’ve been going to museums quite a bit, and I’ve been just polishing up the manuscript, which is a whole long process in itself.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I see on the websites you’ve got the book here available for pre-order and everything. We’ll also make sure to put a link to it in the show notes so people can check that out.

Kamar Thomas:
Thank you. I’m very grateful. I need it.

Maurice Cherry:
What was your inspiration behind it?

Kamar Thomas:
It came from solving my own problem, which was I was a starving artist, and I didn’t want to be a starving artist anymore so the book is written to, if I can, eradicate that concept, get rid of the idea. And to solve that problem, it’s… The real issue is how does one come up with work consistently that people want to buy? Rather than just making and following the muse and blindly following inspiration.
And I sat down and I came up with a system. And by sat down, I mean with trial and error and teaching people and tried a few other method here and picking up things through teaching and applying them to myself. And the system is combine your interests with your biography, with art history, repeat. Eventually someone will buy.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds pretty simple.

Kamar Thomas:
Sounds pretty simple, just like saving money is simple, but it’s really difficult. Just like exercise is simple, but it’s hard.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Well, I want to get more into your work as an artist, but let’s talk about your work as a professor first. You mentioned teaching at two universities. You’re teaching at the Visual College of Art and Design; that’s in Edmonton, Alberta. And you’re teaching at Centennial College, which is in Toronto, which is on in Ontario. That’s east coast, west coast geographically. How do you balance teaching at both of those schools?

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah, balance is a strong word. Let’s just say… What’s the word? Manage. Balance supplies. For a season, there is teaching Visual College of Art and Design is online, and their classes are two to three hours long. And I fit them in the schedule where I can. And I teach at Centennial in person; I’m full-time there. And that schedule is largely immutable. The meetings have to happen, the classes have to happen, and I have to physically be there. And so it’s just a matter of systematizing and being rather ruthless with what I say yes to and being very hands on with the planning. I spend a significant portion of time just planning just 20 minutes here and there. I think if I added it up over the week, it would be at least an hour and a half just on planning what I’m going to do with the time that I have.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, it’s good that you manage both of them because it sounds like one’s online, one’s in person, but then the schedules don’t seem to really cross over either, so that’s pretty good.

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah. If it’s one thing I’ve learned from teaching, it’s systematize. If you repeat anything, figure out the best way to repeat it rather than having to make yourself figure it out each time.
I have a complicated system of things coming into my inbox to moving to a… I gather up a place, I put them in a folder, and then once a day I go in the folder, I put those into the planner ,and the the next day I get out a physical piece of paper and I write down the things from the planner. And I keep it on my person so I won’t have to keep checking the planner. And then somewhere on the paper on my person, I have somewhere to put the new stuff coming in so nothing really slips through the cracks. Some things do, but for the most part, 90%, 95% do not.
The same with art; a system that you can go back to, that you can rely on to produce results is much better than inspiration-based or client-based. It’s more of if you have a method of working, you go, you consult the system. I do this. Let me check art history. What do I have inspired there? Let me draw something from my biography. Go.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s interesting, I didn’t really realize that about teaching myself until I started teaching. Which when I was in college, I would always have professors that would… They wouldn’t necessarily repeat themselves, they’d always just tell you it’s in the syllabus. It’s like, “It’s in the syllabus. I put it in the syllabus.” And I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Then when I started teaching, I was like, I get it, because the syllabus is like your system. You put everything in there, and it’s up to the student whether they read it or not. If they don’t read it, it’s not your fault. You put it in the syllabus. They should have read it.

Kamar Thomas:
Correct. It not only has everything, it has when everything is going to happen and it has how you expect it to happen and it has the consequences of if they don’t happen.

Maurice Cherry:
Yep. And then the students get mad when they’re like, “Well, I didn’t read the syllabus.” Well, that’s your problem. The syllabus is the key to the system for me, so I get it.

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah. That’s exactly right.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve been a teacher for awhile now. Not just with these two colleges, but you’ve taught in Canada, you’ve taught in Jamaica, you’ve taught in United States. What do you learn from your students? Are there any differences between students in different countries and stuff?

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah, there sure are. In Jamaica, the difference in students in Jamaica, I was teaching high school. And the difference really… Well, what would have made the difference there is finances, it’s money. A lot of the issues could be solved by a few dollars here and there. The main challenges I was up against was actual art materials, was the space to make the art, was the resources. Once you have the money, those problems are solved.
In the United States, when I became a professor, the problem I faced the most was a problem of agency. And that I loosely define as is this thing for me? The students, a lot of them didn’t feel like making art was… Nevermind being possible, it’s possible, but just for someone else. And so a lot of my teaching was geared towards having students not only believe that it’s for them, but making projects that reinforce that belief. And there are very few things more encouraging than a few dollars in your bank account.
In Canada, it is the students I teach now, it is a equivalent of a community college. And the students I teach are adults, and they want to be professionals, and they need tangible results. The difference in Canada is students are a little more responsible because they’re a little school older. But they just need the resources. They need to know when and where what’s happening. A lot of my job is just finding things for my students to enter, finding outlets for them.
In Jamaica, it is a straight financial barrier. In the US, it is a problem of agency a lot of the time. And in Canada now, it’s a matter of finding and connecting the students to the resources.

Maurice Cherry:
I found when I talked to some educators here in the States that teach at HBCUs, it’s a combination of those things that you mentioned. If they’re teaching on HBCUs, it’s often the lack of funds and resources as well as the agency, depending on what program it is or how many people are in the department and such. It’s interesting how the problems scale based on not just country, but also just where you’re teaching and the students that you’re teaching, the type of students you’re teaching.

Kamar Thomas:
That’s correct. The agency is a rather complicated problem because it’s not an individual problem. You can’t really solve it by one student, you have to get the whole class to want to do well. And as a result, the individual will do well within that, so you have to set the expectation and then you have tom in a way, make it known that what they’re doing is hard, and it’s supposed to be hard, and see if you can get them on board for the difficulty. It’s a really delicate dance. But the US, that was the problem I faced, and hopefully I rose to the challenge. And I apologize to the students if I have not.

Maurice Cherry:
Do your students take you up on office hours?

Kamar Thomas:
Yes, they do. Because drawing is a bit like singing where it’s your voice, with drawing it’s your hand, it feels, and it’s your art, it’s what you are trying to say, a lot of the things that I give in class, it feels like I’m attacking them personally. They take up the office hours to tell me that I shouldn’t have attacked them personally. And then we have sessions to show them, no, it’s not you, it’s understanding of the subject matter that we’re doing is not quite there yet. This is what you’re doing. You’re over here. I need you to get to here.
An example of that would be I’m teaching measuring things, just measuring, and I’m I say, “You draw a line, a straight line, a perfectly vertical line and then you measure every other angle from that.” If I say picture a 90 degree angle, you have that in your head. If you cut that in half, you have a 45 degree angle. If you’re looking at a line, you can guess what that angle is because you know what 90 is and you know what 45 is. If it’s below 45, you can say, “Oh, that’s about 30,” et cetera.
And what students do, they don’t do that, they just guess. They just put it down, it looks right, and they come to office hours and say, “Hey, you were picking on me.” And I said, “I knew you guessed because you immediately put down something before attempting… Before I even finished the sentence.” Yeah, they take up office hours, they get extra time at the beginning.
Now, at the advanced level, when they’re about to graduate, they want to know if there’s a gallery showing, which ones I should contact. If there’s an art festival, how do I get in? What do I do now? I’m about to be out there. What do I do now? And I have a whole packet for them. I have what’s the steps that they take. What are the expectations? I break out the spreadsheet. Rent is $1,500. If you sell for $500, you need to sell three every month. You need to contact 10 people every month as a result. It’s 30 days in a month. If you do one every other day, you’ll get to 10; three of them might buy. And if you do this over a year, you won’t run out of money. That’s what my office hours are for.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, back when I was teaching… Oh my goodness, this might have been over 10 years ago. I started off teaching in person, and then I asked to be moved to teach online because my students were wearing me out. One, well, my students were all older than me, and so a lot of them tried to think that they would punk me because they’re like, “You’re my son’s age.” And I’m like, “So? I will fail you if you don’t get these assignments right.” Some of them would ask me to… They would bring their kids to class and they would try to use office hours as babysitting. They would have their kid come to office hours. And I’m like, “Where’s your mom?” And they’re like, “I don’t know.” What am I supposed to do? I’m not running daycare over here. And I asked to be moved online because I was like, I can’t keep coming out here and fooling what y’all doing this stuff.
And online is just different because the students just have to have more discipline. And again, this was 10 years ago, pre-pandemic. Now where I think everyone’s used to doing virtual work. Just trying to get them to have the discipline to just say something in the forum, just participate in class. Because there was a participation element to their grade. And then when they have office hours, it’s just like, “Well what can I do to make up for the time that I wasn’t speaking?” I’m like, “You can’t. You can’t make up participation. There’s no extra credit for participation. You didn’t speak up. That was it.” Trying to do anything they could just to pass. I would have students that would try to justify why they thought it was okay cheating because the class was online. And if the class wasn’t online and Wikipedia wasn’t there, then why would it be available as a resource? They’re very creative.
I was teaching a… It was basically principles of web development to business students, which was probably why they were so duplicitous, because it wasn’t design students, they were business majors that just needed a credit. They didn’t really care to learn, they were just like, “What can I do to get past you?” Essentially. And it would be just so disheartening because I would have students that would fail my class two and three times coming back doing the same stuff, and it’s like, “Do you want me to just pass you out of pity? Because it’s getting there. It’s hurting me to see you doing the same stuff. The assignment has not changed from semester to semester. I would think you would be better at it because you’ve done it before.” Yeah,. I do miss teaching though, I just don’t miss all of that, I don’t miss all of that.

Kamar Thomas:
Some people you’re not going to get when you are in… What is it? The lower school levels of everybody, and everybody’s decent. But as soon as you go to high school and you’re high school as 2,000 people, you know at least one or two crazy people, just absolute… You see them, you cross the street.
In teaching, some people it might be they might not make it. It might be that they, for whatever reason, their motivation, they’re unwilling to do the work; and that’s fine. I do my absolute best to not take it in any way personal. I actually take it as a point of pride to produce the same professionalism, no matter what the student comes with. And I treat them extra, extra nice just to make the D or the E that they’re about to get a bit more palatable. But I’m-

Maurice Cherry:
Wait, did you say D or E?

Kamar Thomas:
Listen, there’s no time machine. You’re going to fail this class. It’s over for you.

Maurice Cherry:
Wait, wait. There’s a grade that’s a E?

Kamar Thomas:
There’s a F.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, okay.

Kamar Thomas:
It exists, but I explain in great detail, the grades that are coming, and I explain the connection. And I try and point out what they can do next time, provided and they take it again. And I make it really long, and it takes a long time for me to do it. When they come back the next time I say, “Remember that long list I sent you? You haven’t done it. You showed up when there was three weeks remaining in the semester and you were asking me to perform a miracle, but I am merely a teacher. I am not the Lord. I cannot turn the water into wine. I’m sorry, I can’t make time return itself.” If you plan on making it, you have to come to a certain number of them to get participation. A lot of it is merely giving people the benefit of the doubt that they’ll try again and not taking it personally. And I’m going to be honest; it’s been really difficult.

Maurice Cherry:
I can imagine. I can imagine.

Kamar Thomas:
It’s very, very difficult. But again, systematize. I’ve seen it before now. I’m actually mad if it bothers me at all when I see the second time. I always think you’ve seen this before. You really [inaudible 00:21:30]. You see it’s not the first person that has come in three weeks before. Go look for the three weeks before folder, search to your computer. Oh, here it is. Oh yeah, this is what I said. Got it. And then I go and set out the template.
And that way, again, because in the US, agency was the problem, I always wanted to preserve the idea that this person felt like what I was teaching was theirs. And so I would try and be excruciatingly kind, the kind of understanding, “Oh, you’re still going to fail, but it’s an understanding fail.” It’s with love, it’s with kindness, it’s with accountability. And I think if the students have changed me in any way, I’ve become way more understanding and way more empathetic. Still going to failure you, though, but way more empathetic.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I get it. Sometimes I know students are going through a lot, and you try to do as much as you can. You want to get them to the level where they hopefully are understanding and doing it for themselves, and then sometimes you just don’t have that. But I think as educators, you and I both realize that it comes with the territory.

Kamar Thomas:
Unfortunately, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Let’s switch gears here a little bit and talk more about you. I think, as folks can probably tell by now with the quiet storm voice, that you’re from Jamaica. Tell me what it was like growing up there.

Kamar Thomas:
I’m from port Antonio in Jamaica. Place called Boundbrook, which is near the town of Port Antonio. Yeah, it’s called Stony Hill. As the name suggests there are stones. It’s a hill in areas. Not forest. There are trees, lots of them. There are dogs wandering on your properties. That’s your dog now. My neighbors knew all of my business. It’s a small place and it’s…
My parents, man, they did a great job. They did what they were supposed to do. And as a result, I felt like I could… Not only was I supposed to do well in school, but it was like, yeah, when I pass any exams and I come home with some a good report, all right, that’s nice, but we were expecting this. And that environment, I think, is what I credit for my trying so hard at anything.
Growing up there, our national heroes are all Black people. Every teacher I ever had was a woman. The prime minister was a woman at the time. When I came to the US and the term African American or Black had anything negative attached to it, I was very, very surprised, to say the least, because we don’t really have any negative connotations towards a Black identity in Jamaica at all when I was growing up. Things may have changed. But when I was growing up, we didn’t.
I come to the US and, oh. In Jamaica, you’re a man, and you come to the US, you’re a Black man. What does that mean? And my work is a direct result of trying to answer that question exactly. What does that mean exactly? And the answer for me was to expand what I think Black identity is, to expand what identity is in general. And to do that, I make a whole bunch of paintings that refer to my identity on the one hand, but also does so in a more abstract way. I make a whole bunch of paintings that are abstract, but they’re real, and I’m trying to say identity is abstract and also real.

Maurice Cherry:
When did you first get into art and painting?

Kamar Thomas:
Ah, so that is a really good question. In Jamaica, we have, when we leave school, they’re called Caribbean examination council exams. Everything is exam-based. And I took art in these exams, and I got just a little bit below the best, so I was into art in high school.
As a profession, absolutely not. That’s not in the tables. That’s not a thing. It was at my university I met my painting professor; her name was Tula Telfair. She was born Capon. She had long hair. She wore Prada dresses. I don’t know if it was Prada dresses, I just know these dresses were expensive. And she got oil paint on them and it didn’t bother her. And she drove an Audi, a blue one that sounded like a hair dryer. And she could paint quite a bit.
And I was thinking to myself, I understand being a professor pays, but you’re not buying an Audi from professor money. And I actually asked her, I got up courage, “Hey man, how you sell these paintings? How does this work?” And she’s like, “Well, you have to get very, very good and go take the classes you need. And we can talk about it when you get into the class.” And I did. I took the classes that was needed. And while I was painting with her, she just treated me and all the other students as if we were already professionals.
Now, to many people, she was mean, but it’s a very specific thing where she wants you to be ready. As soon as you step out, she wants you to be already ready. And so she would come into this studio and say if she were a curator and she gave me a show, she’d take it back immediately. I need to be painting way more than this, and then just leave me to contemplate what she just said. She would come in and just really treat me like an equal, to be honest, treat me like, “Look, when you graduate, nobody going to know what this is. This is not fun and games. You really need to be making the work consistently and professionally.” And somewhere along the line, it just happened that I felt like I was a professional. It was very gradual, but a few well placed curse words got it into my head that one should be a professional, treat it you would like any other job. It was really in college.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s get back more into you, into your background. Was your family really supportive of you getting into art?

Kamar Thomas:
That is such an interesting question. Supportive is a strong, strong word. My father is an EMT, and before that he was a fireman. He’s out here saving lives. My mom was the secretary to the dean of a college in Jamaica. This serious working people. And they send their son to America definitely not to paint, definitely not.
I’m there. Initially, I was doing physics, and it went okay, but I decided, okay, if I attack the painting with the same consistency I was doing physics, I might be able to make it work. And I, behind their back, just major in art. Don’t tell nobody. Get down to business. And it’s time to graduate now. And I call them up and I go, “Hey, the graduation is nice, but it’s me and 700 people. Nobody cares. Why don’t you come to this thing I’m having called an exhibition?” And they came and I made some sales, but I told the people, “Could you wait and give me the money in the exhibition so that my parents could see that I’m out here making it?” And they did. And they’ve been supportive ever since.
They’ve been supportive of me as a person, but because I hid it initially from them, as an artist, after I graduated, they were on board. And they have the ordinary fears. All parents are afraid that their children will perpetually depend on them until they’re 60. Parents live like, “When are you going to grow up?” And once I demonstrated that I got this, I’m fine, then they were very happy. Then it was like, all right, relax, mom. You don’t have to tell this lady that’s doing your nails. Then it’s a matter of holding them back right.
But before that, if you’re an artist listening, your parents are afraid you are going to be broke. Avoid it at all costs and you will be supported. And then you’ll have the problem of having them… Telling them to relax on the support a little bit.

Maurice Cherry:
What made you decide to go to Wesleyan for school?

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah, so I got into medical school in Jamaica. Got into the University of the West Indies. I’m 17 years old applying to things, my dad’s an EMT I saw those medical books. And my dad has been going on, ambulances, picking people up, so I was barely familiar with what medicine actually means. And I thought to myself at 17 years old, nah, can’t do that.
And I was in this program for… I don’t want to say gifted. It was the Association of Quietly Excellent Scholars and Thinkers, AQUEST was the name of it. Just a group of people who met. And they said, “Apply to some colleges in the US. They give scholarships.” And I applied to a few and a few said yes. And I picked Wesleyan because it gave the most.
I went blindly with not very much information. These are the days of, of course, paper applications and paying for internet at internet cafes for half an hour at a time. The kinds of research that people do today, not possible. The virtual tours and the flying in and doing it, that’s not a thing. It’s you see a name, all right, it’s in Connecticut. How much of a flight is that? Okay. All right, apply, see what happens. And what happened was they called me and said, “Hey, you’ve been accepted.” And I go, “Great. What does that mean?” “It means you’re going to get a visa and come and you live here before.” “Oh, all right.” It was more of I need to get an education, and medicine at 17, at 18 is rough. That choice was too difficult, so let me go to a liberal arts school and figure out another path.

Maurice Cherry:
And what was that path? Of course, it was art, but tell me about that.

Kamar Thomas:
Initially, it was physics. In general, I really like excellence of any kind, but I really was into all of the great physicists, Faraday and Einstein and Niels Bohr. I read these people’s biography. I loved the mathematician, Riemann’s hypothesis. I was reading that. I was just in the library reading up about people, with their mind, with their head, they were doing things. And that kind of a thing was impressive to me because I’m nearsighted so physical feats, they were impressive, but they were hard. I wasn’t going to catch anybody. Got glasses and sorted that out. But what really wowed me was sitting into the library and reading. Wait a minute, this guy, Newton, came up with the theory of gravity and figure out white light is made up of all the other colors and invented calculus, and then he turned 26. Whatever he’s doing, I need to have some of this. These people were what were impressive people to me.
And then I went to college and I found out what professional physics was, which is you write some code and you run a model and then you refine the code and then you run the model. If you are a professor and you’re at the end, if you can manage a tenure position, you have a grad student write parts of the code and run the model. It’s not this romantic notion of sitting down and solving the kinds of universal questions I was hoping for. It was more of can you learn to code? And can you learn the math? And can you learn the math to tell it to code?
And so I figured that out around my second year when it was time to decide a major. And I was doing some drawing and I said, “If I actually flipped a coin, flipped it, heads, I stay with physics, tails, I go with arts.” It was tails. I then went, “This can’t be real,” so I went online and I took a random question answer generator, and it ended up with art as well. I said, “All right, I’ll go with art.”

Maurice Cherry:
What?

Kamar Thomas:
That’s what it was. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
You just left it up to chance, huh?

Kamar Thomas:
Left it up. Because again, I figured… Let me put it in perspective.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Kamar Thomas:
There was a guy in my classroom, his name is Zin Lin. He was from Burma. He skipped both levels of calculus, and multi-variable calculus, and was the TA of the physics class while he was taking it. And there was fives Zin Lins in my class of 20 people. And there are people who they’ve been doing physics so long, they are as good at physics as Mozart is as good at music. These people are good, good. You’re not going to catch them in your lifetime.
And I was working an extreme amount just to… I would get 92%, and that would be a B because somebody got 108% and the A was moved up to 108%. It’s this kind of environment where the effort I’m putting in, I’m thinking if I apply this work ethic to basket weaving, I’m going to have some amazing baskets.
And again, I was already doing… It’s not a random pick, it was something that I was already doing. I was taking languages, and I’m doing art at the same time, art and art history all at the same time. And I figure if I threw myself at this art the way I’m doing at physics, I’m going to be all right, I’m going to be cool. And that’s why I was comfortable leading up to chance. For those listening, that’s not wise. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. If you already have an arena of proven work ethic, go for it. But if not, then put some more thought.

Maurice Cherry:
You’re attending Wesleyan, you’re majoring in art, and you graduated. After you graduated, you ended up going back to Jamaica for a while, and then you ended up coming back to the States. Tell me about that time.

Kamar Thomas:
I graduated, and I just couldn’t come up with the money to move to New York so I stayed near that the school and worked at a little supermarket, sold paintings and again realized… really figured out that I don’t have a gallery, I don’t have a curator backing me. I have no critics looking at my work. I’m just a guy out here, but I need to eat. And so I would, for jobs that I was applying to that were arts related, I would send them what I was working on and just let them know that I painted as well and let them know what it was about very quickly. And many of them would respond, and I wouldn’t get the job, but they’d buy a painting or they’d refer me to somebody else, and they would buy a painting. I figured out pretty early, if you tell people, they will buy.
Then, of course, my visa expired and I had return to Jamaica where I was hired as an art teacher at my old high school. Taught 8, 9, 10th, and 11th grade. And then after that, while I’m in art school, I’m doing the same thing I did, just whenever I had to email somebody or whenever I met someone and I took their number, I just told them that I painted. And it worked the same way in the US, it worked in Jamaica. Somebody was like, “You paint. I never met an artist before.” Said, “Well, now you have. Would you send them what I’ve done?” And I sold paintings. And people would pay me in installments, so they’d pay a little this week and then another bit next week in Jamaica, and that allowed me to save up the money to apply to graduate school. Came to graduate school, did pretty much the same thing. And I’ve been doing it since.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, it seems like you always had your eye on the prize when it comes to that, which is good. Even though you were doing other things like teaching and stuff, you still were telling yourself and other people, “I am an artist.”

Kamar Thomas:
Yes. I think around half of the battle is just showing up and making the work and committing to telling people. Around half, which seems like an exceptionally large percent but the thing is, if you continually tell people, you are going to need to show them something that you’ve told them about, which is going to make you want to continue to paint. And the more you paint, the more you want to tell people, and it starts this virtuous cycle of making something, talking about it. And the more you talk about it, the more you make, the more you make, the more you talk about it.

Maurice Cherry:
But it’s also just keeping that dream in the forefront. It’s not about having whatever the weight of reality or the weight of the world kill that idea for you. You still had it in the front of your mind, I am an artist, I am an artist. You’re telling people, you’re doing it. I think that’s just a powerful thing for people to keep in mind as they go through whatever it is they’re going through as part of their creative journey; keep the dream at the forefront and keep striving towards that.

Kamar Thomas:
I was raised as a rather religious person, and in the church, they have daily bread. They have daily readings, daily Bible texts. And as a young child, this is bothersome. This is a problem. You’re up every day? kind of a thing. And I applied that same concept to my artwork, which is the daily reminders and daily things and daily… not affirmations, but something entirely dedicated to reminding me that I can probably be better but also looking back at what I’ve already done to give myself the permission to just do a little bit more. All around my house, I have all kinds of… Well, I have paintings that I’ve made, so I see them every day.
But I also have whiteboards here and there. And I’ll write a quote that I want to keep repeating. And one of them, the most recent one I have written is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. I didn’t realize that that’s where that came from until you asked me that question, but it’s the idea that you have to do something every day to remind, to get yourself to do it so that inevitably when you don’t feel like doing it, you’ve had 47 days of reminding yourself of the importance and looking back at what you’ve done so much, for how much you’ve done so far. And you eventually will just keep making stuff just because you’re in the habit of reminding yourself.
The same with exercise. I haven’t really missed a workout in years. And when I have to miss one, I feel it because when I get up, I exercise. I don’t even think about it. I get up, I exercise, them’s the rules. The same, I get up, I exercise, and before I leave, I have to see this thing that I wrote down with my hand. I’m surrounded by paintings that I like, so it’s a constant reminder. I think that’s really key when you’re pursuing something that is a creative risk, to constantly and regularly remind yourself and encourage yourself because outside is not going to do it. There is no reassurance coming. You have to provide it for yourself.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s get more into your particular art style and your process. Based on what I can see from your website, I feel like after you came back to the States from Jamaica, this is when you really started to come into your own as an artist, not just in words, but in deeds as well by the actual paintings that you’ve created. Tell me about your process. What inspires you to make the art that you do in this fashion?

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah, so the main inspiration was the difference of being a Black man from Jamaica to the US and trying to work out what identity means and trying to make something that says it’s a little bit more complicated than you think. And what changed in graduate school was I more clearly could articulate what the art was supposed to do and I could use better metaphors. I could talk about it better is really what changed. And talking about it better is a function of thinking about it better and more clearly.
The change I want to make was I want someone to look at whatever identity they occupy as something that’s within their control. That sentence took two years of making artwork that I didn’t like to figure out. It took two years of trial and error and critiques in graduate school.
And once you have a clear direction, then I choose from the tools that are available to me. Oil paint I can paint really realistically or I can paint really abstractly or I can use technology to manipulate how an audience interacts with that artwork. And I make series of paintings that are somewhere between really abstract or close to realistic to walk people painting by painting through the idea that your identity can also be… Sure, it can be tangible, it can be reifined, it can be reaffirmed, but it’s also changeable by you. What changed in graduate school was I refined the message a lot more.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you have a connection with one of our other guests on the show, Bennie F. Johnson. He’s the executive director currently of AIGA. How did you two connect?

Kamar Thomas:
After I graduated but before I graduated, a parent of one of the students graduating was walking by the cafeteria, and they had some paintings of mine in there. And she Googled me and contacted me and said, “Hey, I’m in the art business. I’d like to have a conversation.” And we had that conversation. And she introduced me to Bennie. And we went down to DC and I painted Bennie and his wife and hung out with his kids. Wow, those kids must be grown by now that I’m thinking about it, probably. He was really little boy and really little girl, but now they must be big.
Yeah. I made two paintings of him and his wife. And I actually painted their face with face paint with the kids. But the kids are just rough with the face paint while stabbing daddy with the paint brush. I’m like, “You have to be gentle. Just paint a little bit at a time.” And just attacking his face. And same, his wife Akira, I believe is her name, [inaudible 00:46:26], painted her as well I painted them both. I painted a pair of paintings, and I delivered it. And I believe it’s still in their home to this day. It was a lovely experience, and I thanked them for trusting me to do that.

Maurice Cherry:
He texted me the photos. They’re really something. I know the photos don’t do justice to your work, but they’re really striking

Kamar Thomas:
Again, remember I’m from Jamaica, I’m from this hill in Jamaica.

Maurice Cherry:
Stone Hill.

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah, Stony Hill. Washington, DC may as well be Mars. It may as well be a different planet. This is a place where people work in the government and people talk about the Capitol. And people are like, the president’s going to be… White House down there, and this is an Anacostia. And this is professional. He’s driving around and telling me about all this, and my world is expanding. And I thank him quite a lot for that, just telling me about the history of the place and the residents that were there and the kinds of just work that people do.

Maurice Cherry:
Actually, Bennie wanted me to ask you a question. When I talked with him, I told him I was interviewing you. He’s like, “Oh yeah,” and he texted me the photos. Bennie wanted me to ask you about how you use the Black figure and abstraction in your work.

Kamar Thomas:
Yes. When I came to college in 2008, around ’08, ’09-ish was when occupy Wall Street happened. And it was activisty, activist town, activist everything. I arrived in the United States in 2014. And if I remember correctly, that was when one of the first big public police shootings happened. It was just bam, I stepped out of the airport, and then the shooting happened. It was on TV. And it was very much in the air, the making of work that was overtly describing the Black experience as well as it is lived by many in the United States. And I said to myself, “They don’t need anymore negative portrayals of Black people.” I understand, I get it fully what’s happening, but I think… What’s his name? Do you know the book Between the World and Me?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Yeah.

Kamar Thomas:
Ta-Nehisi Coates. Yeah. If I’m a writer, he got it. He nailed it. He got it. I don’t need to write another one like that. I think he has it. I said the same with my paintings. I think when I look through what’s being made right now, I think they got it. I don’t think if I say something, it will be nearly as impactful as if I really focus on this idea of agency, of mutability, of aspiration. And I think now more than ever is when it’s needed.
Never say never, but for the most part, I look at the Black figure… I want, when I’m an old man and my memory’s going in the art history books, they see images of representation that are complex, that are layered, that are nuanced, that are not only in relationship to whiteness, that are exploring the same way every other artist gets to explore. And so that’s how I use the Black figure. Complicated. Take its place, like everybody else.

Maurice Cherry:
Masks are a regular theme in a lot of your work. Tell me about that.

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah. Masks are a metaphor that I return to. And masks in the Caribbean… In Toronto, they recently had this big carnival called Caribana. It’s where one gets to put on a mask and put on a costume and go outside and essentially simulate sex through dancing, essentially, to a beat. And that’s only acceptable if you’re wearing this costume. You can’t just do this at your day job. You can’t pull up to accounts receivable and start doing this behavior.
And I use and I think about masks in that way. It allows you to occupy an identity that gives you privileges, that gives you the ability to act in a way that you ordinarily wouldn’t. And you don’t have to keep it forever. You can change it. And so masks, as a notion of identity is look, of course you are who you are, you’re born or you’re born, but if, when it comes to making art, if you view all of it as yours and like you’re supposed to be there, suddenly where you take influence from is much wider. If you view that the creative production is for you, then telling people about it is not that big a deal. If you think that you are supposed to be passing this class, that your identity is, yeah, pass classes. Then chances are, you’re going to work to pass that class.
Masks are this wonderful metaphor that I keep going back to, I keep finding nuances. Mask can conceal things. You can put it on, you can rob somebody, you can get away with it. Masks can review things. You can wear a mask for ritual purposes to act in ways to enter into states like trances, to enter into states, well, at carnival, et cetera. And masks, with the pandemic, went from being something to protect other people from getting infected with COVID to protecting yourself, to being a status symbol, to… The meaning of it changed over time, so I’ve been fascinated by this concept of masks.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you talked earlier about this exhibition that you had recently. How did it go? Tell me about it.

Kamar Thomas:
It went okay. What I did was I rented a gallery and just paid them the rent for a week and told as many people as I could about it. And people came and purchased the work. It was undertaking because when you pay for the gallery, you have to do everything. You have to show up and hang the work and sweep out the gallery and paint the wall and nail in the painting onto the wall and set up the lights. But from a introducing Toronto to my work perspective, it went swimmingly because one does it. I can show you better than I can tell you. It was a matter of inviting people. Many of them were new to Toronto. And I sell my art mostly to people who have never really bought art before, so it was a great success in that way. I got many, many people who didn’t even think of themselves as people who buy artwork to buy art and to think about it.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s awesome, that’s awesome. I’m glad that it was really successful for you in that way.

Kamar Thomas:
Thank you, thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
Are you planning on doing another exhibition this year? Or surely in the future, you’re planning on doing something.

Kamar Thomas:
In the future, yes. My time for the next couple months is taken up with the book and with… I’m going to be the coordinator of the program I’m teaching at Centennial, so it’s a lot of emails and a lot of tours and a lot of interviews, et cetera is coming up.
But next year I’m planning to… I’ll be painting the whole time. Next year, I have anywhere from five to 10 exhibitions that I’m putting into the calendar. But I’m going to be producing the work to get that done now next year, 2023, by January, the book will be out. By March, I’ll have at least one exhibition. By June, I’ll have another. By July, I’ll have another. By August, I’ll have another. And if my papers are right, I might have one or two in Jamaica as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, you got a plan. That’s good.

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah, I have a plan, but saying man makes plans, God laughs, because COVID really.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, well, that’s true, that’s true.

Kamar Thomas:
Here there’s a whole monkeypox coming on the scene.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kamar Thomas:
We can’t get a break in this century.

Maurice Cherry:
What is it that you ultimately want to convey with your work?

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah. Ultimately, I want people to see art as something that is for everybody. And I want them to see it as a decent job. Now, will you get rich doing it? Probably not. That being said, will you get rich doing anything? Probably not. It’s not more difficult than anything else.
I want people with looking at my work to understand and think through their identity as something that they get to pick. I want to overall increase agency in the world. Increase not just confidence, but the idea of possibility.
My largest challenge is getting students to not just believe that they can do what I’m asking, but that they’re supposed to do what I’m asking, and they’re supposed to do it well. If you look at identity, there is… I think Ben Akerlof, he’s an economist, and he says identity is one of the most significant economic decisions that someone can make. That means when you pick your identity, you pick what clothes you’re going to buy, you pick what shoes you wear, what colleges you can get into, what person you can marry, what neighborhood you’re going to live. And I want people, after having consumed my work, see the significance of those decisions and see that they have much more agency over them. They have way more power.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look back at your younger self, let’s say your 16 year old self, when you look back at him, what advice would you give him?

Kamar Thomas:
Oh man, that’s such a really good question. At 16 years old, I was honestly not listening to nobody. You weren’t going to tell me I’m not going to be pretty good at physics. You weren’t going to tell me I’m not going to be pretty good at anything.
At 16 years old, well, I would actually say go to the dance, is what I would say. When I was in college, they had these things called winter dances. And I was a member of the ASA, African Student Association, and they had a dance. And every year they would ask me, “Just come practice for the dance and do it on the night.” And I would go, “No, I have to paint. I have this problem set to do.” And I never did the dance, never did the dances because, again, your undergraduate was so hard I never did them.
And it was in graduate school I realized how much I missed by not doing the dance, how much outside of class relationships I could have formed if I did the dance, if I just went through the thing and practiced and maybe gotten 98% instead of 100%. You still get an A. I realized at that time, because when I started selling paintings, I realized the need and the importance of human relationships. That’s most of life. Life is group work, is what life is.
I would tell my 16 year old self, A, just go to the dance. Sure, be focused, but you don’t have to be all that focused. Go to the dance. You will have a good time. You’ll form human connections. And when they need help, you’re going to be able to help them. And when you need help, they’re going to be able to help you. But go to the dance is what I would say.

Maurice Cherry:
At this stage of where you’re at in your career as a painter, as an educator, now as an author, how do you define success?

Kamar Thomas:
Yes. I was talking to someone earlier about this concept. I woke up when I was 26 years old and I realized that I had all that I wanted. I wanted to be a painter, and that’s what I did most of the time, most of my days. I applied for a professor job, and I was working as a professor at 26.
Success for me was spending my time doing and utilizing God’s gifts as they have been bestowed to me. And I can learn pretty quickly and I can teach fairly well and I can paint, and I do all of these with most of my time. Success is doing or using the gifts that you have for most of your time. Doesn’t have to be all the time now. We all have to pay taxes and commute to work; most of the time. And for me, I have all I want.

Maurice Cherry:
Given that, and you’ve sort of, I guess, already teased this out a little bit, but where do you see yourself in the next five years? What work do you want to be doing? Any bigger projects or anything like that?

Kamar Thomas:
Whenever I run into any new medium, I try and figure it out and do a project in that medium. Now I’m looking into AR, so Instagram filters and Snapchat filters, provided Snapchat still alive as a company. Those are the kinds of AR that everyone would be familiar with. Augmented reality is what AR stands for. And I’m thinking that this can be a really strong addition to my work. And I’m thinking if I can figure this out, if I can learn that small bit of code… I’m taking a class here and there. In four or five years, I will have two, three projects tying technology and the art that I’m doing.
When I moved in Quebec, all of my friends were concept artists, and they worked in the entertainment industry designing monsters and trying to tell stories. And a part of my job now as a professor is I found myself helping people become illustrators and helping them learn to design those monsters. And as such, I’m looking at them watching much more stories, so there might be some short films in the mix. There might be some form of narrative in the mix.

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

Kamar Thomas:
You can find me at kamarthomas.com, or you can find me on Instagram at O-H-K-A-M-A-R. As mentioned earlier, I was a flowery languaged young man, and I got the sentence, “Oh, Kamar,” quite a bit so I made that my Instagram handle. And you can find me at those two places primarily, or if you type my name, Kamar Thomas, into Google, I am proud to say you will find me.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well, Kamar Thomas, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. One, I think just like your energy, you really just come across as very self-assured and cool as well as artistic. But I think also just telling your story of coming from Jamaica and always putting your artwork and the work that you’re doing and who you are as an artist at the forefront as you’ve went through life I think, one, it’s granted you the success that you have now, but I think it’s just a really great example to set for others out there that can hopefully do the same thing. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Kamar Thomas:
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much. It was a privilege and an honor.

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Dr. Perry Sweeper

Avid listeners of the podcast know that whenever I have a Black design educator on the show, eventually I’m going to bring up my alma mater, Morehouse College. And while I’ve had a few Morehouse alums on the show in the past, I’m really excited to have an actual Morehouse faculty member — Dr. Perry Sweeper — as a guest this week. Has Morehouse leveled up since I was a student there *cough cough* years ago?

After a quick summer check-in, we talked about Morehouse’s software engineering major, and about how it feels teaching at a school with such a historic reputation. From there, Dr. Sweeper told the story about growing up in Baltimore, attending Morgan State University, and how his post-grad career led him into education. With great minds like Dr. Sweeper teaching the next generation, I think we’re going to be in good hands for the future!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Hi. My name is Dr. Perry Sweeper. I’m a Professor of Practice at Morehouse College. I’m a designer, an educator, and a researcher.

Maurice Cherry:
What is a Professor of Practice? What does that mean?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
So there are different levels at universities. There are Adjunct Professors, who maybe teach one or two classes. There are also people who are on the tenure track, who might be in the Assistant Professor ranks. A Professor of Practice, by my definition, is someone who comes in from industry to teach a particular class or classes for a university.
And one of the benefits of having someone in a Professor of Practice role, is they’re someone who’s both working in industry and academia at the same time, so they can give you a right now experience, from the perspective of a person working in the field, for the students.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. That makes sense. So it’s not like someone that’s a career academic essentially?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Correct.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. All right. I got you. I was thinking, I know that there’s some trade schools I know that do that. I think the art institutes do that as well. They’ll have people who are actually working professionals, but then they also will teach courses and stuff.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
So how’s the summer going for you so far?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
It is busy. It’s really busy. It’s good. I’m going to try to take some time to rest before classes start in a couple of weeks, but it’s going well.

Maurice Cherry:
Are you ready for the upcoming school year?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Yes. I am. I’m ready to talk to students again, interact with students again. I have some things that I want to do as far as the syllabus is concerned or the curriculum, some tweaks I want to make, but other than that, I’m fully prepared and ready to go.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Speaking of school, you teach at Morehouse College, and listeners of this show know I am an alumnus of Morehouse College. You started in the 2021 school year. I’m just curious, how has it been teaching during the pandemic?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
It has been extremely interesting because you have to be agile and flexible, and in your work role, in the way that you assign, you also have to be transparent as well and you have to be empathetic to what’s going on with the students. So during that time, I tried to make sure that I was thinking about what was going on and also trying to get a cadence of where the students were physically, mentally, and emotionally because some of them were stuck at home and not able to come to campus, or they came to campus and they had to leave. There were so many different things going on personally with the students, so it was a really, really interesting time. I think it is actually a time where it felt like we were really, really far apart, but I think it brought the campus community closer together in a way.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you haven’t been to the campus yet though, have you?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
No, I haven’t.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, you got to come down to Atlanta and come to the campus. I don’t live that far from Morehouse actually.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Oh, awesome. Yeah, I actually visited the Morehouse campus years ago, probably 10 or 15 years ago, but I haven’t been there since.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Morehouse is a college that has a distinct history, so I’ve heard a lot about it, read a lot about it. It’s actually an honor to be able to teach at the school.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s changed a lot since I graduated certainly, which is, my God, knocking on 20 years ago. Oh, my God, I just thought about that. I just did the math. I mean, the campus has changed a lot in terms of they’ve expanded in some ways. There’s a performing arts center now. They’ve got campus apartments and things like that. I think even the building where… You’re in the Computer Science Department I think pretty much, right?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Correct, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
So even the building where that is used to be… When I was there, the computer lab and all that stuff used to be in Wheeler, but you haven’t to campus, so you don’t know this. There used to be a Wheeler Hall, which is right near the entrance of Morehouse, and then they built the Technology Tower, which is where they moved it, which is kind of near Sale Hall and near Graves Hall, which is kind of near the big lawn on Morehouse’s campus, the great lawn on Morehouse’s campus. It’s nice if you get a chance to check it out. Actually, I don’t know if this is true, but you’ll have to tell me, does Mrs. Banks still work there?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Mrs. Banks?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
What’s the first name?

Maurice Cherry:
Martha. She’s the Administrative Assistant for the Computer Science Department.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
I almost remember her retiring.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, man.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Don’t know if it’s the right person, but I’m not a good person to ask when it comes to… I know interacting with the department, I haven’t had a chance to interact with her.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, okay.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
So yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
She was like my mom on campus. I was a math major, so most of my stuff was in Dansby I believe. I’m trying to remember the names of the dorm now that I’m thinking about it, or the names of the buildings. I think most of my stuff was in Dansby, but I was doing work study stuff, so I would always be in the computer lab. I would always be in Mrs. Bank’s office at the desk and everything. I don’t know if she still works there. I mean, I would imagine 20 years from now, probably not, because I think she had been there probably since the ’80s when I started, so I don’t know.
If she is still there, shout out to Mrs. Banks, who has been helping a generation of Black male technologists pass through that school. She is an unsung hero of Morehouse College.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Wow. While we’re shouting out Ms. Banks, who I’m going to look up by the way, we have to shout out all of the Administrative Assistants who were like moms and aunts at HBCUs.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
There’s always one. When you’re talking about Ms. Banks, I’m thinking of Ms. Brown. I’m thinking of countless others, and Ms. Ash in my experiences at HBCUs, so that’s really interesting to hear you talk about her.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about some of the courses that you’re teaching. What are you teaching at Morehouse?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Right now I’m teaching Human-Computer Interaction. Last summer, I also wrote a Data Visualization course as well, and so I’m looking to teach that very soon.

Maurice Cherry:
So you were telling me before we started recording that what you’re doing is kind of… Or at least the program in which you’re teaching is not really a department. It’s like an interdisciplinary studies program. Is that right?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Yes. It’s experiential learning and interdisciplinary studies, and so there are various subjects in the department. I think that it’s a really innovative way to look at education. Morehouse is doing something very interesting as well because they’ve had some shifts in the way that they have designed their program, and even as I’m talking, very recently they’ve changed the structure, the departments, so departments, divisions, chairs, it’s really going to be more of a STEM-oriented environment, more so.
This will be the first semester that we’re under that structure, so I’m looking forward to that as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Can you major in Design at Morehouse? I would imagine with this experiential learning and interdisciplinary studies, you can kind of mix and match kind of different fields of study. When I went there, and I’ve told this story countless times in presentations and stuff, I started at Morehouse in 1999, right around the early days of the web, and I remember telling my Computer Science professor there, Dr. Jones.
I started in a dual degree program doing Computer Science/Computer Engineering, and I remember going to him one day and telling him that I wanted to do Web design. I was interested in Web design. I had been doing view source on websites and stuff, and I told him about it. I remember him telling me that the Internet was a fad, and that if I wanted to study that, I would need to change my major because that’s not what we study here. He’s like, “We do hardcore computer science. We’re learning assembly. We’re teaching you how to be a programmer.”
I wanted to be a programmer, but just not, I guess, a computer programmer. I wanted to do Web design, and so I did end up changing my major, but I’m wondering now, since Morehouse went through all these shifts in curriculum and programs as you mentioned, is it possible now to major in design there?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
No, it’s not. There is an Art Program, and then there’s a Computer Science Program. So a lot of the students that I actually teach in Human-Computer Interaction are Software Engineering majors.

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
And so you won’t get the design part, but my background is design, so I teach Human-Computer Interaction from a design standpoint or a UX-design standpoint because the fields are so closely knit. When you look at industry, typically when you look at the waterfall method of software design, you get an idea, you make it, and you give it to the users, and that’s it. Then you have agile and other methodologies where you’re constantly iterating on the design and speaking to users as you go along, so that what you actually produce is something that the users will actually want and need for what they’re doing.
So it’s really interesting to interact with computer science students and engineers because I take pride in bringing this perspective to them and teaching them about psychology and teaching them about doing interviews with your users and finding out about them and learning about the environment that those users are working in, whether they’re going to be looking at a computer screen for a very long time and they might need dark mode, or just a lot of different things. So it’s almost like looking at anthropology or ethnography and really getting to know the users.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s really interesting that Morehouse has kind of branched out in that way. I mean, I knew that they had the art major, and I don’t know if they have any more art professors because the one professor they had I remember, Dr. Anderson, I believe he passed away. I’m pretty sure they might have another art professor now if they still have the major, but I often get asked from people when I tell them I went to Morehouse and because I’ve been a working designer for so long, they’re like, “Oh, did you major in design?” I was like, “No, I majored in math,” and they’re like, “What? How’re you a designer and you didn’t go to design school?”
That’s interesting. I would like to see Morehouse still have some kind of a design discipline of some sort because I feel like it’s something that the school is really greatly missing. I mean, they’ve got music. They’ve got so many other things. I just feel like one day, and I’m saying this probably partially out of vanity because I would like to come back and speak at Morehouse one day, but I can’t really speak to the Math Department because I don’t do math and I can’t speak to the Computer Science Department because I don’t do computer science, so yeah.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
We can make that happen now. We can make it happen.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Let’s talk about that offline then. We’ll confer about that.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Yeah. It’s actually a desire of mine to one day see a design program at Morehouse as well, and so we’ll see how far we get that in the next five years.

Maurice Cherry:
How has it been teaching at such a well known institution? Do you feel any kind of pressure or anything?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, Morehouse is looked at… As far as males and Black colleges and excellence and all of the alumni and graduates who are doing great things out there, it’s a lot of pressure as a professor because I’m not a Morehouse Man, but I take pride in having a hand in the education of a Morehouse Man. So being able to understand the history and the distinction behind it is, I think, integral in being a part of the campus in a way, and when I say the campus, I mean just the academic cadre of folks that are there.
I haven’t gotten to interact with certain professors there, like Dr. Muhsinah Morris, who’s doing Morehouse in the Metaverse, or the Metaversity. I’m teaching on Zoom, but in the next year or two, I want to transition to VR headsets and looking at a hybrid way to kind of teach on that campus, and she has been just integral in making sure that that happened during the pandemic. It’s just amazing to see that grow at the university as well.
We had the COVID and all of that. It’s terrible some of the things that happened during that time, but it’s just a great opportunity for innovation in academia.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I know last year’s commencement took place in the metaverse. I got an email about that. I was like, “Oh, isn’t that something?”

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Yeah. It is. Actually it’s a direction we want to go in. We are partnering with different EdTech companies and trying to make sure that we are looking at education in a different way and making it available to more students.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, if you’re looking for some Black folks that are doing stuff in the metaverse, I can certainly introduce you to a few we’ve had on the show before.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. I would love to get those recommendations, and I will comb through it myself and look at it because your podcast is basically a place to go for research at this point. So I’ll definitely do that homework, and I’ll look at those recommendations.

Maurice Cherry:
What’s the rest of the department like? Have you had a chance to work with any other professors? Or talk with any other professors?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Yes. So the Division Chair, Dr. Kinnis Gosha, he’s been just integral in my development. He’s the one who posted the job, and so getting an opportunity to speak to him. He’s at the university. He’s an Endowed Professor, so he is been at the university for a while, and he runs the Culturally Relevant Computing Lab there, and so they’re doing some really interesting projects around Black male initiatives and technology. So being able to speak to him and Dr. Morris as well has been great.

Maurice Cherry:
Well man, you got to come down to the campus. I think you’ve got to come and spend at least a week on campus. Go to Crown Forum, see the King statue, definitely got to eat at Chivers. Got to eat at Chivers.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Okay.

Maurice Cherry:
You got to go through the Technology Tower. You got to go see the view of the grass. Don’t walk on the grass, that’s the one thing. There’s a big great lawn in front of Graves Hall, which is the main… When you see the Morehouse logo, that building, that’s Graves Hall. It’s a dormitory. Don’t walk on the lawn, it’s supposed to be bad luck. Especially if you didn’t go to Morehouse, it’s supposed to be bad luck. People play soccer on that lawn sometimes, but that was 20 years ago. I don’t know what it is like now. But you got to go and experience really not just Morehouse, but experience the AUC.
You said that you’ve been to Morehouse before though, right? Didn’t you say came here several years ago?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Yes. So I came to Atlanta. I saw the campus. I saw some of the campus. I saw a lot of Dr. King monuments and different artifacts. So I’ve been down there, but it’s been a while. During the pandemic, I planned it once, and then, “Oh, COVID is high,” and it’s all these different things. So it’s been up and down, but I feel it. How can I teach at the university and not actually step on campus? I just feel I have to make it happen. I have to do that. Even if you do it virtually and you walk around campus with some Oculus VR headsets on, I got to go and look at some of these things that you’re referring to.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, man. I’m telling you the AUC in the spring is lit. I mean, the Strip, which is this promenade. It’s mostly Clark Atlanta, but it connects Clark Atlanta, Morehouse, and Spelman. It kind of connects us together. I mean, in the springtime, I might be looking at this through filtered 20-year-old rose-colored glasses, but man, I’m telling you, springtime on the Strip is like none other. It’s paradise, just a cavalcade of positive Blackness as far as the eye can see.
People talk about a different world, and Hillman, which of course is based off of Morehouse and Spelman, it’s very much like that. Especially when Spelman opens up, and they have Market Fridays and you get to see Lower Manley and the steps and everything. Oh, it’s such an experience. I have pictures from that time because I was a photographer. Back then, I called myself a photographer, I had a digital camera. I just look back at that time like, “Oh, man. We were so young, just so crazy.”
It was such a wild time, and it’s funny because some of us now have went on to do great things in the world. The current Mayor of Birmingham, Randall Woodfin, we were in the same graduating class, in the same class.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
[inaudible 00:21:47].

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So it’s really interesting. I don’t know. It’s funny because like I said, I don’t live that far from Morehouse. I don’t really go there because I don’t have a need to as an adult 20 years out of college, but it is right there in the neighborhood. It’s just good to know that it’s there and it’s still kind of doing great things in the community. So what do you learn from your students? What do they teach you?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Well, I had this project during COVID, and it was my attempt… So let’s go to Black Panther for a second. I’m super excited. November is coming, so we’re going to get… But there is this scene in Black Panther where they’re there and they go back, and they want to give this new technology to the United States, I perceive it as, that they’ve never seen before. You have the little kids, and they’re like looking at what looks like to them a spaceship or crazy looking car and this new technology, and their idea was to bring this innovative technology into this urban environment and see how it could improve.
So I thought about that in one of the projects that I gave. So the way that the course works, you learn the principles of the human-computer interaction during the first half of the semester, and as you learn those principles, you get small projects, but the students gain an understanding of what human-computer interaction is.
Then during the second part of the semester, they start putting those things into practice. So the project was to come up with a piece of technology that would be needed in a community like that, and I framed it based on that part of Black Panther. Just some of the projects that came out of that, so what did I learn from them? I learned where their minds are, where their focused at. I was just so, not surprised because I know they’re all bright students there, they teach me that all semester, but to see just a small example of the contribution that some of these students can make and will make in society, it’s amazing.
Some of the projects they came up with, for instance, was this one-line encyclopedia or anthology. So in 2020 and 2021, there are all kinds of things going on in the news and so forth and so on, so if you had to have a conversation or talk to someone about what was going on, a lot of people didn’t want to talk about it. Others wanted to talk about it, but they didn’t know how.
And so one of the students came up with this version of an online encyclopedia or resource, where it had all of these resources on things that were going on racially in the community, how to talk about it, different resources, and so he put his time into it. It’s a human-computer interaction class, so you don’t have to code it, but he went the extra mile and actually coded the site and put it up and running. Their projects, they always just blow me away, some of the things that they come up with.
So in the AUC, as you know, there’s Morehouse, Clark Atlanta, and Spelman, so I’ve had an opportunity to interact with Clark Atlanta students and Spelman students as well. I had a very large group of Spelman students in my class last semester, and it was just excellence. All of the projects, they were always on point. No matter what was going on, they were active in class, asking questions, so forth and so on.
They really, really teach me the greatness of this generation. In society we can go and look and say, “Oh, these kids don’t know anything about music and they’re doing this or doing that,” like generations before, but to see just excellence from the students is extremely encouraging.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I have a feeling that Spelman students are probably pretty good. I mean, probably better than Morehouse students, and I say that not out of rank comparison, but I keep bringing this back to my time there because that’s such a easy reference for me to pull from. But I mean, I went through a summer program before I started my freshman year, and I mean, the women at Spelman were just leaps and bounds above the guys at Morehouse. We were in a similar program. It was a NASA-funded program. I mean, just leaps and bounds. It was amazing, so I can only imagine.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Yeah. They’re exceptional.

Maurice Cherry:
So let’s kind of switch gears here and learn more about you. Let’s learn more about your origin story. Tell me where you grew up.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
So I grew up in Baltimore City, and I grew up not too far from Morgan State University where I later went to school. So as a kid growing up in Baltimore City, all the schools I went to were less than five miles apart. We call it Smalltimore here because it seems like you know someone who knows someone else, and you end up being related to folks that you didn’t know you were related to, or people know your parents and different things like that. So I grew up in Baltimore, Smalltimore. I didn’t know about design growing up, but I loved art, and so I grew up getting Disney Adventures magazines.
When I got older, I used to take my allowance and buy Vibes and XXL and Black Enterprise and all of those magazines, and I would really spend a lot of time in the house, dissecting those magazines, finding out who those people were. It got to a point where I was dissecting them. I was looking at them so in depth that I found out who was designing it and what their job titles were. So going from being an artist per se and drawing all the time, I learned about graphic design. I learned about design.
Fast forward to high school, I went to Baltimore City College High School in Baltimore. There was an opportunity at the school to do independent study when you’re in 12th grade, and so I took two semesters of independent study, drawing, doing artwork, producing a portfolio at that point. That’s how my career started from that point, learning about graphic design.
As I’m matriculating at Morgan State University, I got more into my program and started to get more interested in graphic design, I volunteered to work on the yearbook at the university. They were somehow behind in years, so it might have been the year 2003, and they were behind. They hadn’t given the graduating seniors from the 2001 or 2002 graduating year their yearbooks, so what they did was they contracted us students who had graphic design skills to actually design the yearbook, do all the layout, and make it look like it wasn’t a yearbook, make it look more like a magazine.
That was our objective, to make this interesting. They’ve been waiting a really, really long time, let’s make this good. So for about two or three years, I worked in that office. It was right across the hall from the newspaper office as well, and so before the offices became integrated and it became Student Publications, I worked separately, giving some extra effort to help out with the newspaper and also help out with the yearbook. So while I was learning, I was looking at other opportunities to gain experience while I was on that campus.
It’s like all of these things just kind of snowballed together because I gained an understanding of publication design and that particular office, the Office of Student Publications, was run by Ms. Denise Brown, who was one of those people that felt like your mother. And if she didn’t feel like your mother, she at least felt like your aunt, and she ran those offices and we produced those publications. We caught up, and she gave us other opportunities as well. One of the professionals who was helping out with that newspaper actually worked at the Washington Post, so we talked, and he said, “Keep in touch,” and I kept in touch with him.
So I graduated and after graduation, I got an email from him saying, “Hey, we got an opportunity for a person to come and be a Production Assistant at the Washington Post.” The Washington Post had a Washington Post magazine, and so at the Washington Post, I got to work on that Washington Post magazine, helping to layout those stories that go in it.
I worked in Student Publications, but everybody knows the Washington Post in the States, so it was huge for me to get that opportunity to work there and sit in that room and see news as it happens. Even though I was working on the magazine, I still was in the newsroom or near the newsroom, so I got to see all of that going on. So that is how my story kind of evolved to publication design and graphic design, and I call that my origin story.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s back up because you just took me through 20 years, so let’s back it up. I get the sense that definitely design was something that you were always into. Clearly you went into that with going into school. I want to hear about what the program was like at Morgan State because you were studying design. I guess this was right around maybe 2001, 2002-ish, something like that when you started?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
I started in 2001, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
What was the design program like? Because I didn’t even know that… Again, I’m basing this off my experience with Morehouse, I didn’t know that any HBCUs even had design programs back then, so tell me what that program was like.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Yeah. Entering into that program, my first couple of years at Morgan I was taking general education classes, so I didn’t even get to the department until the end of my sophomore year or junior year. I didn’t really know what was going on, but when I got there, it was in bad shape. They had just let the building actually, and it was leaking and everyone was frustrated and the program didn’t have much money. It didn’t have a whole lot of support, and there weren’t enough professors teaching in it, so I walked into a department that was in chaos.
I think in 2003, they were moved to a brand new building. It’s called the Murphy Fine Arts Building. So, this was a state-of-the-art building, and it had a performance hall. Morgan is known for its choir. The choir is huge. They tour all over the world. People have successful careers as singers and musicians coming from the Morgan program, and so a lot of that building was built for that department. There were other two other departments there, the Theater Department and it was us, the Art Department.
And so our program was really focused. When you first enter in, they taught you the foundation. Even if you’re a graphic design major, you’re taking painting. You’re taking printmaking. You’re taking drawing. You’re taking a couple years of basic design. They want to really make sure that you get an understanding of how this was done before computers really took off, so that was the foundation there. So all of this stuff going on, they didn’t have money, and then they transitioned to this new building and it felt like a hallway in this huge building.
So although they weren’t in the position that they were in before, they were in a better position, they still weren’t where they needed to be. What the department did is they said, “We need to get a professor in here who knows about graphic design, who can come in here and build this department,” and so they hired a person named Joseph Ford. He worked on the campus previously in the Public Relations Department, so he had a hand in making sure that all of the publications that needed to go out, graduation, commencement, the Morgan Magazine, he was working on a lot of that. Any branding or logos that needed to be done, he was working on that.
But before he worked at Morgan, he had a successful career in advertising, and he also worked for TV stations doing graphic design for them, so he had an understanding of the campus, and he also had an understanding of the industry. He came to the department and really built the program, so those last couple years he was there, he was teaching basically almost all of the graphic design courses.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Yeah. One professor, and he is really just amazing, what he did with that program. You come to him with a problem, and everybody’s there and they’re like, “Oh, we only got this hallway. We got this, that, and the other,” and he is hearing it, but he’s focused on making sure that this program and the students get what they need. So what he did was he had some friends in the industry, and he somehow connected them all, and he made a way where famous Black artists got together and they produced a poster for the department. The proceeds from selling this piece of original artwork, and they had print made of it, went to scholarships for students there. Then it went to bringing these particular artists to the university to speak to the students.
And so he was bringing these particular Black artists to the department, raising money. Really, he took the money out of his own pocket, but it’s the crazy things that professors do to make sure that students have what they need. He supplied everyone that was there with a scholarship to an AIGA membership, and so he gave that to them. He promoted all of the events that they were having at AIGA in Baltimore and the AIGA Nationals, and he really introduced us to the AIGA.
We had no idea what it was as students, and we would go to the particular programs. We got to know the president of the AIGA, he would come to the campus and support what we were doing there. He also had made a connection where the AIGA brought a conference to Morgan State University. I think it was like a portfolio review, and so we got our portfolios reviewed by people in industry. I remember Ellen Lupton was there, a bunch of other professional designers, and so he came up with all these innovative ways. He bootstrapped basically the Graphic Design Program while I was there and graduated.
When we look back on it, a lot of the students there have had successful careers in graphic design. I mean, some of the students have graduated. They work for the NBA. They work for Major League Baseball, doing design. They work for IBM, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun. [Ogilby 00:38:38] was included in that, but having their own businesses and doing a lot of things, so we really were a program that started from the bottom, but made something of it. Really didn’t have much, but made something out of the program/.
And I think I have to give my hat off to him and all the work that he did. I still speak to him a whole lot now, but I have to give him credit for it. The other professors there absolutely, but as far as graphic design is concerned, he was definitely instrumental in making sure that happened.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. So after you graduated, you talked a little bit about the Washington Post. You also talked a little bit about going back and working at Morgan State. Now also after school, you kind of ended up going back to school. You went to MICA for a while, and then you went to the University of Baltimore, which is eventually where you got your doctorate at. Kind of tell me about that time. What sparked that decision for you to decide to go back to school?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
There were two points that I want to make. One was when I was early on in my career at Morgan, I remember one of the professors telling me that you could get a Doctorate in Design. I had no idea. So I think that sparked something in me as well because I was like, “Well, how far can you go in this career as far as education is concerned?”
The other piece is that the graphic design world, the design world, changed so much. Even throughout college and starting out, it was all about publications. I had a love for publications. And then publications started to fold, and the industry started to go digital. It was convergence, where news reporters were now writing the story, taking the photographs, and almost designing the stories at the same time. Multimedia journalists were coming about, and so I really said to myself, “I have to learn more.”
I never really grasped coding a website, and I wanted to learn more about that, so I had a Bachelor of Arts in graphic design and illustration, double major in both of them, and I wanted to learn more about the integration of design. So that’s why I looked at the University of Baltimore and their program.

Maurice Cherry:
And so as you were going through that program, I’m curious, was it much different from what you were learning at Morgan State? It’s kind of interesting you kind of started out at an HBCU and then went to a traditional art school with MICA, and then now to University of Baltimore. Was that a big shift, just education-wise?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
It definitely was. So when I went to MICA, I was taking continuing studies courses. I just always had a love for learning. So after I graduated from Morgan, I automatically wanted to learn more, get better at my craft, and the best way I knew how to do that was to go back to school. I was taking digital illustration courses at MICA. Then I saw the program at the University of Baltimore, and they were one of the only programs at the time where you could get a Doctorate in Design. During that time, I think early on, it used to be a Doctorate of Communication Design.
That just brought so much together, what I was interested in with publication design, this integration of various forms of media and producing it, and seeing that program really attracted me to the University of Baltimore and the level of skills. So one of the first classes that you have to take at the University of Baltimore is a class about writing, so you have to write. You have to design the stories at the same time, so that’s challenging because they want your writing to be just as good as your design.
That’s what you talk about in the class, and that’s what you work on. The class was on a Saturday, early in the morning until in the afternoon, so it was a really long class, challenging subject. When I first got there, I really struggled with those first couple of classes because it was a different level. Not to say that the level of education that I got at Morgan wasn’t high, it was just different at the University of Baltimore. It was pulling different muscles, working different muscles in a different way.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you’re kind of in a rare echelon of Black design professionals with PhDs. Are there any other peers of yours that you work with or you do research with or anything like that?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Most of the time in the environments that I’m in or freelancing, people find out I have a Doctorate in Information Design, and they almost ask the question, “Why?” You may get an MFA, and that’s a terminal degree, but most people, they don’t think there’s a need for it, so it’s hard to understand the value of it. I think looking at the way that the different forms of media come together, and then adding a research perspective and understanding design research and understanding more about the user and pulling in these different disciplines, like psychology and anthropology and computer science, I feel like it puts you in a different class with all of those. You have more in your toolbox to add to the environments that you’re in, and so the peers that I have, sometimes I come into an environment and they’re like, “What are you doing here?” It’s like intimidation, depending on who I’m around.
In other environments, it’s like, “Let’s go. Let’s do this. Bring everything that you have. I’ll bring my skillset, and we can work together.” So the cohort of graduates, there are a couple of people that I still talk to that graduated from the program. There are people in the program now that I speak to. There are people in the industry, some people that you’ve had on this show, that could relate to just that level of education or that thirst for that education, so it’s a small cohort that’s growing.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look back at your career now, look back at the span of everything that you’ve done, what advice would you give to your 16-year-old self?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
I would really say, “Be fearless. Just be fearless, and do it. Don’t be afraid of your own greatness.” I say that because I think about my career and how I walked into some situations timidly that I could have taken more advantage of, that I could have went all in and probably benefited more from it. So I think I would say that, “Be fearless.”

Maurice Cherry:
Speaking of that, if you knew that you couldn’t fail in your professional life, what would you try to do?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Wow. I would bring a whole bunch of different things together. I think I would just take all the energy that I have and put it into making sure that as many people who are interested in design in my city, in my sphere of influence, knew about it. They had opportunities. They had internships. They had mentors. They had apprenticeships. They had jobs. I think that’s what I would do. If I could just do anything, I would probably do what I’m doing, just at a higher level.

Maurice Cherry:
What does success look like for you now?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
I think success, to me, looks like not just writing down the idea, but following through and putting action to it. If there’s success in it, great. If it’s successful, great. If it fails, I learn from it. So I think success is either it goes really, really well or I learn from it, and both of those are success for me.

Maurice Cherry:
What are some projects and things that you’re working on now?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
So I’m really excited about a book. I talk a lot about the program that I grew out of at Morgan, and so I’m writing a book about that now, the Morgan story basically, and it’s called Design at a HBCU. It really tells my perspective of what went on there, and so I’m really, really excited about that. I just started my own studio, and so I’m at the beginning stages of building that. That’s called [LADS 00:48:00], and so I’m really excited about that, a studio practice.
Also, after I graduated from the University of Baltimore with my doctorate, one of the decisions I made was to start an endowment for Visual Arts students, and so far since graduation, we’ve raised about $10,000, and so I’m really excited about where we are now and I’m excited about growing that. So I think in the next five years, I’d love to see it reach $100,000. That would be awesome to me.

Maurice Cherry:
Overall, what’s the next step for you? What do you want the next chapter of your legacy to be?

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
I want it to be a growing a design studio and possibly entering academia full-time instead of part-time. I’m really thinking about that. So having a studio practice, interacting with academia on a regular basis, growing that scholarship fund, raising a family. I have two boys and a wife, so that’s important to me, making sure they get what they need and they grow, and just looking forward to the future.

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

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
So I’m available on LinkedIn under Dr. Perry Sweeper. You can find me there. You can find a website at www.psweeper.com. Send me an email. I’d love to talk to you.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Well, Dr. Perry Sweeper, I want to thank you so much for coming on this show, and I want to just thank you for sharing your story about how you really got into design. I could tell it’s something that you’re super passionate about, and the fact that you’re able to also help to teach the next generation of designers and technologists.
You’re teaching in that department at Morehouse, but you’re able to kind of teach the next generation and take your love for design and pass it on to them so they can know that they can make their own mark on the world, just like you’ve made your mark on the world. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Dr. Perry Sweeper:
Yeah. Thanks for having me.

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Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel

Our paths have crossed several times over the past couple of years, but I finally managed to sit down and chat with the one and only Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel. Along with being an author, design educator, and community builder, she is one of the editors behind The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection, a compilation of essays from over 70 Black designers, artists, curators, educators, students, and researchers.

Our conversation began with some good news about a recent grand that she won, and from there we talked about her areas research and what she teaches. Dr. Noel spoke about growing up in Trinidad and Tobago and studying design in Brazil, including becoming a Fulbright Scholar and arriving at North Carolina State University. She also talked about motivation, ambition, and about the importance of finding your own community.

Take Dr. Noel’s advice — the world of design is a lot bigger than you think!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
All right. So my name is Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, and I’m an assistant professor of design at North Carolina State University. What I do is a hard question because I do a lot of things. I guess the main thing is that I teach design and I work as a design coach in a kind of consulting capacity. And then I do research because I’m at a research university. So I do research in education, public health, and community engagement. And then, I’m an author and an editor. And maybe I’m a convener. I like to bring people together to talk about design. Yes. So I’ll stop there.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I was going to say I’m glad you mentioned author and convener, because you did bring so many people together, myself included for The Black Experience in Design book that published earlier this year.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah. So I’m one of six editors of that book. But I think you see my character and my outlook in the way that I brought people together, I suppose in the chapters that I worked on. Or when we were preparing the book, I brought people together to write together. Because I really believe in I guess the power of community. And I understand everybody’s journey with their own kind of imposter syndrome.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So in that book, one of my key roles was just that. To bring people together and kind of tell people, “Oh my goodness, your writing is amazing. All you need to do is change this little thing.” If you have that kind of approach, people can become so much more productive. So I think that that’s an outlook that I take into a lot of the things that I do.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I remember those Saturday morning Zoom writing sessions. Those were really helpful.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah. I’ve been doing those maybe for about two and a half years. Actually when I went to Tulane, so I’ve worked at about four different universities. So when I was at Tulane University, I was introduced a little bit more to this culture of writing together with other people. I joined some of their writing workshops that my colleagues had organized. But then I started either joining other people’s writing workshops, or running my own. I have to say that is really what has made me really productive writing wise in the last two years or so, because I write so often. So now it’s like I write every day, I suppose.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you also recently won a grant too, right? The Outreach and Engagement Incentive Grants.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah. So I won a grant at NC State. It’s a small grant, but it was an exciting proposal to be funded. It’s called STEM Games Against Oppression. Right? And it was a kind of, I don’t want to say it was a crazy idea. Because the stakes are “low” because it’s a small grant and it’s an internal grant, I felt I could actually be very creative in the way that I put together the grant. So this grant combines a lot of things that I’m interested in. So Afrofuturism or speculative futures. Games. STEM, and teaching STEM in different ways. And of course design. So for this grant, we are going to work with a group. And then the other interest is teenage boys. That sounds weird to say it like that.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
My son is 14, and I kind of jokingly say to some of my friends a lot of my research has always been focused at whatever age he’s at. Right? So with this one, I’ve been thinking about how can science be more engaging or more interesting for 14 year old boys? So that’s what this grant is about, this project is about. Where these boys are going to discuss society, and oppression, and all of these things. But they’re going to make these games. And while they’re making the games, we’re going to introduce them to a lot of design-based STEM kind of concepts making. And I don’t know what the content is actually yet. But I’m excited about doing this work, which I’m going to start late fall.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
It was just exciting that I could win that kind of creative grant, to really bring together a lot of the things I was interested in and just create this experimental workshop where we’re just going to make these fun games. But while we’re making these fun games, we’re talking about society. We are going to do some 3D printing and AR/VR kind of stuff. So it’s creative, and it was exciting for that kind of creative activity to be seen as research. So hopefully, it’s another line of work that I’m going to be able to continue in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, it sounds like you’ve had a banner year so far. Not just this year, but last year also. I mean, before we started recording, I was just congratulating you on your honorary doctorate that you got from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Have you kind of had a chance to celebrate all these wins? I mean the doctorate, the book, the grant. Have you had a chance to celebrate?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
No. No, I haven’t. And it’s strange to say it, but I know that the pandemic caused a lot of disruption for a lot of people. For me too. But the pandemic also created access in a way that I might not have had access before. I’m parenting. So before the pandemic, I was always weighing things and trying to figure out, “Okay, what can I say yes to? What can I say no to?” And most things I would have to say no to, because I couldn’t go and participate in things because of my son’s school year or something like that.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So what happened with me with the pandemic is that because of these virtual meetings that we do, I could actually say yes to everything, right? Which is not a strategy that I recommend for a lot of people. But that is I suppose what has led to this bumpy year that because we weren’t physically going to places, I could now suddenly be involved in a lot of projects that I couldn’t have been involved in 2019. But also because of the pandemic, I haven’t had time to celebrate. Now I want to go somewhere and celebrate, but I haven’t actually been able to.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah, it’s been an exciting year. It’s an exciting year or a couple of years that have been the result of a lot of collaboration. So people might see me, but it’s hardly ever only about me. I love working with other people. So it’s a lot of these kinds of collaborations with other people that have created a lot of the results and the visibility that exists now.

Maurice Cherry:
I know what you mean about taking everything as it happens. I swear that summer, really I’d say from the summer of 2020 on to the end of that year, I just had this influx of opportunities that came in. And I didn’t say no to any of them because I could just do them all from home. So I know exactly what you mean by that, not having to kind of weigh the pros and cons. You can do it all because you happen to be in a place where you can do it all.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah. And actually, you reminded me of this other thing of course, which we have to talk about. As Black people, summer 2020 was I suppose a year of hyper visibility for Black designers. So there were a lot more opportunities that would’ve come … or certainly for me. Let me not speak for everybody. A lot more opportunities, many more opportunities came my way after summer 2020. And I didn’t have to worry about could I accept them or not. So that’s why I guess I’m visible now and I’m able to celebrate these things. The book, the honorary doctorate, all of these things. Because really the visibility for us professionally changed that summer.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It really did. And it’s interesting because now just two years later now, really kind of looking back on it, I mean we’re recording this right around the time a lot of this stuff happened back in 2020. It’s almost two years to the day when a lot of this really happened. And it’s amazing to see how things have changed just in terms of not only visibility, but also that attention. I don’t know about you. But for me, I feel like the attention has pretty much just completely died down. Like companies that said they were going to do stuff haven’t done it yet. Or they made a pledge and they never actually went through with it. That sort of thing.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
I’m an academic. Right? And I guess I’ve maybe been able to use visibility in a slightly different way to other designers. Right? So it’s like if then that hyper visibility of that year and a half or those two years has given me … I don’t want to say it like this, but I will say it like this. It’s like that has given me permission or validation to do other things. Because then, my name became known as a designer who talks about equity or a designer who talks about social justice. I’m kind of channeling that into the research that I want to do or the community engagement that I want to do.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So it’s not quite that I’m depending on the companies that said that they would be doing stuff to do this stuff because I’m in academia. But I am using the little bit of validation that I got during those 18 months then to underpin some of the work that I want to do. Right? Whether it’s this work about futures, and Afrofuturism, and how we combining that with design and world building, right? At least I could use the little bit of name recognition that I created in that time to now continue to do this other work.

Maurice Cherry:
Speaking of being an academic, you mentioned teaching at North Carolina State University. How has it been teaching and going through all this over the past few years?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So an interesting thing that I found out during the pandemic is that I love teaching online, which is strange. I enjoy teaching face-to-face or online. But what I really enjoyed about working online … and there were ups and downs, right? But I first taught online in I think 2018 or 2019. So just before the pandemic. When we went into that crisis in March 13th, I already had two different experiences to build on. One, I worked at the d.school at Stanford in 2018 to 2019, and I did teach some Zoom-based classes then. And then 2019 to 2020, I was at Tulane. And at Tulane, we had to have a crisis management plan where we had to practice teaching online before the pandemic. We didn’t know the pandemic was coming. It was just part of hurricane crisis management.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So from those experiences, I already had some experience in things like bringing music into the classroom while on the Zoom call or changing up my Zoom backgrounds. I’d already started using these kind of warmup activities to get people comfortable online. So certainly the early days of the pandemic, I actually really enjoyed teaching online. There’s some frustration. As a design teacher, one thing that is complicated or difficult to manage is that we don’t have the same relationship with materials when we’re working remotely. But then we can experiment with other things, like maybe drawing together on a virtual whiteboard. I did some activities where people had to take photographs and add them to the virtual whiteboard. So I really enjoyed that.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
I think that the last semester that was kind of hybrid was the worst point of the pandemic, because you can’t do both at the same time well. So I really wanted to be either online or in-person, but not both. Because there are these other issues that people hadn’t thought about. Like maybe we can’t hear properly when we’re in that kind of format with booths. Or our classroom suddenly became very accessible during the pandemic. And then when we went back to this kind of strange hybrid space, it became inaccessible again. I had one or two students who just couldn’t come to the classroom anymore because of accessibility issues like stairs and stuff like that. Right?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
But what else can I say about the experience? The accessibility issue, the pandemic broad accessibility. Or let me not say the pandemic, but teaching remotely made some classes and design classes accessible in ways that they might not have been before. Like throughout the pandemic, I taught hearing impaired people in many different settings, and I never had a lot of engagement with the deaf community before the pandemic. Right? So I that has always been something that has concerned me as we kind of go back to business as usual. What about all the accessibility that we created? Where is it going to go?

Maurice Cherry:
Now you mentioned North Carolina State University being a research university. Can you talk a bit about what research you’re working on?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah. Well maybe, first I’m going to talk about one thing that I teach that might be tied to research. So I teach a class called contemporary issues in art and design. And it is a class about … well contemporary issues yes. But it’s equity and social justice. And that’s kind of one of the areas that underpins some of the engagement, because we do research and engagement. And the public engagement that I’m interested in is very equity and social justice focused.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So out of that class, I’ve been doing writing that’s related to the content of that class. So about race, gender, disability, all of these oppression issues. And I’m starting to bring that into the research that I have to say I want to do, because I’m a new assistant professor at NC State. So not all of it has started.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
But there are three areas of research that I plan to continue working in. Right? So the first one is tied to education. And it is about using design, and design principles, and design pedagogy, the way that we teach and learn design. And using that to make STEM education more accessible.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
I see this also as a justice issue. So that’s why I said it’s tied to that class that I teach. So when I was at Tulane, we started to do this tiny experiment where we turned a math class into a design class. And that’s a little bit of an example of where I see that research going. Where I worked with a professor, a math professor at Tulane called Marie Dahleh. And she taught me about something called ordinary differential equations, which I knew nothing about before. But when I did a little bit of research, I found it is about actually predicting the future. She might not describe it as that. And mathematicians might not describe it as that. But as someone who’s interested in futures, that’s the thing that I grabbed onto. This equation is to predict the future. And then we turned the math class into a design class about predicting the future and then using the equation to somehow support the prediction. Right?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
And I’m playing with making STEM curricular really exciting, engaging, future-focused, and critical at the same time. So maybe overlaying a lot of things, but it is a track that I’ve been following for a little while. In my PhD research, I worked with children who were in fourth grade. And at that time, they had to discuss society and the world around them and then take action through design. And I’m really just continuing that research and saying well okay, you’re going to discuss society. Yes. Take action through design, but we are going to make the STEM principles that are attached to the action that you’re taking a little bit more explicit. So that’s one area of research that I’m involved in.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Another area of research. And again, this is tied to another collaborator again at Tulane. This is Alessandra Bazzano. And in this area of research, we are looking at how can we use the way that designers think, talk, express themselves, the way designers use materials. How can we use all of these things to support patients or members of the public to talk about their public health experience more, or more clearly? So we did some workshops where for example, we gave people prototyping materials. And then we asked them to make something related to their pandemic experience, and then use that thing that they had made as a prompt to open up and talk about issues related to public health, right? Or could we get people to use photographs that they had taken as a prompt to get people to talk more about their public health experience in the pandemic? So that’s another area of research, which is related to patient-centered outcomes research, which is a whole area of research in public health. But it is using design methods and these design ways of thinking to support that patient centered outcomes research.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
And then the third area of research that I’m into is civic and social innovation, where we are building capacity within cities to get more people within the city or from the public to go through the design process together to address social issues. Right? So it’s civic or social engagement through design. So I mean, maybe I explain all three badly. But these are the three areas that I’m interested in. STEM education, public health, or patient-centered outcomes, and civic and social engagement. And all through design.

Maurice Cherry:
I think it’s really interesting that you are doing this as you mentioned, all through design. Even the first part that you mentioned about math really kind of struck me, because my degree is in math. So you start talking about differential equations. That took me right back to my 2002 differential equations class at Morehouse with my professor, Dr. Bozeman and him talking about how a lot of engineers and stuff, they use differential equations for futures predictions. For example, if you want to predict the spread of an oil spill, you would use differential equations to try to figure that out. You’re predicting it. You don’t know for sure. But with calculus being the rate of change across a certain period of time or across a certain distance, differential equations helps you to try to chart those paths and stuff. So you’re right on with that. Certainly. It’s really just interesting that you’re able to do all this and tie design into all of it.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah. And it’s about access an agency, and creating access and agency through design. But I’ll just share like a little bit of feedback that the professor I was working with that she gave. After we did that math class, that was a design class. She said, “There were different students engaged in the class today. And that’s interesting.” Because there’s some students who just expect, they’re going to love everything about math. But she said, “When we turned the math class into the design class, there were different people who were involved,” because there were people who were involved because maybe they were acting as they presented the future scenario that they had predicted. So I think can we use design to get people engaged in different ways around STEM education, public health, and social innovation? These are the three little pockets I’m interested in.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And I have to say, I think that’s important for designers now to really think about. So much I feel like design within the past maybe decade or so has really largely been product focused and UX focused. I think as certainly technology, and tech companies, and social media and stuff have started to really become these pervasive entities in our lives. There’s so many designers now that are just getting into product, or UX, or something, but not thinking about other areas of practice where they could use their design. Like the stuff that you’re talking about with social innovation, other non-product oriented design work, community engagement. Speculative futures, which is related to an article that you just published recently. I think it’s important to show that these options are options.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
These options are options. And then also, we create these options. There’s something that I say all the time. So someone’s going to listen to this interview and say, “Oh my God, she’s saying this again.” But when I was finishing up undergrad just before the end, our professor said something like, “You make yourselves relevant?” I did industrial design. And he says, “Nobody needs any industrial designers anywhere.” But you are the one who kind of make yourself relevant to the conversations that everyone is having. So it’s like we make these opportunities for ourselves. So we don’t only have to talk about product and tech. There is work for us as designers in education, in even project management. Because to be a good designer, you know how to manage things, and manage time, and manage people. So these skills kind of don’t have to stay within the design world. We can take these skills and move them to other sectors where the opportunity might be so obvious.

Maurice Cherry:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Well said. Also at North Carolina State University, you’re co-chair of the Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group, which is part of the Design Research Society. Talk to me about that.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
All right. So that’s an exciting little research group. So the Design Research Society is supposed to be the largest professional organization for design research in the world actually. And they do an annual conference. There’s one that’s going to happen in June or would’ve happened by the time this is. So they do a conference every two years. And I’ve been a member of this association for about five years. Right?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So when I used to go to the annual conference, I used to be very struck that nobody was discussing stuff that I wanted to talk about. Right? And when I say I wanted to talk about, I mean as a Black woman from Trinidad and Tobago. It doesn’t have to be about race, I suppose. But as somebody from the global south, I found there was no one talking about design in ways that I really wanted to talk to. But if in the conference I met someone from Brazil, from Nigeria, from any other place other than Europe or North America, I found that we started to have more overlap of issues.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So we created this research group, myself and colleague Renata Marques Leitao, we had created this little research group to focus on issues in design from a non-European and non-North American perspective. Right? Also issues related to challenging the dominant narrative in design. Challenging that kind of white Euro American perspective in design. So this group became a group to talk about these types of issues within this Design Research Society. So it was like where could you find stories about practice from designers in South Africa and in India, for example. This became the group where we could have these kind of multicultural or cross cultural conversations in a way where … in design or very often, these kinds of conversations come with a little bit of a hierarchy where it’s kind of assumed that the person who is from America or from Europe has more authority or more knowledge than the person from wherever else. And this group challenges a lot of that kind of conversation.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So we’ve been around since 2018. It’s a vibrant group where the most vibrant thing that we do is actually a book club where we focus on design. We focus on who designers should be reading, authors that designers should be reading that are not from Europe or North America. People from within the group suggest people, so one week we had worked by a Puerto Rican feminist, Aurora Levins Morales. Another week we had someone talking about, N. K. Jemisin who is American, but is not part of that dominant white male perspective.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So we bring all of these authors that we think people need to hear from and talk about that, and talk about how their work affects design. And then we share stories about practice. We share research. And it is a group then that is focused on decolonizing design, but not only talking about decolonizing design. Because a lot of people talk about decolonizing design, but it remains as just talk. And in group, we’re asking people to share practice, and share stories. And kind of like, what are you doing that is not focusing on maybe more traditional ways of doing design? How are you shaking things up in your own design practice? And can you share this with us?

Maurice Cherry:
I know you mentioned that about decolonizing design, and it reminded me about well one, I know Dr. Dori Tunstall is doing a lot of work in driving conversations around that. I remember, I think this might have been maybe a couple of years ago, there was some pushback from another Black designer about even using that term decolonizing design. I believe it was … oh my goodness. I think it was Saki Mafundikwa from Zimbabwe. He had written this piece for AIGA’s Eye on Design kind of pushing back on that term. I think thinking of colonialism in the more imperialistic sense, particularly with him being African. Pushing back on that term like can you really say you’re decolonizing design as an American?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Right. So that’s a good point of view. Actually, we had a conversation … when I say our conversation, I mean our group, we led a discussion a few months ago where we actually said that you probably should be an existential crisis if you’re a designer to be. Because you might want to talk about something like decolonizing design, but actually design is modernist and colonial. So how do we decolonize this? And when we decolonize it, is it still going to be design? Even that’s going to be part of the future existential crisis. It might not be design when we reach whatever place we think decolonization is.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
And it’s not actually a place, it’s a journey. And the work that I’ve been doing, I guess my step towards this whole decolonizing work is every issue that I look at, I keep asking myself, “Well, what is my perspective as person X?” Which to be really reductionist, this Black woman is from the Caribbean or Black mother from the Caribbean. So that informs a lot of the issues that I am focusing on. And I think that that’s my small step towards decolonizing given the space where I’m practicing as a designer and as a design researcher in my very authentic way. I don’t want to say an authentic way. It’s my way. And I encourage other people to do that. Bring your way into the process. And I see that us moving towards decolonizing the work, right?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Because a few years ago, maybe five, six years ago, I really thought about how I would see students kind of struggling to fit in or kind of struggling to replicate what they thought good design was.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So I travel a lot or I used to travel a lot, but I went to a design school in India. And at that point, at first I was like, “This is kind of interesting.” To see the similarity in the design world between Brazil, and Trinidad, and India. But actually on the other hand, I found it really disturbing that all of these students would’ve come into design school with their vibrant, vibrant identities, and maybe leave with this more homogenized outlook. And I think that my step towards decolonizing design is making sure that that doesn’t happen. Right? Getting people to really bring themselves back into the design process.

Maurice Cherry:
Now we’ve talked a lot about your work. But I really want to kind of dive more into your origin story, because you’ve sort of dropped some little breadcrumbs here and there about going to India, and Brazil, and stuff like that. I know you’re originally from Trinidad and Tobago. So let’s start there. Tell me about growing up there. What was your childhood like?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah. I grew up, from Trinidad who might be listening to this, I’m from Diamond Vale Diego Martin. I had probably a really kind of ordinary, middle class kind of existence. And I was a middle child. So growing up in my sister’s shadow and then kind of the baby after me. But you probably want to know about okay, design in Trinidad. And people in Trinidad don’t see this, but Trinidad is a very designerly place. Right? Because we have carnival culture. So it means that you are talking and thinking about design every year. And it’s a very fashion-conscious place.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So there’s a design language in Trinidad that I think people use from [inaudible 00:37:48], and at different festivals. Maybe they’re talking about design with regard to the way bamboo structures are made for some of the festivals and things like that. You know? So there’s that designerly sensibility I think all the time.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
The first design that I remember is in the equivalent of sixth grade, which is like form one. I remember designing maybe my first carnival costume and doing some work with lettering, which I still had. I still have somewhere. I saw the image the other day. But I can’t say that I know when I made the real conscious choice that design would’ve been it, right? But I guess maybe somewhere between 10th grade and 11th grade, this was the path that I joined. I became a ‘designer’ from that age, became really interested in things like typography. I did a lot of book covers in school. I remember one design exam where I did a popup book with Christopher Columbus. So maybe this was me already challenging the world. Right? So Christopher Columbus was sailing across the ocean. And then when you pulled the little tab, he fell off the flat earth or something like that. But I always thought that design was exciting.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
I went to high school where art and design were really considered respectable professions or respectable areas. My parents probably wondered if I would’ve been able to pay for myself, survive as a designer. But my parents were really very open-minded and maybe focused on making sure that their children felt empowered. So when I wanted to study in Brazil, nobody ever told me no.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So actually, maybe I have to go backtrack a little bit and say how I ended up in Brazil. But I couldn’t study design in the way that I wanted to in Trinidad. And again, my parents, because they spoke a language that was very open. They kind of said, “Well, you could study anywhere in the world, as long as we don’t have to pay for it.”

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
And that’s a good challenge to give 17 year old or 18 year old child. Right? Because I then started to just look for places around the world that I could study and my parents wouldn’t have to pay for it. Because what they were saying is that, “If we have to pay for it, we are going to tell you where you have to study. If you want to study anywhere, then you find the opportunity.”

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So eventually, I ended up starting school in Bahia in Brazil. So I started graphic design in Bahia in Federal University of Bahia, but then eventually I moved to a town called Curitiba in the south of Brazil. And I did industrial design. And I spent a really long time in Brazil. But it was an amazing … I actually spent six years in Brazil. An amazing six years where I was just able to grow without family influence. I just really became very independent and very worldly. I lived in a community, a university community that was very politically conscious and politically active.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So my interest in equity and social justice really started then with my roommates who were in social sciences and psychology. Because we didn’t have those conversations in design. Those conversations were happening on other floors in the building that I studied in. But those fueled me and world view.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
From Brazil, I went back to Trinidad in the late ’90s. And then kind of almost immediately started working as a kind of design consultant with agencies that was somehow tied to export. So within Trinidad, I worked as a consultant with our trade and export agency for a few years. Then I worked with, there was a regional agency, Caribbean Export. I worked with them also as a consultant. Then I worked in East Africa in different places. Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya also as a consultant in trade and export. And, I was also adjunct faculty at the same time at the University of the West Indies in design.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
But I suppose it’s a little bit of that work with the export agencies, because this is kind of like development, international development kind of work. That work encouraged me to ask questions that eventually led me to do a PhD. And there was pressure from the university as well, because I eventually moved from being an adjunct to full-time. And you probably know how this academic thing is, but you probably need a PhD if you’re going to stay in academia.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So it was both the internal pressure from the university as well as these questions I was asking about the work we were doing as designers working in the area of development that eventually led me to do a PhD. Because I just thought that we needed to be asking harder questions, different questions. Really about how do we engage communities? What’s our role as designers when we are doing this work with people and trying to tell them, “This is the kind of product you need to make to get more sales and export you.” I just thought that we needed to reflect more on the work that we were doing. And I took a step back, and I started to apply to PhD programs in the mid, I don’t even even know how to call that decade in 2015. With no name.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So how did I end up here in the states? I actually got a Fulbright award. NC State, and the Fulbright Association have a good relationship. So it was a school that was recommended to me. I knew about the work that NC State was doing in education and design education. And that’s kind of how I ended up with the Fulbright Award. And because of NC State’s reputation, I ended up applying here, and coming here, and really enjoying the program. I spent three years here. I did not actually pursue the questions that I was thinking about pursuing, where I was thinking about design and development, because I was interested in education as well. My PhD is more tied to design education and developing critical design curriculum. So design curricula where people are asking hard questions about society. That was what my PhD research was about.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
But yeah, I spent three years here. Then I spent a year at Stanford and two years at Tulane. And now I’m back here at NC State. So I don’t know if that’s an origin story, but that’s a little bit of a story.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, that’s quite a journey. I think what I kind of want to pull from that is what drove you to really make these big jumps not just geographically, but culturally? I mean, you’re going from Trinidad to Brazil, then from Brazil back to Trinidad, and then from Trinidad to the states. So there’s that. But then also it seems like you’re also leveling up educationally and vocationally I should say, in each situation. You’re going to undergraduate in Brazil. You’re pursuing your masters and working in Trinidad. Now you’re pursuing your PhD in the states. What was driving you during that time? What was really fueling that ambition?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Oh my goodness. I don’t even know. So what got me to Brazil … or maybe I’ll give a kind of umbrella statement. I’ve had people around me who have made me feel that I could do anything. So it was like the openness of that conversation with my parents. So that challenge that they gave me, that got me to go to Brazil. That got me to find Brazil as a place to go to. Right? Or little things that I would’ve heard from that professor in undergrad that made me just feel fearless.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
For most of my adult or professional life, I have felt that I could do anything. I have to say I’m grateful to the people around me who have made me feel like I can do anything. I guess the leveling up is just kind of what had to be done. That was part of the opportunity. I wouldn’t really have come to the states maybe without doing the PhD. But again, the people around me just made me think, “Well okay, of course you can go and get a PhD. Why wouldn’t you be able to get a PhD?” You know? Or, “Of course go to Brazil. Why wouldn’t you be able to go to Brazil?”

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So I’ve had that kind of empowering language around me all the time. And that has opened up my world. I really would say though, that I credit my parents for giving me the openness to think of going to Brazil. And I will say to any parent who might be listening to this, that changed my whole outlook on life. Because learning a new language, learning a new culture, that kind of removed all of the barriers on the world. Because I was able to do that, encourage other parents, “Push your children to kind of open up their worlds a little bit more.” That open world will just continue to take you to other places.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So of course Brazil, that experience of going back and forth between Trinidad and Brazil for six years made it seem like going between Trinidad and Tanzania for a few months, or Trinidad and Kenya, it was just another thing like that. All of this travel, and getting to know new cultures, and new people, and understanding that the world happens differently for other people. And that curiosity of wanting to know more about how other people experience the world. All that started because of that very open experience I had, I think in undergrad.

Maurice Cherry:
And what is it that sort of keeps you motivated and inspired these days?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
There are a few things. I’m still very excited about conversations with other people in other parts of the world, and how they live, and think, and do. So the Pluriversal Design group is a little bit of that. How do we create a space where we can really listen to how other people, whoever other is, how people do things differently. So that’s one thing that continues to inspire me, just my curiosity about other people in the world. So that also affects the way that I do research, because that’s why I’m interested I suppose in anthropology, or anthropological methods, or ethnographic methods. Because I have that curiosity about the world and people.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
What continues to inspire me as well is that … well, this is where we get wishy washy, I suppose. Because I think my son, and my niece, and my nephew. What is the world that they’re going into? I suppose that’s why I’ve always had this one area of research that has focused on child centered methods or questions that I think are from a child’s point of view, or questions about making things better for other children so that other children don’t have to deal with some of the legacy systems that we have that don’t work. I’ve been very interested in redesigning or challenging things that we think just have to be the way they are. Right? So one example I’ll give is we have an exam in Trinidad called the Common Entrance Exam. And that is actually one of the things that started my PhD research when I changed direction. I was like, “But why do we even have to have that exam?” And that’s why I started to do that research.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So that’s something that continues to inspire me. How can we change the things that don’t work? And that’s also tied to my interest in futurism or Afrofuturism, because it’s how do we build new things, and new worlds, and new systems? How do we use design to do all of that? So I’m very interested in first having these critical conversations so that we could see clearly the things that don’t work, because sometimes we’ve been so brainwashed, that we don’t actually see the systems that don’t serve us. So everything that I do has to start off with that kind of conversation where we actually talk about what are the things that are wrong? But then we don’t just stay in that space of talking about the things that are wrong. We try to kind of move beyond that and take action through design. So I mean, that kind of social change also is something that motivates me as well. So I guess internally, it’s a curiosity. And then externally, it’s about changing systems, and fighting oppression, and social justice, and equity, and stuff like that.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you want to tell any designers out there listening who might be feeling a bit lost right now as to what to do with their future? And I’m asking this because I’ve had several people right into the show, particularly over the past two years, that maybe they just got out of design school through the pandemic. They got a job, but it’s not what they wanted, because they’re working from home, which is not really an ideal place for them to work, because this is their first job. And in some cases, it’s their first department.

Maurice Cherry:
And then there’s also people that have been working at places … I mean, we’re recording this right now in mid-June. But there’s been a huge slate of design and layoffs in the tech community over the past couple of weeks now. And some people have just ridden into the show just wanting some advice like, “I don’t know what to do now with my future.” What advice would you tell them?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
I’m not actually going to give people the job advice. I’m going to ask them about the non-job stuff. Right? Or my advice might be about the non-job. So one thing is about finding community or creating community. So because your job might be fantastic, but maybe you’re lonely in your job. But it’s like we need other people to go along this journey with us. Right? And they make the process more interesting, more exciting. They might validate us as we do the work. So like for me personally, when we created that Pluriversal Design group, that kind of changed again my outlook on the world. Because my group was also then feeding me and my work, you know? So for people who might be a little bit lost, I would definitely advise them to make sure that they’re not just doing this alone. Right? And find these groups, whether there’s a meetup group about the area of design that you’re interested in. Or groups probably exist or you can create the group, but you don’t find that community.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
And then the other bit of advice I would give people is figure out what your passion project is so that you aren’t only pouring your energy or your creative energy into the work that your employer is giving you. There must be a side creative project that is also feeding you. And maybe that’s the project that you’ll get known for later on. Right? Or maybe that’s going to be the thing that’s really going to eventually take over, and pay your bills, and whatnot. Right?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
But I think that for me professionally, those two things of making sure that they’ve always been communities of support, and then making sure that I’m doing work that is very, very fulfilling and satisfying. Even if that’s not the work that the employer’s giving me. I think that those two components of me, and my life, and my work have been really important. So that’s what I’d recommend to young designers. Find that stuff. And then the professional work hopefully will get better because of those two buckets.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
And then maybe a third bit of advice I would give to young designers is just about, well this is tied to the community thing. Networking sounds crass or crude, but make sure that you are yes, meeting people and telling them about their work so that you’re not invisible. I think that that’s also really important to be talking to new people often about the work that you do. And that’s going lead into other opportunities in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you appreciate the most about your life right now?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
I like gardening. But actually, because I talk about design in a very abstract way now, because I teach about the design process and maybe helping people to see the design process. This means that I now see the design process as I’m gardening, or as I’m cooking, or as I’m dressing in the morning. And all of this, I do appreciate. I really do love choosing where I’m going to put that gladioli bulb in my garden, or choosing which salt I’m going to use as I cook dinner. I think there’s a real ordinariness in my life now that I’m happy for. I’m very appreciative for. Because I move a lot. I’ve had like a lot of chaos I suppose, or kind of been in constant flux. So what I really appreciate now is not being in flux like that, and just being able to relax and watch the plants grow.

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

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So I really want to continue doing the civic and social innovation work that I’m doing. I do some of this work with a foundation. And I’d love to do more of it with other cities. So what I do is I work with a city for about nine months, and we address some issue that the city has been interested in. Right? And I really enjoy that work. I love working with design students at the College of Design. But I also love working with people who are using design for the first time.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So in five years’ time, I hope to be doing more either public engagement or research around Design for Social Innovation. And working with cities and close to, whether here in North Carolina or back in Trinidad or in the Caribbean. But I really like that kind of public design work that is done with community members and maybe local government representatives, and having people co-create solutions to the issues that they’re concerned about. So I hope to be doing that more of that in five years’ time.

Maurice Cherry:
Well just to kind of wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work? Where can they find all of that online?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
So I’m on a lot of different platforms. But actually, LinkedIn is probably the best place for people to find me. They just have to look for my name, Lesley-Ann Noel. L-E-S-L-E-Y. That’s the thing. So if they want to know more about the general work that I’m doing, LinkedIn is the place. As an academic, I’ll repost some of the academic articles that I’ve written on ResearchGate. And then I’m also pretty active on Twitter actually. But if people Google me, they’ll find me on some platform that they can reach out to me. And I actually do respond to people generally. But LinkedIn is generally the easiest place to find me.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well Lesley-Ann Noel, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a long time coming I think. I feel like you and I have intersected quite a few times over the past few years, so I’m really glad to finally have you on the show. Not just to of course share your story and your research, but I think to inspire. I mean, so much of what you’re doing is about pursuing your own curiosities and interests. And I think that’s something sometimes as designers, we tend to lose sight of. Especially if you’re like working in product, I hate to say that. But if you’re working in UX or product, it’s hard to kind of see the forest for the trees sometimes because what you’re doing is so laden into a specific thing, whereas it sounds like at least you’ve been able to indulge a lot of your creativity across many different passions throughout your career, which is just super inspiring to hear about. I’m sure of course, we’ll hear about you now for years and years to come. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel:
Thank you so much for the invitation. And I hope that at least this conversation is able to help people see that they could kind of craft a bit of a path that works for them. Even when the path looks like it’s been clearly marked, they could kind of shake up the path a little bit and do a little bit of what they want hopefully. So thank you for the invitation.

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