Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators: Conversations on Design and Race 1616899972, 9781616899974

Citation preview

BLACK, BROWN + LATINX DESIGN EDUCATORS

BLACK, BROWN + LATINX DESIGN EDUCATORS C O N V E R S AT I O N S O N D E S I G N A N D R A C E

KELLY WALTERS P R I N C E TO N A R C H I T E C T U R A L P R E S S • N E W Y O R K

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

DAVID JON WALKER ANNE H. BERRY SAMUEL ROMERO NIDA ABDULLAH JASON ALEJANDRO JENNIFER RITTNER SHANTANU SUMAN ASHLEY DOUGHTY RAMON TEJADA KALEENA SALES ALI SHAMAS QADEER KELLY WALTERS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

6

8

22

34

48

62

78

92

108

118

132

146

158

174

Preface Throughout my career as a design educator, I have consistently engaged with questions related to graphic design and race. Many of the concerns I faced racially as a student—how my design work might be perceived, how racial content is addressed in design, how to find my place in the design community—have continued on in other forms as an educator. Some of the most urgent questions for me right now are: What are the experiences of Black, Brown, and Latinx graphic design educators in college classrooms today? How does our racial identity influence our work? What are the challenges and strengths of teaching graphic design at minority-serving institutions, predominantly White institutions, or historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU)? Most importantly, what does being Black, Brown, and Latinx mean in the context of the United States or in the field of graphic design? I decided to unpack these questions with a group of design educators in preparation for a panel at the 2020 College Art Association Conference (CAA). I led interviews with eleven design educators, many of whom would eventually participate in the CAA panel, in order to learn more about their unique insights into this field. As a way to share my own path, I was interviewed by design educator Anne H. Berry. It was critical for me to see what similarities we shared as graphic design educators and as members of the Black, Brown, and Latinx communities. Our conversations got real. The vulnerability and openness of our discussions led to rich—sometimes difficult—exchanges around the shared challenges of growing up as people of color and the paths that led us to become the designers and educators we are today. Patterns emerged that revealed perspectives on navigating the immigrant experience, growing up in predominantly White spaces, facing financial considerations that influenced the types of colleges or universities we were able to attend, experiencing challenges in undergraduate and graduate design programs, handling toxic work environments, and defying parental expectations. A secondary aim of this book is to foster a dialogue around the specific observations of Black, Brown, and Latinx design educators who teach at a variety of institutions: private art schools, small liberal arts colleges, large public research universities, community colleges, or minority-serving institutions and HBCUs. Knowing the type of institution offers insight into the privileges and challenges that come with such affiliations and how they influence one’s trajectory. When coupling the institution with the regional contexts

each designer hails from (Connecticut, Tennessee, Florida, Toronto, and India to name a few) one can clearly picture how these educators might be racially perceived in their design communities. The intricacies of race as it takes form in the inner city versus a rural environment or the suburbs create vastly different experiences for people of color in design. The designers in this book also represent a cross section of Black, Brown, and Latinx communities—African American, Jamaican, Indian, Pakistani, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, Brazilian—and some have multiracial backgrounds. This is only a sampling of the many racial and ethnic communities that see themselves as Black, Brown, or Latinx and is not a monolithic view of people of color, a term that has its own complications. The facets of our identity that connect to the languages we speak, our socioeconomic standing, or our gender identity create additional cultural intersections—intersections that reflect characteristics of how marginalization, social hierarchies, and colorism take place within our ethnic backgrounds.

Kelly Walters October 23, 2020

6 / 7

The stories and insights shared here—interwoven with images of objects that maintain cultural significance for each design educator and quotes that resonate with their understanding of identity and representation—are imperative for both students and emerging academics, especially Black, Brown, and Latinx designers, to hear. They will see aspects of themselves in these interviews. It is essential for the design field to engage in deeper conversations about how race, racial identity, and design education intersect and influence the way designers of color may position themselves in the world. Our perspectives need to be shared in order to serve as reference, inspiration, guidance, and validation for the many Black, Brown, and Latinx designers who are studying and working in the field today. The future of design and design education depends upon building an archive of reflective and introspective representations. The stories from the Black, Brown, and Latinx designers in this book offer necessary discourse from individuals who are making change, expanding definitions in the field, and redefining the design landscape for all who follow after them.

DAVID JON WALKER is an African American designer and

Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. He is principal of Rhealistic Design, a small design consultancy that specializes in branding and collateral for special events for nonprofit entities and that partners with small minority marketing agencies to help build their portfolios. Before joining the faculty at Austin Peay State University, Walker taught at Middle Tennessee State University.

DAVID JON WALKER

Typographic layout for the 2019 Senior Design Show at Austin Peay State University. Design by David Jon Walker.

DAVID JON WALKER

Can you share a little bit about where you’re from and how you got into design? I’m from Nashville, Tennessee, and I went to an HBCU for undergrad—Tennessee State University. We didn’t have a traditional design curriculum. Our only design classes were Desktop Publishing, Introduction to Web Design, and Introduction to Photography, all under the studio art degree. I came out of the program in 2004. I had a professor, Dr. Herman Beasley, who gave more lab access and equipment to students who showed the initiative to learn more. At the time, the art department had just bought and installed InDesign, and I’d seen a couple of folks dabbling in Flash, so I decided to learn the software. We were using Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker, and Macromedia Flash in the courses. Some of our projects consisted of laying out magazines and creating editorial designs, but there wasn’t any real depth of instruction in terms of constructing how those things should look or feel. We did comparative research to figure out on our own how to produce pieces that actually looked usable. For me, attending an art program at an HBCU without a specific design track meant a lack of exposure to the design luminaries we currently look up to today. Album artwork and party flyer design were very prevalent and prominent on campus at the time. Publications that I saw at church rounded out the extent of my critical design exposure. Even though as students we were exposed to book covers and magazine ads in design practice, the curriculum in my program did not prepare us to go out and get design jobs. After graduation, I interned at a larger church here in Nashville with John Girton, a design professional who was an in-house creative and local entrepreneur. He taught me so much more than what I had learned in school, as far as how to utilize design software collaboratively and how to view design critically. As a start, he gave me a strong introduction to typography and how it worked, including the variation of weight within a font and the science behind design decisions. That was basically my creative safe space at the time, so I started producing design work for actual clients under him. Following that opportunity, I landed my first large freelance job at my alma mater, working with the media relations department

to produce billboards, magazine ads, and whatever else they needed, or simple stuff like T-shirts. Nothing complex, no real visual system building outside of making sure that everything matched aesthetically if there was a campaign. I kept them as a client for a couple of years and then felt that my portfolio was strong enough to apply to graduate schools. Upon being accepted into and attending graduate school, I learned about AIGA, and this was my first exposure to being around people who had similar interests in design and life pursuits. Where did you go to graduate school?

As I mentioned, graduate school was free for me. I attended the program on an assistantship and was also fortunate enough to be selected for a university fellowship. I thoroughly enjoyed graduate school, especially from the standpoint of feeling like I was finally in the “mix.” I’d never been in an environment where everybody was talking about design and knew what I was talking about. I didn’t have to overexplain what I was trying to create or the reasons I was trying to create it. It was this atmosphere of inclusion based on the discipline and not based on race, religion, or creed. However, I was the only person of color in my graduate school design classes. There were seven students enrolled in the graphic design MFA track, including five full-time and two part-time students. Within the entire graduate art program while I was there, there were just three of us Black students: one student of color in photography and one student of color in art history. Since we were all on our own tracks and trajectories, we really didn’t cross paths other than making intentional contact. Because I was the sole Black student on the MFA

10 / 11

I went to graduate school at the University of Memphis. It was free, thankfully. It’s so funny; after you make a choice based on economic circumstances, you say, “Man, I could’ve gone to another school.” I loved my program, but after you get out of school you begin to ask yourself, “What does my design network look like? How does the network function? Who do I become as a designer? Who can judge my work?” I mean, I don’t have buyer’s remorse, but if I had done a little more research, maybe it would have been different. Maybe I would have gone elsewhere.

graphic design track, this reinforced the mentality of, “I’m finally in this place where everybody understands what I’m saying, but nobody looks like me.”

DAVID JON WALKER

Coming from an HBCU, where people did look like you, what came to light with that realization—in comparing your undergraduate to your graduate experience from a cultural perspective? A lot of people’s futures are dictated by their primary existence. What I mean by that is that both of my parents were college educated. Both of them had advanced degrees. One was a college professor and administrator, while the other was a city school system administrator. The schools they chose for my sister and me to attend, growing up, were predominantly White. They were public schools, but they were predominantly White. A friend of mine I had gone to elementary school with recently sent me a class picture on Facebook. We had attended kindergarten through twelfth grade together. In that picture from sixth grade, there are about twenty kids, and out of the whole group five are Black. I still have great relationships with them to this day; some of them are out-of-state and some of them are still here in town. But all that is to say that I was prepared early on to be one of the few persons of color. Based on the math, it wasn’t altogether strange for me to be the only Black person, of seven, in a graduate program. To be honest, going to the HBCU after my primary and secondary schooling was a culture shock. That’s funny because your background sounds similar to mine. I think the reason I didn’t choose an HBCU was that I was worried about that culture shock—the reverse culture shock, in a way. I had been in an environment where I was around mostly White people for school. Then I went to a PWI (predominantly White institution) for undergrad. Yeah. l went from an HBCU, an all-Black school, to a state PWI for graduate school. I’m teaching at a state PWI, and I’ve only taught at state PWIs. It is the culmination of learning and growing up in a life of doublespeak or code-switching. That’s a very real thing, code-switching. I talk to my own children about being able to transition between our communities without losing their sense of self, but I’ve always wondered, “What is

“ The paradox of

– JAMES BALDWIN Excerpt from “A Talk to Teachers”

12 / 13

education is precisely this–that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”

DAVID JON WALKER

my level of authenticity?” We live in this duality. I guess the authenticity just comes from knowing who you are, and what you are, and the possibilities of navigating almost any space. Clearly, as Black professors, we are ambassadors for all sides. We are ambassadors for people who grew up having had a Black experience, but we also are representatives of those people whom they don’t see. That bears a lot of weight. What do the demographics look like in your current institution? My school is five miles from the third-largest military base in the country. We’ve got a mostly military-connected or military veteran student population. Within this group, we have what would be called nontraditional students, which includes students who have just completed active duty or who are just older students. This presents a few challenges because everybody’s coming to school for different reasons. Some folks just come and get a degree because they joined the army or the military for their education, while others are first-generation attendees. My institution is predominantly White, and within the arts space I would say it might be a one-percent minority. I am the only African American on faculty. We just hired a sculpture professor who is of Asian descent, so the diversity of the department is slowly evolving. With this population, what are the aspirations beyond school? When your students are learning about graphic design, where do you see them aspiring to work? Do they stay local, or do they go to other cities? Do they continue to do design, or do they switch gears? What have you found? Design overall is trending toward more women becoming designers. In the design classes, the ratio of women to men is probably 60/40. With this population, depending on what their relationships are, if they’re ex-military or they’re married to an active-duty service member, they just may not get a job. They could come in, take the class, get the skills, and ultimately may or may not work. We’re producing designers with BFAs who are capable of being designers and who can go get jobs if they want to work. Nashville has a growing design scene. We have a healthy number of agencies and small firms here, and there are a fair number of in-house design jobs as well. My school

isn’t in Nashville, though; it’s forty miles northwest. There are four major graphic design programs in the Nashville area: Austin Peay State University, Middle Tennessee State University, Belmont University, and David Lipscomb University, and all of them are preparatory universities. One of the other programs is a great deal larger. They’ve got six full-time design professors. They teach a wider variety of classes because they’ve got the faculty to handle it, and their enrollment is higher. It’s almost double what my institution has, which means they can offer multiple levels of digital learning, digital illustration classes, and interactive design. We’ve only got three full-time professors in design. We’re working very hard to make sure that they can compete with the larger programs as well as the smaller programs that have more intimate settings. What do you find to be the most exciting part of teaching at your institution?

Do you think there is a lack of Black, Brown, and Latinx design educators and designers, or are they out there and we just don’t see them? That’s a very macro question. I think there are a lot of Black designers but few design educators of color. There are a lot of informally trained or self-taught Black designers. They get by doing small-scale projects that will never get major exposure to the masses. If you go a level up, where you have associate’s degrees in art programs or studio art programs, students pick up the introductory skills of learning the software, but there’s not a lot of depth there. They’re qualified to be

14 / 15

For me, the exciting part is having the opportunity to introduce students to design. A lot of our students come out of high schools that don’t have art programs. Once they get to the design classes and they see the possibilities of design, you can see the light bulbs turn on. They’re like, “This is a lot more than I thought it was.” Through the design curriculum, you can introduce different levels of specialization, like visual identities, publications, motion graphics, typography, or illustration. It’s really amazing to see people choose their trajectories and then help them navigate their path.

DAVID JON WALKER

David Jon Walker: “This is one of my grandmother’s quilts (Lone Star Quilt). She was an elementary school teacher and introduced me to color, organization, and pattern at a very early age.”

in-house production designers or to work at sign shops or screen-printing shops. It’s not really about art direction or creativity. They can be creative, but it kind of stops there. You’ve got the students in the studio degree programs, and then you have the BFAs in graphic design. Their relationships with their professors, their willingness to take initiative when learning design, and their communication and research skills directly affect their career trajectory.

If you’re a Black student who goes and works hard in a design program at a PWI, you can get passed over. You’re earning a degree, but your portfolio may not stand out. You may only have access to a production-level job because you’re technically proficient, but you’re not as conceptually strong. On top of that, maybe your communication skills aren’t as great because you haven’t honed in on the design vernacular or the social vernacular needed to navigate the system or the networks. It’s just awesome to see and know folks like Gail Anderson, Forest Young, Eddie Opara, Bobby Martin, and Ashleigh Axios. I mean, these are folks who did have to scale the design mountains as far as I’m concerned, because they put themselves in the spaces to do so. They went to the big name schools—School of Visual Arts, Yale, etc. They’ve been able to make it for a number of reasons, including choosing great schools, having determination and grit, and figuring out that you absolutely need to code-switch to be successful.

Oh, absolutely we are more scrutinized for the most random of reasons, but networks can prove a viable pipeline for us. For example, I had a student, Anthony Crawford, who graduated from my former institution, Middle Tennessee State University, and he keeps up with me quite frequently. He went from Nashville to Los Angeles based on some of my connections and recommendations. He eventually ended up working at Weiden+Kennedy and then went on to Zambezi, which is an ad agency formally co-owned by Kobe Bryant. He was getting recruited by Nike and some other large agencies to art direct and produce design work. Most recently, he’s been working for Netflix. While he was a student, we had extensive conversations about posturing and who to be in the workplace. We almost have to have a sponsor to get us through the door in order to get to the next door. If you know someone who knows the important person, it helps a lot and it goes a long way. Going back to what I was saying about picking my design school, had I done a little more research, I may have been at

16 / 17

What do you think are the challenges for Black designers in relation to their ability to access different design networks? Do you think how we speak or present ourselves is more scrutinized? What affects our success?

another place. I still may have ended up teaching, but I may have gone to another institution. What do you think is missing in the discussion around design education right now in relation to some of these topics or in relation to race and institution connections? Well, I think it’s hard right now to talk about design education without talking about inclusion. I mean, if you’re privileged it is hard to speak to someone who’s underprivileged. It takes effort for someone who is seen as underprivileged to understand where a person of privilege is coming from in order to grasp what they’re attempting to disseminate to you. It’s almost impossible to know where to begin on that.

DAVID JON WALKER

Why do you think that is? What I mean is, we have lived in this colonial system for so long, and design is understood by people based on the proverbial land that’s been crafted for them. We as educators and designers have a lot to learn. We already know one side, but we have to learn the other side in order to produce design work for people, consumers, or whomever we’re trying to communicate to and with. I think that’s the piece that’s missing—how to be inclusive of culture in design without appropriating one another, without being predatory, and without almost bastardizing something out of its original context. Sometimes I do feel like the conversation around decolonizing design, or around diversity and inclusion, has also been co-opted by White design educators in a way that feels to me like they are assuming an authority. I don’t know how to wrap my head around it. I know it when I see it. Certain presentations that I’ve seen when I’ve gone to conferences, or just conversations or writings about diversity and inclusion—there’s something slightly off about it. I think they’re able to say that they’re inclusive because of these five steps, for example. Yeah. There is no checklist.

“ Racism is not merely

– TA - N E H I S I C O AT E S Excerpt from “Fear of a Black President,” The Atlantic

18 / 19

a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.”

DAVID JON WALKER

Exactly. I’ve watched some colleagues who operate with those finite checklists, which seems bizarre. I agree. There’s so much nuance and variation between students and where they come from that checking boxes doesn’t really work. It’s weird to say, and I’m sure you feel the same way, that our personal prisms in the design classroom speak volumes. All students come into the classroom with extremely diverse life and academic experiences. As faculty, we may recognize that different design students have differing sensibilities toward their approach to design. In working with students, our ability to guide them through their thinking processes must be based on the individual in order to arrive at possible design solutions. The student’s design aesthetics, time management, and process are constantly challenged by faculty, but at the same time they are also being validated. Students are also challenging faculty for the things they need (design support, resources, knowledge, etc.) but these needs vary per student, making teaching arduous at times. Do you think design education has changed since you first started teaching? No, I don’t. We still have typography. We still have to teach composition and structure and the way people take in information through user experience and user interaction. I think we’re more conscious of who and what we’re designing for now. I think it’s moving toward being more people-centered versus product-focused. I think that’s the shift that we’re seeing, but I think design education, how we’re teaching students—I don’t feel like this is changing. I mean, another piece of that conversation is that we all want design diversity, and that’s something that design educators are kind of struggling with. But at the same time, we also hold true to the industry. We know that the industry needs people in order to survive. What has your experience been working in the industry as a Black designer and educator? It’s been really mixed. I’ve done a lot of nonprofit and political work. Again, since my trajectory was based on my MFA, in order

to teach, that’s a different lane. If I had held a corporate in-house design position before I worked at a design agency, I think my clients would be different, or at least my exposure to design clients would be different. It’s changing, and this is funny to say out loud, but I told myself maybe three years ago that I wanted to diversify my client pool—to have fewer Black and Brown clients and more White clients. I’ve been a little more intentional about how I design and what I design for. I’ve seen a shift in who I’m doing business with. Definitely as a Black designer, you have really weird conversations with people. When I say weird, I mean like people asking, “Why would I pay you that much?” It’s just disrespectful. On the race or gender thing, I’ve had people say, “Well, I didn’t think that you would be the one to design something so elegant,” like I was incapable of researching or figuring out what a certain segment needs, or what they were looking for. It’s been really interesting.

20 / 21

What advice do you have for Black students as they’re making their way through school and once they’re working? I would advise them to be courageous and say yes to a lot of stuff. By saying yes, you learn a lot about yourself, you learn a lot about other people, and it opens the door for a wide variety of experiences that you otherwise wouldn’t have. If you stick to your own people or stick to what you know, the opportunity for growth diminishes. The student I mentioned [earlier] ended up doing the brand redesign for the AfroTech media platform and conference. I see people start from nothing, with limited or no thoughts on design, and progress to moving the needle for society in different ways. That is what encourages me to keep at this teaching thing.

ANNE H.BERRY is a writer, designer, and Assistant Professor in the

Department of Art and Design at Cleveland State University. Her research focuses on race and representation and on ethnic and racial disparities within the field of graphic design. She is a 2018 Design Incubation Fellow, and she recently published an essay titled “The Black Designer’s Identity” for Recognize, an online design anthology presented by InVision that features essays from Indigenous people and people of color.

ANNE H. BERRY

This panel is on permanent display at the Indiana University South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center, which is located in what was once a segregated public pool.

How did you get into design? Where did you go to school? I received my undergraduate degree from Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana, where my dad was a history and political science professor (now retired) and my mother taught children’s literature. I overlapped with my dad but not with my mom. My MFA is from Kent State University.

ANNE H. BERRY

I didn’t take any art classes in high school. I worked on the school newspaper, and that was the extent of my experience with design. My first exposure to design was on a tour with my mom at a publishing house. That was when I first saw that designing book covers was a paid profession and understood that graphic design was a viable career path. When I got to college, I still wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. I had this idea that it would be nice to use my creativity in a way that would still allow me to make a living. However, the school I went to for undergrad didn’t have a particularly strong graphic design program. Essentially, I had a concentration in graphic design, and I wasn’t really plugged into the design world at large. A lot of that came later when I was trying to get a job in the field. Ultimately, I realized that I needed to go back to school, if for no other reason than to fill the gaps in my education. Grad school seemed like a way for me to actually move forward, rather than not quite finding my way and continuing to struggle. Do you think that your experiences in design and design education were influenced by your background or identity in any way? I have an older brother and an older sister, which means I am the baby of the family. My brother knew he was interested in science, so his path was laid out for him. The same was true of my sister. She loved theology. She knew she loved being involved in the Mennonite church. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. I did figure out that I was really interested in visual things, creativity, and visual representation, but I didn’t know how to translate those interests into a career.

I was also obsessed with Diana Ross and other Black people. My dad is Black and my mother is White, and I grew up in a predominantly White town. Though I didn’t have the language for it at the time, race and representation were definitely on my mind: I thought a lot about how Black people were or were not portrayed in the media and publications. That’s something that I kind of latched onto. Partly because, again, you want to understand your own experience, you want to understand where you fit into the world. As a result of being mixed and constantly thinking about identity, these were the paths or themes that found a direction through design. It’s one thing to figure out if design is something you’re interested in and it’s another to not feel like you fit into design culture with all of these barriers. Knowing what I know now, I would’ve done or seen things differently, which would’ve made my life a little bit easier, but you don’t know what you don’t know.

Can you expand further? Well, my first portfolio was a piece of crap. I just didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to put it together because no one had really talked to me about it before. This was before Google was a verb, and at the time I didn’t really have any instructors or mentors who could help me. Every now and then, I’ll show it to students and say, “It’s hard for me to do this, but I’m making myself vulnerable in this moment to show you that it’s important to always look back on where you came from as a way of appreciating what you’ve learned, appreciating the role of education, and helping you evolve.” I didn’t have connections to the larger design world. As an undergraduate at that particular college, I just didn’t have access to people who could foster or support that. I didn’t have a grasp of the broader picture. In design, the professional portfolio is your currency, so it took a while to

24 / 25

Since going to graduate school and teaching, I’ve found a better language for describing all of those things I was experiencing that I didn’t understand at the time. I thought, “Why is this so challenging? Why is this so difficult? I was always a good student, right?” I worked hard in school, but design is not something that you can just do. It’s a process.

Chicago Art Deco Society Magazine, Spring 2018 Issue. Design by Anne H. Berry

26 / 27

“

Black designers are working at a disadvantage when they do not feel a kinship with existing design traditions and also have no evidence of an alternative African or African American design tradition upon which to base their work.” – S Y LV I A H A R R I S Excerpt from “Searching for a Black Aesthetic in American Graphic Design”

get past that barrier and recognize that the work I was doing was not good. I mean, there were limits to what I was able to do. I ended up working for a terribly bigoted, awful place in Denver. I was just happy to get my foot in the door, but I was miserable. I would leave work and cry every day. It was a very toxic work environment, but I didn’t know any better. There were advantages—I really honed my production and craft skills because I was afraid I was going to get fired. Everything had to be done just so. I perfected a lot of skills that I wouldn’t have otherwise, which ended up serving me well in graduate school. I was in this toxic environment, and they clearly didn’t see me as having any creative skills. These things feed on themselves psychologically, but I did learn a lot, even if it was difficult at times. How did you know that you wanted to teach—was it something you fell into?

The turnaround, for me, was a faculty member by the name of Eric May. He was one of my favorite human beings ever. And he was one of the individuals who made my experience at Kent State so significant. Eric was this relatively quiet, unassuming designer who’d been around for a long time. He did not shirk away from voicing his opinions, but he was also a gentle soul. His approach helped relieve a lot of my anxieties about my abilities and whether I was cut out for design. As you can imagine, it’s one thing to get accepted into graduate school, and it’s another thing to go and do the work. I was terrified that first semester. I was living on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and I lost a lot of weight because I wasn’t

28 / 29

I had no interest in teaching whatsoever. I went to grad school for myself. I didn’t want to be an educator, partly because I came from a family of educators, and it didn’t appeal to me. I think a lot of it was born out of my own insecurities and feeling like I didn’t want to be responsible for shaping young minds. I thought, “I’m not good enough, so how can I be responsible for these students? Their work is not going to be good, and it’s going to be my fault.” It sounds melodramatic, right? At the time, I didn’t want the pressure. However, as part of my assistantship in grad school, I had to teach.

ANNE H. BERRY

eating well. I was full of anxiety the entire time—convinced I was going to fail. I had imposter syndrome times a thousand. I took calligraphy and letterpress with Eric, and those courses in particular really helped take a lot of the stress away. Getting past these psychological barriers was hard, but taking these courses gave me a freedom and ultimately advanced my design work. What I learned from that experience is that, without Eric Todd, I don’t know that I would have gotten into teaching. It was his gentle encouragement and nudging that made me believe I could do this. When people come along and speak to you, it’s important to pay attention and listen. When I graduated in 2008, at the height of the economic downturn, I knew it was not a good time to look for commercial jobs. I felt like I was at sea all over again. I had just given my blood, sweat, and tears to grad school, and I was feeling good about that experience. Luckily, a teaching job soon opened up at my undergraduate alma mater. My thinking at the time was: “I don’t want to go back to just any industry job, not with everything that I just worked through. Teaching would be one way to use my degree and put the new skills I developed to use; I could be an agent of change.” What types of social or environmental factors influence where your students work or aspire to work in design after they leave school? Have you noticed similarities or differences across institutions? A majority of the students I’ve worked with are White students—White, middle- and working-class students, who are interested in design and social responsibility. You kind of go where the opportunities are, and I ended up at the University of Notre Dame through a connection, Ingrid Hess. It was definitely a stepping stone for me, no question about it. The students at Notre Dame were wonderful, and there were many wonderful things about my experiences there, but I was still working with mostly White students who were already getting a good education. I also think it makes a difference when you’re talking about design education and you have Notre Dame on your résumé. It won’t get you the job necessarily, but it’ll get you in the door. It helps catapult you to the

30 / 31

Anne H. Berry: “This is a drawing of ‘Christmas Star’ [above] by my brother Joe from when he was in second grade—our father commissioned it into a quilt [top] decades later. In addition to reflecting the history of quilting represented in both my Mennonite and African American cultural traditions, the composition is a reflection of Joe’s positive association with Blackness.” Drawing: Joseph J. Berry. Quilt: Quilt Designs.

ANNE H. BERRY

front of the line. The alumni network and connections provide many advantages. I reached a point where I knew that I wanted to work with more students of color. When the position at Cleveland State University opened up, there were a lot of draws for me. Like many other design programs, including Notre Dame, we emphasize how design skills can be used to contribute to society in some way. However, the culture at Cleveland State is very different from what I’ve been used to in my academic career. In some ways I’m still adjusting to an environment that is more diverse, which I love. But there’s been a learning curve. Many of our students are balancing school with full-time or part-time jobs, and many of them are first generation college students. I am continually humbled by the knowledge that design education is going to have a significant impact on their lives. This is why I’m interested in design culture, right? You don’t see a lot of people of color really being represented across varying professions or the design discipline as a whole. If people who look like you are not represented, then, of course, in your mind, even if it’s not conscious, you’re going to think, “This is not something that people like me normally do.” What are the types of hierarchies you see in design and design education? How do visibility and exposure get influenced by affiliations with certain grad programs or job status? Do you think tokenism plays a role in this? I think when you’re a person of color, the affirmative action piece is always going to be present, along with the internal questioning: “Do I deserve to be here?” Especially when you’re teaching a class full of White students. There was an unconscious level at which I was trying to make my audience, in this case students, feel more comfortable with my presence. I’m told frequently that my students find me intimidating. Why is that? Maybe because they’re not used to having a Black person standing in front of the class. They’re not used to having a Black professor and certainly not a Black female professor. This leads to a related discussion about teaching as a performance, especially for faculty of color. All of these pieces play a role in making sure that I prove that I’m legitimate, that I’m valid, and that I’m here because I earned this spot.

What are the ways in which we can get more Black, Brown, and Latinx students and designers in the field? What do you think are the support systems that are needed once they’re there? Part of the reason I’m interested in narrative inquiry as a research method is because when you look at the entirety of a design career trajectory, there are so many aspects that can make or break a designer, and there are many points at which students may decide, “This isn’t for me.” Even if you’ve made it into the professional world, why in a million years would you want to continue on and get an advanced degree and then teach? That’s another set of barriers right there. Part of my theory in terms of how we recruit or bring more students of color into the fold is about demonstrating the value of design. It goes back to how you can use your design skills to contribute to society, to your community. I think that once students are in design, they see these opportunities more clearly. If you don’t really know what graphic design is, you may not have a sense of how it can be a positive influence within society. 32 / 33

SAMUEL ROMERO

is a visual artist and educator. After receiving his MFA in painting and drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, Romero returned to his home state of Florida, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Art and Graphic Design Program Director at Florida Southern College. Romero is also a founding member and creative director of the US Latinx Art Forum.

SAMUEL ROMERO

Los Bleeding Brakes: Type for conceptual band created by Samuel Romero.

Where are you from? I’m from Central Florida. In middle school we ended up moving to a little neighborhood that is predominantly Mexican American in Wahneta. The area was predominantly a bluecollar neighborhood.

SAMUEL ROMERO

Where did you study design? I did community college for two years and then went to Florida Southern to complete my undergrad in studio art and graphic design. When I finished school, I was really thinking about how to make a living. If you look at artists in general, there is this stereotype of the starving artist. Maybe I thought about this more because I was coming from a working-class family. My family migrated to Florida, as farmworkers, in the late 1970s. I was always thinking, “I’ve got to also be able to make a living out of this art.” As a result, I started focusing on graphic design as well as developing my studio practice. It wasn’t one of those situations where I felt, “I’m just going to go into graphic design because I need to find a way of making a living.’’ I saw a lot of overlap with the way that I thought about my studio practice and its relationship to conceptualizing and problem solving. Even though I technically did a double major, I was short maybe one or two credits for my graphic design major, so my degree is a BFA in studio art, even though I also completed a graphic design senior thesis. Right out of undergrad, I was working as an in-house graphic designer for a pretty large in-house design team. There were probably about fifty of us, and it was a corporate job. I learned a lot about production work and designing within a brand but disliked the gray walls and monotony of a corporate gig. I just couldn’t do it, and I was already thinking about going to grad school. I ended up applying to grad school, got in, and went to The Art Institute of Chicago in the painting and drawing program. Similarly, my MFA is in studio practice, not in graphic design. When I was an undergrad taking senior graphic design courses, I found myself really enjoying the academic environment, especially critiques, having different courses, and schedules changing. This was the exact opposite of the corporate world,

where it’s the cubicle and it’s nine-to-five. I felt that I just functioned better in the academic environment versus the corporate world. My goal with the MFA was to get a teaching position. I taught middle school and high school for two years before getting the professorship at Florida Southern, and this is my twelfth year teaching there full time. In your experience in both undergraduate and graduate school, did you feel like your identity was centered in either of those spaces?

I also pulled inspiration from race riots, and using that became a way of informing my work as a designer. The designs became a little more militant, aggressive. When I was making my podiums (which I would eventually put my collateral material on for display) I made the base out of a concrete block and used fence poles. I was thinking a lot about riots and people using these types of materials, and getting really gritty and raw. I looked back at my history as a Chicano and at Chicano activism, as well as at people on the streets, to inform this brand that I was going to create.

36 / 37

I think it was probably more specific to undergrad. An example would be my senior thesis. I think at that point all of us had to take some sort of nonprofit and rebrand it. That was kind of an atypical graphic design project, and I chose to do the National Council of La Raza (now UnidosUS). It’s a group out of California that’s looking at Chicano culture. At the time, it was all very generic and bland. I ended up taking a more activist or “street” approach to the design. My goal was not to create this brand that was going to be like, “Oh, this looks nice, this is clean, this is sleek. It’s not offensive.” Instead my goal was to actually become more offensive and be more in your face. In my research, I started looking at protest posters, designs, and photographs that were related to violence or were from the civil rights era. I even ended up pulling up photographs of lynchings and things like that. It was emotionally draining in a good way because this was history that I had to find out about on my own. I wasn’t looking at any of these images in any courses, whether it was in design or history.

Where are you teaching now? I’m currently teaching at Florida Southern College. It is a private institution here in Central Florida. I believe we have about 2,700 students overall. Within the art department, we’re anywhere between ninety and 120 majors. The majority of the students are actually in studio art and graphic design. I have about fifty students in the graphic design program.

SAMUEL ROMERO

Do you see any students who you’re working with in your institution wanting to express their background in their design work? This year one student wanted to do her senior project on jewelry inspired by her Haitian culture. In her project, she’s trying to embrace that culture, as well as educate through this brand. I will say that she’s done a ton of research that has helped her learn more about her culture and identity, which she really didn’t know much about. That’s kind of the issue that she’s wanting to help solve, or at least remedy, through this brand. I told her, “This isn’t easy to do.” You have people who are professional designers who are going out there and trying to do this, and they fuck it up all the time. If they don’t have the right people around them, everyone looks the same. When none of them come from the actual culture that they’re trying to use as a source or as a reference, the design isn’t done very well. She’s trying to figure out the balance between research and design, and she’s been spending all of her time researching because it’s so new and it’s extremely exciting for her. However, how does she turn research into a brand, and then turn that into a design? I’m trying to help her bridge that gap. At the end of the day, it’s still a brand that you’re creating. You’re still working with colors, lines, shapes and forms. They’re still communicating, but you’re having to figure out the right things to communicate based on what you’re wanting to accomplish with that brand. I’m looking forward to seeing what she is going to turn out. I also have another student who’s Mexican American and is branding a chocolate company from Mexico. Similarly, she’s doing a ton of research but coming up with these stumbling blocks because she’s never done anything like this design-wise before. I’ve talked to them about the importance of this work. I feel guilty putting so much pressure on them, but the pressure

38 / 39

Samuel Romero: “Orange Tree: I am a native Floridian and the son of farmworkers.”

is there. I think for them it’s more important because of the expectation. I let them know that they’re not alone.

SAMUEL ROMERO

Year after year I’m showing more work that deals with culture, and I’m talking about my own projects and my interests—that may be why they feel like it’s something that is possible, whereas before they just had no clue that it was something that they could do. There is no way of me quantifying any of that information right now, of seeing if there is any sort of correlation with me teaching this content and students feeling as if they have the green light to actually do some of this stuff. It just gives them another option that they didn’t know actually existed, which I think is probably why more of it’s happening. Similarly, when I’m working with my students who are Black, and they are addressing topics around Black identity or representation, it’s tricky because I want to push to make sure that the craft and the concept and the ideas are executed with care and sensitivity. Especially because of how it might go out into the world and then also get judged. You don’t want to necessarily put the weight of an entire culture on their backs, expecting them to be able to solve everything in one project. I totally get how it’s a tenuous sort of space. I always find it fascinating when students come to me with these ideas and how I can share some of my thoughts around it, but not influence them directly—“You have to think like me”—but rather that you are being critically challenging of the space that you’re looking at, or the research that you’re looking at, so that you can develop new ideas. What do you think the current state is for students of Latinx or Chicano descent in graphic design? How is the industry encompassing this population? Do we need more students of color in design? I do think we need more students of color in graphic design. I have told my students to take this discipline seriously. It’s not just a hobby. Designers create the world around us. Artists create the world that we live in. When we look at these advertisements as posters, these logos, these brands, we need to have other voices out there, and they need to come from people of color. I think it’s important to do that. They’re going to have a

“ We have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time! It’s exhausting!” – EDWARD JAMES OLMOS Performing as Abraham Quintanilla in the film Selena

SAMUEL ROMERO

Detail of The Orales Rooster album cover for the conceptual band The Orales. Design by Samuel Romero.

specific perspective that is going to be able to speak to other people who feel marginalized. We need a little bit of seasoning in there. Some of the design work that comes from people of color is going to be designed a specific way or work with specific color palettes and textures. We all know that diversity is good, right? It’s good for everybody and challenges people. It gets them out of their bubble. The thing is, I don’t know how, especially because we’re talking about an industry which people still don’t know what graphic design is. Some people of color don’t go into studio art practice because their parents are not going to let them or they don’t know what design is. They want them to be lawyers, doctors, or engineers because they didn’t sacrifice all of this for them to go paint and play in a studio. This is what many parents are thinking, but then who’s going to be telling our stories?

What challenges do you think are affecting students’ success or completion of a program? I think the main challenge is the idea that they don’t feel like they belong there. There are very valid reasons that students feel isolated. Sometimes it’s because they don’t see people like themselves in the classroom, on campus, or in the faculty. I think the hardest thing to do is to take those students, especially if they’ve come from an area that doesn’t look like the place that they’re at now, and let them know that their ideas are valid. Even though they might be different from what everyone else [thinks], their ideas are still valid. Their skills are what brought them there, and they belong. It could also have

42 / 43

I also look at it in a more practical way as well. There are companies trying to create a product that will reach a lot of people in different communities. However, a lot of the time they run into issues because they’re targeting a specific demographic that is outside of their wheelhouse or they’re trying to go into a new area. They have to be smart enough to bring in people of color to say, “This is how it’s done respectfully.” This is the right way of doing it, and that’s something that I think is going to be valuable moving forward as our country becomes even more and more diverse, but also as a design and business brand becomes more global.

SAMUEL ROMERO

nothing to do with their actual treatment. Based on my own experience, I think it was more self-inflicted. Was it self-imposed? For me, it was self-imposed, and sometimes you become defensive because of history. I think that’s the challenge. I’ve talked to other academics, and you hear this term “imposter syndrome.” I had a bit of that when I went to the Art Institute in Chicago. When I got in, I went to the Post-Bacc program. I didn’t get into the MFA program. I’m coming from Central Florida, and all of these other people are older than me. They’re coming from larger programs and institutions, and I’m like, “Fuck, what’s gonna happen? Am I going to be able to do this? Am I going to be able to make it?” I get in there, in the critiques, and I realize I can hold my own. I actually turned this into a game. I was thinking, through this critique and through this program, “Can I outwit everybody else?” Even the professors, in regards to the way that I approached my critiques, my responses, my questions, my answers. Very quickly I realized not only do I belong here, I’m kicking ass. I think if more of us thought that way, we would push forward, and we would be more vocal. We would be able to be more confident and stand our ground and hold our own, you know, not in an aggressive way, because we all know how that goes, but in a way with language, with humor, in order to make a change and to give ourselves the freedom of being comfortable. Once I told myself that I belong, I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Of course, there are other roadblocks. But we have to then be more creative. Right? That’s kind of what sucks. We have to then do more work [when] our voice isn’t being heard. It’s physically and mentally draining. I think until it becomes a norm, that’s what people like us have to do in order for more of us to get out there. There are students and emerging academics looking at us and seeing what we do and how we teach, and that’s allowing them to see a path that they didn’t even know existed. Is there any advice that you could give for emerging Black, Brown, or Latinx design students who are considering design or even thinking about teaching? What kind of advice would you give them?

Samuel Romero: “I played Loteria at family events growing up, and I do so now with my kids. This card is significant because I am a scorpio.”

44 / 45

SAMUEL ROMERO

Specifically, for people of color, right? It’s being strategic. I think they have to strategize, to say, “If this is the type of institution that I want to get into, what do I need to do to get there?” Come up with a game plan. If there are not a lot of people of color in this field, think about what they need to do to strategize and articulate why they are more valuable to this institution than somebody else. It’s using it as a strength, right? Using this idea that there aren’t very many of us here, not that we don’t belong. Maybe we belong here even more because we’re not here. How do they articulate those things? I think that’ll be very important in regards to interviews and even writing this down on résumés, their teaching statement, or their artist statement. What makes them different from the other 120 applicants who are going to be applying? If they’re able to stand out in a positive way and look at all of these things that this person brings to the table, I think they’ll have a much better chance of getting into an institution or getting a job. Also, how could they take things that could be looked at as a hindrance and turn it into a positive? That’s what I would say, and it’s hard to think that way. Again, if you’ve been conditioned [to think] that you are less than, or you don’t see people like yourself here, automatically you go in there defeated. That’s the last thing that we need to do. We don’t need to go into any situation feeling that we’re not going to get the job because of the color of our skin. We need to become even more strategic and use that to our advantage. Is there anything that you think is missing from the conversation right now in relation to design or design education? Is there anything that we as educators and as designers are not addressing? Over the past few years I’ve seen this big push for inclusion task forces and diversity groups. I think that there are good intentions with all of those things. If there’s a lack of diversity, it’s like, “Let’s put a group of people together in order to solve it.” They take all the Brown and Black people and put them together in a group. These people already know the issues. They don’t need to sit down and talk about them even more. Whose time is it to do the work? While I’m not at an institution that’s predominantly Black or Brown and I’m not in a Chicano studies program, students and

administration should still realize its importance and be okay having it brought up in my class. I think if we all did more of that, we would be better off as a whole. There was even a Diversity Task Force that was put together at Florida Southern College, and I asked some kids [about it] and they said, “They just put us together and want feedback.” They told me they don’t think anything really happened or came out of it. Those in the industry need to talk about it less. Enough committees design narratives. Is there anything within Indigenous culture that is an alternative, that is an equivalent, or that challenges the Bauhaus?

46 / 47

NIDA ABDULLAH is an Assistant Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design program at Pratt Institute. Prior to her appointment there, she was an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University and Lecturer of Graphic Design at Georgia State University. Her research interests focus on the conditions and circumstances for designing, deconstructing, and disrupting inherited hierarchical and hegemonic modes of production.

NIDA ABDULLAH

A collaborative composition built using only Google Sheets. This ongoing project questions the assumptions and value systems we inherit when using certain tools and software for designing. How might form be challenged? How might ownership or nonownership of form be challenged? Design by Nida Abdullah and Anna Buckner, 2018

How did you get into design?

NIDA ABDULLAH

I went to design school at NC State in Raleigh, North Carolina, which is a public land grant institution. My parents never thought design was a real thing. They’re both scientists. I ended up in design school because I found art and ceramics to be really interesting. It was also because of a discussion with another person at my high school who told me about design school. I was really interested in design, but I wasn’t allowed to study it. I mean, my parents are immigrant parents and they said, “You have to stay in state, you’re not allowed to go far, and you have to live at home.” I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which is where UNC (University of North Carolina) is, and NC State is forty-five minutes away. I knew I really wanted to go to design school. I was really defying my parents and what they thought was a viable career at the time. Although now they’re pretty good with it, that’s why I ended up in design. It wasn’t so much that I knew about visual communication; it just looked cool and I wanted to try. What was it like going to the same school for grad and undergrad? It was interesting. In 2008, after undergrad at NC State, I worked for several years before I applied to a lot of different graduate schools. I went with NC State really because I didn’t have to pay to go to school. I’m really lucky that I don’t have debt. While I respect and value NC State for what it is, it was hard to find myself in the program, which I think could be said for many programs around the country. For instance, one time I wanted to work with refugees. I was told that wasn’t a valid project. It’s probably changed a little bit now, but at the time it was a very rigid program that sought validity in more codified practice. It was hard to feel connected to the language or feel like I was doing something I was interested in. Do you feel like your identity has influenced the way that you understand design or even teach design now? Oh yeah. My identity being Brown, Muslim, and a woman. I’ve taught at three different institutions. The first institution I

taught at was Georgia State University, which calls itself a minority-serving institution, but they have hiring problems. They have systemic issues, where they hire predominately White faculty and staff, so I don’t think that reflection of community trickles up. It’s more in who they admit. And I would say, that is an issue; what is their philosophy on what it means to be educated, or what is the process of educating? Whose values are students being exposed to? When I’m in the classroom, I try not to impose ideas reflective of the accepted systems in design. It’s always about questioning, and it’s always about acknowledging the differences among my students. It’s not just who you are or your race; it’s also interconnected to socioeconomic issues. For me, a lot of it stems from when I was younger and the relationship I had with my parents. I’ve always tried to find something that was meaningful within design. I think that’s a struggle that a lot of students have, because again, they might not see themselves in it. 50 / 51

I also introduce my classes with a code, which the students contribute to. I really just call it the culture of the classroom— always acknowledging that we’re all from different places and have different life experiences and that we all have biases, and also acknowledging that when we step into this space, we need to be present and aware of that. I acknowledge that that’s the case for me too. You can’t say that no one has biases. We talk about that on the first day of school. It’s about acknowledgment, presence, and then questioning your own assumptions, questioning your peers, questioning assumptions—and also questioning me, but respectfully. We talk about what that means—what is respectful?—and allowing yourself to be open to those questions and the kind of discovery that might challenge the assumptions that you’ve had coming into the space of the classroom. Generally, this is how I start my classes because I don’t think there was that acknowledgment when I was younger. It was just the teachers and their point of view. It’s also always about questioning and acknowledging my own authority in that space, where there’s the expectation of authority, but also talking about what that means.

Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.” – IBRAM X. XENDI Excerpt from How to Be an Antiracist

Do you find at the institution that you’re at now, being in an art school environment, that setting up this framework at the beginning is helpful toward generating larger discussions or critiques?

What are the challenges or successes across the different types of institutions, with regard to race or student population? I think at an art institute like Pratt, where I am now, there’s a lot more openness to my work being in the critique of and scholarship of teaching and learning. There’s an openness to discuss, although there’s still hesitancy toward challenging disenfranchising systems or the acknowledgment and acceptance of internalized White supremacy—that it exists everywhere, its quiet prevalence. That kind of hesitancy exists everywhere though. I’m more vocal here because I feel that there’s more of an openness toward the discussion. A lot of our students are, I would say, affluent, so there’s an openness toward experimentation with how far we can push that critical discourse in the classroom. For instance, what are the structures, processes, and standards that guide designing and design pedagogy, and why are we adhering to them? Can we challenge the Western, colonial philosophy and approach? That’s more of an available discussion here at Pratt. Although there are definitely internalized legacies of colonization and gentrification here. At my previous school, the proximity to Whiteness as a

52 / 53

I think it’s been really helpful, and I continue to tweak it. This semester I also added in the tenants from Afropunk— no, racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia. We talk about that too, and we also discuss what these things mean and how issues are consistently reproduced through the (visual) systems we work with. How can we deconstruct these issues through their work? My students and I also do a lot of different formats for critique. Every time it’s a peer critique or students are working with each other, I’m just in the space as a facilitator. We talk about me relinquishing that authority. I find that the more transparent I am, the more the students are transparent back. We always have that discussion about, “Why are you seeking validation here?” Although, it’s not the responsibility of the student to figure everything out, it’s about talking it through. They challenge the traditional teacher-led single voice discussion and are engaged in the process.

NIDA ABDULLAH

measurement of legitimacy was definitely internalized. Everyone was coming at design from very different places, from very different socioeconomic backgrounds, so Whiteness is seen as the standard. This is definitely an unconscious kind of thing, but among the students and much of the faculty, this is the aspiration, the measure of success. It’s the accepted approach to designing. And my question would be, “Well, whose standard?” The way that institution and curriculum were structured, it was more about validity through design, so that the students could become people who hold jobs. I always questioned, “Why is it that we have to accept the visual language that has been present for many years and the processes of making that have become codified in order to feel validated?” Those discussions are not as available. I do think that there are certain affordances that come with an environment that allows for experimentation and interrogation of design versus learning how to do design and then get a job. And I’ve taught in that kind of environment as well. And I think there are just different outcomes for student populations that need to get that job, which is real. It’s immediate. But also, I don’t think challenging conventions and the need to get a job have to be binary; students should be able to be revolutionary, while also making a living. Based on how one is taught, I think that’s the replication that you’re talking about—using the same model in their practice or teaching after they finish school. I’ve been really reflective of what and how I’ve learned, and I continue to add different methods. How do you critique and hold conversations about what design is or define its meaning? The classroom can be your own space, but there are always goals toward curriculum development and things like that. What are the learning outcomes for the program? The discussion is around what we are reproducing through these program learning outcomes, or who we are privileging, which is usually the White global North. Let’s be critical about that. Why are we doing it this way? How does it then translate into all these modes of making and understanding throughout the classroom? I think these are systemic issues within the institution. Knowledge production in the classroom, or making, doesn’t have to be what we’ve come to understand it as. I even question the idea of a process book, or what we include in the process

book for the final presentation. The things that we are creating to present our stuff. These are also in their own way different standards and forms of legitimacy, and I guess I deconstruct a lot of that just to see where I stand. What barriers do you see for Black, Brown, and Latinx students in design education and in industry?

I think that on the grander scale there are these biases related to success, and they’re based in part on what a student might feel, but also on the systems around them that are reinforcing certain things. I think that’s part of this challenge. It’s like there’s a layered discussion with multiple factors so that you can’t point to just one thing in order to say here’s the reason why this is happening. Exactly. I think that for me, as someone who is Black in this space of design, and as a woman, I think that I’ve been trying to unpack what Black is, right? Black means so many different things to many different people across the United States and around the world. I think that part of that layering is that there’s not one way to be Black. There are all these different layers, including the kinds of places you grew up or the backgrounds that have shaped your understanding of these things. I’m interested in how we as design educators are even thinking about how we’ve woven in our understanding of what a barrier is. It could be from the institutional level or even just work environments that feel uncomfortable because you’re by yourself—because you are the only person who’s not White.

54 / 55

I’ll tell you a story. First, I’ll say what I think the barriers are (and this is based on the students I’ve taught and the contexts I’ve taught in) but a lot of times my Black, Brown, and Latinx students are juggling multiple jobs as well as coming to school. I think that they’re also very driven. I think my students have historically faced trouble finding themselves in design. I think they always feel like they have to be interested either in their identity or use their identity as a way to prop themselves up in the classroom. This is my experience, but I don’t think all students necessarily want to design about those things. That’s just the expectation. They meet that expectation, now what?

NIDA ABDULLAH

Do you think it’s changing or slowly moving? We’re slowly moving, but there are things that happen that just make the space uncomfortable, and I think a lot of students and a lot of faculty of color tend to just say, “Oh, that’s just some White shit.” There’re a lot of issues that I’ve had here too that have been just about people’s identity, my own identity in the space too. I think a barrier could very easily be something as simple as having certain expectations of a person. A lot of my students who are not White bring very different things into the classroom. For instance, one student right now is creating publications that will lead into a larger book at the end of the semester, but his topic has been about mumble rap versus lyrical rap. It’s very different from anybody else’s and informs his approach to form-making. What you find interesting, where you come from in the world informs how you see making, design, cultural production, whatever you want to call it. A lot of the group critiques he gets with students are like, “I think you need to look at type, make this into a grid.” I don’t think a grid is a bad thing. I also think those are the things that other students will say because they think that that’s what makes it a valid piece of form, but then the topic is something that those students don’t want to touch. I’ve seen that, too, when the topic is uncomfortable or an experience that someone else has not had. The unwillingness to be wrong. I’m teaching this new class this semester called “Black Visual Culture,” and I feel like this is just a rare occurrence for me to have an entire class that is all students of color. Being able to figure that out. It’s weird in that it’s an anomaly to me, but it’s also exciting because of all of the things that we’re trying to unpack. It’s completely flipping the narrative. Usually you are the only Brown or Black person in a class. You generally have to move around and negotiate that White narrative. To switch gears, did you always want to be a design educator? What led you down that path? No. I TA’ed when I was in graduate school and I realized I really loved helping the students. I also thought, at the time, that design education should change. Most of what I was looking

When White is designated as normal, those who are not White are forever deemed not normal, no matter how hard they work or what they accomplish. Restricting the definition of White supremacy to a collection of bigoted that institutionalized power in this country, whether social, political, legal, economic, or cultural, reinforces the primacy of Whiteness.” – D AV E M O L K Excerpt from “Teaching Inequality: Consequences of Traditional Music Theory Pedagogy”

56 / 57

individuals overlooks the myriad ways

NIDA ABDULLAH

Basmati rice and desi atta: the liminal spaces.

at were Eurocentric processes, and I wondered why we accept them as “the” design process or method. Who decided that they are the ones we should follow? Who gets to have a say, and where does that agency lie? In graduate school, I was looking at critique structures. I realized I like helping, I guess. I teach, but I don’t see myself as the sole voice in the classroom. Although I recognize that I come into class with authority, there’s always a power balance. A lot of what I was encountering in graduate school was that there are ways to invert the powers that we’ve accepted as true, you know? That is what brought me to design education. I got the job at Georgia State right after school and I loved it. At Georgia State, I had maybe one or two White students per class and I was teaching classes of twenty students. It was just a lot more comfortable. The space was really fun. There was less of an expectation to perform in that narrative, and I think I really found myself as an educator there. What do you think is missing from the conversation right now in relation to some of these topics in design or design education? I think we talk a lot about things like decolonization, which everybody has a different understanding of. It’s a really big topic

in design right now or among design educators, but I wonder how decolonization maybe translates to the industry. Also as educators, why do we have these curriculum structures that are accepted as true, that come from a really old and very White and Eurocentric model of education? I think that that can be reconsidered, as can even the syllabi and the way the syllabus is understood as a document. The form of authority or validity that comes from the institution can be reexamined as a tool for discourse and contribution from students. Since we’re in academia, I think a lot of the things that we should think about are like peer review, and who gets to say why our peer review structures are the way they are? That means going through the process of tenure and who validates the work you’re creating against this idea that this is what design, design education, or research in design ought to be. I think there’s so much room for negotiating or expanding those ideas of knowledge production, especially as we (hopefully) get more people of color in academia.

I agree. I think that even in decoloniality or approaching design from a decolonial perspective, a lot of the work that’s being done there is by people who are colonizers. They’re colonizing the discourse because it’s trendy, it’s popular, it’s like diversity and inclusion. I think a lot of people view diversity and inclusion with a lot of skepticism. Is it when stuff becomes institutionalized that we begin to doubt it? I just feel like there are people who co-opt it because it’s a trend and then it’s something that you can tout around, “Oh, let me raise this flag.” I think it’s so challenging for me because, as someone who is continuing to understand what is happening, I’m in no position to say, “Here it is, this is the solution.” I’m just continuing to try to move the pieces of this puzzle around and to see from different vantage points, but I still feel like there’s so much more to unpack. Accepting and embracing pluralism is really important; there are multiple ways of doing things. I’m not saying we get rid of Bauhaus, I’m saying, “What’s the

58 / 59

Yeah, I think sometimes we get caught up in saying “diversity and inclusion,” and I get tired of hearing just that and similarly with “decolonizing design.” I think there are elements that have been co-opted, just like everything else gets co-opted.

alternative?” It’s being able to accept multiple ways of seeing, of doing, of making. This is still “good” design.

NIDA ABDULLAH

I would love for us to have more histories, more thought processes, or methodologies. We are saying, “Here’s the canon and here’s the ‘alternative,’” but I think we should also take a look at canon formation. How have we come to know these things? For instance, through translation, through violence, through theft? Or through institutionalization? Through the limits of language and its use? Through image and its use? Rather than having a canon alongside alternatives (which I think still maintains hierarchies), how do we de-form the canon? It’s hard because I think when we use words like “alternative” or “vernacular,” it’s like we’re saying this is lower than the way we “normally” do it. What do you see as the hierarchies in design? Do you think that grad programs create certain hierarchies? Do you think that certain industries create hierarchies? I certainly think that schools create hierarchies, and different institutions have different kinds of credibility. That has to change. I used to be ashamed to say that I went to NC State because it’s not one of the big art schools; I also got disappointed reactions from people. I think it’s definitely stratified across all the industries within design. For some reason a place like Pentagram is still revered. If you’re a big designer there, I think that gives you legitimacy in the industry. I also think you are legitimized (if we’re looking at the United States) by where you work. If you’re working at a small school or you’re in-house at a healthcare facility, that isn’t legitimate or it’s viewed as less than. I think that’s where a lot of the hierarchy comes into play—even though those are really practical things that do need designing and do need attention from a designer’s perspective. I think they expose you to the real ways design is part of people’s lives. Right now, a lot of my students from years past work with small government organizations. A couple of them are working for the Atlanta city government. They really want to find an agency job, without seeing that the work they’re doing in those spaces is valuable work.

Because I went to state school for undergrad and grad and am now teaching at an art school, I often find myself comparing and contrasting the hierarchies attached to these spaces. They both have their own complexities and issues. At the end of the day, I think I’ve learned a lot about institutions and the way they work with people. How they don’t really reflect people. Teaching is a very amazing, loving thing, but the institution hardly moves, and the hierarchy of the administrative gaze sometimes diminishes the act. Is there any advice that you could give for emerging Black, Brown, or Latinx design students who are considering design or even thinking about potentially teaching? What kinds of advice would you give them?

Sara Ahmed, who writes a lot about institutionalized Whiteness, wrote that as a Black or Brown person or a person of color in a White space, we often try to blend into the background or not disrupt. But I think it’s important to be disruptors. That’s very challenging; it’s a lot of emotional and intellectual labor. It’s okay to constantly question. I think a lot of the time people get annoyed at me because I’m always thinking and questioning, but it’s important to allow yourself to do that if you want to do it. You don’t have to be a representative for your entire people either.

60 / 61

Even though I probably didn’t follow my own advice, I wanted to come to Pratt thinking it would be super cool, and it is, but I also feel like I left behind a place where I felt more myself. Staying in your own spaces doesn’t mean you failed in any way. I think there’s always this idea of migration toward Whiteness that is incredibly internalized. I reflect more on that than I did before. I would also say to design educators who are coming up—be confident in how you want to approach design. I think a lot of design educators who are Black, Brown, or Latinx have their own way of approaching design or design education or creating a culture in the studio space that are valid ways of doing it. I would suggest being confident and maybe finding a mentor.

JASON ALEJANDRO

is a Puerto Rican graphic designer and educator based in New Jersey. He is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) in Ewing, New Jersey. Previously, he taught at Rutgers University, Lehigh University, Kean University, and the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include Puerto Rican design history, the decolonization of design, and typographic form and invention.

JASON ALEJANDRO

One poster design from “Courses,” a series of eight posters about graphic design pedagogy by Jason Alejandro, completed during his MFA studies at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

How did you get into teaching design?

JASON ALEJANDRO

It’s funny. Looking back, I think that it was just in the cards for me. My family is from Puerto Rico, but I was born and raised here in New Jersey. I’ve always lived in New Jersey. My mother was an English teacher who taught ESL in an inner city urban area, and I went to a very diverse high school. I grew up surrounded by a lot of different cultures and ethnicities, and books were a big part of my childhood. My dad was a truck driver, but he also painted as a hobby. Looking back at what my parents were doing, there were influences that I didn’t realize I had at the time. In high school, I took an art class with a teacher who had a degree in architecture, and she suggested I take her drafting course. Throughout high school I was really into architecture and started drafting by hand, then went on to draft things on the computer. I grew up between low-income neighborhoods and really affluent neighborhoods in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Elizabeth is very diverse but largely Hispanic. My grandmother lived there, and we went to her house every Sunday after church. Most of my friends were White. All of that shaped how I’ve ended up and where I’ve ended up in important ways. That’s probably when I realized what graphic design really was for the first time in my life. That’s where I first heard the term, and the way that it came to me was through album artwork and music packaging. This is like 2002 to 2003. I was into lots of different kinds of music, everything from mainstream alternative music to punk rock, hardcore, metal, hip hop—all of that. Visually I was very influenced by a lot of the artwork that came along with the CDs and album packaging. That’s when I started to notice connections in the liner notes of the music, like art direction by so-and-so, or creative direction and graphic design by so-and-so, and realizing that that was a skill set. That was really enlightening for me. I realized that it was what I wanted to do, not architecture, because I wouldn’t be able to be super creative in that field. I went to architecture school in New Jersey for my first year of college, but I struggled when it came to my math classes. I ended up switching majors from architecture to graphic design, enrolling in community college. I worked full-time and eventually transferred to Kean

University, where I got my BFA in visual communication. While I was there, I had a few professors who really shaped my outlook on the field and my outlook on education. My graphic design education was kind of circuitous. It also became an opportunity for me to start to think about what academic rigor really was. While getting my BFA, I was able to make connections between graphic design and other fields that I don’t think everyone else was making at the time. Part of that was because I had a typography teacher who was very old-school and taught type by hand. After class, I asked him how far I could take this, and he invited me to be one of two students who put together a proposal for a research project. That was my first experience in research. That summer was amazing. He threw us into researching typographic history and understanding type classification in a very deep way. We compiled everything into a binder, which he was going to use as the basis for a book about typography.

After I graduated, I worked as an environmental graphic designer for a little while. It was great, but the company I worked for was not so great. I was also commuting a pretty far distance. At the time, my wife and I were starting a family, and I wanted to be closer to home. A position opened up at Princeton University Press for a junior book designer, and that was pretty close to my house in Central New Jersey. I applied and I got that job. I spent eight years there as a book

64 / 65

At the same time, all of that research informed us in creating our own typeface designs, drawing letters by hand, and digitizing them. We worked on three different alphabets and collaborated on our professor’s typeface. That was huge because when I went back to school in the fall, I had done this incredibly immersive research project. That was the first time I connected typographic history to architectural history and history of the Western world through the lens of politics, sociology, and various movements. It all came together and started to make sense to me. It was a big “Aha” moment when I understood why letterforms looked the way they did at certain points in history, and how that was connected to the technology of the day. I knew at that point that I would want to go to grad school and eventually teach.

NADIE PUEDE DAR LO QUE NO TIENE. – D R . R A M Ó N E M E T E R I O B E TA N C E S Translation: “No one can give others what they don’t have for themselves.”

designer. We designed books for everything, from religion and sociology to philosophy, physics, literature, history, and economics. It was really fantastic because I was able to absorb information about almost every subject. It was an education in and of itself.

Can you speak more to what that research and work was about? I had invested a lot of effort and time in ignoring my own culture and heritage as a child. I have siblings who are much older than me, and even though my parents occasionally spoke Spanish to me, I never replied in Spanish. As a child, I didn’t want to hear the music, I didn’t want to learn how to dance. I just wanted to fit in with my White friends. When I was twenty-something and had a newborn daughter, I realized how much damage that had done. While I was doing research into Puerto Rico’s history as a colony (for the first time in my life) I came across the names and lives of Puerto Rican Nationalists, who fought and worked for Puerto Rican independence. Since I hadn’t grown up on the island, and I had worked hard to reject my culture, the research became very meaningful to me. I came across a particular quote that translates to “No one can give others what they don’t have for themselves.” It had a specific legal interpretation, but what it meant to me was that I would never be able to pass on to my own kids what I couldn’t

66 / 67

While I was [working] there, I did a low-residency MFA in graphic design because I wanted to go to grad school, but wasn’t able to move my family to do a full-time residency program. I did my MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. The program was started by Matt Monk, who came from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Silas Munro was one of the early faculty members in the program too. During my studies I found out that, at the University Library at Princeton, there were archives from a Puerto Rican graphic designer by the name of Lorenzo Homar. I remember thinking to myself that I could not believe that I had never considered graphic design through my own heritage. It became a really important part of not only my research but also just my own personal identity. I started looking into Puerto Rico’s history and really engaging with that in a way that I had been completely ignorant of growing up.

JASON ALEJANDRO

claim for myself. I knew that I had to learn as much as I could about Puerto Rico and its history. Through that research, I created posters with quotes that I found. I also engaged in a collaborative research project with a colleague of mine. Her name is Laura Rossi García, and she’s also Puerto Rican. We found out that we were essentially researching the same things, but from different perspectives, so we decided to combine our efforts and create a publication. In 1949, the US government created a social education program in Puerto Rico called DIVEDCO. Through this program, some of the first silkscreen and screen printing equipment came to the island, and artists were trained and employed across Puerto Rico to create posters, publications, and films about a variety of topics. Everything from basic hygiene, social education, social welfare programs, and preserving a sense of Puerto Rican culture and legacy, to promoting health and wellness. One of the initiatives was a series of almanacs, which had illustrations, artwork, typography, photography, poems, games, and songs to build a sense of community and present new kinds of information to a Puerto Rican population that was becoming connected to the rest of the world at that time. It was also very important in promoting literacy in the more rural parts of the island. Laura and I both tried to imagine what a modern-day almanac would look like based on design work we found during the 1950s and 60s. We started buying some of the originals on eBay, and then digitized the typography and wrote and edited a bilingual publication—silkscreened the cover, assembled, bound them, and distributed them at our graphic design residency. That is research that I’m hoping to continue as a professor. Do you imagine that some of this research will come into your curriculum? Do you find that students want to engage with how imagery or typography is informed by various cultures? Right now I’m preparing a lecture for a freshman seminar course where faculty from different departments present. I’m going to talk about the protests that happened in Puerto Rico in the summer of 2019, and the revolutionary, explosive nature of creative work that made the protest possible. I also want to show that the oppressive circumstances we find ourselves in can be the thing that inspires us.

68 / 69

Jason Alejandro: “Photograph of my grandmother (abuelita), Emilia Ayala, as a young woman. I restored this damaged photograph for her ninetieth birthday in 2017.”

It’s very easy to just be comfortable and do work in a self-absorbed way that doesn’t think critically about the world around us or those who are oppressed or marginalized. I do have to push certain students in a direction that they aren’t comfortable with at first. I’m happy to see that a good portion of them are starting to ask some deeper questions about what it is that they’re exploring.

Almanaqué is a collaborative research project about Puerto Rican design and culture, with a particular focus on developments in education and the arts during the mid-twentieth century. The journal was written, edited, designed, and published by Jason Alejandro and Laura Rossi García as part of their graduate studies at Vermont College of Fine Arts. It was printed and distributed in an edition of sixty copies.

70 / 71

JASON ALEJANDRO

I absolutely plan on using this research and bringing it into the curriculum here. TCNJ is a liberal arts college, and I’d say it’s predominantly White. One of the reasons why I wanted to teach here was because, like many institutions, we are having conversations about not just diversity and inclusion, but also about antiracism and dismantling White supremacy. It’s not just a conversation, though. When I first visited the campus, I could tell that they were putting their money where their mouth was by investing in opportunities to change the demographic of the student body. Another thing that was important to me was that Dr. Maurice Hall, the dean of the School of the Arts and Communication, also had Caribbean roots. My conversation with him during my campus visit was amazing. He asked me incredibly tough questions about what it would mean to teach here as a Brown person, as a Latino, and how I might engage with the students here. Another thing is that there’s a high proportion of female students. I had to think about what that would mean as a male professor. A lot of his own work and research is in communication studies and Caribbean culture, and he had an interest in theater and performance as well. I liked that. Essentially the person who would be my boss was going to be somebody that I could learn from. It wouldn’t be just another White administrator or faculty member talking about issues, but someone who has actually experienced things and is living with them. That was important to me. We’re located between Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey. Trenton is a tremendously underserved community. During my faculty orientation they took us on a tour of the city, and I found out that some of the faculty members here at TCNJ were already working on communityengaged learning opportunities and research projects within the Hispanic population here. There is a large community of Puerto Ricans. Years ago, I made a promise to myself that, if given the opportunity, I would work to make graphic design a field that was accessible to underserved youth of color. I would just love to create a summer program, or some kind of graphic design intensive for high school students or at juvenile detention facilities or prisons. Graphic design can be such a powerful tool. Do you see there being an increase in the number of Black, Brown, and Latinx designers? What do you think is influencing or challenging that population when they’re learning about design or working in the industry?

“

– LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA Excerpt from Residente by Residente. Translation: “We were born with revolution in our veins. Between the rhythm of ‘bomba’ and ‘plena.’ And we are connected in the bad times and in the good times.”

72 / 73

Nacimos con revolución en las venas. Entre ritmo de bomba y plena. Y estamos conectados en las malas y en las buenas.”

Jason Alejandro: “Six stones of varying color and shape, collected from the bed of the Virgin River at the Temple of Sinawava in Utah’s Zion National Park, during the summer of 2019 on our family cross-county roadtrip. The stones serve as a reminder of the tremendous natural beauty of the place, as well as the experience our family of six had as we drove coast-to-coast (and back) over twenty-four days.”

I feel like we’re on the cusp. There are scholars and designers like yourself, Ramon Tejada at RISD, and Silas Munro at Otis, Jerome Harris, and so many other people who are doing such amazing work right now. Whether it’s writing, curating shows, or working in the realm of feminist or queer design, I feel like there are so many people really working to try and reshape this field in amazing ways. It can be difficult not being at a school like Parsons, SVA, or Pratt, where there is a global dynamic in the student body. When I taught in Philly, at UPenn, I was really lucky to have a very diverse group of students there, from different countries and ethnicities and backgrounds.

Here at TCNJ, they’ve recently hired a vice president for equity and inclusion. It’s a relatively new role, but I think here on campus there is a level of ownership. The history of this campus is really interesting because it used to be called Trenton State College, and in the 1990s there was a very intentional move away from any association with the city of Trenton. Its name changed to The College of New Jersey. Even that was kind of a racket because technically Princeton University used to be known as the College of New Jersey. That certainly left a bitterness with the township, and it felt like the college was turning its back on the community, which it was. With the

74 / 75

The most exciting work to me is about dismantling systems of power. In our field and in academia, it is hard reading the same old history books. We’re tired of not seeing ourselves in them, feeling like the work itself is not really reflective of what we hold to. But I feel like there will be more and more opportunities in the future for students. I’ll talk about New Jersey as an example. We have one of the most segregated public school systems in the country, and across the state there is tremendous inequality between the various school districts here. At the same time, I think New Jersey ranked third in the nation for the quality of education in public schools, which is tremendous, but that isn’t available to all students across the state, only in certain school districts. There is a lot of inequality in our state. I would love to see more opportunities for design education for high school students, as I mentioned before. Even at a young age, visual literacy is important, as is understanding where certain references come from and what they mean, so that we have a population that is more educated about that.

JASON ALEJANDRO

rebranding, it became exclusive and the demographic in the student body shifted. I think what we’re seeing now, in the last five years or so, is an owning up to that, and saying that it wasn’t right and that we want to engage with the greater Trenton community. I’m sure certain faculty had been engaged with the community all along. I know that there’s an art professor here who’s been doing projects in Trenton for many years. I think that collectively we want to see the campus being opened up, being made accessible to people in the surrounding communities. I think it’s important that young people of color feel like this place is here for them. If there are children or high school students who come here and see a theater show, a concert, an art exhibit, or a lecture, they should feel comfortable—not feel like they’re somewhere where they don’t belong. That will be a good indication of whether the faculty and administration are doing enough to change things. What do you think is missing from the conversation right now in design? Do you have any advice for emerging Black, Brown, or Latinx graphic designers? I think I left out a little bit of how I ended up here, at TCNJ. After working at Princeton University Press for eight years, I took a job at a local branding and creative agency. Following that, I became an art director for a global healthcare company. I was there for three years working on a team that did a lot of corporate communications and branding work. It was a great learning experience, but teaching was the goal. I also felt very conflicted about working for such a huge client that was involved in the opioid epidemic. I didn’t know what to do, and also didn’t feel like I had anyone to talk to about it, which is a weird thing to say. I should mention that apart from that, I really enjoyed working there. I loved the people I worked with. I didn’t get to do the most exciting graphic design work, but it was a tremendous learning opportunity and the collaboration was amazing. The other designers and the people I’ve worked with, they’re like family to me. But it was also very isolating because out of a company of fifty to sixty people, there were only a handful of Black, Brown, and Latinx designers, and that was difficult.

When I came to TCNJ, and in response to your question about what’s missing in the field, that experience speaks to what we need as educators. I think, as design educators, we should be having more conversations around the opportunities that are presented to our students, and enabling them with an ethical sensibility to make good choices in their careers—looking into the companies that we apply to and the values they represent. I’m guilty of this myself! I’ve always said I would love to do typography for Nike. But then I really have to consider their labor practices, how much waste or pollution they create, or even just ask myself, “Do we need more sneakers?”

76 / 77

I was at the New York Art Book Fair recently, and I remember thinking to myself that there were so many T-shirts about climate change. I thought, “Do we need all these quotes about climate change on a new T-shirt?” There’s something really wrong here. That made me think about my career as a book designer, and the question about waste, paper, and how books are produced. I never had to be the person who sat there and did all the math and figured it all out. I was shielded from that part of the process. I think we should really start to think about all of those things. When we take a certain job for a certain client, we should think about the entire system that’s at play, including the supply chain, and labor, and how decisions that we make as a designer might also affect factory workers on the other side of the world. We shouldn’t just do things because they are convenient. I think we need to get angry and have difficult conversations. We need to use the tools at our disposal to express how we feel about these things. Those are the things that I’m thinking about and struggling with myself right now. I have four kids, we’re a big family, and I’m imagining what their future might be like. It’s difficult to think about. I think it’s important to start to think about how designers can play a role in supporting the conversations that really need to happen to change things. Since 2016, I have not been as hopeful. I’m very curious to see how, as we move out of this presidency and this political climate, how that’s going to shake out as well.

JENNIFER RITTNER

is a writer, educator, and communications strategist who teaches courses in design history, design for social value, and thesis writing in the graduate programs at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). She has been published in the New York Times, DMI: Journal, Core77, AIGA Eye on Design, and Against the Grain. She frequently writes and lectures about design and social justice.

JENNIFER RITTNER

DESIGN AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Developing Insights Through Open Dialogue PART 1 – NOMENCLATURE

The language of intersectional identity is as fluid as our own experiences. The following terms are meant to provide some general framings for interrogating identity, our own and others. IDENTITY

Your sense of self. Articulated as, “I am . . . and what that means to me is . . .” PRESENTATION The visual demonstration of your identity to the world, both conscious and unconscious. Articulated as, “I want to be perceived as . . . because . . .” SIGNIFIER Ways in which you consciously signal aspects of your identity, such as grooming, dress, iconography, body art, etc. Articulated as, “I demonstrate my identity by. . . because it shows that I . . .” REACTIONS Your perception of how others respond to your identity presentation and signifiers. Articulated as, “I think others perceive me as . . . because they . . .” SHIFTS Changes in your identity and identity presentation, which may happen in reaction to external stimuli or internal reflection. Articulated as, “I used to be/think/act this way. . . and now I . . .” CONFLICTS Experiences of identity in which one aspect of your identity may feel contradictory to other aspects of your identity, either because of societal norms or inner conflict. Articulated as some version of “This but . . .”or general uncertainty. ADAPTATIONS (CODE-SWITCHING) A means of altering one’s identity presentation to suit a particular situation in response to perceived cultural norms or expectations. Articulated as, “I alter . . . when I’m in or with or around . . . because . . .”

Design and Social Justice Teaching Tool created by Jennifer Rittner.

I’m just going to jump right in. What does “Brown” mean? Brown could also mean Latinx, or it could be Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian. I’m curious as to how you’ve unpacked what these terms mean.

JENNIFER RITTNER

I’ve got a lot of thoughts on this. There is language relevant to all people of color or marginalized groups, but I think that there are very specific forms of marginalization that hit specific communities. There’s a responsibility to encapsulate the larger question of race, color, and ethnicity-based discrimination, as well as to hold up a very specific form of racism in the United States that affects African Americans differently than it does people who are considered Latinx. The larger umbrella of discrimination is meaningful, but so is drilling down the specific language. There’s this thing that’s happening in my class that has made me start to think about this framing a lot. This year, of my eighteen students, eleven are from China, three are from the United States, and one is African American. Then we have two from India, one from South Africa, a Black South African. These are all different identities, and the largest group is the Chinese students. The argument was made to me early in the semester that maybe I could shift the focus of my class to incorporate the Chinese experience in terms of the social issues that are relevant in China, and that we could use that framing to talk about privilege, power, marginalization, and so on. I considered it and thought I could maybe do something around that, but I realized that I don’t have enough knowledge around Chinese history or politics to really do it well. My point is not that all forms of marginalization are the same, but that the marginalization of African Americans in this country is very specific. I want to center that and hold it up. My mother is Brazilian. She came to the United States in the 1960s when the civil rights movement was happening, and was unfamiliar with Blackness in the specifically US context. She had her own experience with being Black and marginalized in her country, so because of how and where I grew up, that conversation was very much a part of my life. I recognize the ways in which I live on the margins of the conversation as well. I’m biracial. My mother is Afro-Brazilian, not African American,

but I grew up in a neighborhood that was marginalized and artificially redlined as a Black neighborhood. The conversation around Blackness and marginalization as an African American story is what I grew up with, and so I felt that it needed to be centered in the design space. For me to say, “Let’s just transfer that idea into a Chinese context, or into a global context,” is to once again say that the African American experience doesn’t matter. That anything can stand in its place. That is just not the case. The reality is that if you look at forms of African American culture as we understand it, it is appropriated, it is stolen from, it is referenced, it is built on, and it is central to how we understand ourselves as Americans. We can’t just push that aside and say, “Let’s tell a different story.” There’s a lot of value in people bringing in their perspectives. I think that making those connections globally is the responsibility of the students. That’s not necessarily what we’re doing as educators. As educators, we’re saying that this particular story is one that matters and should be told in a very particular way. 80 / 81

The design history class I teach in Design Research, Writing, and Criticism, which is a one-year MA program, is a small cohort of only eight students. Before the semester started, when I was rewriting the design history curriculum, I thought, “Well, what does it really mean to decolonize design history?” For me, it means taking away all forms of text and centering the object. It means using the object as a catalyst for having conversations around what is made, what it is made for, who uses it, what it is used for, and how it is used. Also, how does it represent cultures? That means looking at the context of an object from a culture other than White, European historical culture. Use the object as a way to open up the possibilities of how we tell counterpublic stories. I thought about where I could take students to have them engage with that story in other spaces, and one of them is the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I took my class up there before I knew what the students’ thesis topics would be. I knew I wanted to take them to the Schomburg, because again the issue is not how to make sure that I’m relating to what their thesis is; it’s how to make them understand that their thesis will tie back to African American culture in some way. It all ties back, even if you have to think laterally. We went uptown to the Schomburg

JENNIFER RITTNER

Mind Maps created by Jennifer Rittner’s students.

to have the conversation about these artifacts of African American history that tie to all of the students’ subjects in some way; part of their responsibility is to find connections. The problem is that most people only study this material culture if they feel that it has a direct correlation. I want them to see that everything has a connection to it. A big misconception is this notion that Black culture should live in this bubble of Blackness, that that’s all there is and that we can’t penetrate it. That’s the reason that people are like, “I don’t go into that neighborhood,” but really it’s an intellectual, cultural space that they should be eager to engage with. Where and how did you get into design? Where did you study and how did you land here? I started my career as a museum educator. I graduated from NYU with a degree in art education and went on to work in museums. My mentor was the brilliant Rae Alexander-Minter, who was the Head of Education at the New York Historical Society. She’s a Black woman who held that space in a way that made me want to learn from her. I did not realize when she was my mentor that she would be the last Black woman I would meet in museums at that level for my entire career. It didn’t occur to me that she was going to be the only one. She brought

Cornel West and all these new voices into that space. She really wanted to hold space. I believed in her and I thought that that was what I wanted to do, so I worked there. I moved around museum roles and landed in a place called the American Federation of Arts, where I spent four or five years working on a project that was intended to bring new audiences into museums through education and PR. I loved the framing of it, but I was kind of young at the time. It became less about what is deficient in these communities and more about what is not coming into museums. It also looked at what museums were not doing well, in order to begin to appeal to more generalized communities. I tried to find people who recognize the truth that these institutions have not been designed for inclusion. I worked on that for several years, and then I just got to a place where I could not advance without another degree and couldn’t afford to go back to school. I thought, “Where can I go in my career that will take me to graduate school eventually, but where I can earn money in the meantime?”

How do you think your identity has influenced the way that you teach design?

82 / 83

A colleague, Max Burton, who was working at Smart Design got me very excited about design and the understanding of design as a social construct. I had not thought about that before. It was a whole new area of interest for me. I got involved with the AIGA through seeing what’s out there in design, and then ended up at Columbia University for grad school, where I earned my Ed.M. in Communication and Education. I wrote a thesis titled “Space, Time & Objects: New Media and the Evolution of History Education.” After I finished school, I worked at Pentagram for five years. I was always an educator just working in design (including writing lesson plans for the New York Times Learning Network while I worked as a project manager at Pentagram), but never truly connecting both fields. Then my Pentagram colleague Denise Ramzy asked if I would like to teach at Parsons, where Susan Yelavich needed faculty to teach her junior year course, Contemporary Issues in Twenty-First Century Visuality. She said, “Do you want to come and teach this class?” That was when I started to put the two together.

JENNIFER RITTNER

Again, through my mother, I saw the complexities of being Black and foreign, which is its own separate kind of marginalization. Within Black communities, she often gets marginalized and silenced for having a very thick accent. Once she speaks, people develop a whole other perception of her. I use a lot of the experiences that I learned by watching my mother navigate the world, but I also pull from my own experience. As a lightskinned, biracial woman, I’ve been hired as the “safe” minority on teams and for projects that require “diversity.” In 1994, I was an intentional minority-hire for the AFA’s Art Access II project, and it felt important to me to represent “minorities” in whatever way I understood that term when I was in my twenties. As the only person of color in a lot of rooms at that time, I didn’t really have anyone to turn to and ask, “Am I doing this right?” I questioned myself constantly, and at the same time, I picked a lot of fights with people in power because I knew they were wrong, but I didn’t have the language to constructively express why or what could be different. I just had anger. Anger on behalf of my mother, and my friends, and my communities, and myself. A lot of my interactions with White people in positions of power were expressed as rage. I have tried harder as I’ve gotten older to become more subversive. I was not very successful at that earlier in my life—and that’s not necessarily a good thing. I used to be much more radical, and angry, and in everybody’s face about all matters racial. I burned a lot of bridges early on, but I’ve changed the way I talk so that I will be heard. I’m not advocating for “softening” one’s approach, but I know that for me it meant that earlier in my career I was not being effective in initiating change, only in alienating people. In your experience, how do some of the challenges or concerns around race shift at an art school like SVA versus a public institution or an HBCU? Or an institution that’s primarily serving students of color? That’s such a good question. A colleague, who is also a biracial person of color, talked about the fact that he did not want to teach at SVA anymore because he just thought, “Why am I teaching these kids? I could be doing more good somewhere else.” He wanted to teach students in the CUNY system. I agree with that, and I’ve been struggling with that thought. I think there are really different conversations that can happen when

“One of my mother’s handkerchiefs. My mother needlepointed, sewed, and for a time worked in a lace factory. I love her handmade lace samples as well as this small handkerchief, which is quite old. I like having them in my dresser drawer with my perfumes and hair things.”

84 / 85

Jennifer Rittner: “My mother’s sewing scissors after decades of use. Dresses, dolls, pillows, and drapes: there was almost nothing she couldn’t make with fabric, needle, thread, and a good pair of scissors.”

JENNIFER RITTNER

there’s more than just one Black student in the room. That’s been my experience here at SVA—there’s usually maybe one other Black person in the room. I don’t know what to do about that except center the conversation for people who don’t have access to it in other parts of their lives. Maybe there’s something really valuable in bringing complex ideas about race, racial discrimination, and equity into a majority White and international school like SVA, because where else are they going to learn it? Don’t we need these design students to engage with hard questions about power and privilege? I think that what I am bringing to this particular art and design curriculum is a way of thinking critically about design that decenters White Europeanness very intentionally in the context of design history, design for social value, and the framing of individual thesis investigations. I think I can do that at SVA because I have the autonomy to develop my curriculum, and in my close collaborations with one of my department chairs, Allan Chochinov at Products of Design, I can affect meaningful change in how the department talks to itself about race, identity, discrimination, and equity. And I strongly believe that the students I’m reaching would not have opportunities to engage with these ideas if I weren’t there. If I do that work here at SVA now, maybe I can create opportunities for more Black and Brown students and faculty to be whole here, without having to center all of their teaching on validating their racial identity. Look, I went to NYU as an undergraduate, a school with a structured liberal arts pedagogy. I feel really lucky that I got the core curriculum at a time when people were asking what should be taught. It was amazing at that time to see faculty bringing in new voices. Toni Morrison was in the core. James Baldwin was in the core. The conversations about which ideas were central to the core curriculum was exciting to witness. I also had a work-study job in the classics department, and there, too, they were talking about what should be considered “Classics.” They were interrogating how to construct the idea of early Western culture. The interrogation of those spaces was a huge part of my experience. This year I launched a new graduate program at SVA called the Summer Colloquium for International Graduate Students, which is

“ If you have come

– L I L L A W AT S O N Indigenous Australian artist

86 / 87

to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your success is tied up with mine, let us work together.”

JENNIFER RITTNER

designed as a humanities intensive that very intentionally introduces international students to Black American thought. Exactly. Part of the problem is that, in discussions about the intersection of race or representation in design, there is a gap in knowledge of context and knowing how to have conversations about that context. So then you’re just creating designers in this bubble who are coming out of school and not investing in a conversation that deals with these topics. The priorities of certain students are really just about getting certain kinds of jobs that look good on their resume, but there’s still an absence of engagement in those social, ethnographic research components. Not that you have to be completely immersed in that space, but I do think you have to be a fully competent and culturally conscious person that engages with some of these things. How do we encourage students to read with a critical eye, and to ask questions? Susan Yelavich, who was teaching about global issues in twenty-first-century visual reality [at SVA], was trying to close that gap a little bit because the readings were historical, global, and sociological, and they dealt with a lot of the issues that would come out of a humanities program. I think she recognized that not everybody was going to have humanities in their various programs, but that she could give them this as a framing, providing the space to not understand and to ask questions. I think that’s one of the things that you can’t get in a professional practice program because they expect you to understand everything. They want you to demonstrate knowledge. You aren’t encouraged to ask questions. I think that is a fundamental deficit in how these programs ask people to just churn out work. How do you think we could get more Black, Brown, and Latinx designers in the field? Should they even be here? Are there more supportive institutions? Everybody should be here. I think we should be reaching out to tribal colleges and HBCUs in more intentional ways. Students who have a strong core of critical thinking will thrive in graduate design programs, learning how to translate complex ideas into material reality—through object design, system design, and experience design. They will already have a strong foundation

What should institutions be doing in terms of support? What does support look like for you? First of all, I don’t think there is a clear formula that institutions can follow in terms of providing meaningful support to faculty and students of color. As far as I know, no model for it has been shown to work, in part because I’m not sure if we’ve defined what “working” would mean. The truth is, I would have answered this question very differently a year ago. But through conversations with colleagues like you, Anne Berry, Michele Washington, and others, I’ve come to feel that structured mentorships at our institutions that intentionally provide opportunities for faculty of color to move into leadership positions is an area of support that should be heavily invested in by our institutions. They should be systemized so that faculty have equitable opportunities regardless of popularity or portfolio, and there should be clear measures of accountability in terms of how adequately their mentors are serving in their roles. I also think, speaking for my own institution, that we need term limits on leadership positions, so that faculty have positions to grow into. Support

88 / 89

of humanities, liberal arts, and in some cases business, and the thing that design school can do is to be a transdisciplinary bridge to all of those other fields. Graduates from HBCUs and tribal colleges should attend graduate programs in art and design school because there’s a value in the particular perspectives those students bring around how to mechanize change in the way product design, community design, design research, and design writing make possible. In short, we need them, and I hope some of those students agree that they would gain something from the experiences our programs offer. How the hell do you bring people in? I feel like part of it is representation, right? Some of it is shitty and tokenizes those of us who are here to reach people, and you’re like, “Look, we’re here trying to make change; come and be a part of the change with us.” We need to recognize that part of what we can do is be a conduit. Part of it is just more intentionally going into tribal colleges, community colleges, and HBCUs where there isn’t currently much recruitment effort, and telling those audiences that design is a possibility. The design world can be so insular that students in liberal arts programs simply don’t know that we exist and that we can offer them something of value.

JENNIFER RITTNER

also looks like an office of mediation, or an ombudsman, who serves as a neutral voice when conflicts arise. This person should have the power to address abuses or concerns at every level of the institution, on behalf of students, administration, faculty, and leadership. Support in that sense is both the listening to of grievances and concerns and the actions that follow. I think that the curriculum shift is where the institution has a bigger responsibility. That is a much bigger deal because the curriculum has to be meaningful. The curriculum in most of the SVA programs is defined by the chairs. As far as I’m aware, there is not a larger conversation around what is being taught, and how each of these programs are representing and creating equity. For an institution to create more inclusion, there’s got to be some kind of curriculum oversight, and there have to be hard conversations. I don’t think that a faculty chair should necessarily be in their position if they’re not willing to have those conversations. Schools that are engaged in professional practice have a responsibility to do more than just churn out makers. They’re producing thinkers. One thing is criticality and the other is fidelity. There’s this choice. You can make things that are high fidelity and high criticality, and that’s the optimal space. I think the danger zone is when you have very high fidelity and low criticality. In that space you can just make stuff, and it doesn’t matter if you’re stepping on people or stealing ideas or trading on culture. It’s just about making it look pretty. I think that a lot of our programs are allowing that shit to fly—really high fidelity and extremely low to no criticality. Why should we allow that? We can have students coming in who are already feeling marginalized in spaces where they’re trying to find their voice as professionals, as makers, and as changers of culture, and also have to work alongside colleagues who express no interest in cultural meaning and critical thought. That’s the worst kind of demoralizing space that you can be in. What do you think is missing from the conversation in design right now regarding some of these topics around race or design education? I love this moment because I feel like so many people are talking about this in ways that are really exciting, and I am just so happy to be a part of the conversation. Important ideas are

What advice would you give to emerging Black, Brown, and Latinx designers who are either thinking about going into design as a student or going into academia as an educator? It’s different for everyone. It’s a hard question because I feel like the onus is always on us to be their voice and be a mentor. It’s not that they need the advice as much as they need the support. They should know that they have support, and that we all collectively need to empower anyone who’s in these spaces who is truly marginalized historically. For those of us who are working on this, teaching and trying to make change on this level, my advice is to keep finding each other. I guess if that’s the advice for us, that is the advice for students as well. Keep finding each other. It’s not always going to happen in your own institution, but building community is the thing that we can do for each other.

90 / 91

surfacing, and we’re not having these conversations just among ourselves; we’re actually making change at higher levels. One thing that is missing is the issue of how we can integrate our programs with this much more highly interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approach. That is to say, we have to not be working only within design to fix it. I think that we need to be integrating sociology and other forms of social science. I just think there are other relevant fields outside of education because design touches everything. We need to have more consortium think tanks around interdisciplinarity, so that, when you get a degree in design, it is assumed that you understand something about how the mind works, you understand how the physical body reacts to stimuli, and you understand how culture and politics are informed and influenced by design. You should understand the social implications of the things that you’re making. That seems to be missing around race. It’s not only about race, but it very much is about race. The other component is how we define ethical research as a space where design making is not just exploiting populations and extracting knowledge. How do we make explicit that design research itself, which is not neutral, is a form of amplification of voices that are not currently being heard? Also, activism and ethical design research have to be modeled in every academic space, so that they can then be understood better at the professional level.

SHANTANU SUMAN

is an Assistant Professor of Visual Communication at Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana. He earned his Bachelor of Design in 2004 from Apeejay Institute of Design, in New Delhi, India, and received his MFA from the University of Florida in 2013. Suman has worked in India and the United States as an art director, graphic designer, documentary filmmaker, and design educator.

SHANTANU SUMAN

Hand-painted centerspread for the UK edition of Wired for a feature on Indian startups. Design by Shantanu Suman and Marisa Falcigno. Shantanu Suman and Marisa Falcigno / Courtesy Wired ©The Condé Nast Publications, Ltd.

How did you become a designer?

SHANTANU SUMAN

I’m the first person in my family to leave India and go outside the traditional job market. When I started going to school, people were thinking about going into engineering, becoming a doctor or a lawyer, or maybe they’d think about going into the military. Those were still the traditional jobs. I was good in a course called Engineering Drawing, and that would have led me to architecture, but nobody in my family knew how to help me with those things. It was a happy accident that I got into graphic design. I didn’t know exactly what I was getting into, but after spending a year and a half studying design I realized, “Okay, this sounds interesting.” I was friends with people who had older brothers working in advertising in New Delhi, and I was doing my undergrad in New Delhi. That was a good thing because New Delhi, if I have to compare, is probably like Washington, D.C. It’s the capital of India. There’s a lot of exposure in terms of the international market and what’s happening in advertising and design. That was my exposure, and it led me to believe that I wasn’t in the wrong field. I could do this. I finished my undergrad in 2003– 2004. From that point until 2010, I was in advertising in India. I worked in Delhi for a few years and then in Bombay (now known as Mumbai) for two years. I enjoyed my work more than going to meetings and managing a team. I also realized that if I could take a break and go to graduate school before getting too deep into advertising, that could be helpful. I eventually went to grad school at the University of Florida in 2010. The reason I selected Florida was that I got a fellowship and did not have student loans. I’d saved a little bit of money from my advertising days, so I was able to use that during grad school as well. What was that transition like moving to Florida after working in advertising? The interesting part is that weather-wise it was perfect because I was moving from Bombay. It was the same climate, and it had a similar humidity and heat. I also think it was a good transition because the University of Florida has a very strong international

student body. There was a strong Indian student group there— not that I was part of it, but it was still nice to be able to see a lot of familiar faces around. You were in school with not only an international group of students, but also a significant Indian population too? Exactly. Interestingly, not a lot of Indian students come here to the United States to study art or design. Even if they do, some of them go to schools like Maryland Institute of Art (MICA), Pratt, or the bigger places that are well known across the country. Why do you think that fewer students of Indian descent go into design?

Anyone who wants to go to grad school, I recommend that they get some work experience in the industry first. When I was in school, I realized that there were a lot of things that I didn’t do properly [in advertising], because nobody was there to teach

94 / 95

When my parents were telling their friends that I was in design school, they thought that I was studying fashion design or textile design because India has that market. They think that’s design. Graphic design, interior design, and other design disciplines were limited to bigger cities like Delhi or Bombay. Those who are born and raised around or in these cities know about graphic design. Not too many people from outside the bigger cities know about it. A lot of my friends who had been to the United States or the United Kingdom on vacations with their families were exposed to design. But for a lot of kids in smaller towns, like myself, it’s not something that they or anyone from their family has ever thought about. People who live in bigger cities go to schools in New York, in Chicago, or on the West Coast typically when studying abroad. Those are the places that they went to when they were traveling with their families, or they already have relatives living in the United States or the United Kingdom. These are also bigger institutions that have been ranked in the top fifteen or twenty colleges of design across the United States, so they are familiar with them. What was graduate school like? What kinds of projects were you considering as you transitioned from a strict advertising background?

SHANTANU SUMAN

Shantanu Shuman: “In the last few years, I have started working extensively with Devanagari (Hindi) script. I purchased these Devanagari wooden blocks from Uncle Goose, and they are a reminder of having fun while doing serious work.”

me. For example, I didn’t know how to do research. When I was in grad school, that was something that I was forced to do. I was supposed to learn how to do research properly, how to meet people, talk to them, interview them, read books and articles, expose myself. A lot of that happened in grad school, and I’m forever thankful for that because I think my undergrad education was very traditional and limited. When I came to Florida I realized how the discussion was on a different level. We were discussing how design cannot be taught using books. It has to be based on experiencing things and learning from the world. One project I worked on in grad school was about the truck art of India. It changed my life. This is an art form that has existed in India for eighty to ninety years, and I couldn’t find the people who started doing it. This is back when India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh used to

How did you transition into teaching? This is tricky because this is where things get very complicated. Design doesn’t fall under STEM, so I wasn’t going to get the traditional OPT (Optional Practical Training) that is granted to students who graduate with a STEM degree. For an international student with an arts degree, the OPT period is twelve months to look for a job. The employer has to sponsor them when they are hired. After grad school, I didn’t want to go back into the advertising industry. I applied for an O-1 visa, which is granted based on extraordinary abilities in the arts [and other fields]. I had to work with a lawyer and prove that I had so many accomplishments, that my work had been featured, that I had been talked about in all these places. It’s almost like you have to prove that you won some sort of an Academy Award equivalent. I was able to do that because the documentary film did well, and I had also worked with several clients and won advertising awards. I got the O-1 visa,

96 / 97

be the same country. There is hardly any documentation about it. Personally, I have used this art form for design inspiration or as a design reference in my advertising projects without even trying to find out where it started. There was no time to do the research when I was in advertising, but in grad school, I decided to use this as a small project. When I went to the library at the University of Florida, a research-based university, I quickly realized they had a robust library system. For the first time, I read newspaper articles and talks from all over the world. When I had access to all that material, I realized how little had been written about the truck art of India; that was so sad because nobody had the time or the willingness to write about it. That’s when I decided that I’d do the research. The next summer I traveled back to India and teamed up with two friends from my advertising days, Shreedavy Babuji and Istling Mirche. We traveled across India and documented work we could find. We didn’t have the best equipment. We used an iPhone and a Handycam. By the end we had enough material to make a short documentary film called Horn Please, and it’s the first-ever documentary film on that subject. This was all possible because of the exposure to research methods inculcated in my design education.

SHANTANU SUMAN

which helped me for the first three years after grad school. At some point, I realized that this was not sustainable and that I needed to look for a job that would sponsor my work visa. I was working with Open Door Design Studio (ODDS) in Asheville, North Carolina, a beautiful place. We did fantastic work there and won some really good awards. We worked with both international clients as well as local farms. There were some challenges with ODDS being a new business. I didn’t know what I was getting into, so within the first two or three years I realized how difficult it was to make money. I was working 24/7, and there were no breaks, no holidays, nothing. Even after working so much, I was still kind of borderline poor. Coming from the world of advertising, where I had more money than time, this was completely different. This basically made me rethink my options, and with the O-1 visa expiring, I had to renew it, which meant that I had to work with the lawyer and pay them again. I decided to apply for a teaching job at a university that could sponsor my H-1B visa, the regular work visa. I had already taught typography at the University of Florida. Teaching was something that I could do, and I figured I could find a way to balance my research and professional practice. That was a risk that I took, and I applied for teaching positions and was later hired at Ball State University in 2016. Are there elements of your cultural background that allow the curriculum to expand conversations around what imagery, typography, or pattern start to look like? There are two things that I want to say here: I want to talk about my culture and how it influences my teaching; and I want to talk about the culture that I was exposed to after moving here, being in the US for nine years and working in different industries. When I say industries, I mean within the creative industry. I’ve been in advertising, I’ve been a grad student, and now I’m faculty in a small town. After moving from India, I tried to tell everyone that the best way to learn and grow is to travel. The more you expose yourself, the more you see the world and the more you learn about other cultures. I have students in my class who haven’t traveled much outside of Indiana. It’s a little difficult to talk to them

98 / 99

Indianama 2017 “A Million Tongues” is a visual representation of the million eclectic languages that India holds within itself. Shantanu Suman and Shreya Katuri took inspiration from Indian matchbox art—an art form that offers insight into the diverse culture, commerce, art, politics, and lifestyle of Indians. Design by Shantanu Suman and Shreya Katuri.

100 / 101 “Keep Distance” fabric for a taxi in Mumbai that promotes road safety while trying to inculcate a better driving culture in the city.

SHANTANU SUMAN

about national designers, let alone international designers. This forces me to incorporate more of these conversations into class because that is how I am teaching myself and how I am learning about other designers as well. There’s a respect for and understanding of culture among students, not just for my own culture but also for the culture here in Indiana as well. When I say “my culture” I’m talking about India, and now “my culture” also means being in Muncie as an international designer. I incorporate a lot of those conversations into the classroom and talk about the benefits of these discussions. I’ve seen a rise in the number of students who want to move out and experiment and do things outside, so that’s a good shift. Another thing that I try to incorporate into my class is the philosophy of design thinking from IDEO. Basically, it talks about empathy: listening to the user and listening to the client. It’s almost like a mix of being an artist and a commercial artist, where you have your own style but you still have to work for the client. We need to be proud of who we are because that’s why clients want to work with us. We need to understand them and listen to them. I also have a lot of friends in India who are designers. I have friends from grad school who are not from the US, but from China or Spain, for example. If I have the opportunity to have them over Skype, I invite them to talk with my students about their experiences. It has helped expose my students to different kinds of audiences or groups. With these discussions that open up the dialogue, do you think it helps shape or influence where students aspire to work after school? Do you think that the aspirations for where people go once they finish school are influenced by that familial and cultural tie to where they grew up, or do you see more students pushing into other larger cities? I’ll give you a little background on this. When I came to Ball State, I was asked to introduce my design industry experiences to the classes, and one of the things that I did was to start a new class, which is almost like a design studio that is run by students. I’m like the creative director or manager of that studio. The design studio is in its sixth semester, and we have worked with about seventeen or eighteen clients on over fifty projects. Some of these projects have been international, there

Statue of Ganesh. In Hinduism, every good work starts with a prayer for Ganesh.

102 / 103

WE MAY HAVE ALL COME ON DIFFERENT SHIPS, BUT WE’RE IN THE SAME BOAT NOW. – MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

When I joined the Vis Com program, I found out that we needed to build a strong alumni connection. This meant that we needed someone to take charge and start building these connections. I have tried doing that through my connections to the students who have graduated. We have some students now in New York, Chicago, California, Washington, and Florida. We also have a lot of students who are in Indianapolis. Every semester for the senior year, in the first two classes, I schedule ten-minute meetings with every single senior during which we just talk about what their plan is. My first question is, “What do you want to do once you graduate?” I am not looking for a very specific answer, but I am looking to find some indication of whether they want to stay in the area or move out. Based on that, I try to introduce them to people either in the area or outside of the area throughout the semester, depending on what they want to do. When I went to school, I wish someone had been there to help me with this. Even when I was moving from India to the United States, I couldn’t find people who could provide answers about how to look for colleges or universities. Again, I’m from a very small town in India, and I know how afraid these kids might be. I know how much

104 / 105

have been a couple of national projects, and the majority have been local projects. The reason why I’m saying all of this is because obviously there are a lot of students who are from Indiana or Ohio. When we talk about designers who are doing all of this fantastic work, and we see their work in the news or on blogs, then the students think that they need to be in a bigger city. In the last few years, this student-run design studio has won eleven design awards, the majority of which are Graphic Design USA awards. For the first time, Ball State was listed among the top design schools in the country by Graphic Design USA magazine. Most of this work was for local clients in the community. The idea is to show them that you can work with local clients, but you can also have a very international approach and talk to a global audience. While we are still working in this international arena, we are also working with the community and are basically growing together with the university. I also enjoy doing that because there are students who want to live and work in the local community, whether it’s here in Muncie or in their own small town. There are students who want to move out of Indiana and out of the Midwest and outside the country as well.

SHANTANU SUMAN

pressure they must be getting from their parents for going to an art school, so whatever I can do to help them I think it’s my duty to do that. What do you feel is missing from the conversation right now in design or design education? I think that I was the first international tenure-track faculty hire in the school of art at Ball State. I just hope that that changes sooner rather than later. I know that a lot of people who are coming from other countries want to stay in the biggest US cities, but I think that needs to change. Their mindsets need to change. I think they need to move to smaller cities. State institutions need to start hiring more people of color who are of international origin. Not only that, but state institutions also need to hire people in human resources [departments] or in the international center who know how to work with these faculty members. Since graduating in 2013, I’ve spent at least two months out of each year doing paperwork, making sure that I’m eligible to work here and keep my job. I wish I could use that time for my professional practice or other things. I’m not even getting into this entire other debate about the H-1B visa, and what I can and can’t do. It takes a lot of work to be an international citizen in this country; people have to prove their qualifications. Sometimes more than people who were born in this country. It’s not just the work that we have to do—we also have to make sure that we have the proof that we have done this work. It gets tiring, and if there were more help, more support, and more understanding of that fact, that would be helpful. I don’t really expect this from the students because they’re still learning. Sometimes there’s a lack of understanding from adults, staff, faculty, or other people in the university or in the community. That can be challenging at times. For new and emerging Brown students who are entering design, whether they’re from the United States or outside of the United States, what advice would you give as they transition here to go to design school? One thing that I would suggest, now that I’ve been through this process, is that people who are in my position as art educators or design educators should announce it to the world that we

are here. We have the experience to share. That’s the missing link. That’s missing. There is no platform to tell students whom to contact. I can definitely talk to my peers or colleagues who are American citizens, but their experience would be very different. They might not even understand the paperwork and all the legalities of international students. I think that people like us have a platform and we should try to put ourselves out there more and more, so that students who are looking for that support system know where to go. For the students who are traveling from outside the country, it’s scary. It’s not easy. I mean they have to take out a lot of bank loans or borrow money from their families if they are traveling outside the country. If they could identify people to talk to, I think that could be a very good starting point. I think that both the international students and the international faculty in the United States need to get out of their comfort zone more. That’s what I can suggest at this point. 106 / 107

The last thing that I’ll add to this conversation is more or less for the international citizens and for people who can make a difference in American universities. When we talk about Asian studies or teaching international curriculums, I would hope (I mean, it seems like common sense) that they would actually look for international faculty to teach those classes and not just people who are here. As much as I know about Western design history, I don’t know a lot of things. I don’t see myself as an expert. I think someone who was born here, who has lived in that culture, would be able to teach that better.

ASHLEY DOUGHTY

is a visual storyteller, explaining personal experiences through verbal and visual language. Much of her practice deals with socioeconomic, racial, and gender-based issues, particularly those relating to cultural misconceptions and the development of personal identity. She shares and encourages such art-making as an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

ASHLEY DOUGHTY

N.O.Y.F.B. 2014. Design by Ashley Doughty.

How did you get into design? Why design and not something else? I always liked to draw things, especially in middle school. I also designed a lot of t-shirts. Once I started researching colleges in high school, I started specifically looking at illustration programs because they would allow me to make art focused around a specific problem or to illustrate a specific message. I just felt that was a better fit for me than going into painting or something more along the lines of fine art.

ASHLEY DOUGHTY

As you navigated those spaces in school, what were your experiences like? I’ll first say that in middle school and high school I went to private schools, and those were predominantly White schools. I’ve been used to being the minority every single day in that respect, so going to college and being in the minority there wasn’t anything new to me. My first two years, I didn’t necessarily bring in any subject matter related to being African American or even my personal experiences; it was more about just doing the work and getting a good grade. When I studied abroad in Italy the spring of my sophomore year, that’s when it really hit me: just how the color of my skin makes me stand out. I started to think about the fact that I shouldn’t necessarily try to be a certain way because people are going to see me as different from the get-go. Overall it was a good experience for me, having to be away from home and experience a completely different country and learn a new language. By the time I got back and started my junior year of college, I did feel a bit more comfortable bringing topics of race into my work. Still, for most of college I was focused on getting good grades and getting work done. I’ve always been really hard on myself, so if I didn’t do well in class that really bothered me more than anything else. Then I actually started working as a graphic designer in Knoxville, and I stayed there for three years before I applied to grad school and went to Chicago. At that time, I was more secure in myself as a professional designer and as a human being. If you ask anybody about the program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, they’ll say it’s very conceptual. The visual communication program focuses a lot on visual storytelling, especially once you get into the first year

of the MFA; you look at yourself and topics that concern you. At the same time, being in Chicago, I had experiences that I hadn’t had and really haven’t had since—things like people saying stuff to me out in public—that really fed into my work and even changed the way I look at design and art, and how I take that and relate it to my personal experiences. What were racial things or negative things people would say?

How did you get into teaching after leaving grad school? One of the reasons I went to grad school was because I wanted to teach at the college level. I forgot to mention that in undergrad I had some really great professors, one of whom was a Black woman, and seeing her in the studio had a huge impact on me. I was a TA almost the whole time I was in grad school and got my first teaching position right after graduating. Thinking about curriculum or your engagement with your colleagues and students, what has your experience been like as a Black educator in graphic design? I do feel like since I am a minority, I can relate to students on different levels, even with students who aren’t Black. I can

110 / 111

Most of it was racial, but it all came from other African Americans. That was a shock to me. In the past, things were said to me from family members about the way I talk or the way I dress or the music I listen to. Obviously, that was hurtful. It’s one thing to hear that stuff when you’re a kid and just kind of move on from it. As an adult it’s hard, especially hearing it from people who have no idea about your background or the things that you’ve been through. Things like, “Why are you dressed that way?” or “You talk funny.” It’s just strange. The most hurtful things were said when I was out in public with my now-husband, who’s White. I don’t know what it is about Chicago, but people just feel like they have the right to tell you whatever is on their mind. I’ve always been a more reserved person. I don’t lash out or have quick responses when people say things to provoke me. I actually found that design, art, and writing were good ways for me to channel my thoughts and reflect on what I wish I had said or could have said.

usually find some way to relate to them because there are struggles that everybody faces, especially if there’s some kind of adversity in their lives. The teaching aspect has been really good. On an administrative level. I’ve been warned several times about being taken advantage of as a Black woman in academia, so I’m constantly on the lookout for that. There’s a tendency for Black women in particular to be given more work or not be taken seriously. Ultimately, they’re getting driven out of academia because they have so much put on them but have little given to them in return. I didn’t have anything like that happen to me, but I am very aware of it.

ASHLEY DOUGHTY

What’s the demographic like at your current institution? In terms of the students, it’s one of the most diverse campuses in the nation. It’s similar to Middle Tennessee State University, where there is socioeconomic diversity, but the racial and ethnic diversity is much greater here. I find that really interesting because in the classroom, there are so many different backgrounds and different experiences. I try to encourage the students to bring those into their projects if they feel comfortable. The demographics of the faculty and administration don’t quite match the student body, which is a bit disappointing. However, I do think in the art department there is a bit more representation of the students. What do you find to be the students’ aspirations once they’re finished learning design? Do you think that they’re guided by certain factors or parameters? I think it really varies because we have students who have taken graphic design classes in high school; they are already pretty advanced. They expect to graduate and get into a career right away. There are also a fair amount of students who had not taken any art or design classes before they got to University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). A lot of those students don’t really know what options are open to them. Like you, I’m teaching a group of capstone students who will be graduating at the end of the semester. One of the things we talk about is options after they graduate. I’ll talk about freelancing, working in-house for a company, or working at a firm. I’ll also talk about things like grad school. Grad school is something that a lot of

– A MAN ON THE L IN CHICAGO

112 / 113

ALL THE BLACK MEN IN THE WORLD, AND YOU HAD A CHOOSE A WHITE BOY.

Kept to Myself, a solo exhibition by Ashley Doughty in the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

114 / 115

students don’t really think about. I’m honest with them: I tell them that it’s expensive, and that they shouldn’t do it because they feel like they don’t have any other options. If they want to broaden their skills or they want to work on specific projects, it’s a good way to go. If you want to get to a tenure track teaching position, it’s pretty much essential to have a master’s degree.

ASHLEY DOUGHTY

With regard to race, do you think there are really stark differences between attending or teaching at an art school? Do you think that these types of institutions engage with concepts around race differently? I think so. I don’t know about other art schools, but I’ve heard that it’s similar to SAIC where there are a lot of international students. As a graduate student just beginning to talk about personal topics in my work, I sometimes encountered barriers between what I was trying to say and what my classmates were interpreting it as. One of my classmates, who was from South Korea, during a critique was like, “Why do you talk about being Black all the time?” If you come from a place where everybody looks the same, there isn’t that understanding that being of a different race affects your life every single day. It’s not like I’m putting on makeup or something. It’s not a choice. That is something that I think is more unique to art schools, because they tend to have more students from outside the United States. Do you think that there are hierarchies in graphic design that affect who is visible in the work that’s being shown or the writing that’s being featured? Do you think some of that is influenced by the types of design programs people came out of or companies they’ve worked for? I find it frustrating how design is evolving. It’s constantly changing, yet when it comes to design history we’re still focusing on the same people. There are the old school superstars who always get talked about, and there are more recent designers who just keep coming up over and over again (not to discredit them in any way, because they are great designers). Students need to know that there’s a lot more out there. The great thing about the design community right now is that so much is available online. It is a lot easier to find out about up-and-coming designers or artists who aren’t as well known. A lot of times, I

struggled to find out who these other talented people were. It’s often been through Facebook groups. I’m a member of a Facebook group just for Black and African American designers. There are a lot of people in there whom I probably wouldn’t know about otherwise. I do know that groups like AIGA are trying to be more inclusive, which is nice. It also seems like at the conferences they’re bringing in a lot more diversity, but the keynote speakers are still these design superstars that they know will draw people in. I feel that there’s a lot of “diversity” and “inclusion” and “decolonize design” rhetoric, but there’s not enough complexity inside that space. Buzzwords are floating around, but there isn’t enough unpacking of what specifically is happening, or how some of these challenges are actually being addressed. What does decolonizing design mean to you?

Do you have any advice for emerging Black designers or designers of color? What advice would you give them as they’re completing school or potentially thinking about teaching? I would say: Try to find somebody who is doing what you are interested in as a career, and try to reach out to that person. It’s helpful [for established] designers to share—this is how I got here, these are the obstacles that I have had, and this is how I got back up. It’s even helpful finding out what prompted that person to move into a design career or if there was somebody who influenced them. I would tell [emerging designers] to make a personal connection and to get a little guidance.

116 / 117

It goes beyond just saying you’re doing something and actually doing it. There needs to be just a little bit more thoughtfulness— not just showing some element of diversity but also showing us what we can do to take action.

RAMON TEJADA

identifies as an independent New Yorkino / Dominican / Latinx / Black + Brown / American designer and educator. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, his hybrid design and teaching practice, Estudio Ramon, focuses on “the disruption and puncturing of the Design Canon, inclusivity, diversity, collaboration, and the expansion and openings of design narratives and languages beyond the ‘traditional’ Westernized paradigm of design.” He is an Assistant Professor at Rhode Island School of Design.

RAMON TEJADA

The Decolonizing Design Reader, printed version 2 for the Otis Art Book Fair, Summer 2019. Design by Ramon Tejada.

How did you get into design? I started getting into design back in high school during the early to mid-nineties. When I got to high school, I needed to find a way to not leave school at the end of the day because there was a lot of what we now call bullying back then. I somehow stumbled upon the newspaper office at the high school. Where did you go to high school?

RAMON TEJADA

This is in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The teacher—Mrs. Gandia was her name—was this funny, amazing, African American woman. My career in many ways is dominated by all these amazing women who have taught me, pushed me, or literally kicked doors down until I could get through them. She was one of those women. She was an English teacher and the newspaper advisor. She literally was like the mama bear for a bunch of us. When we started doing the paper, I really loved the layout part. At that time, it was stripping type with a hot wax machine. We had no computer and we were working with typesetters. We would strip the type into the layout, burning our arms with wax. Then we finally convinced the school board to buy us a computer, which was a second or third generation Mac. We got PageMaker. We misused the software for so long, until one day I decided to read the instruction books. I was like, “Oh my God, you can link text boxes. Okay, that would save us some errors.” I just really enjoyed it. I loved the way we were trying to arrange all these little pieces, just as puzzles, to make all of that a tight image. At that time, Dow Jones had a lot of summer institutes, and they had a big initiative for diversifying newsrooms. I went to three of them, which was pretty awesome. They were these intensive two-week programs, pretty much filled with Black and Brown kids in these newsrooms. We would be on a college campus with all these amazing journalists of color coming in to teach us. It was so powerful to see these people who looked like me, and it showed me that I could actually do this. Where did you go to college?

When I got to college, Wheaton College, I changed majors, and I did not want to do anything with design or anything with art. Even though I was at a liberal arts college in Massachusetts, the art department would ask, “Ramon, why don’t you come take some art classes?” I kind of regret that I never took classes then. I should have taken those classes. I majored in theater, but I was always doing the posters, and I really had this affinity at that time for the typeface Franklin Gothic. That was in the early nineties, and Franklin Gothic was hot. I just kept doing design as a side job. I majored in theater, but what actually paid the bills was designing. I ended up designing a lot of community newspapers.

I have a way of, like, putting myself in a position where people will know that I’m there. I’m not gonna be the quiet or shy one. I’ve never been. I’ve gotten in trouble for being too loud sometimes, including with my dad. Really getting into trouble with my dad over that in relation to school. I just kept doing it. After Minneapolis, I kept doing the performance and theater thing. I also started working with dancers and dancing again, which I had done as a kid and I really liked. It all morphed, and then one day I just woke up and I said, “I am going to grad school.” The first grad school I went to was Bennington College in Vermont for performance art. That was really difficult. I made that choice, and in many ways, I think that it was a big miscalculation on my behalf. However, I met some amazing people who are really great friends of mine right now. The only reason I was able to make it

120 / 121

Where did you go after undergrad? I went to Washington, D.C., for a fellowship. Then I left and moved to Minneapolis. Out of nowhere I was like, “I’m gonna move to Chicago or Minneapolis.” At this point, I was not wanting to confront the reality that theater was not going to be the space for me. Now I have the language to talk about it, but back then I was just really angry that theater wasn’t interested in talking about or having anything to do with people who looked like me. I didn’t know how to articulate that, and that was a big elephant in the room—trying to understand that these fields that I was interested in had no space for me, even though I was in them and I could make work.

122 / 123 Dominican Republic, Colonialism, First settlement of Columbus in The New World.

RAMON TEJADA

Ramon Tejada: “Dominican Republic, Mom and Dad. These are a collection of images tied to my cultural heritage as a Dominican born who grew up in NYC. These are all playing a key role in my current project “Notes on being a Dominicanyork, or inserting the DR, vol 1.”

through was because of those people and their support. I didn’t have a lot of support in my department, so I would jump to the dance department. Not to throw Bennington under the bus (Bennington is great), but the dance department was super welcoming, could see what I was trying to do, and were very interested in that. Throughout all this I was actually getting paid by Bennington to design all the posters for the performances, which was great. After graduating from Bennington, I moved back to New York and crashed financially, emotionally, in every sort of way. What did you do next? I said, “I’m going to go be a designer.” I ended up getting a really good job at a nonprofit. The women I worked for also started

paying for me to take classes at SVA, and I started taking continuing education classes because I had an inkling that one day that I was going to jump to design. I did not feel that I had the pedigree to call myself a designer, so I started taking these classes. At SVA I met another fantastic teacher, Genevieve Williams, who taught there for many years. She said, “Oh my God, you are a designer and you’re a teacher.” I worked with her for many years, taking classes on and off. She was super supportive. I started generating a portfolio because I was interested in going to grad school for design. I felt that I needed to have the degree. If I didn’t have the degree, there was no way I was going to get anywhere in design. I did three rounds of grad school applications. I really wanted to go to school in Europe. I didn’t want to go to school in the US, and I particularly didn’t want to go to school in New York, because I felt like New York pushed you into one particular space and I was just not interested in that.

How did you get into teaching? Teaching actually started happening because Queens College needed new faculty. Queens College is amazing, and it’s very diverse. It’s a City University of New York (CUNY) campus, and the student body comes from everywhere—all kinds of ages,

124 / 125

I had gone to a show at the AIGA Gallery in NYC, where I saw this amazing printed piece done by Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. I looked at it, I saw the faculty, I visited their websites, and my head blew up when I saw that the program was run by Kali Nikitas. I decided to apply. It was a very quirky program at Otis. At that time, I did not have finances or see myself being able to do the two-to-three-year track. I was not interested in going [to traditional graphic design programs] because of the cultlike personality of those places. I was not in my 20s anymore. I was in my 30s, and I was like, “I need to go to school for me.” Then I got in. The Otis program happens to have one of the most diverse student bodies of any college in this country. The first day I walked in, we were like, “Oh my God, there’s so many of us here.” By “us” I mean that there were some people of color, like Black and Brown kids from Los Angeles and everywhere else. That program was really amazing.

VAMOS A CAMBIAR EL PUNTO DE REFERENCIA. – GLORIA ANZALDUA Translation: “Let’s change the point of reference.”

all kinds of social backgrounds. I’ve always loved the idea of sharing. Teaching, to me, is like a sharing enterprise. The best teachers I’ve had have just shared; they haven’t taught me, they haven’t told me, “This is how you do it.” I love the conversation that you can have between students and teachers. How do you think your identity has influenced the way you teach graphic design?

Based on the student population where you teach, what are the professional, social, or environmental factors that guide where you think students are aspiring to work after they’ve learned graphic design? I never thought I would end up at RISD. I think there’s a lot of pressure for students today, in the context of being at an art school, with all its baggage. The expense of education is so high, and the reality is that a lot of them have to work. I think the challenge then becomes training them to actually go to work. For some of them that’s their livelihood; they don’t have other resources. The trick about this is to make sure that they

126 / 127

That has shifted a lot because, at this particular moment, I’m doing a really complicated investigation into how my identity is affecting what I’m teaching, how I’m teaching, and who I’m teaching. I’ve always been interested in teaching in very unorthodox ways, and I’m not teaching design the way that, in many ways, I was taught it. Visually or aesthetically I would always react to it. When I went to grad school for design, I made the decision that I wanted to get away from that. I wanted something more complicated. The world that I live in is not a world where everything is perfectly put together in a nice grid. It’s really vivid and alive. Living in New York, that’s how the world felt to me. When I think of my family, it’s complete chaos. I was born in the Dominican Republic, and right now I’m trying to reconcile that it’s actually something that I need to work on and make work about. I think it’s really important to think about how our identities and where we come from inform how we talk about design. Particularly for Black and Brown kids, because we are not part of the narrative of design, investigation is super important. I think that there are a lot of students who really want that.

RAMON TEJADA

Santiago, Dominican Republic, El Monumento, from “Notes on Being a Dominicanyork, or Inserting the DR, Vol 1.”

have the skills to be able to go into a space, into a studio or wherever they decide to work, feeling confident about making work. They should be able to go work in any space and have many skill sets so that they can morph within any environment. It’s all about plurality for me these days. I think that that becomes a challenge, but also in the context of RISD, I think that that’s really part of the spirit of the school and the spirit of the community. It’s a very experimental place, so there’s a lot of room for that, and there’s a lot of room for pushing and pulling in different directions. How do you think we can get more Black, Brown, and Latinx students in design? What do you think are the barriers once they’re in the workforce? Or what do you think the barriers are before they even get to the program itself? I think it might be twofold. One is making sure that, again, they see themselves reflected. If you’re in the schools, I think it’s

important for faculty to do some homework and research. It has to be made a priority. A lot of schools have, of course, inclusivity initiatives on social equity. At RISD we have a Social Equity and Inclusivity (SEI) task force, which has been doing a lot of really good work. I think it does take work and reflection on everybody’s part to say, “I need to shift my curriculum (my thinking) this way or that way.” I also think schools have to do a better job at recruiting, at bringing accessibility, money, and support to these students, etc. Do you think there’s a difference between art schools and liberal arts institutions in this regard?

What do you think is missing from the conversation in either graphic design or graphic design education right now? I know there’s a lot of talk about decolonization and diversity and inclusion. I think “decolonization” is a term that means a lot of things to a lot of people, and you sort of have to define it for yourself. I think of decolonization as the big umbrella that is above us all. For me, just for clarification, decolonization has

128 / 129

In my experience, because I went to a liberal arts college, I think that the art schools are doing what liberal arts schools have been doing since the 1990s. The discussion of diversity was, at least in my little liberal arts college, happening in the 1990s. Why did art schools fall behind on this? I think a lot of art schools also need to do a better job of putting themselves in front of these kids as well as doing the work to bring them in. There have to be support structures when they’re here. Some kids just need a lot more support because they haven’t had that accessibility. I think schools just need to make that a priority. I think that there’s just been a lot of gatekeeping and people being comfortable with saying, “I’m just going to hire the same people that went to my school or that look like me.” We need to dig in other places. There are super talented, creative, amazing, intelligent, energetic people who didn’t go to the same three schools and who need to be here, and we need to open the door for them. I just think it’s a conscious, clearly-made public statement, a manifesto, saying we’re going to do this and we’re going to consciously be held accountable for it.

come down to visibility and the fact that I need to see Black and Brown people in classes, in studios, in the spaces, in the books, in the reading list, in the syllabi . . . everywhere. I want people who look like me there now and talking—not just hanging out in the back, taking notes. I think that it takes really making a conscious effort to have the discussion, which at times can be really problematic and challenging. It’s just about being honest and saying that we need this narrative to change because the students need it, and the field will just be so much better for it. We need to allow access to these students.

RAMON TEJADA

Something else I’ve been thinking about is that in a lot of art schools the racial demographics include a large international population. What does that mean for striving for a diverse environment or the accessibility of this education? How is that impacting the classroom dynamics in terms of how we’re teaching? The way I think about it in terms of teaching in the classroom is that it’s important for those students to also have the space to explore where they’re coming from and their cultural relationship to this thing called design. I think it’s really important for those students also to see that the conversation that we’re having expands to them as well, and that we’re actually asking questions for them to really think about how design impacts their culture and the way that they make something. The system, the grid, the way the letter stroke looks, it’s a Western idea. A lot of times we’re teaching Western ideas. Sometimes I feel like we’re just colonizing them. I think that’s a problem. We’re not taking into account the trajectory of the student. Not all students are going to stay in the United States, and not all students speak English. I think it’s about making sure, again, that they leave school with a set of tools that they can adapt and morph depending on different spaces, geographical contexts, etc. What are the hierarchies you see in design? How are these hierarchies mirrored in education? The word hierarchy is one of those words that we need to redefine. Hierarchy, when you look at it theoretically, it breaks down into power and control, right? I do think there’s a pecking order. I think that the narrative of design has played out as if

Given your experiences as a designer and design educator, what advice would you give an emerging Black, Brown, or Latinx designer going into this field? I would say be super generous. Realize that teaching is not about hammering things into students: It’s a conversation where you’re sharing things with them. It’s really about creating a space where you can have this exchange of ideas and try different things. I would also remind them not to be a gatekeeper or propagate particular narratives of design that you yourself are questioning. I think having questions and not knowing all the answers in the classroom is an amazing thing. Let’s talk, let’s have a conversation. I think that being generous is key, and realizing that students, particularly today, have a lot more challenges. Just be empathetic to where students are coming from and ask them, “What are you interested in? What do you want to talk about? Let’s make a project about that.” Let’s not make another branding project. We don’t need another freaking brand, another logo. Let’s just be generous with the students, see where they’re at, and meet them there. You teach them so much along the way, but you also teach the person, not just the designer.

130 / 131

you go here or you go there, then you are going to be successful and you will have access. You can make a phone call and somebody will open the door because they know that you have the same pedigree that they have, which becomes a problem in the hiring process, for example. Whether you’re working in a studio or teaching in an academic setting, it’s gatekeeping. I think that there are creative and talented people who, again, don’t have access to these schools. We create these narratives and continue to propagate the narrative that if you go there, it equates to success. We can take them off that pedestal so that people can pull other students into the field and realize that there are many places where a designer can grow and develop the same skill set. Hell, there are designers who don’t even need to go to school. There are a lot of artists who didn’t go to school, and they’re so successful and intelligent and make work that is so profound. I think we’ve fallen prey to the idea that if you go to this kind of school, you must be really great. It may actually just show that you have a lot of money and that you just have higher access.

KALEENA SALES is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at

Tennessee State University. She received her MFA in graphic design from Savannah College of Art and Design, and her MS in advertising art direction from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research focuses on Black aesthetics and poverty, and her recent work is featured in Graphis’ Design Annual 2019. She serves on the AIGA’s Design Educators Community Steering Committee.

KALEENA SALES

Bold colors and text are used to communicate the Student Learning Objectives for Tennessee State University’s Art & Design department. Design by Kaleena Sales.

KALEENA SALES

Where are you from? How did you get into design? I’m from Nashville, Tennessee. I was an art major like a lot of other people in undergrad because I could draw and paint—that was really all I knew about. Somewhere around my junior year of undergrad, I stumbled across an art director in a magazine or something. I became obsessed with this idea that someone could be not a fine artist but instead more of a graphic designer or art director. That led me to research graduate programs, but still not really having any clue what it was. That snowballed into me pursuing advertising art direction as my first career path. I still wasn’t really a good designer yet. The undergraduate program that I went to (where I’m currently teaching) didn’t have graphic design at that time. I think we had maybe one graphic design class, and I learned Adobe Illustrator. That was my only real-life foundation, but I loved being in front of the computer. I loved being able to merge the artistic side of my brain with the intellectual component of solving communication problems; that was something that I was personally interested in. I ended up doing advertising art direction and worked as an art director for a couple of years at an ad agency. That eventually turned into graphic design for me over time. Once I left advertising, I started to pursue graphic design as a freelancer. Again, it satisfied pretty much everything my brain desired—that conceptual creative part and that intellectual component as well. As I was freelancing, I was looking for other kinds of opportunities, and I’d always had teaching at the college level in the back of my brain. I reached out to Tennessee State University, and I was like, “Hey, I’m back in Nashville, let me know if you guys need anyone to teach,” and I stumbled into an adjunct position. Once I got my feet wet teaching a couple of classes, I really fell in love with teaching. I transitioned from adjunct to full-time, and now I’m on a tenure track. What have been some of the challenges or successes as you navigated from working in the industry to the education sector? One of the biggest hurdles for me was learning how to teach something that was more intuitive for me. Before you teach, you don’t really have to explain to someone why something works or doesn’t work. I had to learn how to give feedback. I had

to learn how to give critiques and how to talk about it in a way that didn’t just seem like a personal subjective opinion; I had to learn how to talk about design in a really objective way. That kind of forced me to sharpen my understanding of the principles of design, those core art and design principles, so that I could communicate to the students why something was working or not working. That was one of the biggest challenges. Then also just personally getting over my shyness. I’m very naturally reserved, so to be forced to get in front of the class and speak was very different. In terms of successes, because I do teach at an HBCU, where I also studied, I feel very connected to these students. I really understand who they are because I relate so much to their backgrounds and histories. We can speak the same language. I can understand what some of their challenges are and address them because I had the same challenges.

Absolutely. It took me several years to figure out what was going on, but I did notice over time that my students were choosing similar imagery and colors, and that they were attracted to certain typefaces. Once I started to take a step back and assess why that was, or at least try to understand what it was, I connected it to the experience of growing up in an urban minority environment and taking in the visual aesthetics of that kind of landscape. The experiences of living as a lower-income minority really seep into your design aesthetic and really influence the choices that you make with colors, fonts—everything. It influences your understanding of the world. Once I made that connection, I was able to talk about it with the students. Early in the semester, we now have an open conversation about who we are as a people, and how our aesthetic preferences can sometimes help or sometimes hurt when communicating to what I call a larger mainstream audience. Once they’re given more tools or learn more about graphic design, what have you seen with the student population in terms of their aspirations?

134 / 135

With that understanding is there a greater awareness of why and how your students use certain imagery, typography, color, or pattern? Do you think there are certain properties that are connected to their experiences?

Kaleena Sales: “Established prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, HBCUs have had a vital role in the educational opportunities for millions of Black Americans. Having attended an HBCU, and now teaching at one, I am deeply connected to its purpose and history.”

A lot of my students really lean toward pursuing freelance upon graduation, or they have ambitions to maybe start their own design studios. I think a large part of that is family influence. I think that there’s a lot of pressure to make money and immediately enter some kind of lucrative career. A lot of the students shy away from pursuing grad school because they feel like it’s delaying making money. Do you find that they are staying close to home? Interestingly enough, I have a lot of students who don’t want to move back to their hometowns, but they also don’t want to move far away. They’re like, “You know what? I’ll stay here. I feel comfortable here. This is fine. I don’t really have ambitions to go back to my hometown.” They want to stay in a kind of comfort zone. Do you think that’s cultural? I think it is, but I’m not sure because my experience has been here. I’d be curious to know if that’s something that happens

elsewhere. I do know that when I was in graduate school, the students I was in grad school with had no intention of staying nearby. Everyone was very ambitious and wanted to go wherever the opportunities were. Did you always want to be a design educator? The original nugget of wanting to teach design arose when I was in undergrad. Again, we didn’t really have a strong design program then. It was just barely getting started. The person responsible for teaching the one design class wasn’t really a designer. I started thinking about design education back then and thought, “Wow, what would I do if I worked in this class? What kind of assignments would I get?” I had the abstract idea that I might be able to teach one day, but it definitely wasn’t something that I was thinking about while I was pursuing my graduate degree or entering the industry.

Again, it took me quite a few years to really understand how significant the differences are. The biggest difference that I notice is the possibilities within curriculum changes and curriculum structures. For a university like mine, it takes a really long time to implement curriculum changes or to offer new courses because there’s a process. At an art school, you don’t have as much of that. I mean, there’s a process, but it seems like changes can be made much more quickly, allowing them to keep pace with changes in the industry as they’re happening. I think things just move a lot slower at public and state schools than they do at art schools. I think that can create an obvious disadvantage for the students. The other discrepancy is the number of courses that are offered within a particular degree program. Whereas art schools might offer multiple core and elective courses in a graphic design sequence, there may be fewer course offerings available at a state school. What has been your own experience in terms of working as a designer in the industry? Separate from being an educator.

136 / 137

Do you think there are differences when teaching at an art school versus a liberal arts institution in regards to race or race demographics? What are the positives and negatives you see in each?

“ Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can’t imagine you.” – MARGO JEFFERSON Excerpt from Negroland

It’s been really interesting. I’ve always felt like I’m primarily a designer who is an educator. Working in the industry, you can work with larger clients because you’re working at an agency or design firm. I have found myself struggling to get those larger client experiences. The scales of the projects that I’m working on are so much smaller. I might do freelance projects where I’m doing a logo or a website or something, whereas when I was working in the industry, it was more for a full campaign or a branding project. I do think that some interesting things pop up with clients who come to universities. They stumble across me as the design teacher and say, “Oh, can you help with this project?” For example, the zoo here in Nashville wanted our students to help them do something, and it ended up turning into a personal client of mine. Things like that would not happen if I were not associated with education and working in the art department. It’s the difference between mostly having to seek out projects now, versus having the privilege of projects just landing on your desk when you’re working in the industry.

For the past few years, there has been a modest conversation about how to get more minority designers to enter the field, asking, “Where are the Black designers?” There has been a push to diversify the workspace, and I appreciate that. For me, the reason why there’s a lack of diversity is so complex that I don’t see it getting solved by the surface-level discussions that we often have about diversity inclusion. My students share struggles that they have managing their own personal aesthetics against what the mainstream audience will be looking for in a portfolio. That’s a real problem for them. That’s a real, legitimate issue that holds them back from getting some of those entry-level jobs. I’m not sure how that’s being addressed. People love to embrace the idea, and I think they are genuine in wanting to increase diversity, but I don’t think a lot of people realize why so many Black students aren’t able to compete with their White counterparts. I think that’s a big part of the conversation that’s missing.

138 / 139

There have been lots of conversations around the term “decolonize design,” and personally I feel like some of that is becoming buzzword rhetoric. How do you see that term being influenced by identity, or not?

It sounds like it’s related to competition, but it’s also just a preference of aesthetics.

KALEENA SALES

Yeah, preference is a part of it. I think it’s also about experience and exposure. I’d say that the students I teach are primarily from environments that really mimic the HBCU experience. They’ve not yet been a minority; they’ve always been in the majority. If you are within the majority, that creates a really different dynamic regarding how you feel connected to your space or how you feel connected, as a Black person, to an institution. For those of us who went to predominantly White institutions, there’s the feeling of isolation. I think that as you’re beginning to form who you are between eighteen and twenty, you’re being molded by lots of different environmental factors. What would you say are the aspects of an HBCU, not so much specifically in terms of design, but just in terms of what it can provide as an environment for a Black student? A lot of people will say that HBCUs create a bit of a safe space for Black students to completely be themselves, without feeling any pressure to be anyone else. They’re free to, without judgment, listen to the music they like, wear their hair however they want to wear their hair, and have a style that reflects whatever is culturally interesting to them. They can do that without fear of being a minority in that situation. This creates this culturally safe space that allows these students to continue to grow and develop who they are while they’re here. I think that that’s a good thing, mostly. I think that sometimes what happens is that when they leave the environment of an HBCU, some people experience a little bit of a culture shock as they try to navigate a world that’s very unlike what they’ve grown accustomed to. I’ve taught in lesser-known design programs at liberal arts institutions, and I feel like the priority for students is really to find that job afterward. There’s a certain level of functionality to the projects, so that there are translatable outcomes that can give them the skills to then go get that job. Similarly, you have experimental art programs that are just about making— not necessarily nonfunctional work, but things that are abstract. I’m trying to grapple with what that means too.

140 / 141

Kaleena Sales: “In my illustration work, I’m primarily interested in showcasing the beauty and complexities of Black culture. I often draw dark-skinned men and women in a silent fight against colorism and in an attempt to broaden representation.” Illustration by Kaleena Sales.

KALEENA SALES

Illustrations by Kaleena Sales.

I don’t know if it’s . .. I hate to use the word “privilege,” but it might be a privilege to be able to explore some of those nonfunctional, more conceptual versions of what graphic design is. I do think it helps. I do think that those types of programs help students to think about design in a different way—that they become thought leaders and that they’re thinking about design in much deeper ways. That might influence who is going to be writing, publishing books, and speaking at conferences about design, because it frames your understanding of what design even is. That sticks with you throughout your career.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others....One a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings .” – W. E . B . D U B O I S Excerpt from The Souls of Black Folk

142 / 143

ever feels his two-ness— an American,

How do you think that ideas around design education have changed within the United States and internationally? I feel like a lot of the conversation is moving away from practicality and tangible results. If you were thinking about how to prepare students, maybe it’s not just putting together a portfolio of traditional branding projects with a logo and a business card. I feel like it’s moving into more transferable design skills that deal more with problem-solving and systems. It’s expanding the definitions of what design is and what a designer can be.

KALEENA SALES

In your opinion, how can we get more Black, Brown, and Latinx people into the design field? Are there barriers once they are trained and in the workforce? I think the problems are coming up before people even enter the field. I have a lot of students who want to be graphic designers. The interest is there, but the understanding is not there of what a designer is and what a designer does. I don’t know if that’s an exposure issue, if the students are maybe growing up and don’t know any graphic designers or anyone who works in advertising. Some young people don’t even know what that means. It sounds cool to them, but they have no idea what a graphic designer is. I think that lack of understanding of what it’s really about creates some challenges. I do think that having people in your social circles or family circles at a younger age talking about design goes a really long way. I think it’s hard to pinpoint any one specific thing without generalizing about an entire group, and while trying to address potential problems we are seeing. It’s so important to try to interpret these observations because they critically impact so many young people. Do you think that anything is missing from the conversation in relation to what you see in the industry? When speaking on diversity and culture, I think that we’re missing talking about cultural biases. I feel like whenever discussions are being held about diversity, it’s a very welcoming conversation where everyone’s supportive of

minority voices and minorities. I don’t think that’s truly reflective of where we are in our society. I think that there are so many biases and stereotypes, and all of that comes into play with the way that we view potential candidates or portfolios we’re reviewing. I just don’t feel like we talk about diversity in ways that make people feel uncomfortable. It’s always very “Kumbaya.” I don’t want to discredit people, but I just think that we have to address some things that do make us uncomfortable if we really want to talk about increasing diversity. At my own institution, there’s an interesting categorization of me sometimes being deemed the “social justice educator.” I’m not anti-social justice, but that’s not how I’ve ever seen myself. I think that the frameworks within academia operate with particular labels and categories that clearly have a bias attached.

Do you have any parting advice for Black, Brown, and Latinx designers who are interested in learning about design, going to design school, or becoming a design educator? Research the industry. Become obsessive about it. I talk to my students all the time about finding the design firms or even art programs that they admire and whose work they like, and figuring out what it is that they’re doing well and trying to learn from it. I mean, it’s simple. I know that’s a very anti-climactic finish, but that’s really honestly my biggest advice. My entry into this world was what I could research online. It was obsessively digging deep into the graduate program that I wanted to go to, and reading a couple of design magazines obsessively every month when they would come out. If you don’t know someone who works in the field, you have to develop your own path and dig in deep with your own personal research.

144 / 145

I one thousand percent understand that. I think a lot of minorities working in various fields feel that push and pull of a duality—recognizing that we could offer insight into an area, but then also feeling like we have a label associated with our experience that’s based on our skin color.

ALI SHAMAS QADEER

is a designer and educator based in Toronto. After completing a BA in philosophy and religious studies at McGill University, he developed an independent design practice in New York City before returning to school to complete an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. His work focuses on algorithmic formmaking, interaction design, and the possibility of graphic design to operate as a new discipline within the humanities. He is an Assistant Professor in the graphic and industrial design programs at OCAD University. In his teaching practice, Qadeer champions a critical approach that always refracts through a practice of formalism and making.

ALI SHAMAS QADEER

Vector Festival 2019 Poster. Design by Ali Shamas Qadeer.

How did you get into graphic design?

ALI SHAMAS QADEER

I was in high school during the mid-1990s when the web thing had begun to take off, and I got really hooked into that world. I was making really elaborately designed websites for my crappy punk bands and even learned screen printing in high school. I never thought that it would be a thing I could do professionally, but when I was in university I continued to make websites for my friends’ bands. I was really into the DIY punk and hardcore scene at that time and loved to play with photocopiers and make demo tapes. I had friends in slightly more serious bands than mine, and I would design their flyers and records. At the end of college, I knew this was an area that I wanted to get into more. After I graduated, I was a bike messenger for a year and collected unemployment for a while. Then my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) started her Ph.D. program in New York. I followed her there and started working at nonprofits doing a little bit of code. I did email management and basic design tasks. I was teaching myself graphic design tools more than processes and formalism. I got better technically, but in a weird way I just couldn’t get better at being a designer. A friend who had done his undergrad at RISD suggested that I apply there, and I did. After you finished grad school, did you immediately get into teaching? What did you do next? In my last couple of weeks of grad school, a tenure track job opened up at OCAD University. I was planning to move to Toronto anyway. I didn’t get the job but worked there part-time as an adjunct professor. My professional life was bifurcated between freelance work and teaching. It felt like I was doing 100 percent of both roles all the time. Two years later another tenure-track job opened up at OCAD—and I got it. What has your experience been in design education either as a student or design educator? There are certain things that have been amazing. For example, there’s a community of people like me (at my institution and around the world) who have come up in design at the same

Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s related to gender? Do you think it has to do with how you present physically as a designer in the field? It’s a mixture of a few things. I think gender is a huge part of it. I think it also has largely to do with the fact that I carry a lot of cultural capital, in the sense that I am a child of an academic. I was raised in an environment where as a child I knew what the concept of tenure was. I was taught and raised in an environment that placed a lot of stock in and value on higher education. It’s an environment that I’m extremely comfortable in. To paraphrase Pierre Bourdieu, I’m in spaces where I feel like a fish in water. Then, being biracial, you were probably processing both sides of those identities growing up? I think in some ways they are almost dialectically opposed, in regard to current political speak. I’m half Muslim Pakistani and

148 / 149

time. I’ve made a lot of deep long-lasting connections within the design educators community, and on that front it’s been great. One thing I have struggled with lately is urgency. I often wish I was doing something where there’s no ambiguity in my ethical and moral obligations to the world. My general experience in design education, for the most part, has felt really easy. Oftentimes doors have swung open for me in ways that I don’t think they should have. I think I have been received as a model minority in many ways. I’m sure this isn’t the feeling for most people, but for me I keep thinking about my own identity as a half-Brown, interracial, mixed-race guy. My dad’s Pakistani. There have been moments where my race and the fact that I am not White has led to racism in really complicated ways, but I’ve been the MVP of POC, I guess is what I’m trying to get at. Because I grew up in a very White town and was educated in very White spaces, my challenges aren’t quite the challenges of other people of color who’ve had to contend with much more severe barriers than I have in lots of ways. Navigating my education and professional life has been more seamless for me than it has been for other people. I would say that I haven’t been systematically shut out in some ways that a lot of my peers have been.

Ali Shamas Qadeer: “Old family blanket from Pakistan. Blockprinted fabric, subcontinental origin. Purchased, migrated, swaddled, shared, wrapped, discarded, found, shared.”

150 / 151

half Jewish American. It’s a weird mix. At times, I thought there was more conflict than I actually felt—to this day, it’s something that gets projected onto me when people hear my ethnic makeup. I think that my family didn’t go deep into either culture. My mom was a New Yorker and my dad was a Pakistani who ended up living in Kingston, Ontario, this small city in Canada. In some ways, I kind of ended up defaulting to the dominant White settler culture.

ALI SHAMAS QADEER

What has your experience been teaching at OCAD University? I’m at a publicly funded art school in Toronto, which has a huge immigrant population. It’s also a commuter school, and it doesn’t have its own residences. Anecdotally, a majority of my students live at home with their parents in the suburbs, pretty far away, in ethnic enclaves. In terms of ethnic makeup, the classes that I attended at McGill versus the classes I teach now at OCAD are just so profoundly different. OCAD has a much bigger population of students of color than any institution I’ve ever taught at or attended. I feel that because a lot my students aren’t coming from the places of extreme privilege that I’ve experienced in my own education—my role matters in helping them to find their voices as artists and designers. A lot of my students are the first generation [in their families] to attend a North American university and the first generation to go to an art school. For many of my students, studying graphic design is the major they have negotiated with their parents in order to allow them to go to art school. There’s a sheen of professionalization attached to this degree. As an educator, I spend so much time trying to chip away at these early perceptions of what it means to study graphic design. There’s a lot of unlearning that occurs. Having my students understand that it’s not just about making ads. At the same time, OCAD is also a pretty underfunded institution. One of the things that I really struggle with is what you can do as a teacher when you have access to resources versus when you don’t have access to resources. When I have a studio classroom that’s three hours long and has twenty-seven students, it becomes very difficult to create an open learning environment where you can allow your students to find their voice in a rigorous and careful way.

152 / 153

“There, where we live, there is our country! A democratic republic! Full political and national rights for Jews. Ensure that the voice of the Jewish working class is heard at the Constituent Assembly.” Yiddish poster, Kiev, ca. 1918. Its message urges Jews to vote for the Bund in an election following the Russian Revolution; non-Bolshevik parties were at that time still tolerated by the regime. (YIVO)

That said, we are in a moment as design educators. There is this new fight to reinvigorate the spirit of our programs in a way that basically allows us to crack it open. To borrow words from Ramon Tejada, “to puncture these spaces.” There’s a big fight for the soul of our discipline, but there needs to be a simultaneous fight for the material too. That materiality fight shows up in what a design program can provide for its students, and in how much a design student can immerse themselves in their own

Schmutz - dirt Nanga - naked Sha Bash - “good boy” but signifies doing something all by yourself Bus - stop Oy - exasperation Feh - indicating disgust.” – ALI SHAMAS QADEER Words derived from Urdu and Yiddish that my daughter understands

education. Working with full-time students who are also working jobs, there is a studio culture that differs from my experience as a student at RISD. I think it would be unfair for me to demand the same of my students. That material culture emerges in the studio culture of the school. It emerges in the fact that I have students who are commuting two hours each way. They’re not doing their design homework around their peers, but at home in slightly more isolated spaces. Do you think that there are differences between teaching at an art school versus a liberal arts institution, specifically in regard to race or racial demographics? Similar to you I have a hybrid background— liberal arts as an undergrad and then on to an art-focused grad program. What are the strengths or the weaknesses of both?

Another big difference, maybe unrelated, is that I think a lot of the dialogues that are being fostered now among art and design faculty are coming from a liberal arts context. I’m going to use you as an example. You came from a liberal arts background, which completely makes sense to me because you have a set of theoretical tools to discuss race that historically haven’t been as present or well developed in art schools. When I was an undergrad twenty years ago, conversations about race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, capitalism, etc., were being had inside and outside of the classroom. I’m not sure what it was like for you. When I was doing my senior thesis in undergrad I talked about race. That was the first time that I was beginning to address these concerns, in a hybrid design/liberal arts kind of way. I was one of the few students leading that pursuit in my design program. Contemporary artists have talked about race in different contexts for years, but I felt like graphic design wasn’t in that space quite yet at the time.

154 / 155

In immigrant and low-income families, studying art can often seem really frivolous. You know what I mean? Even if. . . as faculty, we think and know otherwise. Even when your family really values education, it can feel like—“You’re spending four years doing what?!” What that means is that there is a higher barrier for a lot of students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, and immigrant students. That’s one big difference I think between an art school and a liberal arts education

Absolutely. In contemporary art, race was there. In literature, in history, in the liberal arts disciplines, the movements that pushed against the White dominant heteronormative discourses had been there for a really long time. I still think these questions are fresh in graphic design. I’m constantly borrowing from the liberal arts—maybe because my wife teaches literature and we are each other’s go-to. I’m constantly going back to my undergraduate education for models on how to address more critical approaches with regard to race, gender, sexuality, class, and history. How do we approach those discussions in a design classroom? I was always wrestling with the question of how to turn a liberal arts model into a formal model.

ALI SHAMAS QADEER

What do you think is missing from the conversation right now in relation to these topics in design or design education? I can talk from a Canadian context. Officially, Canadian public institutions are supposed to be adopting the recommendations made from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which were published five years ago. We’re coming to terms with the history of the genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. That is a surfacing discourse in universities here right now, and a lot of value has been placed on trying to continue to push this in curriculum, in hiring, in policy, etc. In design, I think there are people who are doing this right now. However, in trying to open up design to become a field that fosters new modes of cultural expression, it’s clear that the discipline of graphic design was born out of the modernist project. As a result, I think graphic design can become a really useful lens to point at other aspects of the modernist project, looking at the modern epoch, looking at capitalism, looking at late capitalism, or looking at reproduction. There are designers like Chris Lee, an Assistant Professor in communications at Pratt Institute, whose arts and teaching practices are really about using design tools as lenses for close readings of money and aspects of contemporary culture that we consider to be neutral. I get really excited by work that uses graphic design as a mode of historical analysis. A few years ago, a friend of mine, Tucker McLachlan (who graduated from OCADU), created a thesis project where he located artifacts of colonization and settlement in graphic design. He was looking at it from the perspective of a White settler. He created a reading room by resetting the type

of all of the documentation and mark-making practices that are a part of the continuous history of colonization in Canada. He looked at the typography of police uniforms, reset the type of treaties, and reframed foundational documents that enacted settler occupation of land belonging to Indigenous Peoples. Do you think that there are hierarchies in design? Going back again to graduate school programs, undergrad programs, or even the design industry.

When I think about the hierarchies that will emerge in the professional lives of my students, it comes down to the flows of the type of capital one wants. This includes financial capital and cultural capital. Oftentimes when we do really well by our students—and especially our students of color—what we’re pushing them to participate in are the cultures that have historically and systematically kept them out of things. Maybe we should be training them to destroy those things. Trying to do this with graphic design is a bit of a shot in the dark, but teaching students to dismantle those perceptions of value and work within their own cultural practices is important.

156 / 157

Yeah, I really do. If we do really well by our students, and we’re just the best professors of all time—really straight-up Dead Poet’s Society-style professors—even then what is perceived as successful in the field of graphic design is still this polite intellectual liberalism. This isn’t all-encompassing, but I do notice two kinds of success: On the one hand, you can work out of New York for a private design studio for a design master who’s more than likely White, you know what I mean? You design publications and identity systems as one aspiration. On the other hand, you can resist all of that, but it’s a direct pipeline to Europe. You can stake some ideological claim that “only in Europe are they doing real design.” There are other aspirational routes for young designers, like tech, etc. But they always connect to some perceived global space of influence through tech, capital, or culture.

KELLY WALTERS

is an Assistant Professor and the Associate Director of the BFA Communication Design program in Parsons School of Design at The New School. She holds an MFA in graphic design from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in communication design and a BA in communication sciences from the University of Connecticut. In her independent design studio Bright Polka Dot, she works across platforms to create publications, exhibitions, and digital experiences for educational and cultural institutions. Her ongoing design research interrogates the complexities of identity, systems of value, and shared vernacular in and around Black visual culture.

KELLY WALTERS

An All Colored Cast, risograph print poster, 2019. Design by Kelly Walters.

Interview led by Anne H. Berry Where are you from? I am originally from Stamford, Connecticut, and I grew up in the lower southwestern area of the state. What is your background?

K E L LY W A LT E R S

My mom is African American and my dad was born in Kingston, Jamaica but moved here when he was fifteen. My mom’s side of the family was originally from Tuskegee, Alabama, but my maternal great-grandparents moved to Connecticut in order to have access to better work opportunities in the 1960s. Similarly, my paternal grandmother moved my dad and his siblings to Connecticut for work and better educational opportunities in the early 1970s. These choices were not without struggle. On both sides of my family, they relocated to new environments that were predominantly White. What’s your design background story, and how did those pieces lead to the position that you have now? For undergrad I went to the University of Connecticut, where I studied graphic design as an art major and communication sciences in the liberal arts program. I was really excited to learn about design because it married my interest in language with my interest in understanding how we communicate. I liked being able to share ideas in a way that was visual and that combined auditory experiences. I was able to play with all of these different dimensions. During my senior year, I was beginning to dig deeper into thinking about my race, being Black, and understanding my identity as a whole. It was a space for me to unpack a whole bunch of microaggressions that I experienced both in high school and college, as well as to reflect on growing up in Connecticut. After you graduated from college, how did you get into design education? Looking back, I think graduating was a hard rupture for me because I was just getting into how I could use design to explore topics of race, but I realized I had to find a job. One of my first design jobs was working at a local YMCA as a

marketing and design associate. I was there part-time doing posters, email newsletters, and website updates. At the same time, I was picking up other freelance work. I really liked having variation in my design practice. I could do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I was always trying to learn what types of design work I was most interested in by taking on different assignments. In spring 2011, one of my former professors, Emily Larned, reached out to see if I wanted to teach a foundation-level graphic design course at the University of Bridgeport. I was uncertain at first because I never thought I would go into teaching, but I decided to do it as a way to find out. I loved the balance between working in the classroom, having a freelance practice, and working on my own personal projects. Can you share how mentorship has played a role in your career?

What was that experience like for you once you got into grad school? In what ways did you see your own work or your perceptions about design grow and change? I went to RISD for graduate school from 2013 to 2015. What was really influential for me was beginning to feel like I was in control of shaping new conversations around my design work. I also felt I could reconsider different kinds of design projects and the audiences I might be engaging with. I felt like my

160 / 161

Beyond the guidance I’ve received from my former professors, I would say the most influential mentor I have had has been my mom. She taught elementary school for about twenty-four years, and now she’s a sixth-grade English teacher. A lot of the foundational teaching practices that I have learned about managing a classroom or working with students have come through the many conversations we’ve had. After a few years of teaching part-time and freelancing, I was beginning to consider whether there was more out there. I also wanted to continue the work about race that I did as an undergrad. I felt that a graduate experience would allow me the space to dive deeper into that practice while simultaneously blending all the things that I learned in the industry. I also knew that there would be opportunities to teach, so that was appealing to me too.

K E L LY W A LT E R S

classes in the graphic design program really supported that level of experimentation. At times, I definitely pushed the boundaries in terms of content or approach. I just wanted to maximize my time there and make the unexpected. Sometimes I saw other students make what they thought professors wanted to see instead of taking more risks. Today, I think you see that with design students at large, regardless of the program, graduate or undergraduate. I just knew it was more important to create design work that allowed me to connect with others on a cultural level, others who felt slightly alienated and outside of the Eurocentric art and design context. I think you just brought up a really important point. You’re describing the difference between what I would categorize as an undergraduate mentality versus a graduate mentality—having the sense of wanting to take advantage of the opportunity. It’s also choosing some power that you can use in terms of pursuing the things that are most interesting to you, versus waiting for others to tell you what it is that you need to produce. You also just used the word “alienate.” Can you explain more about that? As an undergrad, I was still finding myself—navigating social and cultural dynamics, academics, and being an adult. In grad school, I became more comfortable with myself. We all have issues that we deal with regardless of how old we are, but I think I was getting better at understanding my worth, being comfortable addressing certain topics in design, and being okay with claiming space. This thinking translated into several independent and collaborative projects that dealt with Black identity, race, and representation. One critical project I worked on at RISD was an exhibition I co-curated with fellow grad student Tia Blasingame. We were addressing similar themes in our thesis work, and together we created an exhibition called Kindred that featured the work of students of African descent at RISD. This exhibition was the first time I was able to use my skills as a graphic designer to think more expansively about community and visibility for underrepresented students like myself. I imagine the skills you developed in pursuit of your communication sciences degree facilitated these kinds of projects and discussions.

162 / 163

Kelly Walters: “Front cover of the booklet made for my family reunion in 1990. My mom’s side of the family is originally from Tuskegee, Alabama. ‘Johnnie’ also known as ‘Johnnie Mae’ was my great-grandmother, who passed away in 2010.”

Kelly Walters: “ ‘Where am I going? What is it going to be like?’ There were the questions my dad asked himself when he immigrated to the United States from Jamaica at the age of fifteen in 1972.”

164 / 165

Clearly your identity and claiming space have been important parts of your work. Can you say a little bit more about how those things have influenced your teaching?

K E L LY W A LT E R S

At the end of graduate school, I was nominated to apply for a teaching fellowship. The Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD), a consortium of art and design colleges across the country, offered full-time teaching positions for graduating graduate students of color. I ended up getting selected to complete a fellowship at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in Oakland, California. My time at CCA was extremely influential and allowed me to gain better insight into understanding what being a full-time professor meant. While I was in the Bay Area I was also exposed to the tech industry and had the opportunity to freelance on more digital campaigns. What were the next steps after that? How has your identity influenced the way you approached design education? The exciting part about being at CCA was bringing my own experiences from UCONN, the University of Bridgeport, and RISD together. I felt like I was coming to my first full-time teaching position with a varied background. This influenced my teaching practice because I wasn’t just drawing on everything that I learned in undergrad or grad school. Having these different levels of exposure has allowed me to pivot in my teaching practice, so that I am not always drawing from the same source. As a student, I was really attuned to what was problematic for me in terms of racial issues or ineffective teaching styles. Drawing on this, I began to realize what my values were as an educator and what I found important to value in the classroom, and recognized that these values may be different from how I originally was trained as a designer. In my own experience, I leaned on exactly the things that I learned from undergrad and graduate school in terms of how to approach design education. What you’re describing speaks to a very progressive way of thinking about design education. Were you talking to other design educators? Were you coming across other design educators of color at this time?

I’ve continued to expand this concept of who and what could be part of design discourse. For example, Ramon Tejada and I have had deep conversations about identity and representation in design, and I have learned from him ways we can push design’s boundaries. I continue to learn from my peers of color. I let myself be influenced by everyone I meet along the way, and this makes me feel like I am not alone as the only Black design educator. The way you teach graphic design is the way you learned it, which tends to be steeped in one very particular perspective. I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the teaching experiences that you’ve had and about different institutions. What are some key differences between teaching at an art school versus a liberal arts program? I have many thoughts on this. When I was first out of school, I thought that there was only one way. Now I know that no one way is truly better than another. In having my undergrad experience at an institution that was primarily liberal arts with an art program, I benefited from having a bit of the arts and a

166 / 167

Connecting with more artists and designers of color started to happen in grad school. Prior to that, all of the people in the design canon that I referenced, all the design studios or design examples I could think of, would have been designed by someone who was White. What was fascinating for me was that I knew that even in undergrad, but I was beginning to build this Rolodex of all these other contemporary artists, Black female artists, who were speaking the language that I wanted to speak. Their work may not have been classified as graphic design, but if they were using type or image, I would classify them as a graphic designer anyway. To me, it felt like they met the criteria I was looking for. I was aware of Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Faith Ringgold, and I was mixing them in as a part of my design references. As an art major who concentrated in graphic design, I interfaced with more fine art practitioners and contemporary artists of color who were addressing topics and issues of race in other classes. I was exposed to them throughout this period, both in undergrad and grad school. I began to allow these references to become more elastic and say that they are a part of the graphic design family.

K E L LY W A LT E R S

Kelly Walters: “Jamaica gained independence from England in 1962. This image is of the inside flap of my dad’s cancelled Jamaican passport.”

bit of everything else. That may not work for everyone. When attending a school like RISD or California College of the Arts, there’s a different sensibility as a student immersed in art and design all the time. I think the benefits of those institutions mean that you have more resources, such as more tools or exposure to different facilities. I think that there’s an extreme benefit to having that at your disposal as an undergraduate or graduate student. I think the challenge with some of the larger art schools is finding a way to have community. In our Communication Design program at Parsons, we operate on a much larger scale, and it can be hard to make sure they feel connected and ensure they don’t feel like a number. One strength of a smaller institution or art program is that it can be nimbler and more aware of every student.

How are you creating community with your students? A few years ago, I was a Visiting Lecturer at Central Saint Martins (CSM) in London with my study abroad students from

168 / 169

In talking with some of my colleagues who’ve worked at HBCUs, I have realized one of the values of those institutions is the community that can be built when you’re not the only student of color or the token Black student. At all three types of institutions you get different things, and there are positives and negatives everywhere. I’ve learned that students will struggle in any of these environments, from being in complete isolation (as the only Black student) to not having enough resources as an art major. I contemplated going to an HBCU, and I think about what I would have gotten out of that experience. When I talk to my cousins or anyone who’s gone to an HBCU, there is a different level of support that can be gained from being in a predominantly Black community, and that support deeply influences your understanding of identity. Again, this is just my opinion. I know that there are different schools of thought on this and that there are challenges even at HBCUs, but I imagine the understanding of your Blackness and Black culture, having faculty who are Black, and being around other colleagues and students who are Black makes for a very different learning environment that can be nurturing for many students. For those of us who are coming out of very White academic environments, that visibility is powerful.

K E L LY W A LT E R S

UCONN. During my time there, I was the only Black, female graphic design educator in the Graphic Communication Design (GCD) course. I met some of the Black students and students of color who were in the course. I worked with students across departments or colleges to create a week-long exhibition and an evening of talks where students could present work that expressed who they were. I drew on my experience with a similar kind of project in grad school, realizing that this work has the capacity to be a curricular activity. If you build a frame or hold space, students will come and they will contribute. As faculty, we should be there to help facilitate discussion and foster participation. To me, community can happen through small-scale interactions. This project only started because I asked, “What does race look like here in London?” I was asking this as a Black American woman and drew on my sensibilities to talk about design in the context of cultural backgrounds. This project, which was called Open Dialogue, was so influential for me as an educator at that point, because I wasn’t trying to do this project as a student as I had done in the past. My position had shifted. The power I held had shifted. Growing up, I remember hearing my father say that one of the things that he felt he successfully inoculated his children against was an inferiority complex. When we walk into a room and it’s full of White , we’re used to it and we aren’t necessarily going to be psychologically affected by that. And he certainly was affected, because he was this poor Black kid in all-White circles throughout his education. That speaks to a certain level of privilege and awareness. What do you think is missing from the conversation right now in relation to topics around race and design? What would you say to White design educators who don’t want to bring up issues around race because they are too controversial? It’s so layered. Here’s the thing: Just as Black has several shades, white has several shades, if that makes sense. I feel like there are White people who are very comfortable jumping into discussions about race. There are White people who are not. I think all people really have this to a certain degree, including Black people I’ve met who don’t want to talk about race.

if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” – A N G E L A DAV I S

170 / 171

K E L LY W A LT E R S

“ You have to act as

K E L LY W A LT E R S

When it comes to educators in particular, what I struggle with are those who operate through a lens where they want to be the savior. For those particular people, they feel like they are comfortable talking about certain things and see themselves as liberal and progressive. They feel like they’re ready to have discussions on race and are comfortable talking to people of color. However, there are also people who say they are comfortable but who operate in ways that are diminishing at the same time. I struggle with that, because while the intentions are positive, sometimes their execution still makes me feel less than. In these moments, I don’t think they are able to really acknowledge their own privilege. On the opposite end of the spectrum are colleagues who can be extremely resistant to discussions of race. This is tricky. Sometimes you have to recognize that some people just don’t care and that no amount of diversity trainings or workshops are going to make them change their mind. The White people who are in the middle though, who have the potential to change their mindset, I think they are where we should be putting our energy. Those who can reckon with some of what they have done in the past without getting defensive. There is a level of understanding and immense frustration that, even as a Black person, I’m trying to figure out how to facilitate these conversations in the design classroom. Overall, I think is it important to continue to build frameworks for how we can draw from other fields, such as sociology or communication sciences, to become more equipped to handle these discussions in design classrooms. What advice can you give to Black, Brown, and Latinx designers who are interested in becoming design educators? I am excited about the future of graphic design in that I do feel that there are increasingly more opportunities for Black, Brown, and Latinx designers. While we have a long way to go to create more inclusive and equitable spaces, I do see new radical approaches to how design history is being taught, the expansion of design methodologies that encompass more community-based practices, design projects that prioritize discussions around race and identity, and both physical and digital events to facilitate these discussions as well.

All of the design educators I’ve interviewed for this book, and their presence at the institutions they serve, demonstrate a small sampling of us in the field trying to make change in our own respective ways. I’m hopeful that as more Black, Brown, and Latinx designers get into this field, more of us will become interested in teaching and becoming educators. Seeing mentors and people like yourself in positions of authority has a significant impact on one’s trajectory. I am thankful for all my mentors, regardless of color, in the field of design, who have been open in their discussions with me and willing to share their insight. I especially encourage all Black, Brown, and Latinx designers to seek mentorship in multiple places and to learn to decipher what advice will allow you to expand, learn, and grow as a designer.

172 / 173

Acknowledgments I hope this book and our stories contribute to a wider understanding of the diversity of paths taken, perspectives held, and outlooks conceived by designers of color. In order to highlight the uniqueness of different ethnic groups, to understand the layered histories, cultural beliefs, and shared languages that shape our understanding of art, design, and race, it is extremely important to push against the flattening of what it means to be a “POC.” While academia and the design industry have tried to become more accepting in recent years, there is much work to be done to make these spaces more inclusive. Representation matters. Having design educators who look like you matters. Being able to bring your whole self to the studio and classroom matters. Calling out the fact that design has the capacity to be an exclusive space that does not always value, respect, or celebrate our identities is critical to name. My hope is that the interviews shared in this book create visibility and validation—that they demonstrate what is possible, that design is an exciting field, and that there are a multitude of pathways and approaches to design practice. I would like to thank all of the people who assisted and supported me in the creation of this project, including Aaris Sherin and Robin Landa for their publishing guidance. Thanks to my former graduate research assistant Erica Eisenberg for her assistance with the early editing of the interviews and Iyana Martin Diaz for her creative support in the design of this book. Thanks to my editor Abby Bussel and copy editor Jamie McGhee for their feedback and final editing of the interviews. An enormous thank you to all the designers who shared their stories in this book: Nida Abdullah, Jason Alejandro, Anne H. Berry, Ashley Doughty, Ali Shamas Qadeer, Jennifer Rittner, Samuel Romero, Kaleena Sales, Shantanu Suman, Ramon Tejada, and David Jon Walker. I am truly appreciative of your thoughtful reflections and support of this project; it would not have been possible without you. I thank you for your patience and contributions, and I am eternally grateful to call you my friends.

I am especially grateful to my family. Thank you to my parents, Dee and Greg Walters, and my brothers, Greg Jr., Colin, and Sean, who have been a major influence in my life and a constant source of support and encouragement. I dedicate this book to my great-grandmother, Johnnie Mae Tyson, my maternal grandparents, Freddie Mae and Hubert Lee Green, Sr., and my paternal grandparents, Zelda and Vincent Walters.

174 / 175

Kelly Walters is an artist, designer, researcher and founder of the multidisciplinary design studio Bright Polka Dot. Her practice includes teaching, writing, and experimental publishing, with a particular focus on race and representation in design. Her ongoing design research interrogates the complexities of identity formation, systems of value, and the shared vernacular in and around Black visual culture. She is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the BFA Communication Design Program at Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York.

Published by

Image Credits

Princeton Architectural Press 202 Warren Street Hudson, New York 12534 www.papress.com

Courtesy Patrick Gosnell 8 Courtesy David Jon Walker 9, 16 Courtesy Anne H. Berry 22–23, 26–27, 31 (2) Courtesy Samuel Romero 34–35, 39, 42, 45 Courtesy Nida Abdullah 48, 58 Courtesy Nida Abdullah & Anna Buckner 49 Courtesy Jason Alejandro 62–63, 69, 70–71, 74 Photo by Beth Berstein Photography 78 Courtesy Kelly Walters 79 Courtesy Jennifer Rittner 82, 85 (2) Photo by Laura Suman 92 Design by Shantanu Suman and Marisa Falcigno / Courtesy Wired ©The Condé Nast Publications, Ltd. 93 Courtesy Shantanu Suman 96, 99, 103 Photo by Aashim Tyagi 100-101 Courtesy Ashley Doughty 108–109 Courtesy Chloe Bernardo / Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art 114–115 Courtesy Ramon Tejada 118–119, 122–123, 124, 128 Photo by Margaret Emma Rice 132 Courtesy Kaleena Sales 133, 136, 141, 142 Courtesy Ali Shamas Qadeer 146–147, 150–151 From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York 153 Courtesy Kelly Walters 158–159, 163, 164– 165, 168

© 2021 Kelly Walters All rights reserved. Printed and bound in China 24 23 22 21 4 3 2 1 First edition ISBN 978-1-61689-997-4 No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Where specific company, product, and brand names are cited, copyright and trademark associated with these names are property of their respective owners.

Editor Abby Bussel

Designers Kelly Walters / Bright Polka Dot www.brightpolkadot.com Iyana Martin Diaz www.iyanacreative.com Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949267