Olafur Eliasson:
The glacier, if the weather was good, the glacier would be spectacular. It was fantastic.

Es Devlin:
And she was filming herself in front of the concert all night long.

Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. To mark the end of 2024, on this episode, we’re going to hear excerpts from interviews Debbie did with visual artists in the past year.

Nell Irvin Painter:
My bona fides, which came from academia, counted for nothing.

Carson Ellis:
I was moved when I read it. I read it and I thought it was very funny how boring it was.

Curtis Fox:
If you had to add out what kinds of creative people have most appeared on Design Matters, designers would come in first, especially since Debbie interviewed designers almost exclusively in the early days of this podcast. But a close second would probably be artists. So many designers also have an art practice or their work simply bridges the divide between design and art. On this episode, we’re going to hear excerpts from interviews that Debbie did with four very different artists.

Es Devlin is a set designer who often works on a grand scale. She’s done concert sets for Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, for opera festivals, the Olympics, and even for the Super Bowl. One of her latest projects was creating digital sculptures for U2 and the inaugural performance at the Sphere, the giant immersive entertainment arena just outside of Las Vegas.

Debbie Millman:
In an article that I read about your involvement with the Sphere, you talked about the iPhone occasion of the experience of being at the Sphere and seeing the unbelievable explosion of art and graphics where you’re fully immersed in this environment. It is really transformational. It does feel like either a religious experience or a drug-induced experience. It’s really unlike anything that has come before it. I’m wondering how you feel about the throngs of people videotaping while they’re watching and experiencing.

Es Devlin:
I want to break that into two parts really, because when I said it’s like the iPhoneification of concert design, I sort of meant that when Jony Ive designed the iPhone, in a way, he’d sort of reached the ne plus ultra of design, of that object because it was this infinity call, this beautiful black thing. And in a way, no one’s really gone any further with it because it was like, “Okay, we arrived. This is what this object needs to be for now until it’s in our body. This is as edgeless as it can be, as infinity-edged as it can be before it actually migrates under the skin probably.”

And we had talked with Willie Williams, U2’s creative director 10 years ago when we were first working with U2. We talked about the possibility and the desire that we had for sound and vision to coexist in one piece of technology at a concert because it irritated us that there were two departments, people up ladders and genies putting truss up to hang giant great big speakers in front of necessarily other people up, other ladders putting up big screens. And we longed for a video screen that was permeable to sound.

And we actually commissioned a lot of research on this with our colleagues who made a lot of new video technology, but they couldn’t solve it for all the frequencies for an outdoor concert. It wasn’t possible. And that’s where I think the Sphere has iPhoneified concert design. It has just simply in an iPhone-y way combined the thing you need to do at a concert, which is to hear, and the thing you want to do at a concert, which is to see. And it’s done a sort of sinusthesic, synesthetic move where the speakers, and I can’t remember how many thousands and there are, but many, are behind the screen. And the screen is permeable to sound, and that’s brand new. So that’s one piece.

To give you the other answer about how I feel about the fact that certainly on the opening night, I went back again just before the closing and it was somewhat different then. But certainly on the opening night, it really was like being in a film studio in that everybody is holding their phone because this was new, everyone had to film it. And listen, that’s fine. Making a film, everybody becoming a filmmaker is rather beautiful in its way, but it does preclude dancing. And if there’s one thing I think will be put on most of our gravestones, certainly mine if I died tomorrow, is, “Had a cool life but didn’t dance enough.” So I think-

Debbie Millman:
Who among us? Who among us?

Es Devlin:
So I do think being a filmmaker is cool. I don’t even mind being a self-portrait filmmaker, although I was at the weekend concert [inaudible 00:05:17] the weekend in London at the Olympic Stadium. It was a beautiful night, really beautiful. And the lady in front of me had her camera pointing to me all night. I was like, “That’s weird.” And then I realized, “Well, it wasn’t. It was pointed at herself.” And she was filming herself in front of the concert all night long. And you could say that’s a heroic and majestic act of sustained self-portraiture in the School of Dürer and all the other great self-portraits that have been made. That’s an important act.

Debbie Millman:
That’s a generous way of putting it.

Es Devlin:
I have found life far more interesting when I try to always find an alternative to judging. I thought if I can apply my curiosity rather than my judging bone, life just becomes a bit more interesting.

Debbie Millman:
The Sphere is 360 feet tall. It has 580,000 square feet of fully programmable LED exterior. And it’s a curved 160,000 square foot screen inside. How did you approach making this level of artwork for U2 and for the Sphere?

Es Devlin:
Well, first thing obviously to say, that this was very much not something I did at all alone. The project was led by the band and by their very long top-standing creative director, Willie Williams, who has a wonderful team called Treatment who are beautiful crafters of video.

But that band, very broad in their seeking when they come to make a show, and they gathered together a kind of board, creative board, that we had been working together actually 10 years since the Innocence and Experience tour. So it’s that same group, and we spent three days together and just brainstormed ideas. And I think the first thing we knew was there was a concern that this giant object, what would be the reception of it? Should the world have it? Is it a good thing to even be part of? Really, everyone was questioning that. And I think we wanted to declare our awareness of its materiality, that we weren’t going to just treat it as a portal to something. We were going to start at the beginning by saying, “Hey, we know the minerality of this thing. We know what it took to build it. We know the resources that have gone into it, financial, mineral, human planetary. We know that there’s a commitment to solar power eventually, but that hasn’t happened yet.”

So when you go in, the concretization of it was sort of very purposeful. And actually I went back the other day and someone I was with said, “Oh, how are you going to get rid of all the concrete panels to reveal the LED?” And oh, the other person looked up and said, “Oh, I didn’t know it had a hole in the roof.” And I said, “Oh yeah, the rain sometimes comes in.” So it’s quite believable when you walk in this concrete interior. I say when you walk in, that shows now finished, but when you walked in. And then very purposeful, this splitting apart, it’s a gesture that’s really important to me. That line of light I saw, and obviously important to many other people including Tadao Ando and all sorts of people, not just me.

So, splitting the concrete apart to then reveal the video and then, ultimately, a gesture that Jim Dolan and Bono had been clear on since the very beginning of their conversations was that they wanted to deconstruct the Sphere and reveal what you would see if the sphere weren’t there. So this reveal of Las Vegas built with such precision by industrial light and magic deconstructs itself. And the way that they researched that, they unbuilt every building in Las Vegas in the order in which they were built until you just got back to the planet, the place on the planet where we are, that space in the desert. None of the lights, just that. And then we went back ultimately to the species, which also call that place home.

And I think we were clear that we wanted to consecrate the building, like a cathedral, to make a sort of offering and say, “Let’s dedicate and consecrate this building to the species that call this place home, that don’t have any say in whether or not we use this sister build a giant dome.” So that’s what that final Nevada arc gesture was about.

Debbie Millman:
There were two things that I was really struck by regarding this sphere. One is how much it takes its shape and form from a planetarium and how you lose sense of there being any boundaries when you’re in it. It just feels as if you’re in this infinite space, literally and figuratively. The other thing I was thinking about was how almost impossible it feels to make a film of this show. So many shows turn into films. Hamilton is even a film. And so I was wondering if there was any consideration of that when making this.

Es Devlin:
I think it’s such an interesting thought. I think we were really focusing on making the show to be honest in the medium that it is. But I think there is a version where you could play the show as it is and intercut it with footage of the singers. Because if you think about it, if you’re watching the show from the 400, it’s right at the back, which is where frankly you get the best sense of the architectural form of the place, then your awareness of the people on the stage, they take up a very small percentage of your range of vision there.

So if you were playing recorded sound as well rather than live sound, I think you’d have also a lot of different controls over those speakers. I think that system can do a whole load of things that we didn’t do with it yet because we were working with live sound. So I personally think there’ll be a whole nother level you can take it to when you’re working with a recorded sound and you would just place footage of the performance within that film. I think it’d be pretty spectacular and hopefully make it far more accessible to a lot of people to come and see that work even when the band aren’t there. I think it’s going to be pretty exciting actually for that.

Curtis Fox:
Es Devlin.

Olafur Eliasson is an artist who also works on a grand scale. His sculptures, installations, and experiments with light and water have been drawing huge audiences for several decades.
As she often does with guests, Debbie asked Eliasson about his childhood.

Debbie Millman:
You talked about a powerful memory in your childhood in the late 1970s. There was a rationing of electricity in the town where your grandparents lived. And I read that at a certain hour in the evening, all the lights would go off and you’d all move to the windows and watch how the colors of the twilight sky would take on a new quality. Why do you think that memory is so resonant in you?

Olafur Eliasson:
I think it was the social aspect that sort of stamped it into the back of my mind. In ’72 and ’73, the oil was rationalized because it was the oil crisis. But I remember my grandparents, they had a small house on top of a hill called [inaudible 00:12:49] in the small suburban town to Reykjavík called Hafnarfjörður. And the house was facing… The windows facing north. So in Hafnarfjörður, when you face north, you’re looking up to the part of Iceland, the other arm, so to speak, called Snæfellsnes. At the end of Snæfellsnes, there’s something called Snæfellsjökull or the Glacier of Snæfell. Snæfell means snow mountain. So on a clear day, we could stand in the window of the living room of my grandparents and we would look across the ocean to that other peninsula called Snæfellsjökull, and we could see in the summer the sun would set in north. The sun would go down and it would just go under the horizon and come up again. I mean, if you’re at the North Pole, the sun doesn’t go down at all as we know, right?

So the glacier would be lit from behind sometimes. This is such a spectacular phenomenon. You have this chunk of ice, like about 1 kilometer high and 3 or 4 kilometers wide. This glacial chunk of course now is almost gone. It’s much, much smaller, right? So at a certain time of day, I believe just after dinner, in order to save money, because Iceland had not yet fully harvested its geothermal power that it has today, so it was relying on oil. So Iceland was just in the process of getting up onto its feet. So oil actually was an important thing to make everything run in Iceland still in the ’70s.

So there was a bell, a huge bell in the city, and it was like an alarm bell. It was always fascinating to stand up in the window and look over the small city of Hafnarfjörður. The bell was out and all the lights would go out, like all the streetlights, all the house lights, everything was just-

Debbie Millman:
Instantly.

Olafur Eliasson:
Yeah, it’s a fascinating, right? And then my grandma would come with a candle and, “Let’s all sit by the window,” she said, because that’s the only place there’s a bit of light. So sitting by the window with the family and doing what we were doing, reading and just sitting and talking and so on, I like rolling around on the floor if we wanted to. That was very special because the light outside was really blue, very intensely sort of twilight blue.

The glacier, if the weather was good, the glacier would be spectacular. It was fantastic. And then there was this one candle, this burning little piece of fire. So you had the ice and you had the fire and you had this blue color and you had the warm color in everybody’s faces and the skin. It’s like a little bit of a campfire. So it’s a little bit like you had this sort of red and warmth coming together.

I did not really have much of rituals routines. I didn’t have a childhood where everything was ceremonialized. I always envy the people who had a very clear patterns of Christmas and this ceremony, that ceremony, because there’s something very beautiful in the repetition of things. There’s something really unique about falling into the rhythm of life, the respiratory rhythm of how to live. I had a bit of this and that. My mother got married, then divorced and married again. It was like my father then was here and there and then he died.

This was one of the times where there was a routine. You just knew at… What was it? 8 o’clock, there would be this bell and we’d all run to the candle. And when you’re five years old, they’re so nice to know what was about to happen. And that’s an interesting thing to think about these sort of expectations and then the happening and then memories and how you anticipate. And then you have the moment of presence and then you have the kind of warmth of a memory that you carry with you into life.

Debbie Millman:
Olafur, you had your first art show, your first solo art show of drawings when you were 15 years old. What kind of work were you showing in that exhibit?

Olafur Eliasson:
Yeah, there was where I lived on the countryside in Denmark with my mother, there was a small artist group and artist associations of all kinds of artists. It’s more like kind of a gathering. They had shows in libraries and shopping malls or here and there. And I was the youngest member there.

The first time I ever kissed one was one of the kids of the other artists in that group. It’s not funny, but in a shopping mall at night on an opening where it just drifted into the mall somewhere with this one, wonderful young woman. Looking back at it today, what it was, it was nice because it was nothing in particular. This is me having fun. So what must have been the case is that there was not a lot of pressure to perform because I think I can remember roughly there was a cat and there was a puffin, the Icelandic puffin and stuff like that. And it wasn’t really the best drawings of a cat or puffin or something like that, but it was okay to just be like that.

And then because one of the people in this artist group had a little gallery where they normally showed ceramics and then I had a show there that was kind of funny because I was not so old, I was just turning 15, well, I was just turning 14 or whatever, and I was like, “Oh, I have a show.” My God, I going $40, $30, $60 for the drawings. I was like, “Oh my God, if I sell everything,” I’m like, “$300. It was going to be so wild.”

But what I think now looking back, it was not like my mother looked over my shoulder and said, “This drawing is not good enough. Do it again. Tiger mom is here.” So what was beautiful is that I had a good time, and I said, “Oh my god, this is great. I love having an exhibition.” And I did… I think I did. I don’t really remember. I think I did sent a few of them probably to my family members or something. But these drawings, they must be around or maybe not.

Debbie Millman:
Now, despite having your first solo exhibition at such a young age, I actually read that your first passion was breakdancing. And you even won a Scandinavian championship as part of a trio you named the Harlem Gun Crew.

Olafur Eliasson:
Yeah, it’s funny, right? It’s not-

Debbie Millman:
Tell us. I saw a couple of-

Olafur Eliasson:
Maybe it’s not funny actually.

Debbie Millman:
No, I saw some wonderful videos of you breakdancing on YouTube.

Olafur Eliasson:
So this is actually around the same time of this show. So I went to Copenhagen to see my granddad. I was 14. And in the window, and this is now, this is ’81. Can you imagine? ’81. I’m in Copenhagen on the pedestrian shown and there’s a clothing store. And in the window of this clothing store, there’s like three or four human mannequins. I’m looking at them and say, “My God, they’re real people, but they’re standing very still.” And suddenly they moved like robots, like… You know, the hands.

And then one of them, out of nowhere, just made a wave from one hand through the elbow shoulder over to the other arm and to the other hand. And I was shocked. And I realized my life in that moment had changed. I’m not being overly dramatic. So I went home and from that moment on, I started moving around my house as a robot or as a kind of some kind of moving.

See, now there was nothing called internet. There was barely something called video, like a VHS didn’t exist. There was [inaudible 00:20:18] called Betamax, I think, or what. So I had no idea until a little later I actually met one of the people in Copenhagen and I said, “What were you doing?” Because he was standing on the street. “Where is this one?”

“Yeah, I was in high school in America,” he said. “At there it was quite normal to do it.”

“But what are you doing?”
“It’s called electric boogie or break-dance.”

And I said, “My God, it’s amazing.”

So I was then 15 and I hit puberty. Finally, I was the last one in the class hit puberty. And then I said,

“Okay, I need to acknowledge that I have a body. And how better to acknowledge embodiment by disembodying and becoming a robot?” So I felt very comfortable in being present and being un-present at the same time as you could say. And of course, as things went on and music videos then came and then the Rocksteady crew, and then there was suddenly a whole handful of… Then suddenly there was rap music. And so I just completely by coincidence happened to be on the front end of that movement also when it took place in America.

Curtis Fox:
That was Olafur Eliasson.

Nell Irvin Painter is a celebrated historian in academic who took up art later in life. Painter says her interest in art grew out of the biography she wrote of Sojourner Truth.

Debbie Millman:
You decided, despite already having a PhD from Harvard University, you wanted to go back to school to get another bachelor’s degree.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
But this time in fine art. What inspired that decision?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Two things, Sojourner Truth, and that stay in the art history library had really reawakened my attraction to images and to imagery. And the other thing was I just wanted to do it and I could. My husband takes care of me. I didn’t have to worry about… I had the money. And art school is, as you know, absurdly expensive.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Nell Irvin Painter:
And the degree you come out with is not going to pay your rent. So luckily, I didn’t have to worry about my rent. I wanted the degrees, plural, because I wanted to be professional. I wanted to be professional in the way I was professional as a historian. That has not been totally smooth, but with, I just keep talking, you see where I got to in ways that I could put the two together, it took me 10 years to put my historical self together with my visual artist self. It was very bumpy. And even now, I cannot go from concentrating on writing to concentrating on drawing without a kind of week or so of just changing gears.

Debbie Millman:
You got your BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. And though you originally didn’t know if you wanted to go to graduate school, you ultimately realized that you did. And you’ve written that this was because you wanted to work harder than the kids did. You wanted to be more intense than the kids were. And you thought graduate school would do that for you. Did it?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah, it did. It did. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I tell people getting a PhD from Harvard in history was a piece of cake in comparison.

Debbie Millman:
Why is that now? How is that possible?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, I guess the easiest way is to say that as a historian, I knew what the values and the standards were. In art, I did it. So some of the art that I looked at when I was an undergraduate just looked like piles of stuff to me. I didn’t understand how you use visual archives as opposed to how you use historical archives. And I was too tight and too focused on what I call discursive meaning when I started, to, what I came to later on in graduate school was a real loosening up and that was something I really had to do.

Debbie Millman:
You went to the Rhode Island School of Design or RISD?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
What did the students make of an African-American woman in her ’60s alongside them in class?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I think kind of nothing.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Nell Irvin Painter:
That is not true of everyone. I mean, we were very small. We were 12. But a couple of them felt old because they were like 31, 32. But I was just this old lady. And my bona fides, which came from academia, counted for nothing. And the thing that really summed it up, at the end of the school year, we were going to take our picture. So everybody assembled at the given time and nothing happened and nothing happened and people weren’t there. So finally, I am always on time, but I finally said, “Look, I have to take care of this thing in my studio. Call me when you’re ready to take the picture.” And as soon as I left, they took the picture.

Debbie Millman:
Oh. Despite all the accolades you got as an historian, you often got what you referred to as stinging criticisms that were one long tearing down in addition to this other utterly disrespective behavior. One professor even told you that you would never be an artist.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I’m assuming that that was a white cis-heterosexual man.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
In any case, why did he say that to you and how did you respond and how did you recover from that?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah, his name was Henry. He was printmaking teacher. And this was my first semester at RISD and I was feeling my way. I was not an experienced printmaker by any means, but I tried hard. And he called me dogged. And it wasn’t like, “Oh, you are dogged. You are very hardworking.” No, it was, “You are dogged.” So I called him out on it because I knew teaching. And if you are a good teacher, you don’t say things like that too. So I said, “Henry, that’s bullshit.” He said, “You may sell your work, you may have collectors, you may be in museums, you may have a gallery, but you will never be an artist.” And that stung. And I would say-

Debbie Millman:
Oh, my God. Yeah.

Nell Irvin Painter:
… what saved me was I had friends at Yale, they put me back together again.

Debbie Millman:
You did a fellowship there, did you? Didn’t you?

Nell Irvin Painter:
After I graduated from RISD, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You did a lot of research after that experience and discovered how many people have either been told that they’ll never be an artist or known somebody who was told that there would never be an artist, whether it’s a fine artist or a poet or a playwright or any field in the arts.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Right. Right.

Debbie Millman:
And you talk about this in relation to what you refer to as the talent mystique, the great man mystique and the genius mystique, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about that.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. I can talk about that actually more easily through publishing, because the publishing world right now, people are tearing their hair, “Oh, it’s terrible. All this consolidation.” And in the good old days, an editor could foster a writer even though the writer was not selling out and just wait until that writer flourished. And now there’s just, “Oh, it’s so terrible. The marketing, oh.”

But at the same time, the early reviews came through. I got two really good, strong early reviews from Kirkus and from Publishers Weekly, and another list maker said, “These are the 45 best books by women of color this spring.” And I thought, “45. Wow, that’s fantastic.” So I wonder if my 45 best books by women of color is related to the good old days gone by when the good old days gone by were white male writers.

In the 20th century, there was a tiny sliver of publications by white women. There was almost nothing well known by Black women. The breakthrough is with Toni Morrison, and that is in the 1980s. When I am with other Black women writers and they talk about what made the difference from them, they talk about when they were girls and they read Toni Morrison. When I was a girl, there was no Toni Morrison.

Curtis Fox:
Nell Irvin Painter.

Carson Ellis is an author and illustrator. Her bestselling books for children include Home and Du Iz Tak. Her latest book, One Week in January, is for adults, and it illustrates a diary she kept in her 20s.

Debbie Millman:
The book relays the story of one week of your life in 2001, the monumental week, you first moved to Portland, Oregon. And that week you decided to keep a journal documenting every single thing you did each day, everything you ate, every book you read, every time you checked your email. Why that week at that time, and why so much detail?

Carson Ellis:
I don’t remember why that week and I didn’t remember anything about this journal when I found it. I just found it in a box of ephemera a few years ago and I couldn’t remember why it even existed. I hadn’t seen it in 20 years or something. I was like, “Why would I have kept not only this journal for one week, but a journal that was so meticulous, such a detailed, meticulous chronicle of everything I did?” But then I spoke to my friend about it who is in the book a lot, my really old friend Emily, and I asked her if she remembered anything about it and she was like, “I do. You kept that journal because you were worried that you were losing your memory. And it was some kind of memory exercise because you always were feeling like you were too forgetful and you were somehow trying to boost your memory by writing down everything that you did.”

So I think every morning when I woke up, I wrote down every single thing that I could remember from the day before. And it was the week I moved to Portland, and I think, I don’t know if there’s significance to that, I’m not sure if that was intentional, I’m not sure if it was something that was sort of helping me get my bearings in a new city. My sense is that at the time, I was 25 years old, and I had just a million half-formed art ideas in my head, and this was just one of them, like a bunch of just ways of being creative that I was sort of exploring and trying to find some purpose for in my creative practice, you know?

Debbie Millman:
You said that the text doesn’t read so much like a journal, that you feel that it reads more like a stoic catalogue and that you don’t reveal much emotionally. And I have to say, Carson, I don’t agree at all. That to me doesn’t even feel like we’re talking about the same book.

Carson Ellis:
Interesting.

Debbie Millman:
There’s so much emotion in it. And what’s so interesting about it is that there’s a lot of emotion because the things that you don’t say that give a sense of there being deep emotionality in it.

Carson Ellis:
Yeah. I mean I think my favorite books are books where we’re not hearing from a narrative voice what the characters are going through. We’re witnessing it and we’re discerning it from context and dialogue and stuff. And so I guess in that way, this book is similar where I don’t really ever say how I’m feeling, but because you see everything I’m doing and are privy to so many of my conversations, you can see that I am broke, I’m probably in love with my best friend who I’m hanging out with all the time, but he’s dating all of my friends friends.

Debbie Millman:
And sleeping with in the same bed, but nothing is happening.

Carson Ellis:
Yeah, we’re sleeping in the same bed, but we’re “just friends.” There’s so much sort of longing and unfulfilled stuff in it that it is. I agree with you. I do think there’s a lot of feeling in it, but I think I’ve really go out of my way to not actually express anything, which does seem counter to a diary because I feel like other diaries I have kept, I’ve kept them because I was in some kind of moment of emotional tumult and I wanted to be like, “Dear diary, I am so unhappy because of this reason and this reason,” and there’s none of that in this book.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s certainly very unselfconscious, but that’s also what I love about it. You kind of know that this young woman is in love with this man and he’s bringing her pizza every night because she’s so broke. She doesn’t have money for dinner. I don’t know, there’s so much unsaid beauty in it.

What made you decide once you found it again, that you wanted to make it into a book and make all of these, I think, 20 or 30 illustrations, paintings for the book?

Carson Ellis:
I was moved when I read it. I read it and I thought it was very funny how boring it was. It’s just sort of like, I woke up and I put on this song and then I ate this bagel, and then I checked my email and no one had written me, and then I took a shower. It’s like just page after page of that. And I realized I’m not really selling it. But I think there is something to that.

For one thing, it’s such a time capsule both of my life, which was so different then because I was broke and I wasn’t a working artist, and I was also kind of transient and in constant transition when I was 25 years old, but also because we were in the middle of this radical cultural shift into a digital age. So it was like my email was novel, the internet was novel, and I had no sense of how profound this shift was or the magnitude of it or the fact that it was irreversible and that we were all moving headlong into a era of digital everything that we would live in whether we wanted to or not. So there was something kind of moving about that, and I do pine for a time before my iPhone and my social media. And so it was very, very sweet and moving to be taken back to that period and also to that period in my own life.

And then also I feel like because it is… I do think of it as a pretty stoic account of that week, and so it just felt like a thing that would serve from illustration. I was like, “Oh, the other side of the story is all the sort of emotional poignancy and resonance of that week,” and maybe that could be something that would be in the art if it’s not in the text, or maybe those two things would kind of communicate with each other to tell a more interesting story or something.

I guess as an illustrator, I think I’m always trying to find places where art helps text be more interesting or sophisticated or tell a story that is a little deeper because you’ve combined it with some visual element, and this occurred to me as a good candidate for that.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I mean, what I find so remarkable is that the paintings are so vivid. They really do help expand the text in a lot of ways. And because it is so matter-of-fact, you never really tell your reader how they should feel. It almost feels very objective in a lot of ways. There’s nothing purpley about it. It’s all very clear, and then you see these beautiful paintings that seem to perfectly articulate the memory. And so I think there’s such a nice of duality to that without sounding really sort of eye-rollingly ridiculous. There’s such a nice kind of play between the very ethereal, very beautiful memories as paintings or paintings as memories, and then this very matter-of-fact way of going about your life.

Carson Ellis:
Thanks, Debbie. I was sort of hoping for that. And I was hoping that the two things would feel like these separate voices sort of working together to tell a story, like the voice of the 48-year-old painter and the voice of the 25-year-old writer who are the same person, but kind of not really. So much time has passed.

Debbie Millman:
Do you see this 25-year-old version of yourself as part of who you are, as integrated into who you are? How do you feel about these two women, one at 25, one at 48, that share the same soul?

Carson Ellis:
They feel like they’re the same person, but they also feel really, really different. It did feel certainly more like I’m collaborating with an author than it felt like I was writing and illustrating my own book.

Debbie Millman:
Carson, before we finish the show, I’m wondering if you could read a little bit from One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary Diary?

Carson Ellis:
I would love to. I’m going to read the end.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, good.

Carson Ellis:
Which is Friday. It’s one week. And so this is the last day, and I’m going to start about halfway through the day.

“Colin called Emmy and asked her if she wanted to come to the track with us. She did, so we picked her up and went to Portland Meadows to bet on horses. It was rainy, and we drove down to MLK instead of I-5 and got sort of lost.”

“Colin was being a real brat. To everything that Emmy and I asked, he would say ‘No.’ And when I patted him on the shoulder, he said, ‘Don’t touch me’.”

“I said, ‘You’re never coming to the track with me again, are you?’ He said, ‘No’.”

“I said, ‘That’s mean’.”

“He said, ‘Good’.”

“And I said in my head, ‘I hate Colin Malloy’.”

“We got to the track in time for the third race, and I told Colin that I was so mad and went to get a hot dog, a program, and a beer. I placed my first bet, $2 across on the number 6, and went to the paddock to look at my horse. Then I saw Colin and was still angry, so he half-heartedly apologized and we made up. The only good bet either of us made was the same bet, 3 bucks across on a long shot, and we both won $24.”

“Emmy made one bet on a horse named the Cisco kid in the 5th race and lost. I was wearing Emmy’s grandma’s rings, my red dress, and red high heels for luck. Our luck was never very good though, and we left after the 6th race.”

“We dropped Emmy at home and came back to the warehouse where I fell asleep on Colin and Stiv’s couch for about an hour. Nathan woke up at 10:10, and the three of us walked downtown to see Marjorie, Lucia, and Heidi in a dance performance at an art school. I kept slipping and falling all the way there because of my lucky shoes. When we got there, it had just ended and we all felt dumb for missing it. I walked around and looked at the art, which was bad, except for a painting of a rooster on a pane of glass.”

“Heidi then drove Colin, Nathan, and me to a bar called 15 where we got so drunk. Colin drank screwdrivers, Nathan drank beer, and I drank scotch. I started talking to a boy named Donald, and Colin pretended to be my jealous boyfriend. Then I slipped and fell on a ramp going down to the bathroom because of drunkenness, and again, the lucky red shoes. I broke two glasses, one with scotch and the other with water. And two men rushed over to help me and brush me off. I was sad because my scotch was now on my dress, but one of the men offered to buy me another, so I didn’t care.”

“Then Marjorie came and introduced me to a guy named Shantos in Elvis sunglasses, who was some sort of promoter or something. We talked about me making some posters for him and exchanged numbers. And the owner of the bar brought me another scotch because I had fallen down and broken mine.”
“I went back to talk to Donald, but he told me he was looking for his one true love and tucked my hair behind my ear, so I left and sat down with Lucia, Jebediah, Colin, Marjorie, Nathan, and some of Jebediah’s friends.”

“Nathan was sad because the hot girl that he hadn’t worked up the herd to talk to had left. Colin and I started singing Pogue songs as loud as we could and slamming our fists on the table. The bouncer came by and told us to shut up, but we didn’t. Another guy collecting glasses said to us, snidely, ‘Is that really necessary?’ But still, we sang. I vowed never to return.”

“Then we got up to go home and Nathan tried to solicit a ride from Marjorie who was in the midst of a conversation and I said, ‘We ought to walk anyway, because we were so drunk’.”

“A couple of blocks from home, we spotted some scaffolding on the roof of a building with 30-foot ladders tied to either side. Nathan somehow got on the fire escape and busted the chain that was securing the lowest part of the ladder and keeping it from touching the ground. It was one of those seesaw type ladders.”

“It was raining now, and I ran to get Nathan’s bag and slipped and fell on my ass. We climbed the fire escape to the roof, and Nathan got out his video camera. Colin and I each climbed a ladder on either side of the scaffolding. I was still wearing high heels and climbed so carefully. When we got to the top, we were dozens of feet up with about 30 feet between us.”

“After some time, Colin put a cigarette in his mouth and yelled to me, ‘Do you have a light?’ I yelled back, ‘Yes. Come down and we’ll have a cigarette.’ So we climbed down and ran around on the roof, going up some more ladders and looking into a creepy brick room.”

“Nathan had filmed the whole thing, so we went home to watch it. When we got back on the ground, we started running and I yelled, ‘Wait, you guys,’ and fell in my ass once more. I had left my red candle that I stole from the bar on the ground next to the building, but I couldn’t find it and decided to come back for it the next day.”

“We walked home in the rain and went straight up to Nathan’s. First, we watched the rap video that we made in San Francisco for [inaudible 00:43:44] which was so funny. Then we watched the video of the roof, which was beautiful and eerie with only the noise of cars on the highway and some yelling in the background. We shared the last two cigarettes and the last two beers between the three of us.”
“Nathan rewound the tape and we watched the whole thing again with outtakes from [inaudible 00:44:03], scenes of Colin and Nathan driving out to San Francisco, and some video shot at the Shanghai.”

“Colin went to sleep, and Nathan and I talked about lost love. ‘Now I’m sad,’ I said. ‘Now I’m really sad,’ said Nathan. I kissed him good night on the cheek and went to bed.”

Curtis Fox:
Carson Ellis, her book is One Week in January: New Paintings For an Old Diary. You can hear the full interviews with all four of these artists on designmattersmedia.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

The post Design Matters: Best of 2024 with Artists appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Some people think that race is a fiction, yet it is a fiction that our society has kept lethally alive for a long time now. How? Well, it is all about the details. To make a fictional world seem real, you have to fill it in with images and sensory information. You also have to leave most of the real world out. But if you succeed, the real world will look a little different for your readers.

In her new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, Sarah Lewis traces the visual history of race in America. She explains how art, photographs, movies, and pop culture turned the fictional idea of race into a destructive cultural fact. It’s a scholarly tour de force and a literal eye-opener.
Sarah Lewis is a celebrated art and cultural historian and a professor at Harvard University. She’s also the founder of Vision and Justice, a civic initiative to reveal the important role of visual culture in shaping how we think. Sarah Lewis, welcome to Design Matters.

Sarah Lewis:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s really an honor to speak with you.

Debbie Millman:
Sarah, I understand when you were in high school, you were a 400-meter sprinter.

Sarah Lewis:
How did you find this out? Yes, I was. I loved running. That was my race, hard, hard race.

Debbie Millman:
And so did you have hopes to be an athlete of some sort?

Sarah Lewis:
I did. I grew up in that era when Flo-Jo was running and made us understand that dreams were realized on the track, and those dreams I thought might be mine too. I thought I might run professionally, and genetically I was fast. But I didn’t love the training, I didn’t love the regimen. So in the end, I still run. I don’t run competitively, but I keep threatening I’ll do more marathons and things like that to keep it going.

Debbie Millman:
You were born and raised in New York City and you were named after your grandfather, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee, with whom you share the initials S-E-L. In 1926 when he was in the 11th grade, he was expelled from a New York City public school for asking why his history textbooks only showed images of white Americans. Can you talk about what happened next?

Sarah Lewis:
My grandfather went through the experience that you described so beautifully, and I knew nothing about it until he died. When I was in college getting ready to go to his funeral, I asked my mother why he didn’t have a high school diploma. He was so sharp and understood so much. I didn’t understand. I was in college at Harvard at the time, and she told me this story.

She told me that what came next is, and that’s really what transformed my own understanding about the power of the arts, was it was startling to me. She told me that he dared to ask his teacher why he was perceiving that answer that African-Americans, in particular, had done nothing to merit inclusion in those textbooks. And he was asking about the whole world. He wanted to know where Asian Americans were, Latin Americans were, Indigenous folks were.

He didn’t accept her answer, and he was expelled from public school from high school for his so-called impertinence at refusing to do so. He became an artist, he became a musician. And in those paintings, drawings, he created the very genre scenes he knew he should have been able to find in those textbooks. He was consistent and insistent on ensuring that the whole world was present in those images. I grew up at his knee wanting to draw, learning to paint from him as stunned by this visual display that I described.
And so when I learned about what he did next, there really that day at his funeral, I realized, well, of course that in bearing his initials, S-E-L, my name is so much less cool than my grandfather’s though, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee. I was in lineage and I realized in that moment I could be in lineage with a set of questions that I now realize and occupy the mission of my life. What is the role of art for justice in American society? And that’s really what he was asking his teacher. And the answer is one that he lived out.

At that time in college, I think many of us studying the arts were not told much about the connection between culture, art and racial politics. So I began to teach myself and that work results in the courses I teach at Harvard and many of the publications that have come out since.

Debbie Millman:
As you were growing up in addition to sprinting, you also took salsa lessons and inspired by your grandfather. You also started painting. What kinds of things were you painting at that time?

Sarah Lewis:
I was painting the way that my grandfather did. I was in a class, I went to Brearley all-girls school in New York growing up. The program, the curriculum there really focused us on still lives and figurative painting. So I was doing what was asked of me as I learned to paint, but I was without knowing it making sure the whole world was present too. My mother showed me recently a very early painting I made when we were asked to paint pilgrims and it was maybe an eight or nine. My pilgrim was Black. My pilgrim was Black, but these same kind of black buckled shoes.

And I love that no one corrected me, that yuck age. No one told me about this history, and in so doing, they were letting me create a visual image that inserted my own identity as the center. And of course, I now deeply understand the tensions in the fabric of this country between slavery and freedom and teach on this of course at Harvard. But at the time, the paintings I made telegraphed that I understood that we all count in American society.

So that’s what I was up to. I thought I might, after I abandoned my running ambitions, be an artist. And even in my first year, not really after that, but first year at Harvard, I thought I would be a painter still, but love that I’m able now to think about the significance of the arts in a broader way than I probably could have if I was an artist full time.

Debbie Millman:
When you applied to Harvard, you wrote your application essay on failure. Why that topic?

Sarah Lewis:
Can I just say I need to salute the extraordinary research you do with all of your guests, and I’m feeling the benefit of it here myself. Oh my goodness, you know so much about the journey. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you.

Sarah Lewis:
I did. I wrote about failure from my application essay to Harvard, and it was, I thought without even asking anyone such an ill-advised idea, I didn’t tell anyone about it. I made this decision and I remember even asking my parents to leave the house one day over the weekend so I could write the piece in piece, and then it was a Sunday the next day and bring it to school and submit it.

It was about failure broadly, but really more about the gift of failure that comes and that we all know happens in the creative arts. I was interested in the improbable but irreplaceable foundations of these experiences we wish we didn’t have for the transformation and potentially the triumphs that could come.
I’d had this experience that was unique at the time, and I wrote about it, that experience. It was the NAACP when I was growing up had an Olympiads. It was this Olympic competition, multiple fields, so you could enter it in painting or the sciences, and every state had a competition and then there was a national competition and it would take place in an arena the size of a football field. The awards were given out to an audience that large. It was extraordinary.

And I had won in the painting category in one year and as a ninth grader and then won at the national level. The prize was a computer and some money, and so as a kid it had a huge impact on me and I didn’t think anything of my work on that level until that award. I tried again two years later and I don’t think I even placed enough to go to the national level, and it felt like a massive failure because of how public it was for my peers.

It began my own just pursuit, which led to other work, other publications about the gift of failure because I think especially when you’re going to schools that really condition you to believe in your own success, failure goes against your very understanding of who you are and can rock you to your core, especially as a young person. So I wanted to write a piece that was a vulnerable one for the application to speak to a kind of resilience that I thought I’d cultivated through the process. And I’m glad it worked.

Debbie Millman:
How did you cultivate, but how did you… I mean, that’s pretty young to cultivate. I’m still working on trying to understand my own rejections and failures in a more sort of productive, mature way. How were you able to do that at such a young age?

Sarah Lewis:
It’s a great question. I’m not sure that I can process it with you. I don’t know that I’ve asked myself that question internally. But at that age, I was 17, 18 young Black woman growing up in New York City and Manhattan at that, I think I had learned even then to take the gift of being underestimated seriously. And it’s connected to the idea of failure, right? Because when you’re underestimated, you are seen to be a failure in effect in the eyes of whomever is judging you as compared to who you actually are and who you could be, and you’re aware of that gap in their perception of you and the fact of who you can become.

And that gap is failure. That gap is a failure of imagination. It’s a failure of judgment. It’s a failure of the history of narratives that have told women who they can be, that told Black women who they can be.
So what I was already gleaning from what the world was telling me was that I was going to have to contend with this sort of environment, which failure was around me despite my successes. That experience is one that I drive strength from now still because I think the odds of me just walking a street and someone assuming that I do what I do if they look at me are pretty low still, right?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I hate to say yes, but yes.

Sarah Lewis:
Even though I’m a deep optimist.

Debbie Millman:
How do you feel about failure now?

Sarah Lewis:
I’m inspired by failure and try to push myself to that edge. As you know, I wrote about failure in the Rise nearly 10 years ago now. What that book taught me was just how little we speak about the importance of failure in our lives. And so on a personal level after publishing it, I challenged myself to try to be as brave as the entrepreneurs and athletes and explorers and artists that I profile in the book.

When you work as a writer or an academia or even in the arts, you have to secret away those experiences of failure. So what I try to do is create space for the innovation that happens only through failure. In, say, teaching with the students, I’ll ensure that there’s a gift-of-failure policy in the larger classes so they can experiment with, say, one piece of writing and then produce another piece of writing and drop the lower grade of the two so they can feel free in that sense.

So I think you have to build it in programmatically, and I build it into with my own experiments in writing in particular, but lately I’m trying to do it through pursuits. I used to mention salsa dancing. I used to dance a lot after work and things and just, I love taking classes and now I want to do that too. I’m going to try to pick up another form of dance. I know I’m not going to be good it at the start. I think that’s part of the point.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I mean, one of the issues that I contend with on the regular is feeling afraid to start something new because somehow I’ll humiliate myself with the lack of talent or knowledge or just sort of savoir faire, but I’m trying to work on that. I’m working on it.

Initially you went to Harvard pre-med, which I read and was sort of shocked at. But I understand a Proctor in your freshman dorm room gave you a copy of Richard Powell’s book, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. Is that what sort of motivated you to begin to shift your idea about what you wanted to study?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. Yes. That sweet Proctor, that spirit, she’s actually a dear friend of mine now, April Yvonne Garrett. That was a moment. I really hope and I know that people are, but I really hope people pay attention to those dewdrops on your journey, those moments that feel amplified in your own sense of what happened during the day because it matters. That moment mattered when she gave me that book and I sensed it, and I knew it at the time.

It mattered because, well now I think people privilege and honor the role of the artist even more so than they did say 20 years ago. But to go to Harvard and to be a young Black woman going to Harvard with the sacrifices my family made for generations for me to be there, being in the arts was nearly the last advisable path to take.

So yes, I was pre-med. I was thinking I would be a doctor that’s safe and I can help people and my spirit is to help and to help heal. So it was necessary for me to have lanterns on an alternate path, and that book was one of those lanterns. It was to say, this can be done, you can be a writer and do this. There’s a whole history that you could be part of. And this book really was the guide to looking at that path, Richard Powell’s book.

Debbie Millman:
You went on to get a master’s in philosophy from Oxford University and a master’s of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Sarah, why two master’s degrees? Were they concurrent? How did you manage this?

Sarah Lewis:
Yeah, so I received a Marshall Scholarship to go to study abroad for three years after college, and it gives you this opportunity. It’s fantastic to study anywhere in the UK that you can get in. And I decided to do two degrees, one in economic and social history at Oxford, and the other in art history. Hadn’t yet committed to a doctorate and at the time certainly wasn’t going to do it in the UK because I wanted to be around my friends, and so I wanted to come back.

But I hadn’t, you can see with the choice the sort of split between economics and social history and the arts. I hadn’t yet found a way to bring together this connection between art and politics. So I felt as if I had to go down two different paths to give myself the arsenal I needed to understand it more fully.
So it’s not an unusual thing to do on that fellowship, though. A lot of people end up with those two degrees, but it was also right after 9/11. And I think because I had lost a good friend in the towers and had a lot of friends just pass from accidents of different kinds, I really benefited from having a three-year period to figure myself out to understand how I could best contribute if I could to society.

Debbie Millman:
I understand that when you were in London, you saw Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project. I just interviewed Olafur about his current exhibits that he’s having in London, in New York, in Korea, about how we see what we see reflected back to us, which I think has some really interesting overlaps with your work. What was it about The Weather Project that inspired you so much?

Sarah Lewis:
My God, do you know, I think I’ve just put together for the first time when I became interested in studying vision itself. It was through that exhibition, it was through seeing that show.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, wow.

Sarah Lewis:
So at the time, I was curating at the Tate Modern in London, working with Donna De Salvo who came over to Whitney after that. And throughout the time of that, really was an internship as curatorial assistant, The Weather Project was up. So every day, I would leave my office and experience people having a Truman Show-like experience in effect. They were able to see themselves seeing and see the artifice of the world around them.

But what stunned me most and just for those who haven’t seen it, it’s in the Turbine Hall at the Tate. Olafur Eliasson created an extraordinary half dome that feels like a sun, and then with mirrors completes it so that it appears to be a circle. And you look up at it and can see the artifice, but the response to it was people lying on the ground as if they were on a beach somewhere underneath a sun.

And it was stunning to witness because of course it would be winter months and people were doing that and the floor is the floor. And you know what happens on the floor, people were just so… It was such an embodied response and it made me think about how seeing transforms being, how just the act of looking at something can change your, not just behaviors but your even rational sense of what to do in a space.
So that probably was the moment I wrote about that piece for one of the masters papers, and I loved, I still remember how much the research excited me. And it gave me a sense of just how much we miss when we don’t address the power of the arts for transformations in society. That was the beginning.

Debbie Millman:
In one of the interviews that I read, you said that that experience got you thinking about James Joyce. And of course my eyes and ears perked up because I’m a big fan, and you described it as a kind of wonder and aesthetic experience that you’re not moved to possess or critique or judge but simply to behold. And I think that’s such a wonderful way of thinking about what art can do, how you just behold it and it sort of takes you over in some way.

Sarah Lewis:
That’s it. I mean, even the words as you so well know to describe, the power of an aesthetic experience conveys that we’re in an altered state. We’re stunned or dazzled or we’re knocked out, these are the words we use because there’s a suspension in those judgments. It’s as if you vividly describe it with those words. And that’s why the arts have, I think, the capacity to transform how we see the world. In that altered state, you can revise what you see when you emerge out of it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. So you published The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery in 2014. And I believe that you actually began working on your book first from that experience writing your essay for your application to Harvard. But then when you were getting your PhD from Yale, you’ve said that writing that book was an audacious act. In what way?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. Well, for a number of reasons. Practically speaking, when you’re a graduate student, you’re supposed to be, and I was writing a dissertation. You’re not supposed to be writing another book alongside of it with, of all places [inaudible 00:22:12] publisher.

Debbie Millman:
Unless you’re Sarah Lewis. Sarah Lewis does that.

Sarah Lewis:
Apparently. Apparently, ignorance is bliss, I guess. So I did it and my commitment to myself was, you can do this so long as the excellence of the academic work doesn’t suffer. So in my mind, it was anytime I would say take a break from academic work and binge something, I would be writing instead. So I wrote The Rise instead of doing those other things.

And it gave me so much nourishment. My God, that process of writing that book is one of the greatest gifts I gave to myself. I had no idea what it would do in the world. I did not write that book thinking that it would go on to be translated into seven languages and take me around the world in terms of the conversations it would prompt. No idea.

I wrote it really to save my own sense of possibility and sense of becoming. It’s a book that looks at those improbable foundation’s so-called failure, near wins that artists of all kinds have that led to the works we celebrate, whether it’s a Kafka or a Faulkner or a Cézanne or you name it, and how that takes place in the lives of those who are innovators, Nobel Prize-winning scientist and explorers.

But it really is a book that is helpful for anyone who wants to understand the process of their own becoming, because no matter what our role is, that is going to be an experience that we have. We are going to fall short of a goal that we have. The question becomes how do you give yourself the propulsion to move forward to become the self you know can be.

So I wrote it because I wanted to understand that myself truly, and then realized that the guides and the different themes that were emerging through interviews and research were not just helpful for me, but apparently helpful for others. So doing all of that while being a student, I did seem audacious.
But I now look at the lifespan of an artist process and actually look at what’s happening in their twenties and thirties differently as a result. I think there is an increased risk-taking that can come when you simply don’t know what an endeavor entails, and so you’re willing to do it. If I really knew, I don’t think I would’ve, but thank God I did it anyway.

Debbie Millman:
There were some lines that I found in the book and also in my research that really sort of stopped me in my tracks. You said that failure is not something that might be helpful, it actually is the process. And it sort of made me reconsider how much I avoid doing anything that I’ll fail at in that process I’m avoiding actually doing the thing.

But then you also said that success is a hollow word, and it is typically a designation that someone else gives you. So it’s an evaluation, which also kind of took me, it seemed like I could understand the steps to get to the unseen truth in terms of what people tell you that something means.

Sarah Lewis:
I love that you’ve landed on the term evaluation. Evaluation and assessment, that really is the bridge between the projects. The term failure was once used to describe financial ruin, bankruptcy. It was never meant to be applied, I don’t think, to the human spirit, but we do use it, and it’s a term applied to us from others. So it’s an evaluation which never really takes into account someone else’s goals for themselves or who they will become after that moment.

In writing The Unseen Truth, I was interested in evaluations of other kinds to do with race and society, and it led to that book writing, The Rise. There’s a chapter in The Rise where I meditate on leaders like Frederick Douglass, thinking about societal failure. Frederick Douglass gives a speech that was really unknown when I began writing The Rise in 2010 about the power of pictures in the middle of the American Civil War, and it stunned his audience.

He delivers it in 1861 in Boston, and they’re expecting, you can imagine him to think about anything else but the power of imagery, this new technology. He became the most photographed American man of the 19th century because he understood the function and the force of images to change how we evaluate who counts and who belongs in society.

And so he’s thinking through the impact of this technology for societal failure, to not understand the dignity and humanity of all. That chapter, Beauty, Error, and Justice in The Rise led to the work Vision and Justice, but specifically The Unseen Truth, because I wanted to understand really the failures of evaluation in a more rigorous way, in a more detailed way.

Debbie Millman:
Well, what’s so interesting to me about your notions of failure and success, we do so much to avoid failure. Yet when we achieve success, for most people, they’re never content with just that. Then there’s the next success and then the next. And so there’s this really interesting tension between the sort of avoidance of failure and the pull towards more and more success, and it seems like you can’t really have one without the other.

Sarah Lewis:
Yeah, that’s exactly the irony, right? And the paradox. I love, there’s a parable and effect that opens the book, my barn having burned down, I can finally see the moon. There’s this way.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. I love that quote.

Debbie Millman:
In 2008, President Obama formed an arts policy committee and invited you to serve on it, and he was actually the first presidential candidate ever to form an arts policy committee during his campaign. What was that experience? How did that, one day like, “Hey, Sarah. It’s Barack.” How did that happen?

Sarah Lewis:
I do remember receiving a call from the co-chair. And around that time, I was up for a position at the National Endowment for the Arts that I accepted and then realized wasn’t exactly right for me as deputy director. And being, I think at that stage in my career, I had a sense that there’s more writing I wanted to do, curating I wanted to do, and not policy work just then. So at the time, it was probably natural for me to be part of it and he was the first. I think if we think back to the impact of Shepard Fairey’s poster, Hope poster, it’s probably really easy to envision why this extraordinary presidential candidate would understand the importance of visual messaging for politics.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. And language, just the word Hope and what that signifies. Was that the most important thing you learned from President Obama? You mentioned language, and…

Sarah Lewis:
His ability while speaking in conversation or in speeches to let silence speak and to allow himself time to consider how an idea will land, I think, was instructive for me as a young Black woman in particular because in those pauses, in that silence, there is a modeling of the mindfulness, I think, that’s still required in our civic life to ensure that especially I think African-Americans are not misunderstood.

Debbie Millman:
Or underestimated.

Sarah Lewis:
Or underestimated, exactly. So that model has stayed with me for some time, I will say. He’s a generational talent. There’s so much we learn from the Obamas: both the model of their partnership, their love, the bravery. But in terms of how we present ourselves as Black people to the public, I think that what I’ve just described he was able to do so effectively is I think the most salient lesson.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve stated that “In the history of the United States, perhaps the biggest question we have is how to tell the story of who we are. And in representational democracy, the answer has always been representation itself. The arts, images, culture, performance have long been a way to work through the blind spots of norms and laws that did not honor the full humanity of all those who in this extraordinary country.” Sarah, is that what first inspired your Vision & Justice project in 2016?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. Where would we be in our understanding of the United States without culture, without art? Try to explain it to someone and you really can’t. The project began with that idea, but it found its roots and I think its fire through honoring the legacy of which we’re a part. Frederick Douglass really first had this idea in American politics, and to see as I did this speech, he delivers about that in the Library of Congress untouched, as I did as a student, gave me a sense of lineage, made me understand that yes, the realization I had about the function and power of art and culture for justice was important, but I was certainly not the first to have it. And I’m not even speaking about my other colleagues who’ve written about this too.

Frederick Douglass states at the end of his speech so poignantly, “It might take over 150 years for this idea to be understood about the importance of representation in our democracy.” And it’s a humble line and it really was a call to action as I read it. It really was stating, will you be one of the individuals I had in mind to continue this work?

And so Vision & Justice was born of answering that call and pointing, as I did in the first “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture in 2016 in the publication, to the many artists who I know Douglass had in mind, whether it’s LaToya Ruby Frazier or Carrie Mae Weems or Awol Erizku, Deborah Willis, so many others, and the writers who give us a sense of the importance of understanding visual literacy for racial literacy like the late Maurice Berger, so many others. And that convening through the framework of Vision & Justice of makers who are transforming narratives of who counts and who belongs is really how Vision & Justice began.

Debbie Millman:
The Vision & Justice project is now part of your core curriculum at Harvard. Your Vision & Justice organization has become an initiative that marshals resources, whether it’s public-facing courses, publications, conferences, to educate the public about the urgent work of art and culture for equity and justice in the United States. And I think from my understanding of your body of work and your practice, all of this has led to the publication of your new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America. Would you say that’s correct?

Sarah Lewis:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Would you say that’s accurate?

Sarah Lewis:
That is accurate.

Debbie Millman:
Now, the book took you over 10 years to write, and in the process you had a near-death experience in a gruesome car crash. How did you recover? How did you survive? How did you recover? And how did that impact the journey of this book?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. That experience was a miracle, and I truly have nothing but gratitude for it. It is not a physical experience I would wish on anyone. It was a pandemic experience. It was pre-vaccine when I was driving on the West Side highway and a car hydroplaned after a long day of rains or hours into my vehicle, lost control of his car. And my own nearly flipped over, hit the concrete divider, and the airbags deployed in the car. And it’s really because of that fact that the airbags deployed when they did, and I’m sure divine intervention, that I’m still here. When the EMTs came, they kept asking at least twice, “Is there anyone else in the vehicle?” because of the speed of the impact that they registered and all the rest. And I didn’t have any… I think I have a minorly fractured rib, which we realized later, but really nothing that you would imagine would’ve taken place given that the car was totaled.

The gratitude that I have for that experience is to do with how intensely I experience this just love for the fact of life itself. It’s indescribable because I would walk around with gratitude for life before, but to come so close and know that unless there’s some kind of intervention, you are going to go. And you don’t and you’re all right and it’s painful. You can walk around, you can heal and continue to do this work. I don’t take a second of it for granted, a second of it. I look at a little flower on the street and I just think of just the gift I had to still be here to enjoy these small beauties, these large experiences of other kinds.

The Unseen Truth was on my laptop in that car. I was driving up to Harvard to keep writing. And as I healed, I realized that I had to include a lot more fire. The foundation of the book was there and the research was there. But when you crawl out of a burning car that has just crashed to save your own life, and I’ve seen way too many movies. You know what can happen when you open those car doors. I, despite thinking that, did that and are all right, changes your filter for what you think you’re actually afraid of. So this is a book that required me to be fearless, and I hadn’t yet arrived at that point when I began. So thanks to that experience, the book, I think, is what it needed to be. And I’m in the place I need to be be excited about life in all of its forms.

Debbie Millman:
The book tackles one of the greatest lies in American life, in American history, that there is no basis to the radicalized world of American society that puts white Americans on the top. And the true significance of this history has gone unseen until now. This all began for you with an image you discovered in your first week at Yale in the library. Can you describe the image for our listeners?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. I came across a photograph taken by the most celebrated photographer of the era, Matthew Brady, of a woman who was standing full-frontal to the camera looking quite powerful in a dress, the sash. Her hair is teased to look as if it’s in an afro. She herself was alabaster white in terms of her complexion. And I learned that she was a performer known as a Circassian beauty performer, a so-called exemplar of white racial purity put on stage by PT Barnum in the 1860s. And she would go on to become his highest-grossing performer at the time. I could find so little scholarship on what the real implications of that performance was for the American public that I decided I had to write. So that was the photograph I landed on. And there were others I did find that same day that showed the development of the performance into one that really lampooned the idea of race itself, women who looked like Angela Davis being put on stages as exemplars of white racial purity, that kind of thing. That’s what began.

Debbie Millman:
You begin The Unseen Truth by detailing the story of the Caucasus during the Civil War era in America. So, for our listeners that might not know, what was that, and who were the Circassian people?

Sarah Lewis:
We use the term Caucasian and we think we know what it means.

Debbie Millman:
Wrong.

Sarah Lewis:
Wrong. And that’s what American society understood in the 19th century. So we think we’re referring to a group of people that we consider to be white. Why do we use the term Caucasian? Well, it came about the work of a naturalist who designated the Caucus region in the Black Sea area as the so-called homeland of the white race for reasons that seem ridiculous to us today because there weren’t white people there. There were no white people there. Exactly. So how did that come about?

Well, this is how racial lore gets hardened into fact. The lore was to do with the beauty of the women, which became an indication of racial superiority. It was the symmetry of a skull is another indication of racial superiority. The lore of the skin and the complexions of the women there, which proved to be false, and biblical lore in the Bible and Genesis, Noah’s Ark, it’s claimed it comes to rest in the region. This was the so-called data that was used to define that region and inaugurate it as the homeland of whiteness, and the terms stuck for centuries. It was debunked, though still used, during the American Civil War. And this is what’s been forgotten in history, and it’s critical that we recall it now.

So at that same time, there was something happening called the Caucasian War. And not a metaphor, an actual Caucasian war. And it’s taking place because Russians and the Ottoman Empire are battling for access to the Black Sea and are creating incursions on the Caucus region itself. It results in what many now consider to be a genocide of the peoples in the Caucus region. But the reporting that comes out in the newspapers at the time debunks all of the different lies that had hardened into fact about the type of people that were actually there. So it became clear that there was no such thing as racial whiteness in the region. And you can see what could have happened next but didn’t. When you see a very lie at the basis of the whole regime of racial hierarchy, you realize that you must dismantle it. But we didn’t.

Debbie Millman:
So, an 18th-century German physiologist coins the term Caucasian as a synonym for white in color and claims that the Circassian people were the purest Caucasians of all. PT Barnum, who I think was reincarnated to Donald Trump, then brings these women we think, maybe, who knows if they were really Circassian, in 1864 to his museum on Broadway as the purest example of the white race. And this is the origin story of Caucasians in America.

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. And he puts them on stage as a visual exam and a prompt and a prodding to really ask the American public if they’re willing to hold onto this term, because the performers he’s putting on stage are meant to represent white racial purity but look nothing like that idea. We forget how central the world of performance and the entertainment complex was for dealing with racial politics. So Barnum’s American museum, which we think of as all these humbugs and fakes and curiosities, he was provoking the American public. He was creating a space to work out how these fictions had become fact. So that’s exactly what happened in 1865.

So that, seeing that image, made me think about what has been unseen in American life. I don’t know that I would’ve written the book though if not for stumbling across in the footnote of someone else’s book, Charles King. The fact that Woodrow Wilson himself was fixated and interested in this idea, and we can talk about that too. But at the end of World War I, he effectively creates a PT Barnum spectacle. He asks in 1919 from his chief of staff of the Army stationed and Azerbaijan if he can have a report about the look of the women from the Caucus region. And in the archive you see it, they produce a report. They produce a 70-person party of so-called Circassian women that they admit we’re not really Circassians, some were Georgian, et cetera, and they say no one can tell the difference anyway. It doesn’t matter.

But why? Why would he ask for this in the middle of the codification of a racial regime that seems to be absolute in American life. This is a period where the Klan is active. We have white racial supremacy dominating the land in terms of the history of racial terror. Why ask for a report? Well, it indicates the nervousness at the heart of the racial project about whether there’s really any factual basis for racial domination at all, and there is no basis for this.

Debbie Millman:
So essentially he got this information but ignored it.

Sarah Lewis:
Accident of history. He asked for the information, he suffered a stroke so he never could receive it. But it didn’t really matter because he threw his administration through the federalization of segregation and through his understanding of the power of visual culture cohered a regime to instantiate racial domination with impunity despite the fiction of it all.

Debbie Millman:
Woodrow Wilson authorized the widespread imposition inside the federal bureaucracy. He opposed women’s suffrage. He was very much an orchestrator of segregation at that time. Yet I discovered that and I learned from your book, scholars have generally ranked Wilson in the upper tier of US presidents.

Sarah Lewis:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
It’s another perpetuated misrepresentation of reality.

Sarah Lewis:
Exactly. And flies in the face of what he actually did, which was not to represent the type of racism that existed in the period but, in fact, to go steps further. Another way in which we distort our own history.

Debbie Millman:
So your discoveries show that there was really a widespread confirmation bias to secure very intentionally this vision of white, physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual superiority that were completely based on lies.

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. And to do one thing more, which is to instantiate that unspeakable idea that there is a basis for legitimating racial hierarchy without using outright decree. He inaugurates the idea that we’re working through today, that we can use tactics that are aesthetic, that are creative, that are about public and signaling through monuments to state what will never be said publicly.

So what I most was excited about in the book was being able to salute the Black clerks who work for Woodrow Wilson who see that he’s using visual tactics to cohere this racial regime. One of them is Freeman Henry Morris Murray, who’s an activist, a writer, and sees what Wilson is doing and writes the first book in the United States about the relationship between race, politics, and aesthetics. In 1916, on his own printing press, publishes this book, tries to get it published by others and they reject it. It really details and outlines the origins of the debates we’ve had about monuments today. He saw these Confederate monuments going up on courthouse lawns and understood what it meant and what it allowed politicians not to say because the monument spoke. So Wilson’s work was to marshal the force of this and signaling power of the arts to cohere this regime of racial domination. And that’s what’s so insidious and that’s what is part of the legacy we’re working through right now.

Debbie Millman:
I want to read a couple of paragraphs that you write in The Unseen Truth. You state, “The project of modernity requires that we modulate our understanding of how race transformed what we even call vision.” And you quote WJT Mitchell who said that, “Race is a medium and a frame, something we see through.” And you go on to state that race is a frame, a window, a screen or lens rather than something we look at, and you call this condition sight or visual conditioning. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about how we are conditioned to see the things that we see.

Sarah Lewis:
One of the avenues and case studies that might be most vivid is to think about how in fact the court system worked through these lies that became facts to think about how our sight was conditioned. So what happened when the lies the fiction of the Caucus region was laid bare through visual culture? The Supreme Court needed to figure that out because immigration cases were based upon the terms, these fictions themselves. Racial science created the term Caucasian, and you see Supreme Court justices trying to work out whether they could use this term anymore at all.

And what happens in the 1870s is they begin to state instead we’re just going to use, quote, common knowledge about the idea of who’s Caucasian and who’s not. Literally that’s the term, common knowledge. So what that comes to mean is that every day evaluative modes of determining who is who form the basis of Supreme Court cases regarding who is granted entrance into the United States.

Debbie Millman:
Right.

Sarah Lewis:
So when we describe in this seemingly abstract way, race is a frame, well, it’s a quite literal frame for the portal of entrance even into the United States. Visual tactics we use to determine who enters the category of whiteness that has stakes and consequences for who is demonized, who is exalted, who’s granted citizenship and who is not. Visuality is a deeply political tactic and we’ve been conditioned to think to understand how we utilize it best through this account of racial narratives over time.

Debbie Millman:
So when white people are filling out a form or a census, they really have no idea that the term legitimizes a racial regime.

Sarah Lewis:
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And those that fill out that form and happened to be from the Caucus region know it best. I went there to finish the book with Nell Painter, the extraordinary historian, and I heard a number of those stories of them, actual Caucasians coming to United States and being completely confused about why the term for their ethnic group was used as an umbrella for racial whiteness. And there’s the irony. And also when you look at the accounts of the attempts to make sense of the languages that those, the Adegui people in the Caucus region speak, it’s just, it’s comical because there’s the use of the term doesn’t match the understanding of what’s actually happening there. The details about the language are completely misunderstood.

Debbie Millman:
There is another term that I learned while reading The Unseen Truth, and that is an aesthetic encounter. If you can please, for our listeners, share what an aesthetic encounter is because I think anybody living in America has experienced at least one or two.

Sarah Lewis:
A way to consider it’s how many movements began when a work of art with extraordinary aesthetic force transformed our perceptions of the world entirely, and it’s more times than we could possibly know. I began The Unseen Truth after learning about a few of these aesthetic encounters. One most gripping for me was learning about the life of Charles Black Jr. who listens to Louis Armstrong, understands the genius and the lyricism coming out of his trumpet, his horn. And it’s 1931, it’s deep segregation in Austin, Texas where he’s hearing Louis Armstrong. And because of this aesthetic encounter, he is able to question the rational world around him that has legitimated segregation. He asks himself, “If there is genius coming out of the body of this Black man, can segregation be right?”

So much of what we owe the arts is the ability to understand and see what we don’t know we don’t know about ourselves and about each other. And Charles Black Jr. goes on in that moment after really processing what he doesn’t know he doesn’t know to walk towards justice as he describes it. He goes on to become one of the lawyers in the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, that outlaw segregation in the United States or works to. And he goes on teach constitutional law at Columbia and Yale and he holds this annual Armstrong listening night to honor the aesthetic encounter, to honor the power of the arts for the transformational moments that lead to justice with a capital J in public life.

These aesthetic encounters, I think we don’t honor enough because they are so often private, not discussed, unheralded. In The Unseen Truth, I write about these aesthetic encounters as moments which I myself was forced to reckon with, the false construction that legitimates racial hierarchy. In The Metropolitan Museum, I passed one day, actually after that miracle car collision, I was healing and taking my time doing things and walked through an area of The Met. I’ve never gone in fully the arms and armor collection in Wayne.

Debbie Millman:
Oh yes, this is a good story.

Sarah Lewis:
And there saw arms and armor that were labeled Caucasian armor. And I thought, because I had sustained a concussion, “Okay, I need to read this again.” And I read the label more closely and realized that it referenced armor from the Caucus region, but the term Caucasian was not being used to signal whiteness necessarily. But the label counts on my knowing the difference, counts on my holding and suspension that for the moment, we’re not going to think about racial whiteness. We’re going to look at the actual geography and ignore the fact that there is this contradiction in the two terms.

And there are other encounters. The MFA Boston had a painting called A Circassian from 1870 of the first that enters the museum collection, later called The Caucasian Soldier, and it’s just nested up in this wall and salon hang of other works by American painters who travel abroad. And I stopped in my tracks and thought, “Wait a second, is this meant to be a painting of a quote-unquote white person, or is it meant to be a representative figure from the Caucus region?” And where’s the arena to process this? There’s none. So, writing about these aesthetic encounters surface the way in which visual culture gives us evidence of these moments of fracture, when you see the breakdown of terms that we’ve used just to cohere this regime racially in American life.

Debbie Millman:
You write how seeing is not just a retinal act. It’s never been about observation only. Seeing is about reading the world. And it seems as if these experiences have really solidified how the world is presented to us and then the bias that we have in believing it all. How do we begin to create more representational justice?

Sarah Lewis:
So I find the most important way to slow down and ask yourself what you are seeing and why. What’s the strategy behind it?

I recently went to a building that made the importance of this seemingly simple act very significant, and it was the Washington National Cathedral. I went and I was asked to speak on a panel about the removal of the Confederate stained-glass windows that that cathedral had for decades. And after the killing of the Emanuel IX by Dylann Roof, white supremacist, the dean and canon decided to remove the propaganda that saluted the Confederacy in this building.

Now, this building is meant to be a place of worship for all, and it’s set on a mountain site in DC that really rivals the height of the Capitol. So you can imagine my surprise when I went into this building and saw something that seemed to contradict the very ethos of the building itself. The canon, Leonard Hamlin, beautiful spirit, he took me through and I wanted to see the site where the newly installed windows would be. These are now installed. Kerry James Marshall created the new stained-glass windows, and Elizabeth Alexander, the poet, offered the text and the tablets below. So we walked towards this site in the nave and I stopped because to the right directly next to these new windows was a tomb, and the tomb is that of Woodrow Wilson himself.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

Sarah Lewis:
He’s the only president who’s buried there. And I was stunned by the juxtaposition, the redemptive, racially redemptive, new windows and his tomb. Now, when I say tomb was right there, I mean ground floor of the nave where parishioners worship is his tomb is to the right. So you could be in your chair and his tomb would just be directly next to you. It felt as if I was looking at an American portrait.

Debbie Millman:
You were, yeah.

Sarah Lewis:
And so you have to pause long enough to ask what you’re seeing and why. The tension though being willing to reside in that tension, in that moment was key for me. We could talk forever about the history of that church and just how many civil rights leaders were part of that work as well. It’s the site where Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his final Sunday sermon and where there was a memorial week later for him with 4,000 attending. But yet, and still we have a marker and a reminder of the extension of Jim Crow rule through Wilson’s tomb and the stained-glass windows that are meant to honor his regime.
How could that have gone unmentioned in all the reporting about the new stained-glass windows? I wondered. There was no article mentioned which Wilson’s tomb was there, and I wouldn’t have known myself unless I stopped and took the time to think through how we construct narratives to bolster regimes of who belongs and who counts through the visual landscape.

What we are seeing and why, well, this is a question that we see our politicians taking more seriously. Think of the work of Bryan Stevenson, the leader who is really focused on criminal justice reform, who’s argued successfully before the Supreme Court countless times. He has taken to what he calls narrative work. He has decided to marshal the resources of the Equal Justice Initiative to create a complex of memorials and monuments to honor lives that have not been saluted, that were taken unjustly from racial terror and lynching. This is a lawyer who’s seeing the importance of cultural work, of what we’re seeing, not seeing and asking why. Sherrilyn Ifill, the former NAACP legal defense fund leader, has taken to having conversations with artists from Mark Bradford to Glenn Ligon, to Carrie Mae Weems about the importance of the cultural narratives that they’re putting forward to right this balance.

So if we start to get away from the idea that as you know, culture is not a respite from life, design is not just a kind of luxury, but instead salute the indispensable work of visual culture for conditioning us to see each other justly, then I think we’ll be on a path to a more true sense of the levers that have been required for justice in the United States.

Debbie Millman:
In Susan Sontag’s book On Photography, she asked if we’ve become desensitized to images because there are so many around, and it seems like we’re also doing that with language and the general acceptance the public seems to have now more than ever for the racist language we’re experiencing from politicians that at one point would’ve outraged us, and we’re now just like, “Oh, boys will be boys, men will be men, politicians will be politicians.” Are we becoming more and more conditioned to not see and not hear what we don’t want to? What is around in surroundings?

Sarah Lewis:
Yeah. I share your same concern. I see it the same way. One of the questions though I have is whether we are becoming less tolerant of viewpoints that aren’t our own or whether we are letting the switches that shift through just technology itself with the algorithmic changes determine what we see and what we don’t. Meaning I don’t know that it’s will. I don’t know that it’s personal choice. I think it’s programmatic and platform decisions that by and large shifted our viewing tactics.

You would think given the coarseness of our politics, the teaching Vision & Justice as I do at Harvard would be a really contentious process that I would have a lot of rancor in the classroom. I’m teaching some of the most difficult topics in American life. That’s not the case for me. Why? Well, I should say it’s been difficult for a lot of us, but when you’re teaching from an object, when you’re teaching from an image, it depersonalizes the history or even the current event you’re dealing with. So it’s no longer a fractious debate about what I think and what you think. It’s about a fact in the room embodied by that object, embodied by that sculpture or that image. And it allows for, I think, the creation of a kind of arena as opposed to a conflict.

So if that can be the case just without the power of an Instagram or another platform transforming what’s in front of me, if I can have a conversation like that with 18 to 22-year-olds, with my colleagues, I have conviction still in the power of the image to elicit extraordinary conversations. The question becomes what happens when you are only given to see a certain set of images through devices that are not your own?

I was on a panel recently at the Boston Book Festival and one question came from an individual who wanted to know what I thought of photographs of conflict, and they were thinking about Gaza and Eddie Glaude, who’s also on the panel, added that there are decisions made to switch on and off the number of images you’re seeing about a political event. So at a certain moment, you remember the glut of images we were seeing about Gaza. I don’t see as many and I have not done a thing to my own algorithm, but we know the same amount of images are being taken. I think that just speaks to the invisible actor, which behind the question that you’re asking there.

Debbie Millman:
In the epilogue to The Unseen Truth, you described the foundations of racial hierarchy as a photograph with no true negative. Where do we go from here to correct this false narrative?

Sarah Lewis:
The book presents the evidence, the evidence of the fictions that we have chosen to live with. After seeing them, where we go from here is to ask whether we have the will to no longer willfully, deliberately ignore it and move forward, but to make a new choice to see each other justly finally.

Debbie Millman:
Sarah, my last question is, it’s about a new course you’re creating at Harvard on Beyonce. Tell us about that.

Sarah Lewis:
So there’s a class on Taylor Swift. Why not a class on Beyonce? That’s first one.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I told my wife about it, and we decided that we’re going to ask if we could sit in.

Sarah Lewis:
Come on. I love it. I love it.

Debbie Millman:
Well, no, I understand that it’s really not about her music as much as it is on the visual stylings behind her film and videos and so forth, which is always so extraordinary. And actually, once I saw that you were doing this, I was really surprised that it’s not been talked about more in a scholarly way because it is so extraordinary and investigating where she is inspired to find these images and use them and expand upon them is such an important part of understanding who she is.

Sarah Lewis:
Well, you just created the summary for the course description that matches on my computer. So there you go. It’s exactly why I’m changing a class. And it is a Trojan horse, right? To be able to think through all the ways that she’s referencing, sources that are focused on Black diaspora, broadly defined performance, visual culture, music. I can’t wait. I can’t wait.

Debbie Millman:
Sarah Lewis, thank you, thank you, thank you for writing your new book. Thank you for making so much work that matters in so many ways. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Sarah Lewis:
And thank you for your extraordinary work that’s really nourished me from many years. I’m excited to have this chance to talk to you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you.

Sarah Lewis:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Sarah Lewis’s new book is titled The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, and you could read lots more about her at sarahelizabethlewis.com. I’d like to thank you all for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the Ted Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

The post Design Matters: Sarah Lewis appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:
Sometimes you can tell a lot about writers from the names of their books. Here are three titles by Nell Irvin Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line, Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present, and The History of White People. Nell Irvin Painter is a distinguished award-winning historian, and she’s written a lot about the south in the 19th century and about race. She’s also a retired professor emerita from Princeton University. And by all rights, she could be resting comfortably on her laurels, but she is not because she is also an artist. The title of another of her books is Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over. These two pursuits, history and art, come together beautifully in her brand new book, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays, which is punctuated throughout by images of her paintings. Nell Irvin Painter, welcome to Design Matters.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Thank you so much, Debbie. I’m glad to be here. I love the title of your podcast.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Because design does matter.

Debbie Millman:
Yes it does. Yes it does. Now, your parents fell in love at first sight in the Houston College Library and got married when they were 19 years old. They were married for 72 years until your mom died at 91. You’ve said that this made it fated that you’d be a writer, and I’m wondering how the two were connected.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, my parents’ college was actually called Houston College for Negroes.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Nell Irvin Painter:
This is very much Texas in that time. It was a jerry-built institution. They knew it. My mother had started at Prairie View. She was the youngest. Where her siblings went, but her father died and left her mother too impoverished. The next sibling, her older brother was at Howard to become a doctor, so he was the favorite son, and my mother, Dona, had to come home to Houston. My father’s family was not as educated as my mother’s family, but my father’s family did want him to go to college. So they met in Houston College for Negroes in the library. So I say I was fated to be a reader and having lived a long life, I took the next step into writing.

Debbie Millman:
What do you attribute to the success of a 72-year marriage?

Nell Irvin Painter:
People used to ask my father that. My father was a very beautiful man, very lovable, very charming with a bit of a wit. And he would say, “Eat shit.” And then my mother would say “No, no, no, no, no, no.”

Debbie Millman:
So I guess it was an older version of happy wife, happy life.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Something like that. Yeah. My father was the charming face of the marriage for decades. And my mother was very shy. Had a speech impediment for decades. Couldn’t talk on the phone until she started getting jobs that were commensurate with her education and her ability. She was a fantastic organizer. So when she retired at 65, she decided she wanted to do something different and she started writing books. And her second book is a memoir called, I Hope I Look That Good when I’m That Old, because that’s what people said to her all the time, and now they’re saying it to me. So maybe I should write I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old part two.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ll talk to you a little bit about that later on. One of your earliest memories is sitting on the floor with a gathering of your parents and their friends to listen to the presidential election results in 1948. Were your parents rooting for Truman?

Nell Irvin Painter:
No. They were rooting for Wallace. I come from a good lefty family. I should also add that people like Coretta Scott … She was not yet married to Martin Luther Jr. She was also rooting for Wallace. And you didn’t have to be very far on the left because Wallace, in addition to running a progressive campaign … It was called the Progressive Party. It was also anti-segregation. And he campaigned in the south to desegregated audiences. So it was a very forward-looking campaign. I thank my parents for bringing me up on the left because it saved me from so many disappointments in my country. I didn’t expect things to change radically as say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Equal Housing Act of 1968. I welcomed all those things, but I didn’t think they were going to be the end of the line.

So I grew up with people like Paul Robeson and W.E.B Du Bois and as I say in one of my Hers columns about living in Ghana in the ’60s. So I had an unusual background. And it’s one of the reasons that I very much appreciated Roxane’s stepping out and talking about society and culture and work in general. Because I do believe my background gave me that even though I was very conscious of the pressure only to talk about black stuff. So even now, The History of White People, which is my best-selling book, which I think is my best-known book, it gives people pause. They say, “How should we think about you?” And I say, “As a historian.”

Debbie Millman:
You were born in Houston.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
But your family’s roots reached back into Ascension, Baton Rouge and St. Landry Parishes, Louisiana, Lowcountry, South Carolina, around Charleston, Harris County, Texas. How did you all end up in Oakland, California?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, we were part of the Great Migration, and the easiest way to answer that is by train. My father’s family had moved from Harris County, Texas to the Bay Area in the ’20s. So they were already there. And actually when my parents came in 1942, they looked down on them as Southerners. This is the oldest story in the world of groups whose older migrants looked down on the more recent migrants. But at any rate, my father went first and got partially settled, got a job, and then my mother came. I was just an infant in arms.

Debbie Millman:
I think you were 10 weeks old when they moved.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I was 10 weeks old. Yeah. So these trains … This is 1942. The trains are full. And my mother with two children, my older sibling who tragically died as a young child and this baby in arms, and she said that a black soldier gave her his seat and he stood up all the way from Houston to Oakland.

Debbie Millman:
Wow. Your older brother, Frank Jr., as you just mentioned, he died during a routine tonsillectomy.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And you’ve written how your parents poured all the love they had for one lost child into you. And the sense of safety you experienced through your childhood endowed you with resources that you recognize now as resilience. Why and how did that result in resilience?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Because they were always there for me. They were always on my side. I never had any doubts. I was never subject to physical violence or emotional violence. And I remember at Stanford in the ’80s, I was at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, but at the time I was teaching myself women’s history and women’s studies, so I would hang out with women in gender studies at Stanford. And I was absolutely amazed to hear so many women talk about their mothers as impediments, their mothers as their enemies, my mother, myself, my mother in my way, my mother is the source of miseducation, and I always thought of my mother, my father as my safe harbors in a hostile world.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad is actually the person that first taught you how to draw.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
And what kind of things were you drawing?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Horses.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Why horses?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I don’t know why horses. But I know that that’s a thing that young girls draw. Something maybe eatable. I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I was drawing houses with bad grass. I had trouble with grass.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I also drew paper dolls because I liked clothes.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. So did I. I loved paper dolls.

Nell Irvin Painter:
So these are just every day. I can’t say I did anything spectacular. But I do remember one time I was in class in elementary school and I drew a walnut. I don’t know why. It was a beautiful drawing of a walnut. And I wrote under it nuts to you Mr. So and so who was my teacher. I got in so much trouble over that.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Nell Irvin Painter:
As if I had threatened him with an AK-15 or something. But my teachers always complained that I talked too much. I was obviously a really smart kid who did my work, but also, I knew too much.

Debbie Millman:
You applied to Howard University and you were accepted, but at dinner one night with the distinguished Howard University sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier, who was a friend of your dad’s, told you this. “Nell Irvin, you’re too smart and too dark to go to Howard.”

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Why? What happened? Why did he feel that way?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Because it was true. Howard University … We’re talking 1960 now. So this is in the olden days. And in those days, Howard University, probably like many other black institutions, was a hotbed of colorism. And so if you look at my generation of educated men, black men, every single wife except my father married as light-skinned a woman as possible. The lighter skinned the better. And of course, this is the time when women in college were trivialized as only being in college to get married. So if you know about those assumptions, it makes good sense for me not to go to Howard. And I heard stories about Howard at that time, which were really … It was such cruelty. So I told this to a team who were filming me. This is when I still lived in Newark. I was in my studio in the Ironbound, and they came. I forget what we were talking about, but I told them about that. And so this is like … It was before Coronavirus, but it was in the twenty-teens, and they said, “Oh, that still holds and it holds for men as well.”

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. So I’m glad I’m not young.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t know how I would manage this world if I were any younger than I am truly. You ended up attending the University of California Berkeley, where you were active in the student government, in art circles. You illustrated two covers of the campus humor magazine. You also took a course in sculpture. And I understand you didn’t do particularly well in the class. Tell us about that. Tell us about that experience.

Nell Irvin Painter:
My father did not teach me about sculpture, so I had no way in to sculpture. And I didn’t do any work. I thought that if you were talented, it would just come out. And it was almost like that for me in my regular classes. I didn’t have to work terribly hard to get very good grades. I was an honor student throughout. But I didn’t have any handle for sculpture. I didn’t know sculpture. I didn’t watch sculpture. I didn’t know sculptors. So I made a really terrible project and I got a C. And I thought, “Well, that just proves I don’t have enough talent.” Now, how wrong can you be? I say now that talent is drawing you to something enough to do a lot of it and get good. It’s not so much a talent, but an inclination.

Debbie Millman:
At that point what did you want to do professionally?

Nell Irvin Painter:
What did I want to do professionally? I don’t think I knew. I don’t know. But I was under no pressure to make a decision. My parents were with me and taking care of me, so I didn’t feel like I had to decide.

Debbie Millman:
You graduated with an honors degree in anthropology?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I did. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
At that point, were you considering becoming an anthropologist or did you just know you were going to go on to get advanced degrees?

Nell Irvin Painter:
It wasn’t as hard as that because my parents had already moved to Ghana and I was going to join them, so I didn’t have to make any decisions at that time. I started graduate school in Ghana in African studies, and then there was the coup d’etat and the end of African socialism and Kwame Nkrumah’s pan africanism. And all the reasons that the Irvins had gone there in the first place. So we came home and I finished my master’s degree, still not exactly knowing what to do, at UCLA in African history. I had always liked history. My high school class was tested up the wazoo and I tested at the 99th percentile in interest in history and the 99th percentile in ability in history. But at that point, coming out of high school, the only history that I knew that was recognized as American history was just so Jim Crow. I knew that it was full of lies and I didn’t want to do it. So anthropology was the place to study other people besides white people. And I loved anthropology. So I got my MA in African history and I was actually admitted to the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and that fell through. Well, it had to do with the then love of my life, which didn’t work out, thank heaven.

Debbie Millman:
Right. It’s always so heartbreaking when it’s happening and then after it’s like, what was I thinking?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. That was not meant to be. Finally in ’69, my father said, “Okay. We are ready to pay for all the schooling you want, but only in the United States.” So that’s how I got to Harvard.

Debbie Millman:
You mentioned being in Ghana with your parents. You wrote that the people of Ghana impressed you from the moment you stepped off the plane and that your experience there was one of the best things that ever happened to you.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely. And I still say a trillion years later that if I’m at all sane, it’s because I had those two years. Not only outside the United States, but also in a majority black country. And I have not been back. My father went back to Ghana with some friends and was very attracted to buying a house and staying there. But my father also was a real materialist. He said I couldn’t get clear title so he would not buy real estate in a place where his money would not be protected. But I did not go back. But I hear from people who are coming from Nigeria now or Ghana now, and it’s very different. Ghana is much more open to the world in ways that have made it, I think a little richer, but also mean that some of the bad things like anti-gay legislation and just reactionary stuff and even pressure for women to lighten their skin, all of these things have come with the opening since the ’60s, opening in the 21st century. So when I tell people that I was in Nigeria and Ghana in the 20th century, they look back and they say, “Oh, that was the good old days.”

Debbie Millman:
I understand when you were first there, you found being a member of the racial majority disorienting.

Nell Irvin Painter:
It was. Because even though I never lived in the South, thank heaven, I lived in a racist country in which race was the thing that bore down on me the most. And I used it in ways I didn’t realize until I got to Ghana to orient myself in humanity, in politics, even aesthetically. So when all that was withdrawn … In Ghana, everybody was black. The smart people were black, and the dumb people were black. And then the hardest of all was the mediocrities were black. Just everybody. So that didn’t work. So that in Ghana was where I first started really seeing issues of development and economics and the tensions in your ideals and the real world. So I learned so much there that I took into graduate school, and I took into my writing.

Debbie Millman:
When you were at Harvard, I believe that’s where you first met Nellie Y. McKay. Is that correct?

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I know you had a deep friendship. You exchanged letters to each other for 30 years. You shared a friendship that sustained you both until her death in 2006. One thing that I thought was really interesting was how she helped you understand why despite your book … I believe your second or third book, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, winning the Black Caucus of the American Library Award. It wasn’t reviewed by the Women’s Review of Books. When she did that bit of sleuthing for you, what did she discover?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I couldn’t understand why this book … Even then in the ’90s, Sojourner Truth was known in women’s history and women’s studies, for heaven’s sakes. I was a recognized scholar. I was well-published. W.W. Norton published that book, so why not review it? So I asked Nellie, who was deeper in women’s studies, and she sleuthed around, and she found that … I think it was the editor told her that a couple of potential reviewers had trouble with the book. And I gather that trouble with the book was my insistence, which I’m doubling down on in a project to come, that Sojourner Truth did not say, “Aren’t I a woman,” or, “Ain’t I a woman,” as I suppose it was southernized in the 20th century. Assuming that Sojourner Truth having been enslaved, she must have been a Southerner, which of course was wrong. The project I’m working on now is a series historical essays on Sojourner Truth called Sojourner Truth Was a New Yorker and She Didn’t Say That. So it turns out that so many people, black women as well as white women, were, are invested in the slogan that a white woman journalist made up 12 years after Sojourner Truth spoke up in Akron, Ohio in 1851. People have told me, they say, “Why are you tearing down Sojourner Truth?” I said, “I’m not tearing down Sojourner Truth. I’m asking you to see more of her than a slogan.”

Debbie Millman:
And her arm bearing in a show of muscle. It was-

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. A slogan from somebody else’s art. Frances Dana Gage produced a very dramatic story, which is much more dramatic than anything we have from Sojourner Truth. Because she didn’t read and write so everything we have quoting her comes from other people. And so she could serve this handy, sloganized purpose without knowing that Sojourner Truth was a New Yorker, that New York was a slave state, that there were other black women who were feminist and abolitionist. And some, like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, were even more critical of white women as suffrage became a searing issue after the Civil War. So my point is that stopping with a slogan means that you miss out the richness of Sojourner Truth. She’s so much more.

Debbie Millman:
It really breaks my heart now that I know so much more about this story, that this is what she’s been known for, for almost entirely that refrain of a fake speech.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. So we can keep the meaning, but we should jettison the slogan.

Debbie Millman:
After that book, you began to write more visually, and in 2006, you published Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present. A narrative history whose illustrations are black fine art.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
What inspired that evolution in your work?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Sojourner Truth.

Debbie Millman:
And so during her lifetime, Sojourner Truth was rather astute about her own image. She commissioned photographs of herself when the technology was brand new.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
She sold cards with the slogan, I sell the shadow to support the substance.

Nell Irvin Painter:
To support the substance. Yes.

Debbie Millman:
How did that inspire you to take that step into more visual art?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, there are a couple of steps before that. So not having words from Sojourner Truth as a biographer, I had to try to find ways to understand her from her. So the answer was her photographs, which she controlled. So one of her favorite photographs, and my favorite photograph is Sojourner Truth sitting with her knitting on her lap. And one of the chapters, one of the essays in the new book is “Sojourner Truth Knitter.” I’m a knitter too. And the story of knitting and black women and white women in knitting, it’s very enjoyable for me as a knitter. So anyway, I got involved in Sojourner Truth visually. And that is what got me to art school. And by the time I got to art school, I was also very much involved with art history. And one of the teachers said … I remember this was at RISD, at the Rhode Island School of Design. Thinking that there was no black art before Basquiat.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, god.

Nell Irvin Painter:
And I thought, oh, boy. Because even when I was a kid, my father’s favorite artist was Elizabeth Catlett. And he actually went to Mexico and came back with an autographed print of hers. So I grew up with Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White. The modernists who were deeply invested actually in socialist realism you would say. But at any rate, I knew that the art was there. I didn’t know all the artists I finally found and included, but I knew the art was there and I also knew that black artists had said that they wanted to show the unsung beauty of black Americans, and that there were different versions of prominent people like Frederick Douglass, for instance. So in Creating Black Americans, you don’t get a picture that says, this is Frederick Douglass. You get more than one rendition. And I tell you who the artist is and what the artist said they wanted to show. And so of course, that changes over time. So art made my point about various ways of seeing and processing and representing historical figures. And the artist could put the passion in that I didn’t feel that I could as a scholarly historian. I wrote in a way that I wanted any reader, whether you agreed with me or not, to feel that you were reading solidly researched history. So the artist gave the other side.

Debbie Millman:
I really think that that book opened the door to so much of the recognition and popularity of black modern art today, which is some of the most popular art and certainly the most interesting art that’s happening.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Good. Good.

Debbie Millman:
The impetus for your award-winning 2010 New York Times bestselling book, The History of White People–

Nell Irvin Painter:
No. It is not award-winning. The History of White People, it didn’t win anything.

Debbie Millman:
Nothing?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Nothing.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That was such a hard book for people to deal with.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

Nell Irvin Painter:
People would ask me as I was writing, “Are you writing it as a black person?” I would say, “I’m writing it as a historian.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, I’m glad it was a bestseller, but I’m just horrified at the idea that it didn’t win any awards. But in any case, it came from a question in your mind. And I’m wondering if you can share what the question was and what you discovered.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. That’s how my book start. My Sojourner Truth book started with the tension between the verbal and the visual renditions of Sojourner Truth. It seemed that there was a tension there because as she was quoted, she was the black power, Sojourner Truth. But as she showed herself, she was a perfectly composed bourgeois. What’s going on here? So that’s the question that started Sojourner Truth. With The History of White People, it seems like Russia’s after its neighbors all the time. And at the turn of the 21st century Russia was after its neighbors in the Caucasus, which is also a long-standing pursuit. Russian imperialism has turned toward the South as well as toward the East. And so Russia had bombed the bejesus out of Grozny, which is the capital of Chechnya, which is the North Caucasus. And there was this really arresting photograph in the front page of the Times of bombed out Grozny. And I thought, well, that looks like Berlin in 1945. What is going on here?

I could find out what was going on there. I could read the paper. But then I thought, well, why are white Americans called in effect, Chechens? White Americans are called Caucasian. And how many Americans even know where the Caucasus exists, where they are? Who are the people? Nobody knew. And I asked a couple of my white friends, “Why are white people called Caucasians?” And they said, “Well, we don’t know. We thought we should know, so we never ask anybody.” And so it was this big mystery. So I delved in and tried to track it down, and I ended up for that part of the book in Germany.

Debbie Millman:
And what did you discover as the way it became socialized?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, this German story, Göttingen University there, the great anthropologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, had a collection of skulls. And he is one of the founders of what we consider race science. I still call it race science because it was the science of the times. This is the enlightenment which invented race for people. And so Blumenbach decided that there were five varieties of mankind, and he embodied each one in a skull because he had a big skull collection. And his prettiest skull was from a woman who had been raped to death in Moscow. A woman from the Caucasus, from Georgia, which is the Southern Caucasus. But it was a really pretty skull. It didn’t have dings. The teeth were good. She had never been pregnant, I assume. A very young woman. And in Blumenbach’s scheme, he put the varieties on horizontal. He didn’t rank them vertically. It was all horizontal. And it was physical aesthetics.
So the most beautiful variety was the Caucasian. At the ends were the Asian and the African. In between were the American and the Malay, which is South Sea Islands. So it was a ranking that had to do with beauty and also into a millennia-long slave trade from Ukraine, from the Caucasus into the Eastern Mediterranean. And that trade actually reached Venice and reached Italy, which was a slave society for probably for a millennia. Yeah. Certainly Greece. And the ideal of the beautiful young sexually vulnerable girl, woman is a long-standing ideal, which we recognize in the Odalisque.

Debbie Millman:
Now, this is probably a question that you get asked a lot. You might even hate it. But I do want to ask, as a species, humans are pretty barbaric.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, sometimes.

Debbie Millman:
A lot of times.

Nell Irvin Painter:
A lot of times. Yeah.

Debbie

Millman:
More often than not, it feels.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Certainly one feels that now.

Debbie Millman:
I was on safari in Tanzania a couple of years ago and learned that the zebra don’t hunt prey. Zebras are vegetarians. And while they’re hunted, they do not hunt. Why as a species are we not more gentle with each other? Why do we seem almost genetically predisposed to want to harm or enslave or create rank as a species? Why is that something that is so deeply ingrained in who we are?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, obviously I have no answer to that. However, I would add that that’s not all there is to it. People are capable of kindness and solidarity. But I also notice … We spend a lot of time up in the Adirondacks, and I see animals there. I see wasps and things like that. And they go at each other with a ferocity that is really scary. And so we’re not the only ones in the world who are capable of cruelty. But I don’t have an answer of why that is. I do see in human history that I brushed up against in writing The History of White People, that the story of people is moving, is migrating. Can I use the F word here?

Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Go right ahead.

Nell Irvin Painter:
It’s walk around, fuck, walk around, fuck, walk around, fuck, walk around, fuck. So we’re always churning our DNA and also bumping up against each other, and that’s part of it. But the question you ask doesn’t just pertain to people whom groups define as others. People are capable of doing astonishing cruelty to people like their wives.

Debbie Millman:
Their children.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Their pets.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
From an evolutionary point of view, I just don’t understand why we just can’t be more like the zebra.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Well, there would be too many of us for one thing. There already are too many of us. So maybe balancing the women’s role as creator and the man’s role of keeping the population down. I don’t know. I do not know. And I don’t know of anybody who does know.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I just think about this all the time now is I see what we’re doing to each other in the world. What we’ve always been doing, but right now, the amount of cruelty that we’re facing feels unsurmountable. But I’ll talk a little bit more about that later when we get to your most recent book, because you talk about it quite a lot.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I will say one thing here. That in order not to lose my mind, I do not spend time on stuff I can’t change. I try to focus on the state and local. And there are good things going on. I live in New Jersey. There are good things going on in the state and local here. And I give money to local causes and local nonprofits. So I try to keep my gaze focused below the national and international levels. A few weeks ago, I was in New Haven talking with the group who foster young people. Not foster literally, but ease their way into staying into K through 12 and then going on. And in the questions, one man said, “What can we do about all this book banning?” And he’s wringing his hands about stuff that was going on in the south, in Florida, in Texas and so forth. And I said, “We can’t do anything because those policies are made on the local level. If you want to change that policy, you have to run for school board in Florida.” So I would say find a better worry. Find a better worry.

Debbie Millman:
The publication of The History of White People marked a real watershed moment in your life. After the book was published, you decided, despite already having a PhD from Harvard University, you wanted to go back to school to get another bachelor’s degree.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
But this time in fine art. What inspired that decision?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Two things. Sojourner Truth and that stay in the art history library had really reawakened my attraction to images and imagery. And the other thing was I just wanted to do it and I could. My husband takes care of me. I didn’t have to worry about … I had the money. And art school is, as you know, absurdly expensive.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Nell Irvin Painter:
And the degree you come out with is not going to pay your rent. So luckily, I didn’t have to worry about my rent. And I wanted the degrees plural, because I wanted to be professional. I wanted to be professional in the way I was professional as a historian. That has not been totally smooth. But with I Just Keep Talking, you see where I got to in ways that I could put the two together. It took me 10 years to put my historical self together with my visual artist self. It was very bumpy. And even now, I cannot go from concentrating on writing to concentrating on drawing without a week or so of just changing gears.

Debbie Millman:
You got your BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. And though you originally didn’t know if you wanted to go to graduate school, you ultimately realized that you did. And you’ve written that this was because you wanted to work harder than the kids did. You wanted to be more intense than the kids were. And you thought graduate school would do that for you. Did it?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. It did. It did. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I tell people, getting a PhD from Harvard in history was a piece of cake in comparison.

Debbie Millman:
Why is that now? How is that possible?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, I guess the easiest way is to say that as a historian, I knew what the values and the standards were. In art I did it. So some of the art that I looked at when I was an undergraduate just looked like piles of stuff to me. I didn’t understand how you use visual archives as opposed to how you use historical archives. And I was too tight and too focused on what I call discursive meaning when I started. What I came to later on in graduate school was a real loosening up, and that was something I really had to do.

Debbie Millman:
You went to the Rhode Island School of Design or RISD.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
What did the students make of an African-American woman in her 60s alongside them in class?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I think nothing.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Nell Irvin Painter:
That is not true of everyone. We were very small. We were 12. But a couple of them felt old because they were like 31, 32. But I was just this old lady and my bona fides, which came from academia, counted for nothing. And the thing that really summed it up, at the end of the school year, we were going to take our picture. So everybody assembled at the given time, and nothing happened, and nothing happened and people weren’t there. I am always on time. But I finally said, “Look, I have to take care of this thing in my studio. Call me when you’re ready to take the picture.” And as soon as I left, they took the picture.

Debbie Millman:
Despite all the accolades you got as an historian, you often got what you referred to as stinging criticisms that were one long tearing down in addition to this other utterly disrespectful behavior. One professor even told you that you would never be an artist.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I’m assuming that that was a white cis heterosexual man. In any case, why did he say that to you, and how did you respond and how did you recover from that?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. His name was Henry. He was a printmaking teacher. And this was my first semester at RISD and I was feeling my way. I was not an experienced printmaker by any means, but I tried hard. And he called me dogged, and it wasn’t like, “Oh, you are dogged. You are very hardworking.” No, it was, “You are dogged.” So I called him out on it. Because I knew teaching, and if you’re a good teacher, you don’t say things like that.

So I said, “Henry, that’s bullshit.” He said, “You may sell your work, you may have collectors, you may be in museums, you may have a gallery, but you will never be an artist.” And that stung. I would say-

Debbie Millman:
Oh, my god. Yeah.

Nell Irvin Painter:
What saved me was I had friends at Yale. They put me back together again.

Debbie Millman:
You did a fellowship there, didn’t you?

Nell Irvin Painter:
After I graduated from RISD. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You did a lot of research after that experience and discovered how many people have either been told that they’ll never be an artist or have known somebody who was told that they would never be an artist, whether it’s a fine artist or a poet or a playwright or any field in the arts. And you about this in relation to what you refer to as the talent mystique, the great man mystique and the genius mystique. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about that.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I can talk about that actually more easily through publishing. Because the publishing world right now, people are tearing their hair. Oh, it’s terrible. All this consolidation. And in the good old days, an editor could foster a writer, even though the writer was not selling out, and just wait until that writer flourished. And now there’s just, oh, it’s so terrible, the marketing. But at the same time, the early reviews came through. I got two really good, strong early reviews from Kirkus and from Publishers Weekly. And another list maker said, “These are the 45 best books by women of color this spring.” And I thought, “45? Wow. That’s fantastic.” So I wonder if my 45 best books by women of color is related to the good old days gone by when the good old days gone by were white male writers. In the 20th century, there was a tiny sliver of publications by white women. There was almost nothing well known by black women. The breakthrough was with Toni Morrison. And that is like in the 1980s. When I am with other black women writers and they talk about what made the difference from them, they talk about when they were girls and they read Toni Morrison. When I was a girl, there was no Toni Morrison.

Debbie Millman:
It’s astonishing how often I hear from artists, writers, designers, playwrights, musicians, how someone along the way in a position of power or authority told them that they couldn’t be who they ended up becoming and did it anyway. Whether that be doggedness or resilience or just desperation because you can’t do anything else. What do you think those teachers and professors make of your success now? Despite what that teacher said about even if you do this, and even if you do that, you would not be an artist. You are an artist.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. I am an artist.

Debbie Millman:
And a successful artist. What do you think they make of that now?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I don’t know what Henry makes of it. He was so pigheaded. He says, “I have to say what I know to be true.” So he probably still knows that to be true. But I had a teacher both at RISD and at Mason Gross, who would come into our RISD crits and say, “You can’t draw and you can’t paint. There’s nothing on the walls that’s interesting.” And I was mortified. I believed her. I was so pathetic.

Debbie Millman:
Pathetic because you believed her, or pathetic because you felt at the time your work was bad?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I believed her. That’s the crucial thing about the arts, because there are no standards. And I finally decided that what counts as value in art? What is good art? It’s the market that decides. There are no freestanding standards of quality in the art world. So at any rate, she would say, “You can’t draw and you can’t paint.” I thought, oh, woe is me. But years later, after I published Old in Art School and she recognized herself, she came up to me with great pleasure. She was so glad to see me. All right. Okay.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you write in Old in Art School, which did win an award-

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes. It did.

Debbie Millman:
That one I know for sure. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
But you write about the difference between objective criteria in history, but how art is virtually all subjective and state this. “What I really liked was stepping away from the tyranny of the archive and being able to move into visual fiction and make things up.” It seems-

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s my great pleasure in art.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It seems like at first it was terrifying, and then it became freeing. Would that be correct to say?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I don’t know if it was terrifying. It was challenging in that I knew that I needed to be better at it, but I also knew the way to be better at it was to do it. And if I were teaching in art school, I would say make the art only you can make and make a lot of it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You say that that’s crucial for an artist. “Make your own art, make art only you could make and make a lot of it,” is one of my favorite quotes of yours.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
It does seem unthinkable to me as a teacher in an art school … Although I teach branding, which is an art, but it’s not a fine art. I couldn’t imagine telling a student that what they were doing had no meaning or value. It just feels like that’s telling a person that they have no meaning or value. And it feels just epically unfair. You are now exhibiting your work all over the world. You’ve had numerous solo shows. You’ve been included in a long list of group shows. You’re a part of many public collections. So I just want to say congratulations to that.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Oh, thank you.

Debbie Millman:
And thank you for showing up all those bigots and assholes. But I do want to talk to you about your brand new book, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays. And you begin the book with a quote by Elizabeth Alexander from her book, The Trayvon Generation. You quote her and state, “Art and history are the indelibles.” Why that particular quote?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, I have been such a long admirer of her as a poet and a writer. So she was my host in 2012 at Yale, for instance. So she moves easily back and forth between the visual and the verbal. That is what I wanted to capture. The strength of … She’s really well known now so if I say she said something, yeah, it must be true. And since my book does both the visual and the verbal, I wanted her imprimatur saying, yes, that’s what we need to do.

Debbie Millman:
I Just Keep Talking features your artwork alongside your writing. And in the essay what 18th and 19th century intellectuals saw in the time of Trump, you state, “For a long time, I assumed that going to an art school and making art separated me from my former vocation as a historian.” But it seems now that you fully integrated both of your practices as an artist and as a historian. Do you feel as comfortable in one as another and in that center of the Venn diagram? Comfortably center in that?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Good question. And I’m more comfortable as a writer because I’m better known. When I go into art spaces, I feel viewed as just a little old black lady because people don’t know who I am. And even when I was a la-di-da historian, I could go to history meetings and if I wasn’t wearing my badge that had my name with Princeton on it, I was just a little old black lady. Part of my having to flop around and find a place was that my work is sometimes called illustration, which is a bad word. Illustration is inferior to painting. It’s inferior to fine art. And I felt bad about that for a long time. But in 2022, I was at PAFA, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, to make another lithograph at Brodsky. And I fell in with a teacher of illustration, and he taught me about editorial illustration. And so I say, that’s what I do now. I do editorial illustrations.

Debbie Millman:
That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. And as somebody who’s been in the commercial art world for a very long time, 40 plus years at this point, I can say that if anybody referred to me as an illustrator, I’d be really proud.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Oh, really? Okay.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely. Some of the greatest illustrators of our time, Christoph Niemann and Barry Blitt and Maira Kalman. She’s also both an illustrator and an artist.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. She was one of our great inspirations.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I think that they’re making some of the best work in the world right now.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I Just Keep Talking is a collection of both formal and more informal writing, and it offers deep commentary on a variety of subjects from history to visual culture. I know you talk a bit about this in the coda, but can you tell us more about your methodology for assembling the collection and what you’re hoping readers will, no pun intended, draw most from it?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. I took probably three weeks or so at MacDowell just trying to assemble it because there’s much that’s left out. So there had to be relevance to now. So most of the pieces are 21st century pieces, though there are some older pieces that still ring true, like the one from the ’80s about affirmative action.

Debbie Millman:
Especially true now. Especially true.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Exactly. So they had to stand on their own, but also be related to the other things in the book. I depended on my social media people a lot. I would say I’m putting this together and I have essays on history, but I also have essays on southern history. And I started my historical careers as southern historian. So I know southern history, and I know it’s not the same as US history. So I said to my people … Then I was just on Facebook. How should I organize this? Should I put southern history in history? And some of the people said, “No, no, no, it’s separate. It’s different.” They finally ended up by saying, “Well, there should be a section called history, and then there should also be a section called Southern history.” And that’s how I finally did it. And then there was the question of the art, and some of the essays needed art that didn’t exist. So then at Yaddo, I made a lot of different drawings, not all of which got into the book. So I worked back and forth between the words and the images. I think being in art made a difference in the way I start writing, because I’m very likely now to start writing by hand, which I didn’t do before.

Debbie Millman:
Does it feel different?

Debbie Millman:
Nell Irvin Painter:

It does. It feels slower. And a way to get into questions that were not in my mind, questions that may have no answers. Like your question about why are people so mean? It has no answer, but it’s a really good question.

Debbie Millman:
And I think it’s important to talk about it because I think we need to find the answer.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
In your introduction, you talk about W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of twoness. T-W-O-N-E-S-S. And how you experienced it differently. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about your understanding and experience of that twoness.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Sure. The quote from 1903 is about the Negro, and I grew up as the Negro capital N, of course. But it was not a bad word at all. It was the progressive word as opposed to colored. So when Du Bois wrote, it was about being the Negro in a situation in which you’re in the minority, and how does it feel to be a problem? But I didn’t know when I went to art school that my otherness would be as being old. And that made such a difference. So when people talk about black artists, and they mean black artists now in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, it’s very different. This summer. I’m going to be 82 years old. So I have been around for a long time, and a lot of the people who were young with me are dead or are not in good shape now.

So I have rather few book prizes because when I was the age of young and up-and-coming historians, book prizes were not being given to black women. And then by the time I get into the age when black women are getting prizes, they are going to younger artists and younger writers. So I look back at modernists like Margo Humphrey, for instance, a fantastic printmaker who never got her due because she was flourishing in the time before the country could see her greatness. So in a way, I am in that cohort, but I’m also in a younger cohort that looks at me if they don’t know who I am as just the old lady. It’s deadly enough to be an old lady of any sort, but to be an old black woman is to be the picture of impotence. Of someone who cannot do anything for you. But the great thing about living in Essex County, New Jersey, particularly living for many, many years in Newark, now we live at the next suburb, which is East Orange. In Newark there’s black power and there are lots of black people, including black women, including old black women who are powerful people. And they don’t get ignored or swept under the rug. But that has not been my experience through much of my life.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I hope that changes certainly with this book, which it deserves to be acknowledged. I want to talk to you about a few more essays. In the 27-

Nell Irvin Painter:
Thank you for your careful reading. I really appreciate this.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, it was an honor and a pleasure. It’s a fantastic book.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Thank you. In the 2017 essay, “Long Division,” you write about the construction of race through the lens of the work and thinking of writers such as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, and the section on race as a determinant for the othering or belonging of people in American culture felt very pertinent to our current today cultural climate. And I’m curious, how do you see us handling this now in the wake of the possibility of a second Trump term?

Nell Irvin Painter:
I see lots of handling. At least two different kinds of handling. One is that we go deeper into Trumpiness. You can’t talk about diversity, you can’t talk about race. You can’t talk about history. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. And we are going to enforce this through the force of arms. That’s one way.

Debbie Millman:
Okay.

Nell Irvin Painter:
I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
That was my next question, especially from the essay. It shouldn’t be this close, but there’s good news too.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Close, yes. But when you considered it in the last, what? Eight presidential elections, Democrats have won the popular vote. There are more of us than there are of them. We don’t often think of it that way, but it’s been happening. And I would say that even before Dobbs, even before the in vitro of cultivation, conception.

Debbie Millman:
Conception.

Nell Irvin Painter:
The Alabama IVF yeah. Which are going to already have been good for Democrats as women reject this kind of triage between women and fetuses. I also suspect that Trump is going to self-destruct. There’s just too much going on. And he’s been incoherent in so many ways. I don’t think that is going to end the devilment in our country, which antedate him. I don’t know if you can see behind me on this side on the wall, that’s American whiteness since Trump, which I made in 2020. And one of the pages says, weren’t you paying attention? Here’s George Wallace. Here’s Buchanan. Here are these people. And they have been telling you about white supremacy. Historians have been telling you about white supremacy. It is a longstanding ideology in this country. And so as I say, I don’t think Trump is going to make it, your next statement is, oh, I’m so relieved you’re optimistic. No. I am not optimistic. I have been black in the United States too long to be optimistic. I just don’t think that some of the worst is going to happen.

Debbie Millman:
Does it worry you though that it’s the electoral college that elects the president as opposed to the many, many more Democrats there are in this country?

Nell Irvin Painter:
No. Because as I said, I don’t worry about things I can’t change. If there is a movement … And it would have to come out of Congress, I would support that. I would give my money. I would support whatever Congress people or persons who are pushing for that. But I don’t see any reason to worry about things I can’t change.

Debbie Millman:
At the end of the book, you have a visual essay titled “I Knit Socks for Adrienne.” And you said that particular essay is the most personally declarative piece of art you have ever made. More personal even than your self-portraits.

Nell Irvin Painter:
This is true.

Debbie Millman:
And is that because you come out as a public knitter?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely that. It’s absolutely that. I spoke to you a lot about being othered as an old woman, and I had held on to this fear that … I do knit in public. I

have knitted in public for a long time. I knitted in department meetings, I knit in history meetings. I do knit in public. But to present myself as a knitter, that was until that time, a step too far. And now that I’ve done it, I’m really happy because there are so many other women who are so happy that I am out as a knitter. And one of the things that will go into the Sojourner Truth book, the section on knitting, is also about respect for women’s work.

Debbie Millman:
And the craft that goes into so much of it.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
What does knitting give you as an art form that isn’t quite satisfied by your other visual practices?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, for one thing, I can knit while I listen to a book, I can knit on the train, I can knit on an airplane and I have something to show for it. Now, in terms of the visual satisfaction that is going to a yarn store. This is typical of knitters. I have more yarn than I could ever use in three more lifetimes. But the tactile sensation, the textures, the colors, and then the meditative work, all of that is profoundly satisfied in a way I think that feeds my reptilian brain rather than my history brain.

Debbie Millman:
That’s so interesting. It’s so interesting about creators that like that tactile and how I have a craft closet filled with felt and all kinds of fabric and thousands of colored pencils. It’s that tactileness-

Nell Irvin Painter:
And you open the door and you see all those colors and it makes you happy.

Debbie Millman:
It makes me feel happy. Absolutely. Absolutely a dopamine rush. Now, you said that your next project is a new biography of Sojourner Truth. Will that also include your artwork?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely. But I have two projects and then I’m going to retire. The first one is-

Debbie Millman:
Sure. Sure. Is what I say to that.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah, really.

Debbie Millman:
But tell us about the project.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Sojourner Truth Was a New Yorker And She Didn’t Say That. And so since I and then two other scholarly biographers have published the biographies you need to find out about her life now I can talk around her life. So Sojourner Truth was a New Yorker. The pivot there is the moment when she goes to court to get her son back who was trafficked. And she couldn’t have done that if she were say, in Harriet Jacobs’ North Carolina because the laws had no provision for preventing human trafficking. So Sojourner Truth as a New Yorker, I believe that she carries that sense of herself as a citizen into her public life that we know her and appreciate her for. So the Sojourner Truth was a New Yorker is already contracted with Penguin. The book that I will be thinking about in the fall is about my life as someone who has spent important times overseas and then making layers of experience and thinking about myself as a black American, as American as outside the United States. That book doesn’t really have a title, and it shouldn’t yet. And it also doesn’t have a contract, which it shouldn’t yet.

But that’s the Roxane Gay part of me in a way that says, what I am saying, me is something that will interest you. And that took a big step. Not because I’m a professor at Princeton. Not because I publish with an important press. Not because I’ve had all these books. But because of what I think and what I say will be of interest to you. That was a gigantic step. And I’m not just talking about black people or race in America. I’m saying you will be interested in what I say about whatever I say. That was so hard.

Debbie Millman:
Nell Irvin Painter, thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, thank you so much. You did such a beautiful reading of my book. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. You can read more about all of Nell’s books and writing and artwork on her website. nellpainter.com, her brand new book is titled, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

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