Tiffany Shlain:
Ken and I spent a good year thinking, “What are all the big questions of humanity?”

Ken Goldberg:
Now I still haven’t seen a really good joke from AI yet. I’m waiting for that.

Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg talk about their artistic collaborations.

Ken Goldberg:
I always joke that Tiffany had never met a piece of rusted metal that she didn’t love.

Tiffany Shlain:
I love salvaged things.

Debbie Millman:
Tiffany Shlain is an artist, a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, the founder of the Webby Awards, and the co-founder of the International Academy of the Digital Arts and Sciences. She’s also the author of several books, including 24/6: Giving up Screens One Day a Week to Get More Time, Creativity, and Connection, which we talked about on this podcast when the book first came out.

Ken Goldberg is the William S. Floyd Chair of Engineering and distinguished professor of Robotics at UC, Berkeley. President of the Robot Learning Foundation, an author whose books include Beyond Webcams: An Introduction to Online Robotics. He’s also an artist whose work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale.

Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg are partners, partners in life and collaborators in several films and art installations. Their latest project together is currently on display at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. It’s a magnificent installation titled Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology. Ken Goldberg and Tiffany Shlain, welcome to Design Matters.

Ken Goldberg:
Thank you so much.

Tiffany Shlain:
We’re so happy to be here.

Debbie Millman:
Listeners of the show know that I’ve interviewed Tiffany a few times, but I’ve never interviewed her husband, and so I do want to talk to him about his really fascinating career. And then we’re going to talk about their exhibit together. Ken, you have at least by my latest count, 13 patents, several more under review. Your grandfather, [inaudible 00:02:37] had 10 patents to his name. Has your family always had this legacy of invention and innovation?

Ken Goldberg:
Thanks for finding that. Yes, my grandfather… There’s a lot of sense that we are very similar many people say, and he was an immigrant from Poland and he was an electrical engineer and he developed all these patents in the ’50s around hermetic seals, which was a way of sealing circuits and that were very popular with the military and other applications for aerospace.

So I’ve always admired him. I didn’t get to know him very well because he lived in California. He actually lived in Pasadena and then later in Beverly Hills, and so I always admired him because he had a gold Rolls-Royce.

But he was very creative and my grandfather on the other side was also an entrepreneur and he started companies around various creative ideas. He was very interesting, and my father was an entrepreneur as well. So I think there is an element of that kind of trying to do things a little differently that’s in my DNA.

Debbie Millman:
And is it true that you were born in Nigeria?

Ken Goldberg:
True. My father and mother were both part of the civil rights movement in Philadelphia in the early ’60s, and so they wanted to do something constructive, and so they wrote letters to different places and got a response from Nigeria and they went there and taught in a school in a pretty remote area for two years.

Debbie Millman:
And you then moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And from what I understand though, you considered becoming an artist as you were growing up through high school, your parents wanted you to do something with a bit more security, and you ended up going to the University of Pennsylvania and majored in electrical engineering. You got your BS in economics.

At that point what did you think you wanted to do professionally? Because 30 years ago or some range of that… Because I know that we are both around the same age, so maybe 40 years ago people weren’t thinking, “I want to be a specialist in artificial intelligence when I grow up. I want to be able to create robots when I grow up.” Well, maybe you could because we both watch the Jetsons.

Ken Goldberg:
Exactly, exactly. We are actually a month apart, less than a month apart.

Debbie Millman:
20 days I believe.

Ken Goldberg:
Exactly. But yes, exactly because we were both in that era when it was rockets and NASA and there was this whole idea of mythology around rockets and robots that were, and jetpacks actually was one of those things. And I think that I was very much a kid of the ’60s. My dad was an engineer, so we built go-karts and rockets and things, and we actually did a robot that we developed.

It was just a crane basically, but it was controlled by a computer and it was very primitive it never really worked, but we spent a lot of time in the basement working on this. But it was a way I got exposure to robots and also AI because he taught me binary numbers when I was a little kid. And so then I was interested in those ideas from an early age.

Debbie Millman:
Now, I believe it was when you were studying abroad and took a class on artificial intelligence that you really began to become interested in robotics, and what was the state of artificial intelligence at that time? This was the early ’80s.

Ken Goldberg:
Right. Some people were talking about it. There were classes on it, but my junior year abroad was in Scotland and in Edinburgh they actually had a department of AI, so they had a number of faculty there, and they taught a class that I took and I was fascinated by the different questions that people were asking. Mostly it was in pretty academic research level, but I got that exposure. And when I came back to Penn, I was just walking in the hallway and I stumbled onto a robotics lab that was-

Debbie Millman:
As one does.

Ken Goldberg:
I just got lucky. In fact, actually I will tell you, it said, “ESP lab.” And it was called the… I thought, “Oh my gosh, I got to check this out.” But it turned out to be called the Experimental Sensory Processing Lab at Penn, but it was doing robots, not ESP. So we actually later changed the name and I said, “Let’s modify this to the General Robotics and Sensory Processing Lab.” And that became the GRASP lab, which it still is today.

Debbie Millman:
You went on to get your PhD where you developed… And so I have to make sure I get this right. If I don’t, please correct me. You developed the first algorithm for, “Feeding polygonal parts and you prove that the algorithm could be used to orient any part up to rotational symmetry.”

Ken Goldberg:
Perfect, perfect. I am very impressed.

Debbie Millman:
Tell me what that means.

Ken Goldberg:
Okay, all right. By feeding parts would mean orienting parts, and the idea was that up till then you would have to use a camera and you would look at the object and try and orient it, but there was always uncertainty. And that’s one of the fundamental issues in robotics.

I started exploring this approach where it was just using pure blind motions without any sensing at all. And then I found that if you could squeeze the part with this very abstract parallel jaw gripper in the plane in a sequence of motions, you could always guarantee that the part would end up in a unique final orientation.

And it’s a counterintuitive result, and it worked for lots of examples, but the hard part was trying to prove that for all polygons. And I spent two years working on that problem. And then my advisor was like, “You can graduate when you finish that.” So I just struggled with this math problem for many years.

And then I remember, and I was talking to Tiffany about this recently, was this aha moment when I suddenly saw the answer and it was a step function, and I had been sitting by the stairs for all this time, and the step function turned out be the critical ingredient for being able to prove it.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about that aha moment. I’m really intrigued by aha moments and how they manifest through you. Aha moments feel almost mystical.

Ken Goldberg:
Absolutely. Debbie, I so much remember that moment. I remember that the idea came and I had to write out these equations to formalize it. And as I was writing them out, there was… these were these integrals and they were starting to cancel out, and I was just moving along and all of a sudden they all canceled out. And it became that integral equaled zero.

And I remember this, there was a huge emotional and spiritual moment because I had no idea that would happen. And it turned out that confirmed that there was always an existence, a step that would allow this process to continue and that would work for any object, any polygon that you could conceive of. It was essentially you’re dealing with infinity in some way.

And so it’s very hard to prove things in general like that. So when that all came together, it definitely felt like some bolt out of something larger than myself, and I always remember it because I really haven’t had an experience quite that intense since.

I’ve had aha moments in different ways but that one in particular where it just mathematically clicked, I still think about this sometimes that that is one of my reasons for having a sense of something larger than us. There’s something out there that I really believe in.

Debbie Millman:
Was this the work that enabled you to get your first patent? I know that you patented a comedically yielding gripper, which was a new robot gripper that complied passively to hold parts securely without sensing. And it sounds like that’s what you were talking about just now.

Ken Goldberg:
Exactly. Exactly. That’s right. The hardware part of it was a gripper where I figured out that I could put bearings on one of the sliding jaws and that would allow the friction to go away to eliminate friction. So I called it the kinematically yielding gripper, which is my initials, KYG.

And I didn’t even think of this, but my uncle, I went home for Thanksgiving and he said, “You should file a patent for that.” And so I did, and amazingly it was granted. So that was very fun to actually get it into the patent system. I had known that my grandfather had patents at that point, but I hadn’t had one of my own. I was super proud of that.

Debbie Millman:
I was thinking about how when you go to amusement parks, there’s that amusement that you can participate in where you stand in front of a big glass little room where there’s a gripper and you can try to get stuffed animals from this pile.

Ken Goldberg:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And I was thinking that never works. So they should have used your… But then again, I guess that would be a way to lose all the stuffed animals immediately.

Ken Goldberg:
Well, it’s actually… I love the crane thing you’re talking about where it drops the little claw. And actually I was at a roller skating rink with our youngest daughter, Blooma and it turned out that she had a knack for doing that, and she would win. She would get stuff. And I always think, “This is great.” Because I am so interested in that problem, which is how do you pick things up?

And I am so glad you brought that up because that’s a perfect example, and I should use that for what I’m explaining to people because people say, “Well, what do you work on?” And I usually reach over and there’s a glass or something nearby, and I say, “My whole career has been spent trying to pick this up. That’s what I do.” And we still haven’t figured it out.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I think Blooma’s success at doing it has to be something related to her DNA. I’m just convinced. Now, you also coined the term Cloud Robotics, so help us understand what that is and how do you see that evolving over the next decade?

Ken Goldberg:
Oh, great. Well, thanks for asking. I actually didn’t coin the term. There was a… I was using the word internet robots and networked robots, various things like that because I had done an art project that in the early days of the internet, we had connected a garden to the internet.

Debbie Millman:
Telegarden.

Ken Goldberg:
Telegarden. And in my mind, it was an art project and it was also an engineering proof of concept. And so these two things coming together, we wanted to get this to work where anyone in the world could come in over their browser and tend a living garden. So it was a lot of engineering to get that to work.

And also it had to be online for 24 hours a day, so it had little headlights that would come on so that it would work at night when people in Europe were operating it, but people could plant water seeds. And so that idea of working over the internet, I was very excited about that going back to 1994.

Tiffany Shlain:
I wanted to jump in because you were also… What I love about that project is you were playing with the irony of what you can’t do online. It was also a critique at the same time as you were proving that this could be done, it was also showing what you can’t replicate. And I know Debbie, you’re a big gardener now and all the things you can’t replicate with the internet. So you were also kind of playing with that.

Ken Goldberg:
Good. No, thanks for bringing that up, Tiffany. You’re right. So there was an irony in my mind about doing this because I thought it’s the last thing people want to do over the internet is garden, right?

Debbie Millman:
You’d be surprised.

Ken Goldberg:
I was wrong. I was wrong. Exactly. People spend huge amounts of time. We estimate 100,000 people came in and participated in this garden. And it was fascinating because I was really interested in this intersection of technology and nature and the natural world. And so this was a way of exploring that.
But it also, in the research realm, we believe it was the first robot on the internet. So then it led to research and I got funded by the National Science Foundation and developed these various versions of these systems that explored other kinds of activities.

And then more recently that has really picked up because the idea of networks being essential for robots is being increasingly recognized because now the robot doesn’t have to carry all of its computing on board. It can use the internet.

And so for example right now everybody’s talking about these humanoids, which by the way, I’m a bit skeptical about the claims that people are making. But I think that the beauty is that the robot is, it can’t carry that much weight and it can’t carry that much battery power.

So what it does is it transmits back to some base station or maybe even a data center somewhere, and that’s where the heavy duty processing the AI basically goes on, and then it sends back the commands for the robot. So that idea of Cloud Robotics is now being really embraced worldwide.

Debbie Millman:
I learned it about a new paradox as I was doing my research to prepare for today’s show. I believe it’s Moravec’s paradox, and I’m wondering if you can share what that is and how it relates to robots.

Ken Goldberg:
Yes. So Hans Moravec is still alive. He is a roboticist who wrote a book about 35 years ago where he pointed out that what’s easy for robots, like picking something heavy or manipulating heavy things is very hard for humans.

But what’s easy for humans like clearing a dinner table is still amazingly hard for robots. And that’s the paradox, why is that? That there’s this big disconnect and it’s fascinating, and that’s where really I’ve spent most of my career, studying that.

Debbie Millman:
In an op-ed you wrote for The Boston Globe, you stated that you’ve been a skeptic about AI for over 40 years and felt that AI could never be creative, couldn’t come up with an interesting work of art, an interesting invention or a funny joke.

But after ChatGPT went online and you used it for a few hours, you wondered if you’d been wrong. So this is a three-part question. One, why were you a skeptic for 40 years? What happened when you went online and experimented with ChatGPT? And how were you feeling about it now? Three-part question.

Ken Goldberg:
Okay.

Debbie Millman:
Sorry.

Ken Goldberg:
No, it’s such a good question. Such a good question. Now I know why you’re so amazing. All right, so why I’ve been a skeptic and I still am in general about AGI. I feel that there’s a lot of hype out there, but I think that in my sense, I had also been very involved with AI and seen the claims and the ebbs and flows about how AI has been treated over the years.

And I felt that there were things that were being claimed that were exaggerated in so many regards. And then when ChatGPT came out, I remember very distinctly like I think many people, being surprised by its ability to respond and to actually do something creative. Where for me it was I would give it two very different things and I would ask it to put them together and come up with a new idea.

So I’d give it two papers that I’d written and say, “Well, how would you combine these into something new?” And it was remarkably good at that. It is good at that, and that is creative. I mean, in my mind, when anybody connects two different things, puts them together. I always find that creative and interesting. So yes, I’ve recanted my claim that AI would never be creative.

Now I still haven’t seen a really good joke from AI yet. I’m waiting for that. I think that’ll come, in fact, I’ll make a prediction here, Debbie, with you in 2025, I think this is a year we’re going to see some kind of real breakthrough in AI creating something.

What I mean by that is that I think somehow it’s going to happen, I think could as early as this year, but some breakthrough where let’s say a real hard mathematical problem will be solved or a new important protein will be discovered or maybe it’s a truly hilarious joke.

But I think we’re going to get to something that’s very, very significant and say that that was done with AI this year. I think we’re ready for that.

Debbie Millman:
I’ve done a lot of experimenting with AI in the last year, both visually as well as with writing. I find that you can do more right now that feels more creative, maybe not original, but creative, visually than verbally or with writing. I find that most writing feels very soulless because so many of my students now try to write papers with it or resumes or cover letters or anything.

Ken Goldberg:
You can feel it.

Debbie Millman:
You can tell. I can tell instantly. I mean, I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, because I think you’ll enjoy it. Nobody under 50 uses the word hence or moreover in their writing, and that’s a dead giveaway. And there are certain words that you just know-

Tiffany Shlain:
But there’s more than that, Debbie, I think you’re right. There’s something… It’s almost ineffable, but it’s like when it has been written by… I mean, it’s interesting.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. There’s a soullessness to it-

Tiffany Shlain:
A coldness.

Debbie Millman:
… that doesn’t come through. And even if something that is written from the heart might not be either the most grammatically correct or ingeniously constructed, it still feels more like the person than something that’s constructed in AI by a prompt from a person.

But Ken, you’ve also written about how the scientists and artists you respect most are approaching the latest advances in AI with curiosity and not fear. And I thought that was really interesting because so many of the people that I know in the design community are actually really opposed to it. A lot of writers are opposed to it. I’m more on the curiosity side than the fear side.

And I think that comes from age because I started working as a designer professionally in the ’80s and literally started on a drafting table sitting next to a wax machine, holding an X-Acto blade. And I remember late ’80s, the very famous designers at that time were all lamenting the introduction of the computer and doing design work and felt that it was going to ruin the business and everybody was going to lose their jobs. And here we are 40 years later, and I’m actually hearing almost verbatim the same arguments just with different technology.

Ken Goldberg:
Definitely. And I think that’s a great point because the key is how you can start to use it. I should have made it a little more clear when I was saying about my prediction. I think the prediction won’t be that AI will have done this entirely on its own, but it will have been in a partnership with a human that worked, understood, and knew how to use it in the right way.

And in terms of imagery, Photoshop was such a complex, new, fangled thing when it came out. But it didn’t mean the end of design, it just enhanced design. And now with people learning how to really steer and prompt a system to come up with images and fine tune them, that is opening up incredibly interesting new doors and new potential.

So I think that’s right. And the idea is not to run away from it, but look at it as a new instrument almost, and how can you play it? What can you do? How can it be used? I don’t think it’s going to wipe out jobs in the same way people are saying, I really don’t.

I mean, we can come back to robotics where anything, I really believe any manual labor is safe. We’re very far from being able to reproduce motor skills and what tradespeople can do. But I’ll also say that I’m fascinated by more recently the breakthrough that happened two years ago with ChatGPT was based on a new model of attention. Can we talk about that for a second?

Debbie Millman:
Please.

Ken Goldberg:
Okay. So the technical result, there was a famous paper that was a big breakthrough called Attention is All You Need. And that is a little confusing as a title, but what it meant was if you basically train not just the system on a sequence of words, but you actually had the system learn which previous words to pay attention to, that turned out to be a big breakthrough. And that’s called the transformer network. And that’s what enabled ChatGPT and also in some way is very much a part of the new vision recognition systems.

So that is really interesting and subtle, it’s that what was critical was knowing what to pay attention to. And I think that’s so true. I’ve been thinking about this in robotics is that when we move around, our eyes are constantly moving as you know with our phobia, right? So we’re always paying attention to these fine little details. And if you’ll watch those eye tracking videos, our eyes are moving in this kind of… It’s very hard to figure out what’s going on, but I think that there’s a huge amount of nuance in that. And we haven’t figured that out yet in the physical world.

So when I go to reach for a pen or pick up a glass, there’s things that I’m paying attention to both visually and tactile with my fingers that are very important and they’re constantly changing what I pay attention to. And it’s very fast and very subtle and subconscious. And that idea of where is our attention being focused is extremely profound and I think it’s really the key to making progress.

Debbie Millman:
I have just two more questions that I want to ask you and then I want to talk a little bit more about what you’re doing creatively with your artwork. But what is one ethical issue in AI and robotics that you think is the most critical for us to be paying attention to?

Ken Goldberg:
There’s so many issues that are coming up. I think that the idea of robots essentially running amok is maybe a little bit, I don’t know if you could say it’s an ethical issue. But I think that to my mind, most roboticists I know have no worry about this because robots are just not that sophisticated.

The idea that they’re going to take over is a very deeply rooted fear that goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, but it’s a distraction I think from what’s really interesting. But there’s a lot of people who are doomsayers, but people in the research field generally think of that as kind of a very far-fetched concern.

Debbie Millman:
I think that the only real mainstream robot that’s been introduced to culture are the little robot vacuum cleaners, and they don’t always work well. And I think the only people they’re scaring are cats and dogs, not people. The only things they’re scaring are small, furry animals.

Ken Goldberg:
Well, there’s actually a new one that just came out this week from CES in Las Vegas, and I was showing it to Tiffany last night. It’s Roomba basically, but it has a little door that opens on the top and this little arm comes out and then it can reach over and pick up a sock that you might have left on the floor, and then it drives over and puts it into a laundry bin. And it’s so fun to watch. You can find it online. It reminds me of The Addams Family. Remember the Thing?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Ken Goldberg:
Yes, that would come out of the head. I always loved that. And it looks like that.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God, it’s terrifying.

Ken Goldberg:
So-

Tiffany Shlain:
Well, it’s funny that you’re saying that because Ken just did this amazing performance with this other roboticist who’s also a dancer, and it has a nine-foot arm. I mean, I’m thinking about you showing me that small robotic arm. And then at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, he had this dancer was dancing with a nine-foot arm.

And it’s beautiful and mesmerizing and haunting and loving and all these things you don’t expect with robots, which I think is the brilliance of Ken’s work is here he is spending all this time at the lab in this very technical way and then to take that same kind of robot and have people reimagine what it could be in this other way.

Debbie Millman:
And I believe that performance was with Catie Cuan-

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah. She’s terrific.

Debbie Millman:
… a dance homage to physical labor, which is this engagement between a dancer and a robot. And I think it can be found on your website because I know I watched the highlights and it was really, really beautiful. So I want to talk more about your art.

You, Ken, you’ve collaborated with various artists over the course of your career with Gil Gershoni on Are We There Yet? with Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, with Catie Cuan, as I just mentioned. And with your partner in life, Tiffany Shlain, who is here with us as well.

You work together on numerous documentaries, including the Emmy-nominated series The Future Starts Here, and the documentary The Tribe. Your Latest collaboration is part of the Getty’s Art Initiative, Art & Science Collide. And your exhibit is titled Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology. It is currently on view at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Congratulations. It is a tour de force. It is really, really beautiful in utterly unexpected and really grand ways. But before we talk specifically about the art, I do have one very important non-art-related question I wanted to ask you. You met in 1997, you married in 1998. So was it like wild love at first sight? Tell us about your first meeting. Tell us about that aha moment.

Ken Goldberg:
Oh, but okay, that was an aha moment. You’re right.

Tiffany Shlain:
That was definitely an aha moment. The big aha moment.

Ken Goldberg:
I’ll start off just to set the stage because I was teaching at USC in LA at the time, and I had been working with research as we were talking about and also doing this art project. And several friends had given me the same book, which was called Art & Physics. It had just come out and it was by Leonard Shlain. And I read that book and I thought, “Wow, this is fascinating. This man has written… He’s not an artist, he’s not a physicist, but he’s a surgeon and he’s writing about these topics and such insight.” And so I thought, “I’d love to meet him someday.” So that was in the early ’90s. And then I moved to Berkeley and the day I got tenure, or two days after, I was invited to a lecture by Leonard Shlain. And so I went to that lecture and-

Tiffany Shlain:
Wait, I have to jump in on my side because my father was this incredible speaker and I had 10 of my best friends with me going to hear him speak at this art gallery on art and physics. And the way that my father tells this story is that this very handsome man comes up to him and says, “Dr. Shlain I’m a huge fan of your work and had the copy of Art & Physics. I’m a new professor at UC, Berkeley, and my name is Ken Goldberg.” And the way that my father tells it, he’s like, “Loves my work, check. Professor, smart, check. Goldberg Jewish, check.” And he is like, “Have you met my daughter, Tiffany?” That’s the way he would tell it.

And we did fall in love right at first sight. Right at that moment my father introduced us very stuttle like, I mean, there’s another person who will also take credit, which he really should, David Pescovitz, who was in this moment as well. But at our wedding, my father said, “I wrote Art & Physics to bring you two together.” It was so incredible actually to get an email from this wonderful curator three years ago saying, “The Getty Pacific Standard Time theme is Art & Science Collide.”

And I couldn’t think of a better two people to do an exhibit around it. And it’s so… The fact that the theme is Art & Science Collide, and that was really us meeting was this art and physics colliding talk. So it’s felt like a very auspicious part of our whole journey that we have been doing this art show together. And it was a very immediate experience when we met that has… I’m so grateful.

Ken Goldberg:
Yeah, I knew she was the one. I think your dad said it was like Velcro.

Tiffany Shlain:
We were just like… That night. And you can imagine our first date was with my dad and 10 of my best friends. We went out for drinks after the book talk. And the way my dad describes it is like, “You two were like an inch away from each other’s face the whole night.” And-

Debbie Millman:
Oh, that’s such a wonderful… I love romance, I love romantic stories. Well, I believe this current collaboration, this current collaborative body of work came out of the initial artwork that Tiffany has been exploring in the last few years. In 2022, Tiffany, you exhibited a solo art show titled Human Nature, which also included your feminist history dendrochronology piece, Dendrofeminology: A Feminist History Tree Ring. So for our listeners, can you describe what dendrochronology is and how that evolved into your piece, Dendrofeminology?

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah, so basically when you look at a tree ring slice, every ring equals a year. So years of drought, the rings are really close together, and if there’s been a lot of rain, they’re further apart. So what else have trees witnessed? And the feminist history tree ring is imagining a completely different narrative than what you normally see in a national park. And then that just started my whole journey of imagining all the different narratives.

I have one on the evolution of perspective and technology, and I did my own self-portrait. And I was on this journey working with a lot of tree rings and light boxes and photography. So it’s been this really exciting journey for me. And I was working on it, and we got this email from this wonderful curator, Selma Holo, and Ken at the time. Do you want to say what… It was just kind of auspicious that you were working on something related to trees at the time different, but do you want to mention what?

Ken Goldberg:
Sure. I was doing a project with Google and MIT researchers on trying to develop new data science techniques for classifying trees from images from above. And it was because there was this challenge of urban landscapes and trying to do tree census and see how trees are changing over time in cities.
And it’s very costly because it usually gets done by hand and people walk around street to street with these clipboards, but we wanted to see if we could do it. And it’s actually from the air, but it turns out to be very tricky because the resolution of the images are not necessarily good enough.

So we were developing these new techniques and so it was a nice match for what Tiffany was doing. And I was obviously watching how her work was evolving. And we got this call from Selma Holo who was this wonderful-

Tiffany Shlain:
Amazing woman.

Ken Goldberg:
… inspiring legendary curator out of LA. And I had worked with her years before at USC and she had put together-

Tiffany Shlain:
And followed both of our work. Yeah.

Ken Goldberg:
And she had been in touch with us. So she came to our wedding, in fact, right? I think she was there. Yeah.

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah.

Ken Goldberg:
And she basically had this idea in her head that we would work together and do this for the Getty and put it together with the Skirball Museum, which also has a strong Jewish background. So all these ingredients were really… It felt like they just meshed really naturally.

Tiffany Shlain:
Because when she came to us to do this proposal for an exhibit… And I should say that we have done stuff before, we’ve co-written movies and we’ve done specific art installations, but this was by far the most complex opportunity, which we were excited about.

Because we could co-write the tree rings that I had been working on and we’ve co-written scripts, so that felt very natural. We have a lot of AI components. There’s 10 artworks on the show. They all touch upon AI in some ways. And then there’s just a couple very specific to…

We did just like the feminist history cheering. We did a DendroJudeology, a Jewish history timeline. And then we have the Tree of Knowledge, which is a gigantic piece center-

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I want to talk to you about that one in a lot more detail, but in Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology, this show that we’re talking about at the Skirball, you reimagine both old and new ways of understanding trees through several lenses, time, technology, culture, politics.

And you do this through tree ring sculptures and the timelines address the histories, as you mentioned, of knowledge itself, California Trees, science, Judaism. How did you go about determining the narrative arc of the topics in each of the sculptures?

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah, I mean it was interesting because sometimes we had an idea and then we would find a tree that would be a great canvas for that idea. And sometimes we found a tree and it completely changed our idea. And I mean, Ken and I love talking to each other and it was such a fun subject to mull over and think about on our walks and talks and on our Shabbat mornings when we’re without screens and just wide-ranging conversations or a drive.

So it was really… I would say sometimes the actual material would speak to us and really… In one particular piece, which is one of our favorite pieces in the show, which is the giant redwood salvage wood that’s seven feet and it’s all about the history of mathematical equations. That originally was going to be a different subject, but the edges-

Debbie Millman:
That’s my favorite by the way.

Tiffany Shlain:
Thank you. Well, the edges on it were… Actually, when we went to the… we go to different salvage wood places and we wanted a really big tree, but when we saw it actually had these sharp edges on it. And at first, we were disappointed because normally, all the tree rings you see their natural edge we’re like, “Oh my gosh.” But then we had an aha moment that Ken can speak about too, where it realized it actually looked quite mathematical in some way and it made us change the subject on that tree ring.

Debbie Millman:
And I love the way you work with it as opposed to around it.

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah. And that was a really exciting one.

Debbie Millman:
I learned so much about the science of tree ring dating in my research and read that it was discovered by A.E. Douglass in the early 1900s. Beyond the year of drought or a lot of rain, how can trees help us visualize time?

Tiffany Shlain:
Oh my gosh. Well, I do a newsletter Breakfast @ Tiffany’s. I just sent one out today where I was… I think what’s exciting to me, and I did an image in it, which I wish I could show your listeners, but-

Debbie Millman:
Everybody should sign up for Tiffany’s newsletter.

Tiffany Shlain:
Well, but it’s because I suddenly… Thinking about the tree rings made me think of this ever-expanding tree of humanity, and we’re only on for 80 rings. And if you look at those redwoods-

Debbie Millman:
If we’re lucky.

Tiffany Shlain:
If we’re lucky, if we’re lucky, we’re only on for 80. And some of those… I mean the oldest tree in the world is over 5,000 years old, but some of the old-growth redwoods are several thousand years. And it puts things into perspective of like, “We’re just in this moment, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. You’re not going to be here that long. You better live the life you want to live.” And it always puts things into perspective for me.

So in my show in New York at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, I did one where you never saw the edge if we’re speaking of edges, and it just felt like it was forever going and it says, “You are here, you will be here.” Went a little further and then, “You will not be here.” And then there’s a whole bunch of tree rings ahead of you.

I think it’s very humbling, and I think it’s good, especially in these times we’re living right now, it’s to just not forget that this is a very long story we’re a part of, we are in a hard moment now and we have to keep pushing for what we want to have happen. But I love that about nature where-

Ken Goldberg:
Well, there are silent witnesses in some way to what is occurring in the world. And so they’ve become very interesting ways of tracking time individually. And so sometimes in neighborhoods, if you’re lucky to live in the same house over time, you would see a tree and watch it grow.

So one of the parts of the exhibit that we were very excited about is this idea that you can create your own tribute to a tree that you see in your own environment. And we like this idea that it can be very personal, that there’s a memory and then there’s something, maybe it’s in a periphery because you walk past it all the time, but you know it’s there.

But if you take a moment to look at it, really study it becomes really interesting to see its changes over time.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s really interesting to go through those renditions so to speak, or those individual pieces of art on the website because they’re so heartfelt where they can come up to describe that.

Tiffany Shlain:
Well, and that, we should say, I mentioned there’s a lot of AI in the show that’s an example of direct use of AI where Ken and his students ingested all this LA history. And so once you go see the exhibit, it’s open until March 2nd. You can leave with a tape measure and go in your favorite tree in front of your house or apartment, wherever and give us a couple reflections and the measurement of it. And then we will give back to this beautiful idealized version visually as well as a hundred-word tribute. And they’re really wonderful. That’s an example, like Kenny was saying, of a collaboration of a human and AI to make something really beautiful.

Ken Goldberg:
And to the point you raised earlier, Debbie, is that we spent all summer really or even longer on trying to figure out the right prompt to give to, in this case GPT so that it would generate images that were interesting. Because if you don’t do that, you just say, give me a tree image it’ll give you a very cartoony image. And we wanted to really push it to be thoughtful and to… So we give it prompts, we talk about the F-stop and things like that, which trigger it to start to think more photo realistically.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, they have soul.

Ken Goldberg:
Oh, good. Thank you. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Some practical questions. You’ve talked about all of the trees that you used being of salvaged wood. How did you get the pieces of the trees that you used? How do you find something like that?

Tiffany Shlain:
Well, a lot of time at salvaged lumberyards, and now I have all sorts of new friends that when trees fall or in storms or sometimes in fires, that they will get the trees. And actually I ordered one, there’s one that we fell in love with, that’s… the artwork is called If We Lose Ourselves. And Ken and I looked at it as a history of all the ways we recorded ideas in history, and it goes from oral tradition all the way to ChatGPT and to the Golden record and just all the different ways we’ve tried to transmit ideas.

And this wood is this incredible wood I saw online and I ordered it from Portland and it came and it was just as gorgeous as I was hoping it would be. As a filmmaker, I do collage a lot of finding archival, and it’s like you’re finding an archival piece of wood that you’re reinterpreting and it’s very exciting to find wood.

Ken Goldberg:
I always joke that Tiffany had never met a piece of rusted metal that she didn’t like.

Tiffany Shlain:
I love salvaged things. I love vintage, salvage and reinterpreting in images and artwork and wood.

Debbie Millman:
The ultimate combinatorial creativity.

Ken Goldberg:
Well, we should say, you mentioned the tree of knowledge. And I would say that was really important because that anchored the whole project. And we started there, we said we wanted something that would… The tree of knowledge was so interesting from its biblical roots to its whole connection to Western culture in general.

And I always love the idea that it was this forbidden fruit and it required Adam and Eve to basically subvert the rules, to break the rules. And then it opened up the whole world of knowledge. There’s all kinds of fascination about that. And so we wanted something that would resonate on that level. And we spent some time, and then Tiffany found this gigantic piece of with the stuff-

Tiffany Shlain:
Eucalyptus.

Ken Goldberg:
Eucalyptus.

Tiffany Shlain:
And it was normally… I mean, just to give you a sense, all the other tree rings I had been doing in my art were slices and they would hang on the museum or gallery wall as a slice, as a sculpture. And we saw this piece and it was like, “Oh my gosh, we need the whole piece.”

And I mean, we had a budget, we scrapped a whole section of the show so we could have that piece. It felt so powerful as an object and all the different parts you walk in, it’s gnarled. And to me that’s ideas fighting with each other before they become the elegance of a question of the tree of knowledge.

And we spent… And actually all the other timelines are timelines re-imagining what the tree has seen and playing with time. But this one, we decided to do questions. So Ken and I spent a good year thinking, “What are all the big questions of humanity?” Which was such a wonderful-

Ken Goldberg:
I think 160 questions and you organize them into six categories; mind, humanity, society, sciences, beliefs and philosophy. Some of the questions include, “Why do I exist? Can we create fire?” And as they fan outward, the questions evolve to prescient questions of our time, including… I mean, not that those aren’t, but, “How will we live in a changing climate?” I have a couple of really silly practical questions. Tiffany, the artwork features text and symbols and numbers that you burn into. You literally burn into the salvaged tree slices, and you mentioned it before, I believe it’s called pyrography.

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah.

Ken Goldberg:
Which literally means writing with fire. How did you discover this art form and how long did it take you to master? I’m somebody that’s really paying attention to typography? And this is pretty sophisticated for somebody that’s only been doing this for a couple of years.

Tiffany Shlain:
Yes. Okay, so on the feminist history tree ring, I had a pyrographer, somebody that had done it, a calligrapher, but with fire and a pen and I did the dots. I did what I could. I was so nervous of messing up on this piece of wood. And then as I was getting more and more into it, I’m like, “I want to learn this. I am going to learn this.” The 10,000 hours.

And I worked with this amazing pyrographer, Kancha and by the end for this show, there were some tree rings where I did absolutely everything. And then some abstract expressions, the mathematical one, the really fine equations she did. But I was determined. I’m like, “This is what I am loving creating. I am going to learn how to do this.”

But it’s very intense. I mean, it takes a long time. I love it. It’s very meditative. I can’t think of anything else. There can be no music playing. The phone is off. I am for hours focusing. I used to think my father when he was in surgery, he would tell me, just so focused. But then your mind does get into a wonderful state also.

Ken Goldberg:
Yeah. And also smells good.

Tiffany Shlain:
The smell is amazing.

Ken Goldberg:
The smoke-

Debbie Millman:
It doesn’t seem very forgiving. What happens if you make a mistake?

Tiffany Shlain:
Here’s the thing. First of all, I have made a mistake on a piece, and the feminist history tree was headed to the National Mall, and we had a print of it that was going to be in the de Young Museum, and a reporter wrote a story about it, and I said… I’m like, “Oh, they misspelled.” I’m not even going to tell you what they… They misspelled someone-

Ken Goldberg:
You should say it. I think you should [inaudible 00:48:11].

Tiffany Shlain:
Okay, okay, okay. So I thought, “Oh, the article’s great, but they misspelled Gloria Steinem’s name.”

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

Tiffany Shlain:
And then it was one of those talk about an aha moment in reverse. I’m reading the article and then I walk in my studio and I’m looking at the sculpture that’s just about to be shipped to the frigging National Mall to be on display. And sure enough, it was a mistake. It was on the tree. I was like, “Oh my God, I’m human. I’m not a robot.” No, that’s how I talk to myself.

Ken Goldberg:
No, but then… Okay, so wait, I have to tell you part of this, because then Tiffany was like, “Oh my God, I have to arrange… We don’t have time. I have to arrange someone to come in and sand that off and we have to redo this.” And this whole elaborate thing. And I said, “No, just leave it. It’s actually part of the piece.” Just like in coin collecting, how special those coins that are misprinted are. I always love that. And I was like, “That’s great. And so don’t change it.”

Tiffany Shlain:
Ken, did you say that and my gallerist, Nancy Hoffman, who’s amazing, I was going to go to the de Young and get that. I’d just gotten a frame, break the glass, reprint it, redo it. And she was like, “Tiffany, do not. No one’s going to notice.” And she confirmed what Ken said, “It makes it more valuable and interesting and human. You’re human.” But I did fix the one that went to the National Mall. I could not. I could… But anyways-

Debbie Millman:
I’m sure Gloria will appreciate it, but I don’t think she would [inaudible 00:49:35]

Tiffany Shlain:
It’s all corrected on the sculpture. But-

Ken Goldberg:
Just I also want to mention how the process of designing this, since you’re a designer extraordinaire, one of the things is that when we were thinking about the space, we spent a lot of time with the designer down there and the gallerist, the [inaudible 00:49:54]

Tiffany Shlain:
And both carry it or Selma and Fiki and… Yeah, definitely.

Ken Goldberg:
Yeah. And so what was process was what would fit in that space. And I’m so glad you actually got to be there. I really appreciate. Because we had to really adapt and we didn’t want it to be too full, but also make it full enough. And then even the trees, there was one story I quickly want to mention is that for the abstract expression, the one we were talking about with it’s all mathematical equations that we had to fit so many.

And by the way, there was a huge debate about which to go in and which not to, and the mathematicians all disagree about what should be on the… what are the most important equations, as you can imagine. And so we were putting it all back together, we were laying it out, and we found that because you had so much material there that the lines were intersecting and creating a traffic jam at the center.

And it didn’t look right and we were trying to figure out ways to do it. And at one point I thought, “Wait, man, what if we arrange the points in a question mark?” And then we were trying that, and then I thought, “Wait a second. That looks like something I’ve seen before.” And then another aha moment was that’s the Golden Spiral and that… Fibonacci. And we were like, “Oh, because it’s all about math and history of math.” That solved this problem.

Tiffany Shlain:
And that happened at midnight and we were working with this wonderful designer, Nicole Alzate, really struggling with how to fit it all. And the reason why there was a real deadline with the show. And it was midnight when there was that aha moment. And I should say we’ve talked so much about aha moments that those listeners in LA, there’s going to be a big festival of the trees at the exhibition, a whole day events at the Skirball. And the one panel that we’re going to be taking part of is called Aha Moments in Art and Science.

Because there’s so many beautiful similarities of aha moments in art and science where something you figured out changes the framework of how you see everything or how you do something and that whole, you were saying mystical, you mentioned earlier. It’s almost like a holy mystical moment when you have an aha moment. So we’re going to try to… And the theme for The Getty show is Art & Science Collide, and there’s that similar aha moment. So that’s going to be one of the panels on February 2nd for Festival of the Trees.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely wonderful. Another nerdy, practical question, some of the text goes all the way out to the edges of the tree ring and some don’t. Was that intentional? Was it done to leave room for the future or?

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about the layout of the typography.

Tiffany Shlain:
And all of the tree rings? We definitely want you to think about the future. I mean, we’re taking great liberties and I’ve taken great liberties with these tree rings, sculptures. They’re not literal. We’re going back millions of years on some of them or thousands of years. And some of these trees most are 400 years.

But I think again, this idea that trees are such an interesting way to think about time and to contextualize where we are in this moment. So on each of the subjects it’s like, “Let’s go into the deep past. Let’s go into the present and let’s imagine what will the future…” We have a whole tree ring on the history of California only told through trees. So any fact on there is directly related to a tree fact in California.

And there’s a big space on what is going to happen in the future. And I think Ken and I both, in both of our work throughout our careers, asking questions is such a theme of imagining what something will be. And I think that that’s what that space on each of the tree rings except for the tree of knowledge. We wanted those questions on the edge to be like they’re on the edge of knowing.

It’s that kind of grasping. And on the side of the tree of knowledge, we love the way, the shape of it, whereas one side is very gnarled, the face of it looks like a brain or a hand asking a question. I don’t know, it feels so evocative to what the subject is.

Debbie Millman:
One of my favorite and the most surprising piece in the show is a video homage to Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip. And you created this image using images of trees or you created… I’m sorry. You created this film using images of trees along four major Los Angeles thoroughfares from Google Maps and Google Earth. You then feed this into an AI to create a film that you’ve titled Speculation, Like Nature, Abhors a Vacuum. Talk about the title. That is such a great title.

Ken Goldberg:
I’m so glad-

Tiffany Shlain:
That title is such a-

Ken Goldberg:
Oh, I’m so glad you asked that. So I’ll just back up a little bit because this is where the connection with the project with Google and MIT came together because one of the things that was frustrating me was that the way that we had been listing the data or portraying the images of the city data was just painfully ugly, visually. It was just using the wrong set of colors and it was just very hard to look at.

And this is actually a problem with a lot of my engineering colleagues and myself. They’re just not tuned to the visual nuance of really good design. And by the way, when it’s done well in science, it really makes a difference and it really helps science advance when it can be done right.

But in this case, I said, we’re dealing with these beautiful subject of trees and they’re so beautiful inherently, but why are we portraying them with this very crude and clunky kind of graphics? So I wanted to try and push that. And that was actually very much a motivation when we started working on this was, could we take this opportunity to take that same data and make it into something lush and engaging?

And so that was the idea that we would do the same timeline, but then take these trees and animate them so they would move ever so slightly and have this visceral richness to them. So the trees, we were looking at streets already and we were looking at these trees and then we started realizing that there was a huge disparity between the different streets and neighborhoods and this shade inequity, which is a huge issue.
And especially in a city like LA where you have so much sun and you have these… Some neighborhoods are incredibly lush like Hollywood, and then you have South Central where it’s very rare to find trees. And so we wanted to juxtapose those. But at the same time as we started thinking about that, we also remembered Ed Ruscha.

And we had seen that actually in New York, MoMA had a big exhibition on Ed Ruscha and retrospective. And so his streets of LA where the video pans down the street of LA. So then it all again clicked and we started thinking, “Okay, we can do that same pace of moving along the street, but now from the top. And use those streets and the variations between them to suggest in a subtle way these disparities.”

Tiffany Shlain:
And going back to the title, I think actually the title of this piece is a great illustration of how we work together because we love titles, we love words, and both of us have a lot of fun thinking of titles and in our writing and various things. And this one we could not figure out the title for. And it was getting very close.

One of us is upstairs, one of us is downstairs like, “What about that title?” And it’s a constant one conversation that’s happening over a year. And then it was weeks before we really had a deadline that was wall text that had to be made for the museum. And I remember on, “Ken, Nature abhors a vacuum. I’ve always loved that idea.” And then Ken was like, “Yes.” But then he built on it and then tell Debbie from that.

Ken Goldberg:
Well, it was… Nature abhors a vacuum is a great phrase and you use that in science a lot. It comes back from Aristotle. When I looked it up, because I was trying to think of, “Where did that actually come from?” That Baruch Spinoza comes up. Baruch Spinoza has a variation where he says, “Speculation, like nature, abhors a vacuum.” And he’s making a comment about science and technology and culture really, because he’s saying, “If there’s any vacuum, somebody’s going to start speculating about it.” Right? And it’s such a genius twist on that I-

Tiffany Shlain:
But we were so delighted. But that wrestling, trying to figure it out and then having this wonderful exchange, and then it got to this place, we were so excited by the title almost [inaudible 00:58:56]

Ken Goldberg:
And I think also… And it was interesting because Tiffany started with the idea of the vacuum and the different tree disparities, the shade disparities that there was in a vacuum. Some is filled and some isn’t. But then when we saw it connect to Spinoza, because he’s this art legendary Jewish philosopher, and we were in a Jewish environment, then again, that was another aha moment.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s really wonderful and ingenious on lots of different levels. So my last question for you, how are you feeling about the future? Are you feeling optimistic? Are you feeling cautious? Tell us how you’re experiencing what might be coming.

Ken Goldberg:
Well, I can say I’m very optimistic. I really do feel this. I’ve always been somewhat of an optimist, incurable optimist, but I know that there’s so many difficult things happening in the world and suffering. And so I don’t want to minimize that in that in any way.

But I also feel really positive about where we are and that there’s a enormous amount of potential for change that is going to open up new possibilities. Technology, I see is the entire field is changing in really interesting ways. I don’t think it’s going to be as nearly as fast as people think, but it’s evolving.
I see students being smarter than ever and using these tools in new ways, and I really feel very, very excited and hopeful about where we are.

Debbie Millman:
Tiffany Shlain, Ken Goldberg, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Tiffany Shlain:
Thank you, Debbie. Always.

Ken Goldberg:
Thank you so much, Debbie. Such a pleasure.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Tiffany and Ken’s interactive multi-sensory installation, Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology is on display at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. You can also see more of their work at Letitripple.org.

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.

Curtis Fox:
As of January 16th, the Skirball Cultural Center is closed due to the fires in LA. So please check their website before planning the visit. 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: Tiffany Shlain & Ken Goldberg appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

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.

Ben:

Us designers know. I think we have weapons at our disposal that non-creative people don’t have.

Jack:

I’m too far into the art side of it, but I’m not taking my pieces and selling that at art galleries either. It’s like, this is for nobody but me.

Recorded Voice:

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Milman. For 18 years, Debbie Milman has been talking 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. On this episode, we hear from musician Jack White and designer Ben Jenkins about their business collaboration.

Ben:

Baseball bats are really simple thing. I bet I could figure that out.

Jack:

I’d seen these baseball bats and I remember thinking, “Oh wow. What an obvious idea, of course.”

Debbie:

Jack White has been on the music scene for over two decades. First in the band Goober & The Peas, then in the duo the White Stripes, then the Raconteurs, and the Dead Weather. He’s also released his own solo albums and produced music for artists including Loretta Lynn and Beyonce. He’s won many Grammy awards and three of his albums have reached number one on all of the charts that matter. Ben Jenkins is a different kind of rock star. He’s a former baseball player turned designer, turned entrepreneur. In 2011 he started a company that manufactured baseball bats named Warstic. What brings these two gentlemen together here in person is that in 2016 Jack White became an investor in Warstic, and the company now makes way more than baseball bats. Jack White and Ben Jenkins, welcome to Design Matters.

Jack:

Hi, thank you for having us.

Ben:

Thanks, Debbie.

Debbie:

Jack, is it true that you don’t have a cell phone?

Jack:

That is true. Yeah.

Debbie:

Have you ever had a cell phone?

Jack:

No, I’ve never had one, but I do think my days are numbered. I think time is running out because there’s so many things nowadays I’m discovering last, just since the pandemic hit, for example, where I’m not going to be able to get through a day without that.

Debbie:

How do you do that now? It’s hard for me to even imagine somebody not being able to look at their phone for directions or for Wikipedia.

Jack:

Yeah, I use email and I text on my laptop, so I’m on my computer a lot. So that handles, I think, the big brunt of it. And then there’s just the, I don’t know, old fashioned way of just leaving the house and driving away and you’re not going to see me for a couple hours. That’s how it goes.

Debbie:

Was it a decision that you made when cell phones first came out? Like, “No, I don’t want to be part of this on all the time lifestyle”?

Jack:

I was scared of, for example, I’ve never smoked marijuana, for example. It’s not some sort of judgmental thing against people who smoke marijuana, I could care less and what other people do, whatever. It’s not the thing itself, it’s the things that are attached to it. So it’s not the cell phone itself, it’s just the idea that I’m going to be on it all day long, and I’m going to have it charged, and I’m going to have to wake up in the morning and… It’s all the ancillary things, those are the things I have fears, ancillary things. It’s not the gun, it’s the bullets.

Debbie:

Right, it’s not the phone it’s the addiction?

Jack:

Yeah.

Debbie:

You were born Jack Gillis in downtown Detroit. Your mom is Polish, your dad is Scottish Canadian, and they both worked for the church. You are the youngest of 10 siblings. What is the range between you and your oldest sibling?

Jack:

My oldest sister, Maureen is 21 years older than me. I’m 46, so she’s 67.

Debbie:

My youngest brother is 26 years younger, but it’s from different mothers.

Jack:

Oh wow. So you know the… Yeah, it’s very similar.

Debbie:

Yeah, I felt very much like I raised my little brother or helped raise him, and I know you felt that way about your older sisters as well.

Jack:

Oh yeah. They used to say whenever they would take me out and everyone thought that they… People would say, “Oh, your mom, ask your mom for ice cream,” or something like that. They would always treat them like they were the moms, and they pretty much were. The whole family was very much like that, it was like having a lot of parents. The ninth kid is seven years older than me, I’m way at the end.

Debbie:

So you were an accident?

Jack:

Most definitely, but the Catholic kind. There are no accidents in giant Catholic families. It’s like, “What’s that?”

Debbie:

Yeah, your parents really liked each other.

Jack:

Let’s just call it unexpected, let’s call it that.

Debbie:

Your six older brothers were in a band called Catalyst and you began to play their drum kit when you were five. What drew you to the drums specifically?

Jack:

I didn’t think I had any talent for the other stuff, guitar and bass.

Debbie:

But at five?

Jack:

At five, it felt like drums were just whatever, I’m not doing anything serious. I just like music and this is something I can actually do. And as I got older, I started to play a little bit guitar, but I was always playing something. I didn’t learn, nobody taught me, I was self-taught on these instruments so by the time I was in my 20’s I was thinking, “Oh wow, I actually can play a little bit of piano, I can play a little of the guitar.” But I never thought about that way. I thought always with music, if it ever came to a thing where, what do I would like to do as a musician? I was like, “Oh, I like to play drums in a band.” And by that I always meant a band that plays a gig once a year at a bar in Detroit, that there’s no way you could ever do anything bigger than that, and that I would just do upholstery for the rest of my life.

Debbie:

Well, actually I’ve read, and I don’t know if this is true. I read it fairly consistently in all of the research that we did that because you never really thought you could make a living as a musician, you decided you wanted to become a priest and were accepted at the seminary.

Jack:

That’s true, it’s just slightly convoluted. The acceptance at the seminary was when I was 14. So, that was deciding what high school to go to, and I applied at a seminary in Wisconsin and they accepted me and I was planning to go there. And about the summer before it happened at the last second, I found out or heard by word-of-mouth, “You know you can’t bring your guitar and amp to that dormitory in Wisconsin?” And I thought, “Ooh, that might be a deal-breaker.” I was just getting into music in a way where I was starting to record in my bedroom and things like that, and I thought, “Oh, wow. Am I going to give this up for four years, I’m going to not play music?” I didn’t know, I didn’t actually double-check to make sure that was true. It was just that rumor was enough for me to go, “I think maybe this isn’t the right idea.” So I went to a public school in Detroit, which was its own kind of own weird universe.

Debbie:

Well, you went to a technical high school, but did you at any point really want to be a priest?

Jack:

I thought about it. What they call it in the Catholic world is you get the calling. So you go and you see if you’ll get the calling eventually. So you don’t decide your life at 13 or 14, you just go, “If you head down this one path and then if you get the calling down the road, then it’s the thing.” That’s the nice thing about… As many flaws that the Catholic church has, there’s a nice thing about the Catholic church growing up through it was, they didn’t force that kind of stuff on you. It wasn’t like, “Oh, you want to be a preacher? Cool. We’re setting you up right now at 13. Okay, good. Your rest of your life you’re going to be a priest.” They’re not really like that, and they’re not going out and pushing their stuff down on other people’s throats.

Jack:

So that was a cool, niceness of that environment where you did feel like, “Okay, I was thinking about it but I changed my mind.” I did the same thing with the Marines coming out of high school, in senior year I had signed up for possibly going to the Marines or the air force. They come to your class and recruit you in class. But then again I thought, “Oh it’s not for me, I don’t think it’s the right move for me.” But upholstery, I would have dropped out of high school and just done upholstery if I could have. I don’t think anybody around me would have been very supportive of me dropping out.

Debbie:

You grew up with a Polish grandmother and your parents were in their 60’s when you were in high school, you lived in a Mexican neighborhood and went mostly to an all black high school. And you said it would’ve made just as much sense for you to play in a Polish polka band or in a hip hop group, or in a Mexican mariachi band. What was the first music you were really interested in playing?

Jack:

Rock and roll because that was what my brothers were really into, but our family liked all kinds of music. My parents were into big band music and Nat King Cole and Sinatra and all that stuff. And my brothers were into rock and roll a lot, but also Johnny Cash and folk musicians as well. And so, it was a pretty healthy mix. And then of course, all the friends on my block were all listening to hip hop and house music and Latin music. So, any of those could have been interesting, but I think there was, your older brothers and sisters are going to win out as influence.

Debbie:

By the time you were 15, you were a business major in Cass Technical High School. And you had an upholstery apprenticeship with Brian Muldoon who was a family friend and a former neighbor who ran an upholstery studio. And I read that you remember first being intrigued by Muldoon’s studio as a little boy riding around on a big wheel.

Jack:

Well, our two houses were right next door to each other. So you could ride bikes or big wheels in between the houses and look down into the basement if the door was open. So, I would see him working on furniture down in that basement all the time as I rode by. So it was just by chance that when I was a teenager, he moved next door to my brother in another part of town in Detroit. And then hanging out on the front porch we started talking, he was a drummer, so we started talking about drums, and then he gave me some Modern Drummer magazines. And then he eventually asked me, “Hey, do you want to come and work after school and sweep up in the shop a couple days a week, maybe learn how to do some upholstery.” And I thought, “Wow, what a cool job at 15?”

Jack:

And by the time I got to 18 though, I got around into it, I was really starting. I had gotten so immersed in the furniture and designers and mid-century modern, and arts and crafts and I’ve become really in love with film. So I thought it would be great to take some film classes, maybe end up possibly working in film and directing in film somehow. You discovered quickly that was like, I got… I became a PA on car commercials and stuff. It was mostly car commercials because it’s the big three and it’s Detroit and that’s the industry of film in that town except for art projects.

Debbie:

Had you ever thought about going to Cranbrook or any of the amazing schools that are in Michigan?

Jack:

I would’ve loved to had anybody actually offered this idea to me. I’ve never even knew that was a possibility, I didn’t know about Cranbrook and all that until it was in my 20’s. It’s indicative of a lot of things, the environment that I grew up in the ’80s and early ’90s which it was still crazy. There’s just a lot of things you see now with modern parents and I’m a parent and I have a lot of friends with kids, that you just see how much is put in front of them. Like, “You can do this, you can do that. And this is an option and that’s an option,” and none of these things were put in front of me. And no one even told me when they would see me recording and getting super involved in music like, “Wow, you could press your own record, there’s a record pressing plant in town.”

Jack:

Nobody said that to me, nobody said, “Oh by the way, you can go to this design high school instead of the high school you’re going to, or design college.” When I was 21, I opened my own upholstery shop. And if I saw a 21 year old kid do that now I’d be like, “Oh my God man, congratulations. High five, whatever. Do you need any help?” Or whatever. And I didn’t see a lot of that, I saw a lot of people giving you this look like, “Okay, whatever.” Thinking this is going to fail in a year or so, I don’t know what they were intending, what they were conveying, but it wasn’t pats on the back, let’s put it that way.

Debbie:

Well, it’s a little bit obscure.

Jack:

It is kind of strange, yeah.

Debbie:

It’s a bit of an old school kind of discipline. My grandfather was an upholsterer, by the way.

Jack:

No way.

Debbie:

Yes.

Jack:

Wow.

Debbie:

But it’s not something that I’ve ever heard anyone say, “When I grow up, I want to be an upholsterer.”

Jack:

No, it’s very, very niche. And I definitely think that through going to the upholstery supply places when I was coming up, I pretty much determined that I was the only person under 45 doing that trade in the metropolitan Detroit area.

Debbie:

I would say maybe even in the world.

Jack:

There’s not many.

Debbie:

There’s not many. You began to write notes and poetry inside the furniture, like a message in a bottle. Has anybody found any of the messages over the years and the poetry that you tucked inside the cushions?

Jack:

We did. I don’t think anyone’s found any of my pieces of things that I’ve done in them, but people have found… Two people found this work I did with Brian Muldoon who I learned from. We did for his 30th anniversary of his shop, we did 100 records that we made together. We were a band called The Upholsters and we made 100 records and put them in a 100… He put them in 100 pieces that year. So two of those have been found. People have notified us they found those and they’re keeping them and they didn’t publicize it or sell them or whatever.

Debbie:

That’s incredible. It’s absolutely incredible. While working at the apprenticeship, you were also a drummer in two different bands. You were recording music in your bedroom, as you mentioned. And you also became close friends with Megan White, who you married in 1996 and took her last name. Very forward thinking, very ahead of your time. What made you decide to do that? Was it just because it was a cool color?

Jack:

I don’t have anything to say about that category, sorry.

Debbie:

While you were doing that, you decided to open your own upholstery shop. As you mentioned, you named your business Third Man Upholstery. The slogan you chose for your business was your furniture’s not dead. And you wrote some of your bills out in crayon. And I was wondering if that was a design decision or if it was more arbitrary, because that was the writing utensil you had nearby?

Jack:

I see it now when I work on furniture pieces that they’re more sculpture than they are furniture, really. And it’s something that was happening to me in the final year of my upholstery shop, which was, it was becoming more art than it was a way of sustaining a business and making money. I didn’t care about the money anymore, I was more interested in the fact that I was wearing a yellow shirt and a black pants with a white belt and delivering it and giving the bill in crayon. And I’d gotten obsessed with certain artists and there was this one artist, I can’t remember his name, but he was making counterfeit money. He was hand drawing counterfeit bills, one sided, and his art was to go buy things with that money. And he wanted to buy the object and they would give him the object and the receipt and the change, and that was part of the artistic transaction. And I got obsessed with this and I started writing my bills in crayon, and then all this stuff. And it’s not the way to make business in Detroit doing people’s furniture. That was very-

Debbie:

Performance art.

Jack:

Yeah, it was bizarre. And I knew I started to get to too far. I got this incredible piece which was a psychiatrist’s chair and couch. This was a great moment, I got to do this and she didn’t like dealing with me by the end of it I think. It wasn’t serious and commercial enough for her. And she had gotten, I had a guy upstairs from my shop was building furniture frames. It was like the perfect marriage, this guy could build frames. And she got another set made and took it to a different upholster, and I knew I had blown it with this client and I’m like, “This is a sign, I think I’m too far into the art side of it. But I’m not taking my pieces and selling that at art galleries either.” It’s like, this is for nobody but me.

Debbie:

By 1998, you were playing in bands including the Hentchmen, the Go, Two-Star Tabernacle, and the freshly minted White Stripes which you started with Meg. Did you feel conflicted by pursuing these two very different paths, upholstery and music?

Jack:

I just always assumed the music part was just going to be a small thing and not anything that would bring in any money or pay bills, or be able to have it as a lifestyle or a choice, artistic choice. I always assumed that the upholstery part was going to be how I paid the bills. So I didn’t take any of those any more seriously in that, yes, I would rather be making music, or I’d rather be making sculpture, but my assumption was always, “Oh, we got to gig this week, but probably six months from now, we’re not going to get a gig anymore.” So, but those assumptions started to slowly prove wrong, and it became more and more that I was now being taken away from the shop and working on music and making records and the artwork that went into that, and trying to get studio time and figure out a way to pay for that, and balancing those two. And yes, slowly the upholstery shop was fading away. But I remember people from the garage rock scene, musicians and friends, coming to hang out at my shop while I was working. They coincided for a while there.

Debbie:

In 2001, after releasing two somewhat under the radar albums, the White Stripes exploded during a visit to the UK when DJ John Peel said that you were the most exciting thing he’d heard since Jimi Hendrix, and life really hasn’t been the same since. What did it feel like at the time to go from zero to 60 in three seconds? Suddenly you were world-renowned.

Jack:

It was very strange because we had planned a trip to England. We thought we were just going to play with some other garage rock bands from England and Billy Childish, his whole group and Holly Golightly and all that. And we thought we’d play a couple gigs with them and it would be a nice trip. The trip would pay for itself, and we’d be off. That was not the case. By the time we had landed and what John Peel had been pushing, it was very incredible. It was, we were showing up to his studio and he had a live audience and there was a buzz in town. It was a big deal that we were there. And Meg and I were shocked, we had no clue why this would be happening this way. But John Peel was the last of those real DJs who played whatever he wanted to play and was an influencer and really his taste, he was a tastemaker.

Jack:

So if he played it was good to so many people, and he really loved us. And matter of fact, they’ve end up when he passed away, they had his box. He had his 45 box that he would take to DJ gigs and take to certain things, and they made actually a little documentary on it. But in that box of whatever it was, 150 records or something, there was 12 of my seven inches that I had been a part of. And so I don’t know why, but I connected with this guy. And when we met, we bonded fast. But God bless him because he had a huge impact on my life.

Debbie:

You were also the creative director for the band and were influenced by the De Stijl modern art movement, so much so that you even named one of your albums after the term. And De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands by Pete Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg. What intrigued you about the ideals of De Stijl?

Jack:

Something occurred to me. I had bought a book called De Stijl and I was reading it. And when I found out the time period it existed in, it seemed like it was the exact same time period that American blues music was happening, and it seemed to apply to what we were doing with the White Stripes so definitively. And I had never heard of this movement, De Stijl, I thought it was something that nobody had heard of because I just found this book and didn’t realize if you went to art school, you would’ve read about it just like you’d read about Bauhaus or whatever. So I was, in my own little world, was making a correlation between this and blues music of the 20th century, of breaking things down to the absolute essentials of blues just being stripped onto one person against the world, one person a guitar, one person a piano, one person and a mandolin.

Jack:

And it’s the same thing they were doing, Mondrian and Gabriel Viardot doing with their furniture and paintings of breaking things down to simple shapes and simple colors. So I just thought it would be nice for us to put that together and feed off of that idea, so we did that. Which was funny because I think at the end of the day I remember seeing, who was it? Ann Powers or somebody like NPR of New York Times or something giving us a big thumbs down saying, “This band, they’re pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes. These are obviously art school students and this is art school 101 and this is pedestrian at best. And they’re pretending that they’re above everybody else,” or something like that, some connotation that this was a ruse.

Jack:

Again, this is my ignorance as far as whatever the rest of the world had known about their take on things. I was so insular back then that… You guys understand from the environment of Detroit that you’re in, nobody likes the same stuff that I like or the people that I am around. It’s very solitary, so you just make assumptions. I made a lot of incorrect assumptions that people didn’t know about that, people didn’t know about this, or whatever. But it was nice that I did that because I ended up creating things that it spurred me on and inspired me to think, “Oh, this is very unique,” at least it’s unique to me, something I’m getting an inspiration from.

Debbie:

Well, you didn’t necessarily need to know that the way that you were directing the creative for the band was based on De Stijl, it was just really compelling.

Jack:

It seemed to fit.

Debbie:

Creatively, the use of red, white and black. The red, white and black signified the White Stripes aesthetic. You’ve used green for the Raconteurs. Now you use blue. Well, you’ve been using blue for your solo career.

Jack:

Solo stuff, yeah.

Debbie:

So, talk a little bit about this visual positioning because it’s really, really well done.

Jack:

Oh, thanks. It’s usually the three colors of black and white being, white being all colors and black being the absence of color, and then whatever primary color makes sense to that. And this came from a designer of currency, again, that designed currency in the Netherlands where each denomination was a different color. So you instantly knew in your hand what you had, you had a 10, or you had a 20.

Debbie:

Yeah. Classic branding, by the way.

Jack:

It’s good in that sense, right? So the Raconteurs was not my band, so I suggested these colors of copper and green, but that wasn’t as strict in Dead Weather and Raconteurs with the color scheme.

Debbie:

The White Stripes broke up in 2011 and you’ve gone on to a prolific and often bigger career in other bands, you’ve worked as a solo artist and you’ve collaborated and produced music with a range of artists from, as I mentioned in the intro, from Loretta Lynn to Beyonce. And you’ve said that Loretta Lynn is the greatest female singer/songwriter of the 20th century. What was it like to work with her and then win two Grammy awards together? And why do you think she’s a better singer/songwriter than somebody like Joni Mitchell?

Jack:

I don’t think Joni Mitchell is very nice, and Loretta is very nice.

Debbie:

I’ve heard that.

Jack:

No, I don’t know much about Joni Mitchell, actually. I shouldn’t say anything like that, but I’m just really joking. But Loretta just exudes a charisma in person since I have met her, that is just undeniable. There’s a bizarre brilliance that she doesn’t realize is brilliant. There’s part of her that really realizes and really understands something, and another part of her that has no clue as to how brilliant it is. And it’s so interesting to talk to her because those two sides have this… They don’t meet up and it’s very unique. And most people who are that smart and genius at what they’re doing, have a full 100% capacity to understand all that. That’s a good idea, and that’s where it came from and whatever, blah, blah, blah. She has these brilliant ideas and knows they’re good, but another half of her personality does not know how genius that really is when it’s outside of its own realm.

Jack:

She thinks maybe it’s like, “Oh, that’s a really clever title. And then when I say the next lyric, I’m going to say this because that goes along with that. That’s great.” “That’s not just great Loretta, that’s absolutely genius, and people cannot do what you just did.” That’s the feeling you have when you listen to her talk, this feeling I had at least. And so you experience that, and on top of that, just to have her incredible voice. And then I have the same this rags to riches story, this coal miners’ daughter’s story as well. Goodness gracious, it’s just outstanding.

Debbie:

You said that Loretta Lynn has an unique way of writing songs that is nearly impossible to replicate, and declared that you tried as much as you could to learn from her on the craftsmanship, but couldn’t make your way around it with a compass.

Jack:

It’s very strange. She says, “Oh, people say I write backwards.” And whatever you want to call it, there’s some bizarre double choruses of her songs. It would be like, “Women like you, they’re a dime a dozen. You can buy them anywhere. For you to get to him I’d have to move over and I’m going to stand right here.” To most people that would’ve been the chorus, and then she goes another one, “It’ll be over my dead body, get out while you can. But you ain’t woman enough to take my man.” And either of those would’ve been someone’s chorus, but for her to have both of those in there. For her to say, “Oh, that’s not good enough. I’m going to push a little bit farther and write more.” This is someone who is not trained musically. I don’t know, it’s just a diamond in the rough that people take her a little bit for granted and they need to explore her a little bit more because there’s something going on there that a lot of country writers even then, and today do not have.

Debbie:

What is the biggest thing you learned from her?

Jack:

The biggest thing I learned from Loretta is really just keeping it very simple, that it applied to her lifestyle too. I thought it applied very well to the White Stripes and what made people shockingly connect with that band. But it connected with her too. She was always like, “Okay well, the dress needs to be pretty, or the lighting needs to be good, or that guitar player needs to play louder.” It was always real simple decisions and not overly complicated that seemed to instantaneously work. And I’ve seen that too when I’m working with the Rolling Stones a little bit and acts that, I don’t know, you would think there’d be a lot of deeper discussions about exactly the perfect way to get this thing enacted. And a lot of that, you’d say once they’ve done all the groundwork earlier on when they’re younger, that they’re… It’s easier to just make these simple decisions to put these things in action, which is easy to say, isn’t it? It’s easy to say, “Oh yeah, just keep it simple.” You have to have that groundwork though underneath it all.

Debbie:

Oh, it’s the hardest thing to do. Keeping things simple requires so much education.

Jack:

Sure. You need to learn, go through 10 years of using every color in the pallet to decide to just use green on this one thing and nothing else.

Debbie:

You now run Third Man Studio which includes Third Man Records, books, pressing, mastering, a photo studio and a design studio. Third Man is DIY to the max. The only two things you don’t do in records is to produce and manufacture the paper sleeves and the metal mother stampers. You also still do upholstery and furniture construction. How much hands-on work do you do?

Jack:

I like to do as much as I can. The hard part is having a pressing plant where you own the place, and I would love to go in there and just mess around and make my own records. And you can’t do that with a real factory, we build around the clock, but at the same time I like the idea of that that’s a train that’s already in motion that I’m just overseeing. And you’re trusting a lot of people who are talented and they’re the ones driving the train on the daily. And it’s great, it’s just great to be a little bit of a part of something like that. The end of the day, you can get investors and you can charm people and get a bunch of people in a room to spend a bunch of money and make something. Big deal, who cares? I guess there’s a lot of people who would say it’s an unique position for a lot of people to be in, but at the same time it’s not impressive to me. What’s impressive is actually making something unique and beautiful that money is the last thing on the menu about why you’re doing it.

Debbie:

Before we talk about your work with Ben and Warstic, I want to ask you about your current music. You just released the album, Fear of the Dawn and have another album coming out this summer. Why two albums in a matter of months?

Jack:

I don’t know, really. Just a lot of songs kept coming out of me and they didn’t want to be split up. They didn’t want to be meshed together, they didn’t want to be left to the side, they wanted to both exist. And they both came out as two finished albums and I thought, “Well, that’s not a really good business model in the music world.” You put out an album and then release another one in a year or two later. And I thought, “Well, by the time that comes out, that second record, I might have already moved on to something else.” Which is the whole reason the pandemic was a little bit scary for me was that, “Well, we’re not going to be touring, then why make a record? And then if I’m going to get excited about this record, it’s not going to come out for a couple years and maybe I should just move over to something else.” And I did I really moved over to design and furniture. So by the time I got finally back in the studio, I think it was this floodgate opened and a lot of songs came out. So I thought, “It’s not a good business model, but I’m just going to do it. And I’m going to release both those records this year.”

Debbie:

You made both of these albums during the lockdown, during which time you initially played and recorded all of the instruments yourself. You said that the seclusion of the pandemic helped you reevaluate artistically, and you ended up pushing yourself into new areas you’re really proud of. Does that include the music, or is that really more or the design and the furniture building and a lot of the other things that you’re doing?

Jack:

Starts with free time, just haven’t had free time. And I think that was another thing I learned from Loretta Lynn was, she was very much on it. “Once you stop, they forget about you. And once you stop moving this train, the train comes to a complete screeching halt.” And she sacrificed a lot in her life with her own world and her own family and all that, trying to keep that train running. And I give her a lot of credit for it, that’s a hard decision to make. And that’s what happens with music especially, or if you’re an actor in films, like that.

Debbie:

I think any creative person.

Jack:

Yeah, and if you’re getting a lot of stuff happening and a lot of attention for it, you’re making big mistakes if you take too big of a break from it. So that absorbed, the idea was “Okay, well I want to do this, I want to direct short films and I want to design more things on furniture and interiors, et cetera. But I can’t stop this music train right now because if I do that, then I’m not going to be able to pay for any of these other ideas down the run, I won’t be able to afford to do it.” So you just keep that train moving, so that was the one nice thing about the pandemic for me in my own little world was that I had a lot of free time now to finally work on some of these other things.

Debbie:

Fear of the Dawn actually shows up in several different places on the album. It’s not just the name of the album, it’s also the name of a song. It’s also, you use the scientific word for another one of the songs, and I’m wondering if you can share that word with us, tell us why you decided to choose it, and then why… Do you have a fear of the dawn?

Jack:

You’re talking about the word eosophobia and that was the word I read in an article somewhere, and I wrote it down saying, “Oh, I’ve got to come back and read about whatever that is.” I do that a lot when I’m reading and I’ll just save them into a folder on my computer and go, “I’ll check on this later.” And that was something when I was working on a couple of songs, I saw that word pop up and I thought, “I don’t know what that is,” and I had to reread the definition of it, intense fear of the dawn. Which I thought, what a horrible thing to have an intense fear about, it’s going to happen.

Debbie:

There’s so many other things.

Jack:

It’s not like a fear of something that might happen or probably isn’t going to happen, that’s going to happen.

Debbie:

Every day.

Jack:

Yes, every day. So, what a horrible thing if that’s a true feeling. I don’t know if there’s people out there who really have this fear. It reminded me of something I’d read about people who don’t experience pain, who have the inability to experience pain and how dangerous their lives are. And I got more and more into an idea of how dangerous this idea would be about being fearful of the dawn or having anxiety attacks when the sun would come up. Then I didn’t realize, maybe to other people it was just a simpler concept, more of vampires. I didn’t even think of the vampire connotation of that until later, but I just got a lot of thought out of it, I guess.

Debbie:

It’s a great album. So inventive, so unusual, and really so crafty.

Jack:

Thank you. Thanks.

Debbie:

Let’s talk about Warstic. How did you meet Ben Jenkins and what made you decide back in 2016 to invest in a business designing and manufacturing baseball bats?

Jack:

That’s a great question. It’s interesting, I got really involved in baseball. I had gone through a divorce and I was going through a long lonely period that I was spending a lot of time by myself, and I ended up watching baseball games, Detroit Tigers games, for the first time since I was a teenager. So, that started then in 2013 area somewhere. But I’d seen these baseball bats in a design website that I was reading, and I saw these different colored bats and I remember thinking, “Oh, wow, what an obvious idea. Of course, baseball bats that you could get in any color you want, why haven’t they… What took so long for that to be a thing?” And then down the line, we were opening The Third Man records building with Shinola Watches together in the same building in Detroit.

Jack:

I co-bought the building with the owner, Tom Kartsotis of Shinola and they were doing a bat with Warstic, they were doing a Shinola baseball bat with Warstic. And I went into their shop and I was looking at stuff I said, “Oh cool, I know that company. I’ve read about those guys. That’s really cool that you’re doing that, Tom.” Then I came back to Nashville, what it was a few weeks later and somebody in the art department there said, “Hey, we have this idea about some ideas for new merchandise for the store.” Because we’re always trying to think of something interesting to turn people on, and somebody said, “Look at this, there’s this company doing… We could do these yellow, black and white bats. Third Man Records baseball bats, would that? Since you like baseball, Jack, would you be interested in that?” I said, “Oh my God, I am and I like that company, but I can’t do that because Shinola did that with them already, so we can’t have that.”

Jack:

These Warstic bats in both these stores right next to each other, it looks like we’re ripping off Shinola’s collab they did. So just tabled that. And then he had reached out, I think Ben would have to tell you what takes place next. I think that he might have reached out through Ian Kinsler who was a Detroit Tiger, who was now co-owner of Warstic that something about, I don’t know why my name came up, but I think Ian mentioned my name to him.

Debbie:

So Ben, how did it happen?

Ben:

I like to explain to people that I definitely would’ve never thought of it just out of the blue. What he doesn’t remember probably is that Third Man Records had reached out literally like, “Hey, would you make like a cool black and yellow Third Man bat with Warstic?” And I was like, “Yeah, we’d love to do that.” But I did go, “Hey by the way, who at Third Man knows about us?” Because I was just very curious.

Debbie:

Oh, of course.

Ben:

And the guy was like, “Oh, Jack found you on the internet.” And I was like, “Sick.” But, it’s funny thinking back that was enough for me. I actually felt for one of the first times in my life that, “Oh, I made some art that a really great artist thought was great art,” and maybe patted myself on the back a little bit and I thought that was it. When I met Ian a couple weeks later, that’s when it got weird which was, I mentioned that to him because he was exploring what Warstic was about and he said, “Why is it cool?” And I said, “I don’t know, it’s just cooler than other baseball bats which aren’t cool, these are cool.” And I said, “Jack White reached out and wanted to do something, no big deal.” And he goes, “Oh, I know Jack a little bit.” I joked, “Oh why don’t we reach out to Jack and see if he wants to be the big investor, wink, wink.” And he laughed, and then we looked at each other and we’re like, “Oh, why not?” And that’s very much all of our personalities, to just explore what’s happening and go for it. He emailed him and then we were in Nashville meeting the next week and it was very quick and natural.

Debbie:

So, before we talk about how you both worked together for and with this brand, I’d love to just go and talk a little bit about your background and how you even got to developing a baseball bat manufacturing and design company. Ben, you were raised in Texas where your mom encouraged your creativity, and your dad as a lawyer inspired your work ethic. And you’ve said that you grew up with a complete razor-sharp focus on two things, you loved playing sports and you loved being creative. How did you manage to do both at the same time? They seem to come from very different parts of the brain.

Ben:

Yeah they did, and in Texas you don’t do those things together in public either because you have two sets of very distinct friends as well. I was in bands with this set of friends and my jock friends, they didn’t know each other and I was this weird in between thing that I’d bounce back and forth. But you go play sports games, you can’t play sports all day, it’s tiring. And when I would go home very much at home, right? That’s what I did at home in my room, I would draw just like so many of us did. And I just would put the other thing down and do one or the other, and for some weird reason I loved to do both, but they never concurrently happened.

Debbie:

By the time you got to high school, you were playing football, baseball, track, and you also enrolled in architecture and art classes. At that point, what did you think you wanted to do professionally?

Ben:

100% architecture.

Debbie:

Oh really?

Ben:

Yes, because I think my dad, it’s not that he ever discouraged my art, but he’s a great businessman, he’s a great worker, he provides for his family and it’s like, “Okay, art, cool. But how are you going to provide for your family? A lot of people draw a line to architecture because it’s practical.” And I did love architecture, I loved building things with Legos and making things and things like that. So 100% I went to college on a baseball scholarship, but I made sure that that school had architecture until they kicked me out.

Debbie:

They kicked you out? Tell us about that.

Ben:

Two years into it, with architecture you have these intense afternoon studio classes. Well, that’s when also when you practice college baseball. I would petition the school and I would try to get classes moved, and it got to the point where the Dean was like, “Look, you’ve got to quite architecture or you’ve got to quit baseball,” and I was like, “Can’t quit baseball, I’m here to play baseball. I’m on a scholarship and I’ve got to do that.” And so it was really disturbing at the time because I was like, “This is…” I thought I had it all figured out, I’m a baseball player, I’m an architect. I’m going to just do both until one tells me to do the other, I guess, was my plan. But what happened instead was I was forced to pick a different major. The only thing I could think of that it was even relatable was to go to the art school.

Ben:

And I was very much for a year just painting and drawing. I didn’t even know what design was, and a painting teacher that I’m still great friends with to this day who I owe everything to, his name is Brent [Vanderberg 00:39:22]. Great painter himself, gently took me aside and said, “Look, you’re a good painter for sure. But I’ve seen you work and you have this crazy obsessive compulsive habit of you care about composition and moving things around more than you do the brushstrokes.” He dragged me into the design studio and introduced me to Jamie [Mixon 00:39:40], my other important professor in my life. And I was like, “No way man, I’m painting. I’m a fine artist. I am not doing this computer stuff.” And this was back when the computer was just emerging for graphic designers. But man, I hit that command Z and boy did my brain love that function of being able to try some things three steps forward and then go three steps back. And I was hooked probably within a couple of hours.

Debbie:

Yeah, you can’t do that in upholstery, but you can do that on a computer.

Ben:

But I felt stupid because I was like, “Oh he’s so right.” This is what I love about this stuff was finding that composition until things felt right. And I’m naturally just, I’m a perfectionist, like I’m sure a lot of designers are. It’s the worst thing you could ever be in baseball. There’s so much failure in baseball, if you’re a perfectionist you drive yourself insane which I was very good at. The mentality of design actually much more naturally fits me than what you need to do in baseball, and so that even shook out.

Debbie:

Well, you graduated from Mississippi State University with a degree in architecture, but went straight to the minor leagues to play for the Martinsville Phillies during the 1996 season when you were 22. So, how did that all work? How did that happen?

Ben:

I just went. Baseball was my identity, I think my identity as a child was very much still first sports, that was my public persona. I was thought of as like, “Oh, it’s the quarterback and that’s the jock.” I’m a nice guy, but no one really knew about my art except maybe my band mates, but no one came to see us play so no one knew about it, so baseball always came first. So I did well enough in college to get a pro offer, and I went and did that for a while. But like I said, my perfectionist mentality did not really allow my true athletic ability to come out. So eventually they just say, “Hey, sorry, this isn’t what you’re doing, you’re cut,” and I got cut. So for the first time… I got cut one time in my life when I was, I think I was 23, almost 24. And I had sports every day of my life until that day, and it’s like, “Boom, you’re done,” and it was disturbing.

Debbie:

Well, you’ve written about and talked about how you went through a depression after that.

Ben:

Oh absolutely, because my identity was, it was just not available to me anymore. The goal was no longer they’re available to pursue anymore. And it was one or two things, either really force it which a lot of guys do and they end up playing until they’re 30 and not developing anything else. I did have enough common sense to go, “Hey, I have this other thing I love, and I’m lucky that I have it. I should go put all this energy now into that one thing.” And that’s what I did and I wasn’t a good designer at that point at all, I had barely really dabbled in it. So I just got out one of those US News and World reports and started looking at design schools and, “Hey, this was probably one of it.” And I applied to like the 10 best ones, and I got into The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And I just said, “I guess I better go,” and so I went. And so I went directly from baseball to that, but the baseball took two or three years to get out of my system enough to just fully function and not worry about it.

Debbie:

Well, there’s so many things to talk about regarding this. There is one really important thing which is, you went after a dream.

Ben:

Yeah.

Debbie:

And so many people are afraid to do that because they’re afraid of failure and then spend the rest of their lives wondering what if they had pursued that dream?

Ben:

Yeah. Really getting cut actually is probably really good because it was very like, “Hey.” It was very, “You’re cut. You’re fired, you’re cut.”

Debbie:

Bye, bye.

Ben:

You shouldn’t be doing this.

Debbie:

It’s so hard. Oh my God.

Ben:

It’s like, “You gave it a shot.” Getting turned away, I think that helped me flip the switch on everything else. And creativity was the thing, and I put all that competitive nature, unfortunately for many clients, probably into that one firm versus another and things like that. For 10 years I grinded on competing, OneFastBuffalo, my design and branding firm, against other people. I had that competitive nature and it served me hugely well, I was not afraid to work. If anything, some of my design teachers even would say, “Hey, this kid right here, he’s going to outwork you guys.”

Debbie:

So interesting. Michael Bierut talks about the same thing that it’s really his work ethic that has propelled him into the stratosphere. And that he’s just worked so hard he has more, and you’re going to love this, at bats.

Ben:

Yeah, time in the water I say with surfers, and there’s so many things, the 10,000 hours, whatever you want. I think I spent from age then 25 to 35 getting good at it, and understanding that that was okay. And that I enjoyed the process of getting better.

Debbie:

Sports is such a black and white De Stijl equation in that there’s a winner and a loser. Well, the interesting thing about sports that I try to imbue when I’m teaching my students is how often you do fail in sports, even when you’re winning. And so you have somebody like Babe Ruth who was successful 60% of the time, he had one of the greatest batting averages of all time. But that also meant he was unsuccessful 40% of the time. Same thing with Michael Jordan, Michael Jordan was able to shoot 35% of the time the ball into the basket. That meant 65% of the time he was unsuccessful.

Ben:

Yeah. So design was easy. Honestly, comparatively, it’s more like Babe Ruth succeeded 30 to 40% of the time and failed 70% of the time.

Debbie:

Oh, I got that.

Ben:

It’s actually even worse.

Debbie:

Even better, right?

Ben:

It’s three out of 10 times success in baseball’s Hall of Fame.

Debbie:

Right?

Ben:

Yeah. When you fail, what you have to do is see it as an open door to something else that you need to learn, you need to see failure as something that you need to learn. And if you can do that and have that mindset, every time you fail you’re going to get better, or you can just quit. So there was no quit in me. Once I got into design, it was like, there was absolutely no way I was going to give up on whatever the goal was I wasn’t sure, but I just wanted to do it. And I wanted to get one project and do good so I can get a better project so that I can get a better project, and I just focused on one project after the other until I felt like, “Oh, these are the kind of projects that I’ve always wanted,” because the first ones were obviously bad.

Debbie:

Well, I think they mostly are for everyone?

Ben:

Yeah.

Debbie:

While you were in grad school, you went to an Indian reservation in South Dakota as part of a film project. And this is when you first encountered buffaloes. In my research, I learned that buffalo are surprisingly fast, I had no idea. In fact, they’re as fast as horses. So talk about your intrigue around the buffalo and how that impacted you at that time?

Ben:

Just the physical nature of them, and as a designer just the shape of them alone probably first was like, “Damn, that’s just badass. Look at that thing.” But then learning about, probably specifically back then, the Sioux people about the uses of the buffalo and then how every part was used, and it was used for food, water, clothing, shelter, all these things. And then I ran across… When I first started freelancing, I just called myself something really bad like Ben Jenkins Productions, Inc. Probably the worst name I’ve ever-

Debbie:

BJPI.

Ben:

Oh yeah, there was a BJ logo, all that. It was bad and I did that for about a year. And then I thought, “You know, I probably should name this something cooler,” or something like that. And at that time, probably didn’t even understand the concept of what branding was. But my first branding project was to name myself something bigger than myself and I had the sense that I wanted it to mean something to me and maybe be a little mysterious and people not understand it and stuff. And I’d read a story that… I love the survival story of buffalo that we got down to one herd through us killing buffalo to basically essentially wipe out native people, we killed all the buffalo. And we got down to a really small herd. And how fascinating is it that one herd though survived and today it’s come back.

Ben:

And I just, I always love the underdog story. That’s just natural to my personality. And so, just like we do, I’m scratching on paper and this thing OneFastBuffalo comes out. And then I realized later I was like, “Oh, I think this is branding.” And the process of doing that part, I love the logo part of this, but that process of naming was fascinating to me and fun, and doing it from a place that had meaning to me or the client. And that’s when I started graphic design, cool, but branding is this useful thing. It’s used for something, and getting into the meaning and what you’re to designing and then flipping it to say, “Hey, I can’t really write well, or even spell.” People that know me know for God’s sakes I can’t even read what I’m writing in a text, I can’t spell, but I strangely design out of words. I love to grind and write until I find the words that then narrow down the word that tell me, “Hey, this is where you should be playing with this.” And that’s strange to me to think because I’m just not a word person, but I actually start all designed with writing.

Debbie:

What made you decide to go straight into creating your own agency as opposed to working for someone else first and apprenticing?

Ben:

Well Debbie, no one would hire me.

Debbie:

Why?

Ben:

I don’t know. I came home from grad school and part of it was, I did so many things. I was like, “Oh, I’m an animator, I’m a filmmaker. I do graphic design.” I did too many things which I’d loved doing, and no one could say, “Oh, we could hire this guy as a web designer. We could hire the…” Probably that was it, but I could not get a job. I tried for about five, six months back in Texas. And literally just out of necessity, I convinced probably some family friends to give me some really bad design projects and I made a little dough, 200 bucks. But I loved that transaction. I was like, “Ah.” It took about three little things like that and I just had the confidence to say, “Hey, you know what? I think I can do this.”

Debbie:

You practice what you call the art of brand manufacturing. Can you share more about what that is and how you go about doing it?

Ben:

Oh man, I liked the word manufacturing because I liked the idea of building something. I loved graphic design, but I loved more the idea of building something that would become a living, breathing thing. The 2D nature of that is one aspect of that identity. There’s the… So the name, the identity, all that stuff. But then beyond that, how does it talk? How does it walk? What are the rituals that it has? So really helping for a long time at OFB what I focused on with clients and my business partner, Christine Edgington, who’s amazing and a brand strategist, and now the president of Warstic, ironically. We would pitch to companies that we could help you build what you are not able to get out of your brain to a point where then you can take it and then go run it, and of course then do the really hard part. But it takes something that didn’t exist before and now it exists and now we can call it this. I’m fascinated still by that.

Debbie:

Right? Same.

Ben:

I’m still obsessed with that. Creating the identity. It’s just, I don’t know, there’s something about it.

Debbie:

It’s bringing something to life.

Ben:

Yeah.

Debbie:

It’s interesting though. People always ask me how I define branding and I say, I believe it’s meaning manufacture. And so I’m attracted to that word too, that something about that construction that I find so rich and intriguing.

Ben:

I just love complex systems and then trying to, like Jack said, trying to take complexity and things that don’t seemingly work together naturally, and finding where they do work together and simplifying them down and to then a new thing that then can exist on its own. And because at this point we have so many brands, for God’s sakes. We’ve almost got to put two or three things together now and then make them a new thing, right?

Debbie:

Yes, absolutely. You’ve stated that OneFastBuffalo as it stands today more than ever, is an independent singular underestimated built for survival creative force focused on the relentless search for clear vision. Why do you think you’re underestimated?

Ben:

I don’t know because I don’t think we play in the design world. We’re not in the magazines, we’re not in the-

Debbie:

But you could be, Ben.

Ben:

Well, I know. And it wasn’t that I was like, “Oh, I don’t want awards.” It just never really occurred to me because I was too competitively focused on getting the next client to give me the cool project to express for them what we could do, and we just ran under the radar like that. I like being underestimated. I think it’s the fun of life honestly, is to come out of nowhere and go, “Wow, look what they did.” Being the underdog fuels me, to be honest with you.

Debbie:

Well, that’s certainly a big part of the Warstic brand.

Ben:

It’s probably all built on that concept.

Debbie:

And it’s so interesting because that hunt and being the underdog and hunting for being better than maybe what you are, why did you find that to be something that you wanted to be so much a significant part of what the brand stands for?

Ben:

I think it goes back to my years of working with client and realizing the brands that worked were the… There was a lot of guys and girls that came to us and say, “Hey, we got this great business idea. It’s going to make a lot of money,” but they weren’t passionately individually personally connected to that idea. And the ones that were passionately connected to their business ideas were the ones that got through that first three, four years grind to actually make it succeed. Because no matter what, how good of an idea, it’s three, four years of just horrible grinding on it. So I knew when I started something like Warstic or started getting the idea that I should do my own brands as mostly an outlet to not doing client work, that it should be something I really cared about, right?

Ben:

So, my first inclination was, “Hey, baseball’s boring looking. I think I can bring a more exciting aesthetic to it.” But as a branding person, I know it needs to have meaning to people, and so I went to that underdog. What we tell parents is that we’re hoping that the kids that use Warstic, and we’ve seen this really come to fruition as there’s kids that just don’t believe in their ability, and they’re very shy and they just, they haven’t come out of that shell yet. Our tagline is literally, it’s not the weapon, it’s the warrior, which is crazy. I’m selling you a bat and I’m telling you, it’s not the bat that’s going to make you better, it’s you.

Debbie:

It’s the person.

Ben:

And I’m super proud of that because we have so many kids over the last however many years this has been, that actually has happened. And the reality is those kids are probably not going to play in the Major Leagues, but to see kids blossom and to have more confidence, confidence is a great gift to any kid. And you can do so much more after that.

Debbie:

In a sport where the brands have been around for centuries, what made you decide to pick baseball bats?

Ben:

Well, it was a world I knew and I knew the lingo. I could say, “Hey, I could hit [Alina 00:54:10].” These things that normal people in the street don’t know, but us baseball players in the deck out know. So I was well one, I know the lingo. I know the world, I know how the players think about their equipment. So that’s a good place to start any business, it’s a niche. Someone had brought it up to me as a client idea, some guy called me one time and said, “Hey, I want to do a baseball bat business.” And he is like, “How much does it cost to brand?” And I was like, “Well, I’m good at this, it costs XYZ.” And he’s like, “Oh, I can’t afford that,” hung up. I don’t know if that guy was real or some kind of angel or some weird thing, but that is the first time I thought, “Baseball bats are a really simple thing, I bet I could figure that out.” And I spent 500 bucks getting them done, there’s a lot to it but I designed the website myself, I designed the brand in three… I did the whole thing in three months and I launched it.

Debbie:

The Warstic logo is a simple two line symbol you’ve deemed war stripes. So, talk about your design aesthetic.

Ben:

Oh boy. When I was in my 20’s it was just way too much, was my design aesthetic, so much. And this logo’s probably the best example of the opposite idea, more the Eastern idea of taking things away until only what needs to exist can exist. Or the idea that I use the least amount of pixels and create the most amount of impact. Most baseball bats, they put their brand name on the front of the baseball bat.

Debbie:

You put it on the back.

Ben:

Say [Jenkins’s 00:55:34] baseball bats or whatever, you put it on the front because that’s the billboard and everybody wants to see it. And I was like, “Well, you know what? That doesn’t look cool though.” And when I’m staring at a hundred mile fastball that might hit me in the head and kill me, I like to look at something that actually helps me calm down in that moment and not freak out, and seeing your name on the baseball bat isn’t going to help me do that. So I thought, “Well, let’s put the name on the back like a great piece of…” A modern piece of furniture, the designers is not sticking it on the front and ruin it, he puts it on a cool label on the back. So it actually said Warstic on the back, and the line started as just a feeling, literally a décor on the bat that to me would be calming.

Debbie:

So it’s like a focusing mechanism?

Ben:

Actually, we teach kids now that is a focusing method. We have a breathing technique where they go, they count down from one to 10, going up one line and then back the other. So we do pitch it as a focusing tool, but we teach kids and it’s amazing what kids pick up. Six-year-olds going, “Hey, what’s the logo mean?” “Well, the left side means the past and the right side means the future. And it’s all about staying in between the lines, being in the moment.” So it tears me up it because it… I can super plan it like that, but that’s real to kids. It is, and I understand-

Debbie:

And you’re helping them become who they are.

Ben:

Yeah, and I understand how hard it is to be in the batters box. But then to see kids go through much more traumatic things than I ever had to go through where there’s native kids we work with or something like that. But they get that it extends beyond stupid sport of baseball. So it’s the dumbest, simplest logo I’ve ever designed that just had the most meaning. And it’s just so cool to see it permeate kids’ lives like that. So it’s super cool.

Debbie:

You have a Warstic creed where you outline how there is an ongoing conversation happening at Warstic with your tribe about helping future generations of stick warriors connect mind and heart with mechanics. So it seems like while you’re selling sports equipment, you’re also really helping to train young minds to be able to use sports to become stronger as people.

Ben:

Absolutely. And that goes back to me being a bad baseball player and realizing that. On paper, I actually did have the physical abilities. I was super fast, I was strong. I could hit the ball a long way. I could throw the ball like a rocket. I had all these physical abilities, but my brain did not let those things work often enough because of perfectionism, because of lack of belief in my own self for, I don’t even know what reason. And I’m very aware of that. Once I finished playing, I really looked back and go, “Oh.” And knowing Major League players now, I clearly see the difference. It’s not the physical, especially in baseball, it’s the mental, that’s the warrior. A warrior is not so much, “Oh a big guy with a spear and he can kill you,” and this and that. It’s the mentality of a warrior that… I’m the biggest Karate Kid fan ever. I grew up in the ’80s, man. Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi, he didn’t teach the kid how to do all these techniques, he built self-confidence in this kid to do incredible things.

Debbie:

Yeah, he taught him how to think.

Ben:

Taught him how to think, right? So, I don’t know, that just felt like what it… I basically said, “Well, I’ll make this brand out of my weakness.”

Debbie:

In 2016, Warstic bats were approved for use in Major League baseball. How did you make that happen?

Ben:

I acquired two business partners at the same time. Jack White and Ian Kinsler. So I’m from Texas and everybody knows who Ian is. He’s a Texas Rangers Hall of Famer, this kind of thing.

Debbie:

How did you approach him? Because you approached him before Jack.

Ben:

Strangely enough, I had remained friends with the drummer of my high school band. And he’s a good businessman today and I said, “Hey man, I think I need to take this Warstic project seriously and make it a real company, but I’m going to need funds to do that. And I’m going to need partners.” And in brainstorming with him one day he said, “Oh, I know some pro athletes, would you want to meet Ian Kinsler?” And I was like, “Oh, why not?” So, how weird is it that my high school drummer introduced me to Ian Kinsler, who introduced me to Jack White? It’s just very strange.

Debbie:

And for my design listeners that might not be following baseball-

Ben:

Maybe not.

Debbie:

Ian Kinsler is the four-time Major League Baseball All Star and Texas Rangers great. So, he’s a big deal.

Ben:

Oh, he’s a big deal, and then played for the Tigers and stuff, so he’s one of the best second basemen that’s ever played the game. And he just looked at it in the same way that Jack said and said, “Hey, we need this in baseball. We don’t have cool stuff like this. We don’t have enough. We have these same old choices,” right?

Debbie:

Yeah.

Ben:

He goes, “I feel this. I can feel the energy from it. I relate to it.” So he then took that bat into the Major Leagues and risked his own reputation and proceeded by the way, to have one of his best years ever, which was scary. But he did it, and he proved it, and that’s his thing.

Debbie:

Do you think the bat had something to do with it?

Ben:

I think it actually, he was getting a little older at that point. And I do think it put a little new energy into him and he, Ian takes it into the highest level of baseball that you can possibly be and hits 28 home runs with it. And all of a sudden we’re like, “Oh, now we have both. We have performance, and Ian represents that, and we have creativity and Jack represents that.” And I tell them that’s why they’re the business partners. They represent the two halves of what Warstic is about, which would be just really great design and creativity and doing whatever we want, but paired with the highest level of performance. And that’s also, that’s the threshold that I wanted to cross was, I didn’t want to make toy bats or just things that you put on your wall or something like that. Uh-huh (negative), I want to make things you use in real life that happen to look beautiful.

Debbie:

Despite 300% year over year growth in 2021, Warstic operates with an estimated consumer awareness of about 20% in the baseball and softball markets. And as I mentioned, you’re really up against century old crusty brands, but you’re growing every year and your president Christine Edgington, as you mentioned, has stated that, “You know you’re ruffling feathers and you’re not letting up.” How are you ruffling feathers?

Ben:

Well, us designers know, I think we have weapons at our disposal that non-creative people don’t have. And those baseball bat brands don’t have those weapons. So, it’s just our creativity and our ability to express things in a more human way and exciting way than the other brands because branding 101, man, you can take, let’s say the biggest eight brands that have existed for 40 to 80 years, and you put them on the same bucket. You could throw any one name and the names are interchangeable because they don’t represent or stand for anything. And the best thing you can do in branding is stand for something. The other brands’ heads are spinning because we have a story. We have a conversation that we can have beyond, “Oh, this bat’s made out of a P99 alloy.” It’s so boring, it’s so boring talking about bats.

Debbie:

You’ve evolved from exclusively making bats to making equipment for lacrosse, skateboarding, skiing, snowboarding, surfboards, fishing. How do you envision the brand growing and evolving over the next 10 years?

Ben:

It’s funny, because this is a constant branding conversation we have internally, Christine and I, is if we would’ve been named something else, maybe it couldn’t extend to these other things. But the reality is, think about the name Warstic, in it’s simplest form it probably means warrior’s stick. I took the K off to make it its own word, which is an old branding trick. I don’t know, I owned that word in that way.

Debbie:

I’m so glad that you took the K off-

Ben:

Oh, it would suck.

Debbie:

So many people put K’s in instead of-

Ben:

But it’s an old branding trick, but it singularized it. It created a new word. Well, that word has nothing to do with baseball if you think about it. So, you really look at the different sports, there’s golf, tennis, lacrosse, and stick becomes this thing. I surf a lot and I’d be like, “Hey bro, you got a new stick?” We actually say that’s, that’s a thing. So a lot of things can be sticks at the same time, and it gives us these new pallets to play with. So hunting arrows, pickleball paddles. It’s fun, and then it’s funny because the mentality part of it, the message of Warstic, it plays no matter what. You’re a hockey player? You better have grit, you better have [crosstalk 01:04:08]-

Debbie:

Hockey stick, yeah. Absolutely.

Ben:

In lacrosse. I think it plays, and so we have a plan over the next five, six years to slowly, carefully, very intuitively enter those sports.

Debbie:

So, who is the big decision maker in your collaboration? Oh, they’re both pointing at each other. Oh, listeners, they’re both pointing at the other.

Ben:

The day I met him to be honest, and he said, “Hey, I’d really love to invest with you,” and he’s held true to this. He said, “I’ll never step on your toes.” And I thought in my mind, “It’s totally fine, man. Step on my toes.” I had such admiration for him as an artist, whether it be music, whether it be design, whatever. I did not care, and that was a big deal for me too.

Debbie:

Yeah, you’re a trained designer.

Ben:

We designers have egos, we all do.

Debbie:

Yes we do.

Ben:

And so I knew I had a sense that this could be scary. I did Warstic to get a little bit away from clients and to not have someone tell me what to do, what they like, or “Hey, you like purple? I don’t. I don’t care.” That’s why I did it. I wanted that freedom to just make whatever I want, whether I’m bothered or not. So that moment was I… But I bought into that moment because I said, “Hey, this is a chance to work with someone that I would love to collaborate with, and it’ll be crazy and it’ll be scary.” And 99.9% of the time, it’s totally fine because he’s a gentleman and he just is, and he has respect for other people’s art. And so I have to do a lot of the heavy lifting just because it’s my daily job and he has 1,900 things going, but it’s just a process of getting it going and then truly showing him what we’re doing and going, “Hey, does this direction feel good to you? Yes or no?”

Ben:

And it’s a true collaboration in every sense of the word. And the weird thing about Jack and I is, we’re very different when it comes to design. He loves primary colors, I never use primary colors. I use very earth tone things, and things like that more nature type stuff, but there’s always this 40% of things that we design, we show each other, “Oh, look at this sick thing I saw.” There’s a space where we both like the same things, and so a lot of it is just making sure that we find those things, but it is a brand.

Debbie:

Mm-hmm (affirmative), and it is a company.

Ben:

And it is my job to say, “All brands should evolve over time, but I have to keep it within itself too. But how do we make this art keep evolving?” Like you said, keep the train rolling for the business.

Debbie:

Jack, you invested a million dollars into Warstic. The company has dramatically grown since that investment. How do you think about the return on investments? Are you more of a long view kind of person? Do you expect quarterly returns? Talk about-

Jack:

It’s very hard to find an abacus for your living room wall that has a million pegs on it, that was the hardest part, but I check it off every day whenever in the morning I have coffee, I slide one of those beads over. When you love an idea, you just immediately your investment, you wash your hands of it immediately and just think this is not about bean counting or whatever, and expecting to see a profit. My investment’s always been the same thing, that if I could combine something that I actually love and feel a bit of a passion for, then it’s interesting to me. So, it was real easy with Warstic because it had so much potential and it’s such an untapped market.

Debbie:

And you’ve evolved now from exclusively making bats to making equipment for lacrosse, skateboarding, skiing, snowboarding, surfboards, and even fishing. I have one last question for you both, your flagship store is located at the corner of Malcolm X Avenue and Main Street in Dallas, Texas. Is that address intentional?

Jack:

It was just an added blessing, it seemed like. We found the building and it was so perfect, and that was also the cross street we thought, “Wow, how incredible is that?” And that neighborhood of Deep Ellum had such a deep musical history too going back to the early blues days. And it’s nice to be part of that, to exemplify and bring a little bit of that corner back to life.

Debbie:

Well, congratulations on all of your success. I can’t wait to see how you grow this brand together.

Jack:

Thanks so much.

Ben:

Thanks, Debbie.

Debbie:

You can see more about Jack White’s new album on his website, jackwhiteiii.com, or his entire body of work at thirdmanrecords.com. You can see more of Ben Jenkins’ work at onefastbuffalo.com, and you can find out everything about Warstic on their website warstic.com. That’s spelled W-A-R-S-T-I-C. This is the 18th year, first time I’m saying that, 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 Milman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Recorded Voice:

Design matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. Interviews are usually recorded at the School of Visual Arts Master’s and Branding Program 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 Best of Design Matters: Jack White and Ben Jenkins appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Bisa Butler:

You know when people die and the pictures at the funeral are sometimes younger. Once they die, they’re ageless. It’s perfectly fine to have a picture of her at 20, or 30, or 40. I understood that of her before she passed that that’s how she saw herself and that’s how she wanted to be seen.

Curtis Fox:

This is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 16 years, Debbie has been talking with creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, Bisa Butler talks about her career and about how making a quilted portrait of her grandmother led to an artistic breakthrough.

Bisa Butler:

I think I could see and I could feel it, too. I got it. I finally got it.

Curtis Fox:

Here’s Debbie, first with a couple of messages about her interview with Bisa Butler.

Debbie Millman:

I could say Bisa Butler is a fiber artist and I wouldn’t be wrong. Her work is made of quilted textiles. But it’s saying that Jackson Pollock worked in paint. Bisa Butler does extraordinarily vibrant quilted portraits of African-Americans. Some are famous like Frederick Douglass. But most are unnamed men and women who happened to have had a photograph taken before they were forgotten by history. But Bisa Butler has brought them back to us in life scale images that stick in the mind and claim our attention and respect. She joins me to talk about her work and her career. Bisa Butler, welcome to Design Matters.

Bisa Butler:

Thank you so much, Debbie. I’m so happy to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Bisa is it true you were named as the artist of the month at your nursery school?

Bisa Butler:

Yes, I was. I went to school in the ’70s. It was definitely full on hippie time. The name of the nursery school was Sundance School, just to give you an idea of what we got going. I was artists of the month. I was so thrilled. But I had no concept of time. I thought that meant art like the artists of the school, artists Emeritus forever.

Debbie Millman:

Forever.

Bisa Butler:

When the month changed, somebody else’s name was up there. I was so hurt. I couldn’t understand.

Debbie Millman:

Oh. I understand you were allowed to draw guardian angels on the walls of your bedroom when you were three, so that you wouldn’t be afraid to sleep in your own bed.

Bisa Butler:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

You also want a blue ribbon in the Plainfield sidewalk art competition when you were four.

Bisa Butler:

Yes, I did. Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Was there ever a time in your history you can think of when you weren’t being creative?

Bisa Butler:

I really can’t. As far back as I can remember. I think that goes with most kids, though. They’re drawing, coloring, and painting. I think the only difference is that I kept at it.

Debbie Millman:

You were born and raised in New Jersey. You are the youngest of four siblings and your mother’s family is from Louisiana?

Bisa Butler:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Your father left Ghana in 1960 and came to the United States with a scholarship to study and a suitcase with one shirt, and one pair of pants. He ultimately became a college president for nearly four decades. You’ve said that you got your unwavering work ethic from him. In what way?

Bisa Butler:

Oh my goodness. What my father would always drum that into our heads, “No matter what you do, you have to be the best. If you’re a street sweeper, you’d be the best street sweeper.” He told us so many stories about being a small boy in Ghana in the 1940s, and what that was like to have to … school kids used to sing All Hail to the Queen, talking about Queen Elizabeth because Ghana wasn’t a free country at the time. They were still colonized. He just talked about what that was like and the struggles that he went through as a child. His father died of appendicitis when he was about 11. He was at boarding school, and he caught a bus home. He had heard, they told him your father is ill, you need to go home. It took him about … I think he said about 24 hours on the bus. By the time he got home, the family was on their way back from the burial.

Debbie Millman:

Oh my god.

Bisa Butler:

Somebody after his father passed, the family split apart. His mother, my grandmother, couldn’t afford to take care of the children. She could only keep the baby with her and there were five. Two of his sisters were married to, I think, he was a 60-year-old man.

Debbie Millman:

The two different sisters are married to the same man?

Bisa Butler:

Two sisters to the same man. They were seven and eight, mind you. They weren’t adult women. They were little girls. The family was so devastated financially after my grandfather’s death that my father always had in his mind that that was never going to happen to his family. He said he used to pray every night that he lived because he wants to take care of the children. He’s still alive now. Thank God. He’s still advising me every day. He looks at my Instagram, he comments, and he comes to all my exhibits. I grew up knowing that it was that do or die. You must do well.

Debbie Millman:

He must be so proud of you.

Bisa Butler:

Yeah, he is. He is. I mean, he definitely he steered us, all of us towards education, because that was his way out of poverty, and out of despair. He tried to guide me into being an architect in my undergrad years. But it just was not working out at all. I got a scholarship to Howard University. I showed up to School of Architecture. I remember this big project I did. They have us, I don’t know, design some building. I had this idea that I was going to use a black board with white pencil, because I wanted to flip the script. I was trying to inject some creativity into a project that didn’t really interest me. I worked so hard on this thing.

Bisa Butler:

I remember one of the professors saying mine looked dirty, because he didn’t like the smudge of the white. They gave me a C, just based off of that. I was so wrecked and angry and despondent that I called home and I told my dad, “I’m going to lose the scholarship, because I can’t stay in the School of Architecture.”

Debbie Millman:

How did he respond? What was his sense of what you could do instead?

Bisa Butler:

At the time, Howard’s tuition I think was 10,000 a year and now I think it’s 48,000. It was felt. He was disappointed but he knew me. I was the youngest and I was always really headstrong. I remember him being like, “If you feel this is what you need to do, okay. But you’re going to go into education.” He wanted to at least know that I could teach art, and that I wasn’t going to be a starving artist. That was his fear. That came from his childhood, literally starving.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I want to talk a bit more about your college experience and what happened. But I have a few more questions for you about your origin story and growing up in the family that you did. I know that you came from a family of people who knew how to sew, your grandmother, your mother, and all six of her sisters knew how to sew.

Bisa Butler:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

They weren’t quilters. They sewed out of necessity to enhance their homes and their wardrobe. Did you first learn how to sew as a little girl, or was it something that came later?

Bisa Butler:

I learned as a little girl. I remember my mother always having sewing room. I don’t know if you would call that in the ’70s, every woman had a sewing room in the house, it seems like.

Debbie Millman:

Well, my mom did because she was a seamstress. I grew up …

Bisa Butler:

I didn’t know that.

Debbie Millman:

… and she was making people’s clothes for a living. She had ads in the PennySaver. People would come to our house and she do fittings.

Bisa Butler:

That’s awesome.

Debbie Millman:

Most of the people that she ended up making clothes for were people that couldn’t buy conventional clothes for any number of reasons. That’s what I grew up with. She’d make little drawings of each outfit afterward, like fashion drawings. That’s how I learned how to draw, because I would make them with her.

Bisa Butler:

Oh my gosh. I love that. Yeah. I guess similar to that. Although my mother, she loved French fashion. We always had like Elle Magazine, Marie Claire. But she grew up in Morocco. They all did. We would have the French Marie Claire and Vogue and we would see these Charles Jourdan and Christian Dior dresses. Then she and her sisters would make them. She’d be sewing. I wanted clothes for my Barbie. That’s how it started. I’d asked her, “Can you make this for my Barbie?” I remember one day her sitting me down and being like, “Okay, no. You’re going to learn how to sew this. I’m not making all your dolls clothes.” I remember making a funky looking, funky as in bad pair of wool pants for my Kindle. They had no one last. They have the whole stovepipe thing going. But I think if I can recall that was the first thing that I sew.

Debbie Millman:

I read that for your 20th birthday, you decided to sew a fitted ankle length sleeveless linen dress with a cowrie shell choker style collar and you designed to dress yourself and you sewed it without a pattern while away at school and you were so proud of the dress. You brought it to your grandmother’s house to show it to her. I was wondering if you could share with our listeners what happened next.

Bisa Butler:

Sure. First of all, I thought I was ready to be an extra one and living single or something like that. I thought I was up there with Queen Latifah and them. I made this dress. Me and my boyfriend at the time who’s now he’s my husband. We were going to Miami for that was a big deal. It’s my birthday. He was taking me to Miami. This is the first time I went away with a boy. I was showing my grandma, I went over to my grandmother’s house. I was home for the weekend from Howard. I remember her face when she looked at it. She was like, “Look at the seams, look at the ham. How is that?” Because instead of me sewing anything properly, if it wasn’t right, I would just fold it under and then sew across it 17 times. The ham was crazy. Nothing was cut on the bias. It was all kinds of wrong. But I figured …

Debbie Millman:

That’s come to go sew, right?

Bisa Butler:

Right. I thought it was linens. Linen stretches in strange ways when you sew it. I thought, as long as I had it on, nobody was going to be looking all at my ham or anything like that. I spent the night over there that night. When I woke up the next morning, my grandmother had unstitched the entire dress and re-sewed it together the right way. I remember her saying, “You had sewn that thing over and over, and I had to take all those stitches out.” She was fussing. But she could not let that dress go as it was. She knew that I was going to be wearing it on the trip, too. She fixed it and I did get to wear that dress on my birthday.

Debbie Millman:

You’re loved. That’s a wonderful. I love that story. I love that story.

Bisa Butler:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

When you were at Howard, when you made the decision to pursue fine art as opposed to architecture, one of your professors and also a dean at Howard, Jeff Donaldson was also the founder of a movement called Africobra, which is the African Commune of Bad and Relevant Artists. Can you talk a little bit about the Africobra movement and what you learn from Jeff and your other professors?

Bisa Butler:

The Africobra movement started in the 1960s in Chicago. The dean of the school, Jeff Donaldson, he was straight out of Chicago. I think he was from Pine Bluff, Arkansas. But he had went to the art institute, the School of the Art Institute. He and a whole bunch of Bad and Relevant Artists formed Africobra in Chicago. They weren’t just basically addressing the thing that, “Here are these young college educated artists, but there’s no aesthetic for African-American art.” There was the Harlem Renaissance Artists.

Bisa Butler:

I won’t say that they came up with it. They were learning from the Jacob Lawrence’s Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden. Those men were still alive in the ’60s and very much present. A lot of them were professors at schools, John Biggers taught in Texas, huge, huge influence on the black art scene. Those giants taught my professors. But it seemed my professors were more like “In your face.” I’m proud and I’m not backing down, say it loud, “I’m black and I’m proud,” where the African-American aesthetic in the ’40s might have been Negritude. You know what I’m saying?

Bisa Butler:

There was this little more classy, refined thing. They wanted to go to Europe into Paris to learn. They wanted to come set up their studios here. In the ’60s, they were bump Paris. We don’t want the European aesthetic at all. As a matter of fact, we’re also going to support ordinary people. We want to talk about people living in the projects, people who can’t pay for artwork, people who will never get to see Paris. They went back and took what they learned, and then basically turned up the volume. That volume, you could see in the colors that they chose. They chose what they call the Kool-Aid colors. You think of Kool-Aid, it’s a cheap drink. It’s for mostly poor people.

Bisa Butler:

They wanted to transform something that was looked at as negative and poor as something to be proud of. That also spread into their artwork itself. They had a whole manifesto. It was like, “Your artwork should educate your people. Your people should be proud. They should feel dignified.” Those were taken from the Harlem Renaissance era. Then they also were saying, “We want to be cool about it. This is African commune abed and relevant artists. We’re coming really young. We’re coming really strong with kicking in the door and coming with our own philosophy.” By the time they ended up being my professors they were my age now. They were in their 40s. Some of them were in their 50s.

Bisa Butler:

They were adamant on impressing upon us in the ’90s that you have to take up this mantle. Our people are still struggling and we see that that we’re still struggling now. African-Americans are often miseducated in the American school system. They’re not often taught about their history. If you’re an artist, you have an obligation to make your art accessible to the people. That means make a mural or make inexpensive posters. When our people look at the artwork, they should always feel good about themselves to counteract looking at the Brady Bunch and you’re not there, or Leave it to Beaver and you’re not there. Straight up Tarzan when you are there, but you’re portrayed like a wild ignorant savage. This is your obligation. When black people look at your art is to refute all of the negativity that is being shoved in our faces by mass media.

Debbie Millman:

One of the things that I was so fascinated by in researching the Africobra movement was the notion of painting on black campuses instead of white campuses or using yellow to lighten a color palette as opposed to using white. Can you talk about some of those very conscious and deliberate choices and what that meant, or means?

Bisa Butler:

Sure. I think at that time, they were trying to almost be … they wanted all black everything. To be even as literal as saying, “You’re having a black canvas. Now what kind of paint are you going to paint on there that’s going to be vibrant enough, that’s going to have the same effect? How are you going to build depth out of this inky darkness? That can also be understood. Myself as a dark-skinned woman, I would have been told. I was told, especially in the ’80s, “Don’t wear red lipstick. You’re too dark for red lipstick. You never wear yellow, because it makes you look too dark.” You wanted to wear colors … I could wear blue or purple.

Bisa Butler:

I think that they were trying to reinvent what it is to paint in a black way, in an African-American way. As far as saying, “You cannot use white to lighten the skin. I mean, you can look at that aesthetically, even European artists in the Beaux-Arts tradition, they follow that as well, some, some. But by saying, “If you add white when you’re trying to lighten up a skin tone, the person looks unnatural. We all have blood running beneath our skin. What if you use the light pink instead? What if you use yellow? What if you use orange?” Just that idea that white is not going to work for us aesthetically, but they were also rejecting it philosophically that we don’t want to use white everything, anything. We want to use all black in all colors all the time.

Debbie Millman:

Despite getting a fine arts degree in painting and graduating cum laude, I understand that you struggle to connect with painting at that time, and to find your own voice. What do you think was happening at that time?

Bisa Butler:

I think it just wasn’t me. I thought, “Okay, I like art. I like to create. I must want to be a painter.” But when you’re in high school, high school art class, you have a couple of painting assignments. But it’s not you spent half a year painting. I have never been in a studio course before. I would look to the left, and look to the right. I remember there were these cool ass kids who had their style already. We’re doing these funky things and I wasn’t. If the professor said, “Paint the person next to you,” then that’s exactly what I did. I was very literal. I wasn’t able to just freestyle and go off in these tangents.

Bisa Butler:

I remember one time our professor had a model. She sat in the middle of the room. I forget how she posed. But some basic pose. She sat on a chair and was leaning in her hand. I painted her just like that. Then at the end of the class, it’s a three hour class, you turn your canvas around. My friend was sitting next to me. She had put little Bantu knots in the model’s hair. She had all these colors popping out and around her. I think that was one of the pivotal moments where I was just like, “I don’t have this. What she’s doing, I’m not doing.” My professor, Al Smith, he was really kind and I expressed to him I was like, “I just am not getting there.” He understood that and he said, “Okay, I’m going to come to your studio. Where do you work?” I said, “Well, I work in the dining room at this house that I lived in DC with all my friends. We had about seven kids living in this house.”

Bisa Butler:

Al came over one day. My friends are there, some of them are smokers. I mean, not cigarette smokers. Some had incense going. The hip-hop music was … It was just very ’90s, whatever you can imagine. They’re walking in and out. I’m working. I had on these funky lace pants and combat boots. Al was like, “Why don’t you use the parts of you in your artwork. Look at these funky clothes that you’re wearing. Look at your friends. You should be portraying them. They’re all super gorgeous.” Well, in our 20s, skin glowing, all vegetarian. We were peak glow, peak healthiness.

Bisa Butler:

He told me to look at the work of Romare Bearden. Study what he did with collage and use my fabrics in my artwork. He gave me an assignment. He said, “I want you to do a piece. I just want you to use fabric, and I want to see what you come up with.” I did. I went to the fabric store, and I bought orange and yellow velvet, red satin, silk satin, I bought pink lace. All this was pretty garish. But I put together this face. It looked like African sculpture because every feature was made out of a different piece of fabric. I was embarrassed to show Al. At the end of class, he called everybody around. He said, “Bisa, let’s see what you did.” I pulled that thing out. He loved it. It’s pretty bad. I still have it.

Bisa Butler:

But I remember his reaction. He was like, “Yes. Yes. This is what I’m talking about. Oh, right.” All his 1960 slang all came out. I felt like, “Okay, I liked this. I like walking between those fabric aisles. I feel at home with this.” I felt he had given me something really special at that moment.

Debbie Millman:

At that point, you were still incorporating fabric into painting though, is that correct?

Bisa Butler:

Yeah. See Al, he was the outlier. He actually … I don’t think he was in Africobra. Now was senior year. I had to come up with my senior thesis. I was going to have my senior studio review. I can’t remember how many pieces. But let’s say we had to have 10 to 15 pieces of artwork. I knew that I had to have some paint on there, because it was a painting degree. There was mixed media. But that wasn’t what my degree was in and I didn’t want to have to start that thing all over again. I was gluing on a canvas, and on board I was painting and then adding fabric pieces, collaging them on. They almost weren’t going to graduate me because one of my professors was like, “I don’t know what this is. You’re supposed to be a painter, and this ain’t paint.” Then Al Smith and I think there were two or three who are on my side. He was like, “She is painting. She’s painting on fabric.”

Bisa Butler:

Then it got so bad that in that review, they usually tell you right then. I think the top score was, say, a five, like AP test. You got a five. You got a four. You got a three. They tell me I need to leave and go home, because they have to deliberate on this much longer and they’ll call me later in the evening. I also was five months pregnant at this time with my daughter who’s now 24. I was just like, “You know what? I’m not going to be back in September. I’m going to be a mom with a newborn. I’m 20 years old. I’m not going to be back anytime soon.” I went home, back to my house with all my friends. I did get a call later. They told me that I would graduate. But I just remember even getting that call. I didn’t feel a tremendous sense of relief. I was just like, “Whatever,” at that point. Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Bet they regret that now.

Bisa Butler:

Who knows? I guess.

Debbie Millman:

Because you were five months pregnant with your first daughter. At that time, you found yourself overcome with unbearable nausea at the smell of paint. How were you imagining your future not necessarily ever being able to paint again without getting nauseous, without being sick?

Bisa Butler:

I was so into trying to be a good mother because I was so young. I graduated, I think, May 15th, and then me and my husband got married May 20th. My whole mind was on, “I’m going to be a mother, and I’m going to be a wife.” The smell of oil paint is so strong. You have to clean your brushes with serpentine, using paint thinner to thin out your paint, everything is toxic. The paints themselves, the names of them like xylol xylene green and cadmium yellow, all that they’re seriously toxic chemicals in the paint. I was reacting to it, even opening up a cap would send me retching. It was very hard to finish those last paintings. It was emotionally I was done with it. Physically, I just couldn’t manage it.

Bisa Butler:

Then, after having that bad experience, I remember thinking, “I don’t care if I ever paint again. I guess I won’t be an artist. I can design clothes.” I was making clothing and sewing while I was pregnant. But I really just given up on the idea that I would have a career as an artist. Then I thought, “Well, I could focus on teaching.” That’s what I did. Eventually, after my daughter was a little bit older, I went to grad school and I started teaching art.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. You earned a master’s degree in art education at Montclair State University. But it wasn’t until you were studying for your master’s degree in education, that you finally made your first quilt. What motivated that? What was the topic matter?

Bisa Butler:

That first quilt in grad school was actually … What I loved about Montclair State was, even though I was graduating with a master’s in teaching, they had prerequisites. We had to take jewelry making, which we didn’t have at Howard. Then we also had to take fibers. I would say that I felt Howard didn’t want those crafts courses, because they wanted this African-American aesthetic. But it was also this feeling we want to get away from stereotypical old time Negro crafts, if I say that. I think that they felt fibers, quilting, basket-making, knitting was something that people did on plantations, or something that people did down south that was an uneducated thing to do.

Bisa Butler:

I think they had this a little bit of an inferiority complex that didn’t exist when I went to Montclair State, a primarily white college. The fibers program at Montclair State was heavily run by women, white women. The women’s movement has a whole different categories, and different hang-ups, and different things that they were pushing. They were saying, “We’re embracing women’s art, women’s work. This craft work was revered. They had pushed it that every art student, even if art education, art history had to take fibers. Thank God, my professor at the time, Kerr Grabowski, was somebody who was very heavily into the craft circuit. I think she spent six months out of the year traveling, doing craft fairs.

Bisa Butler:

She wanted us to dabble in all of the major fiber. We did surface design. We did weaving. We did felting, which I had never done. I thought it was so much fun. Have you ever felted?

Debbie Millman:

I love felt. Yes. I love felt. I do actually have done quite a bit of art with felt letters.

Bisa Butler:

Oh. How did not know that?

Debbie Millman:

Because, yeah, it’s just not even in the realm of what you do.

Bisa Butler:

Okay.

Debbie Millman:

It’s fun.

Bisa Butler:

Isn’t it the feel of that wet wool, it connects.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Bisa Butler:

There’s something that is happening that I think is going all the way back to when we were just humans and trying to make our very first cloths.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Bisa Butler:

She had an assignment for us. She said, “You can make a quilt. It can be squares and geometric design, or you can make a landscape, or you can make a still life.” I don’t think she said portrait. She said, “You could do is still life.” I made a little oven midsized piece of the corner of the classroom. There was stuff in there that we use in fiber. It looked domestic. There was a blender. I suppose maybe somebody was blending. I don’t know if we blended ink. However it was. But I did that. Then I was like, “Okay. I can make pictures of realistic things with fabric.”

Bisa Butler:

I want to do for the final project, my grandmother’s portrait. My grandmother’s health was failing. She didn’t want to get a kidney transplant. She wasn’t going to do dialysis. She was like, “I’m not doing any of those things.” She was getting very ill. I was painting her on the weekends. Then when I finished painting her, she hated that painting.

Debbie Millman:

Is this the same grandmother that re-sewed your dress?

Bisa Butler:

Yes. My grandmother was … She was raised with very high standards. She was a New Orleans Belle. She wasn’t a Creole. She was a black woman from New Orleans. But she definitely … Her ancestors were Creoles. She hated the painting. She said “I made her look old.” While that happened, I thought, “Okay, how about I make a quilted portrait of her? For class, I can fulfill my assignment. I have my final project. I’m able to give something to my grandmother.” I use all these fabrics that the teacher had donated. She had some black fabric with purple flowers. My grandmother’s name was Violet. I thought, “Okay, this looks violet, need some there, need some lace.”

Bisa Butler:

But while that was happening, I was I’m coming up with my own aesthetic without realizing that I’m using pieces of fabric to describe her. Not just because they’re pretty. That portrait, I still have it. My grandmother was so happy with it. She’s used to lay it. By this time, she was bedridden. She would keep the quilt over her legs on the bed. But she had to still have the tissue paper over it. She was just really sweet. It was special, because she loved it. How I portrayed her was her wedding photo. She was happy with the way she looked.

Bisa Butler:

I should have realized that, too. Who wants a portrait done of them while you’re at literally dying? I didn’t connect that and understand that she still had her own vanity, and was still a beautiful woman, and she saw herself not as the sickly elderly woman. Creating that helped me to understand her as a person, finally. You know when people die, and the pictures at the funeral are sometimes younger. But once they die, they’re ageless, right?

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Bisa Butler:

It’s perfectly fine to have a picture of her at 20, or 30, or 40. I understood that of her before she passed that that’s how she saw herself. That’s how she wanted to be seen. I was glad that I was able to do that. That kicked off my entire second half of my life.

Debbie Millman:

Reminds me of Lee Krasner’s response when she first saw Jackson Pollock’s strip paintings and said that he had found his voice. Did you have a sense of this being, this moment, this big breakthrough at that time?

Bisa Butler:

Yeah. I for sure. My grandmother was so proud. She made anybody who came to visit her look at the piece. But my mom was 1 of 10. I have a lot of aunts and uncles. All of their responses were like, “You did that? Wow.” They were really impressed. My professor and all my classmates were … everybody else had a regular sheet of project. But when I busted that out, my professor, everybody was like, “Okay, this girl is on the next level.”

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Bisa Butler:

I think they could see it and I could feel it too. This is special. I got it. I finally got it.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. After getting your master’s degree, you worked for more than a decade as a high school art teacher. You taught art for 13 years at the same high school you attended while you were growing up. By this point, you also had … You were married, you had two children. When were you able to create art?

Bisa Butler:

Well, actually, I taught for 10 years in the Newark Public Schools, which is a more urban school district. Our kids there were really, I would say, a lot of their parents are going through economic hardship, or at least more than 50% of them. Then the last three years I worked at my high school where I went Columbia High School in Maplewood, and Lauryn Hill also graduated from that school, SZA went there. Ibtihaj Muhammad the silver medaling African-American fencer went there.

Bisa Butler:

That was so awesome to be able to come home again. I was in the classroom where I was once a kid. My teacher, he had retired maybe four years ahead before I got there. But it was a real mind F as you say when you suddenly are in the shoes that you were as a child. All throughout my time at the Newark Public Schools, I just had this idea that I would work full-time as a mom, full-time as a wife, full-time as a teacher, and I would give myself the weekends to make artwork.

Bisa Butler:

I will say that the African-American community is so affirming. All of the aunties gather, especially with quilts. As soon as you start making something, my friends would be like, “That’s really good. Can you make me one? Can you make me one for my daughter?” Then my coworkers, I made quilts for, I think, maybe half the faculty when I was in Newark. Then I would get invited to things. My whole career was a word of mouth thing. Like, “I know this lady who makes quilts.” Then somebody would call me and say, “I’d like to get an anniversary quilt done for my grandparents. Can you do that?” I would end up having these little jobs and I’d be making quilts on the weekends and in the summertime.

Bisa Butler:

Thank God my husband was so helpful. He would take the kids to the park when they were really small, and then I could sew on the weekends. Because kids, they don’t care if it’s a weekend. It’s all about me all the time.

Debbie Millman:

But these are more than quilts piece. I mean, this is art. I mean, this is thousands of hours put into creating quilts with, I would imagine, minimally several thousand pieces of fabric. That’s quite a gift.

Bisa Butler:

Thank you. I think that my father always saying, “You should do your best. You should do your best thing.” Made me … That is part of my work ethic, too. Then it’s also that I knew these people. If it didn’t look right, I will be embarrassed. I will work really hard. I have an older brother. Well, he passed now. But he was the hustler. He decided that he was going to take one of my quilts and sell it downtown Newark. I was livid. I remember him grabbing the quilt and he had rolled up under his arm. He was halfway out the door. He was like, “I could get $100 for this. I’ll be back.” I was like, “No. I want to have my artwork in galleries and museums.” We were going at it. He’s like, “You’re not in the gallery museum. This was rolled up under your bed. When I leave, it’s going right back under there. He was right.

Debbie Millman:

Well, hardly now your work is in museums and galleries.

Bisa Butler:

Right. He forced me. He put my feet to the flame. He forced me, making these pieces for friends and family is one thing, but exhibiting your artwork was a whole another thing. My father was the president at Essex County College and they had a gallery. I called up his head of programs, Charlotte. I was like, “Charlotte, can I have a show in the gallery?” But I think I really needed to prove my brother wrong. Not really because I thought that this show was going to be a big success. Charlotte told me to come meet her. I went downtown and went into the gallery. It was afterhours, maybe 5:00 or 6:00, and my kids were small. They were running around in this empty gallery. Charlotte was saying, “This is his face. You could have it.” Then she said, “But where’s your art? What do you have?” I opened my purse. I had this piece that I had done with my aunt. I unfolded it.

Bisa Butler:

I will never forget her face and her reaction. It was so good. She was just like, “Bisa, you had that in your bag?” She had never seen my artwork. Didn’t know what I was doing. She was so thrilled and happy to see the piece. Then that gave her this confidence. I think she just thought I’m just being nice to the boss’s daughter. She’s going to put up some little things here and it’s not going to be anything. After that, she was a thousand percent behind me. She’s still helpful in my life to this day. I think I hung maybe 20 pieces for the show, and sold everything. Although I’m pretty sure half of the things were bought because I was the boss’s daughter.

Debbie Millman:

Well, they must be very happy now.

Bisa Butler:

I think so. But then half of the folks I do recall the feeling was genuine. They were happy to buy these.

Debbie Millman:

At this point in your career, your quilts weren’t life-size. Now they are. What made you decide to feature the full body in life-size?

Bisa Butler:

I started making my pieces bigger and full-bodied I think when I started working with Claire Oliver, the Claire Oliver Gallery in New York. The great thing about Claire is that she actually comes over and sits with me in my studio, kind of like Al Smith. Well, I didn’t even realize that till you asked that question. Actually visits with me in the studio trying to get the vibe of what I’m doing. When we first started talking, she saw my smaller pieces where they were all about poster size. She asked me, “If you were to be full-time, what would you do?” I said, “Oh, I would definitely make pieces bigger,” because I almost felt the small pieces they represented the time that I could spend on them. I had a weekend. I would have an art exhibit, maybe, let’s say, an art exhibit at a local church. I needed to make the sizes that I could complete. Even contemplating the idea of being full-time meant that I could make things full size.

Bisa Butler:

I did experiment with making things even really, really big. Let’s say, a six foot tall piece that’s only a person’s head and shoulders. I found that size for me was too big. I couldn’t manipulate the pieces the way I wanted to. Then I scaled it back. I thought, “Okay, I’m going to try making images of my friend’s children. I really wanted to impress Claire with what I have come up with, because she was thinking about signing me. I asked my friends for … send me pictures of the kids. I think about five. All the little girls were about five to eight. I made these pieces. Then the next time that Claire came by, I had all these life-sized pieces of these little girls. I could tell she was all in. I had hit the stride again, like, “Okay, I got it.” They need to be life-size. I don’t need to make them gigantic. I don’t need to make them too small. For me, the smaller it is, the harder it is actually.

Debbie Millman:

Did you have to make those small stitches?

Bisa Butler:

Right. The small stitches, I mean, an eye, if it has 20 pieces, but you’re using an eight and a half size piece of paper, what size is that eyes, microscopic. I also found life-size makes it one-to-one. They feel more real to me, more present.

Debbie Millman:

You also work from photographs. You often work from historical photographs. Talk about why you do that?

Bisa Butler:

I love looking back. I’ve always been somebody who looks at the past and is interested in it. The time that I spent with my grandmother, all her photos were black and white. I loved hearing about my mother’s life in Morocco and hanging out with the princesses. My grandfather was a US emissary, which is very a black man in the ’50s taking his family to live in Africa was not really … it wasn’t common. I’ll say that. Because of that they had a lot of access to all kinds of diplomats and royalty and I loved hearing about the photos. Then my grandmother’s people were the Creoles in New Orleans. That was early African-American middle class, free people in the time of slavery and after. A lot of them were mixed race people, and the Creoles had their own class.

Bisa Butler:

I did some research lately. I found that some of my ancestors were actually slave-owning Creoles, which is just “What the hell?” That’s a whole another ball. But I grew up looking at photos of black people dressed very nicely, living middle class lives, putting their best foot forward in photo. I’m very interested in that and I stayed. As I transition from working as a teacher and making quilts of my friends and family. I started thinking about what do I want to portray? I started thinking about vintage photos. My extended African-American family, and they’re not just African-American, but African Diaspora, because I myself have roots in Ghana.

Bisa Butler:

That’s what I’m interested now, working some vintage photos. Then that query had helped me stumble upon just thousands of photos that are just an identified in the databases, in the National Archives, in the Smithsonian archives. It’ll just say “Negro ballplayer, or Negro washerwoman, or Negro schoolchildren.” That became the thing that I was like, “Oh, this is not right.” Because these photos, a lot of them were taken in the ’40s and the ’50s, their families are still around, even if the photo was dated 1890. The families are still around, but these photos are lost to them. I start looking at a photo. Let’s say I choose a subject. I see Negro washerwoman. I start looking at her. Now I’m doing it one-to-one. She’s life-size. I’m sketching it, I’m thinking, “Who is this woman? Who was her family? What was she really like?” I’m trying my best to pull it out of the photo and give her back the identity that is there, but it’s being ignored or being passed over.

Debbie Millman:

Makes me think of the Susan Sontag quote, “A photograph furnishes evidence.”

Bisa Butler:

Yeah. I think about it personally. If somehow … Sometimes we throw away old photos. You’ve had a relative of the past. You got to clean out their house. What if one of my photos were in there, and it got put in a database? Negro woman making art. No. Negro woman sewing. How about that? How would I feel about that just being written off as basically nothing? You’re almost the spectacle or maybe we’re almost back to the human zoos at that point. I’m not a human being. How I would want an artist to approach my photo 100 years from now?

Debbie Millman:

How do you find and pick and use the fabric in your pieces?

Bisa Butler:

Actually, I just went shopping today. That’s a great question. But I finally started zeroing in on what is my aesthetic? My mother and grandmother were dressmakers. I use a lot of dressmaker’s fabric and I go to local fabric shops. Because I live so close to New York, the garment district is just like my backyard. I’m getting brocades and silk chiffons and silk damask. I can get all of the fine fabrics that I grew up using the scraps to make my Barbie dolls’ fantastic clothing. Then I’m pulling in my father’s side which is African fabric.

Bisa Butler:

In Ghana, they’re famous for making this fabric called kente, which is a heavy woven fabric. The European businessmen back in the 1800s came through Africa. They saw the colors and the textures, but they were able to capitalize on that and make a cheaper fabric and a lighter fabric called Dutch wax. I think they had Indian cotton, and then European printers, and then it was sold to the continent. It’s been popular in Africa since probably before World War One. I use a lot of that in my pieces because the African women, they don’t just … let’s say they make a fabric that has something that looks … There’s one that has … it has this little wavy figurine on it. Then it goes to the marketplace and the African women called that big lips. That fabric is known as big lips. I don’t know if you wear that if you have big lips. But it’s affirmation. Even though that was not the original intention of the European printer, this is what it’s called.

Bisa Butler:

Then these companies, Vlisco is one of the big companies. I think they’re the most well-known. They actually will go back and name that piece big loops. They have one fabric, the print is called [foreign language 00:50:20] or he’s not well off. I’m not sure. I’m like, “Why did they make this. But I love …

Debbie Millman:

I love those names. That’s fantastic.

Bisa Butler:

When I put that on a piece, remember I was talking about, let’s say, I found a woman or washerwoman, maybe putting my husband is not capable. It tells the story also that there’s financial strain in her life. It’s tongue-in-cheek. It’s funny. But the African women, when I exhibit my artwork, they know that fabric. They know what it means. I feel I’m getting communicating a coded message, like the quilts were back in the day. I’m saying something.

Debbie Millman:

Your use of portraiture is creating something truly new in the tradition of quilting. You’re now among a very small group of black artists, including Kehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald, who are evolving a technique historically reserved for European aristocrats to tell the story of contemporary black identity. The subjects in your portraits confront the viewer directly. They’re not just life-size. They’re also looking directly at the viewer. You’ve stated that the portraits include clues of your subjects’ inner thoughts, and their heritage, and their actual emotions and even their future. How do you discover this in the subjects that you choose? Or do you feel you’re helping to create their history?

Bisa Butler:

Sometimes it can come from just close observation. I might be working on a piece that might take me 400 hours. I have a piece that took me 1,500 hours. Staring at anybody’s photo that long, you do start to see certain things. I did a portrait of Frederick Douglass. Obviously, he’s a known figure. He’s an orator, statesman, abolitionist, feminist. But when I was staring at his photo, I saw this dark mark in the corner of his left eye, where the tear duct is. I was thinking, “What’s that? That’s interesting.” Then I went, and I reread his autobiography, and he mentioned that he was once beat so bad that he almost lost sight in his left eye.

Bisa Butler:

Here I am looking at this photo and I’m seeing evidence of the burst capillaries in his eye from that beating. It just made me see him as a human being that somebody who can feel pain, somebody who suffered and had these scars on him for the rest of his life. That goes not just for Frederick Douglass, but other people. Those context clues, I almost feel a detective or anthropologist, because there may be only this one photo of this person. This photo was taken by documentary photographer, or it could have been taken in a photography studio, but the name is gone, the location is gone. The family doesn’t even know that this photo exists. What can I glean from observing it? Look at their clothes. Look at how they’re dressed. Look at their nails. Look at their hair.

Bisa Butler:

I’m looking at these things trying to figure out who are they really, and what can I add? I don’t always know. I have looked at a photo of a man. It just said, “Negro man, Mississippi Delta.” He’s leaning up against a storefront. Maybe he’s waiting for a bus. His legs were crossed so elegantly. I call that piece, “I Am Not Your Negro,” after James Baldwin’s last, I think, manuscript?

Debbie Millman:

Yes. It’s also quite a good documentary now.

Bisa Butler:

Yes. Yes. Right. This man, I don’t know his life story. But just that elegant crossing of his legs like that made me think I want to do a piece dedicated to all of those expatriates, all of those writers and philosophers and thinkers. While this man is not James Baldwin, there was something there in him. But it was a grace to him that you would not expect from a guy. I mean, he has holes in his pants and patched up. His hat, he has a boater hat, straw boater and it’s ripped. But I didn’t put any of those things in there. I chose this beautiful Dutch wax fabric with airplanes on it. Because I wanted to say, “This man is going places, and he’s been to Paris. He’s been to Lagos. I gave him a fixed hat, because I’m also thinking about him as a person. Who wants a portrait of themselves with ripped up clothes? He wore those patched pants because that’s all he had. But if he had a choice, what would he choose? I’m sure it would not be to go with the patches.

Debbie Millman:

These objects in your art also stand in defiance against racial stereotypes. You’ve stated this about what you want people to understand when they look at your work. I’d like to read this quote, because I think it’s that meaningful. You write, “I want them to learn something. If you’re not black, and young black boys on the street make you feel nervous, I hope that it clicks, that this person is human, he has a soul, he has wants and dreams and wishes. I try to pull all that in the gaze itself and the pose. So that people will be confronted with someone who was so human you must see them as an equal.”

Debbie Millman:

Bisa, as an interviewer, one could be tempted to ask you to help white people try to understand what they can do to better understand how to do this. But I am really loath to ask you to do our emotional labor. But I did want to share this quote in the hope that people might be able to just think about it deeply and learn from it.

Bisa Butler:

Thank you. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Bisa, you’ve also stated that you’ve never been drawn to artwork that provokes sympathy, and makes you feel sorry for this subject. Are there pieces of art that you’re referring to when talking about that?

Bisa Butler:

I think that any piece of art or any … and that goes for a dance, a manuscript, a book, piece of fiction, a poem. If you’re depicting someone other than your own people, whether it’d be race, or economic status, or nationality, gender, sexuality, when you’re an outsider looking in, you might have the tendency to romanticize those others. I think it’s so important for us to speak from the inside. You speak up. You tell the world who you are, and what you are. I’m responding to many, many pieces of artwork that I’ve seen. I grew up in the ’80s. Those commercials like, “Feed a child from Africa.” They would show a black child with a fly on them. Although we’re not feeding the children intellectually in this country, not the black ones or the white ones by giving them a false education, sense of self.

Bisa Butler:

It’s just easy to look outside of yourself and say, “I feel so sorry for you.” But you’re never looking inward. I think about my figures. Actually, before this quarantine happened, I used to always say, “I want the figures to stare us in the eye,” and say, “Don’t feel sorry for me, says, I might feel sorry for you. You don’t know what family I have. I could have a stronger family bond, more love, and more fulfillment in my life than you did and that you have now.” Then it was just ironic that the quarantine hit and the COVID prices and I’m thinking, “They might literally, the souls of these people just looking like, “You don’t know what’s coming. But don’t feel sorry for me.” This racial reckoning, when I’m looking at photos from the ’40s and ’50s, or even the ’60s for that matter, and thinking, “Oh, wow, they had it rough.” I think all of us, I hope, are finally getting it like, “No, we have it rough and get our shit together.”

Debbie Millman:

You have also used momentous events, and people to create quilts that comment on history and the stories that we tell about it. One of my favorite pieces of yours is called the Safety Patrol, which just been acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago and will be in your upcoming solo exhibition, beginning at the end of the year. In the Safety Patrol, you play with artistic conventions, and expectations. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the piece and why you chose this particular group of children and what they signify in the piece.

Bisa Butler:

Well, that photo was taken by a man named Charles Harris in Pittsburgh. This was taken, right, I think, 1949. It’s almost turn of the decade. I was attracted to this image of this little boy, taller than the other kids with this cap on his head, like he was official. He has the Safety Patrol belt on. He’s holding back all of his little classmates from crossing the street. I think it’s almost six or seven of them. That’s what initially drew me in. Who was this little man child who isn’t so much charge of his peers.” That’s what I do, that I just collect interesting photos.

Bisa Butler:

At the same time, Trayvon Martin had been killed, gunned down on the yard, in his father’s neighborhood. It was this big debate going around between black and white people. A lot of us lost things differently. One of my daughter’s friends told me, “I mean, it’s so obvious. This obviously wasn’t about race. I mean, right?” I was just like, “Oh, my gosh. We’re on different planets at this point.” This particular woman, she was a white woman who had … she had adopted some black children, some black children. I thought, “This is tragically wrong now because you don’t understand that your children have a target on their backs just like Trayvon.” I was just really, really upset.

Bisa Butler:

I was sitting down watching the news with my dad. I think we’re watching CNN. I was telling my father like, “How are the kids going to make it? How can they live like this, being thought of as less than human that their lives don’t matter, that any person in a car who proclaims themselves to be neighborhood watch can just kill them, and not even be charged with a crime? Nothing.” My father would say, “This is not your world for them. They will know what to do because they are growing up in this. It’s not our world anymore. It’s theirs. They are going to know how to handle this level of violence and racism.”

Bisa Butler:

I felt I was able to take a breath and be like, “Okay, this is true. They will adapt, and they will develop methods to survive.” I thought about that photo that I had found of that little boy, and it reminded me of that saying, “It’s a child who will lead them.” The adults, we can be confused and terrified. But they are ready. I was compelled to portray each child. Show that they’re all individuals. The boy in the middle, his arms are spread out like in a protective manner, but it’s also sacrificial, like the Crucifix. He’s sacrificing himself. If a car comes by, he’d be the one who would be hit, because he’s further out, and he’s holding the other children back.

Bisa Butler:

All of the fabric I chose on there and I was trying to give them each a personality. You look at their faces, some are shy, some are sweet, some look little tricksters and the jokesters. I want people to see each one of them are valuable, each one of them are individuals.

Debbie Millman:

Bisa, their entire lives projected into the faces of those people that are in your piece. I can’t help but hope that the quilt can convey that all black children need to be seen and respected and protected in looking at this work.

Bisa Butler:

One more thing I’ll say that the boy in the front, I put his Safety Patrol belt, I switched it out and I used a piece of kente on there. That’s a nod to my father in Ghana. Kente was used for royal people, wealthy people, high esteem. You only wore it on special occasions. The way it goes across his body like that I wanted to say, “This little child has high honors, and he is somebody worthwhile.

Debbie Millman:

There are entire universes in every quilt that you make. The last thing I want to ask you about is your big solo exhibit that is happening at the Institute of Chicago later this year. I believe that it’s work that is moving from the Katonah Museum. Is that correct?

Bisa Butler:

Yeah, that’s right. The Katonah Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago are working in partnership to present my work from my very first piece. I’m going to be showing my piece that I made of my grandmother.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, good.

Bisa Butler:

Then going all the way up to pieces that I just finished this past winter. It’s about 25 pieces in the exhibit. You’ll be able to see that evolution of me doing just faces and then doing faces and torsos and family friends. You’ll also see my style get more precise and even now through the quarantine working, I’ve gotten better in portraying minute emotions and expressions, very subtle. I’m really excited about it.

Debbie Millman:

I cannot wait to see it. Bisa, the writer, Christina Nafziger, said this about your work, “They are stoic, monumental, full of rich detail in both the expressiveness of the subject and the pulsating patterns. There are voices in the fabric, and they will be heard.”

Bisa Butler:

I love that.

Debbie Millman:

I want to thank you for sharing your voice and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Bisa Butler:

Thank you so much, Debbie. I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed listening to your podcast. I’m thrilled to finally be on here.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. You can see Bisa Butler’s work at her gallery’s website, www.claireoliver.com, and on Instagram @bisabutler. Until October, you can see her solo exhibition of work at the Katonah Museum of Art; and Beginning in November, at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Debbie Millman:

This is the 16th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters. I’d like to thank you for listening. 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.

Curtis Fox:

Design Matters is produced by Curtis Fox productions. The show is recorded in non-pandemic times at the School of Visual Arts, Masters in Branding program in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The Editor-in-Chief of Design Matters Media is Zachary Petit, and the Art Director is Emily Weiland.

The post Best of Design Matters: Bisa Butler appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Speaker 1:

Design Matters is on summer break and we’ll return with new interviews this fall. In the meantime, we are playing some archival episodes. This one with Deborah Kass is from November 2017. This is Design Matters with Debbie Millman from designobserver.com. For 13 years now, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative types about what they do, how they got to be who they are and what they’re thinking about. On this podcast, Debbie Millman woman talks with artist, Deborah Kass.

Deborah:

My whole middlebrow attachment to middle class entertainment, is to me one of the more radical things I do in art.

Speaker 1:

Here’s Debbie Millman.

Debbie:

Brooklyn recently got it’s YO back or is it, OY? I’m not sure. In any case, I’m talking about Deborah Kass’ sculpture of two giant yellow letters, Y&O. Depending on which direction you’re coming from or your mood, you can read it as YO, or you can read it as, OY. It was originally on displayed at Brooklyn Bridge Park and now it’s back in Brooklyn on the waterfront in Williamsburg.

Debbie:

Deborah Kass is a multimedia artist who combines a pop sensibility with politics, feminism and art history. Her work is fun, funny, eclectic and deep. She’s here today to talk about her long and extraordinary career. Deborah Kass, YO, or should I say, OY? Welcome to Design Matters.

Deborah:

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Debbie:

Deb. I need to start by asking you a rather trivial, but potentially polarizing question. I understand you can’t live without Bounty paper towels.

Deborah:

That’s true. Where do you get your information?

Debbie:

I have my sources, and I don’t ever give them away.

Deborah:

That’s really funny.

Debbie:

But really Bounty? I like Viva much better.

Deborah:

Really? Bounties is quicker picker wrapper, I don’t know.

Debbie:

This is not a sponsored podcast.

Deborah:

No, it’s not.

Debbie:

Nobody has to worry about our being authentic.

Deborah:

No, it’s like … I don’t know. I inherited from my grandmother. She had really particular tastes in paper products.

Debbie:

Now do you keep a lot of paper products around?

Deborah:

Yes.

Debbie:

See, I’m a person that has a lot of paper products in storage. I just feel safer when I have a large quantity of paper products around me.

Deborah:

I completely concur because it ends up we have a lot in common, including a need for a big backup on the paper products. I’m never happy unless I see that really well stock shelf.

Debbie:

Yes, I hear you. You were born in San Antonio, Texas, but you grew up on Long island?

Deborah:

Yes.

Debbie:

What caused, what motivated that move to the east coast?

Deborah:

Well, my parents were from the Bronx and Queens. My grandparents were three out of four from Russia, well, the Ukraine, and Belarus and they were New York Jewish immigrants. My father just did two years in the air force in Lackland in San Antonio. They were just coming home.

Debbie:

Yes, you were coming–

Deborah:

Like that generation, the next move was into the suburbs.

Debbie:

Right. I was there as well. Your mother was a substitute teacher in the Rockville Center public schools, and your father was a dentist, but he was also a jazz aficionado and an amateur musician. I read that in your house, there was only one kind of great art, and it was jazz. You and your dad would listen to how Charlie Parker and Coltrane or Billie Holiday, could all perform the same tune but differently. This led you to thinking that interpretation was completely within the realm of a great artist. Do you think that this was only relegated to music? Or did you think it could apply to other art forms as well back then?

Deborah:

I only knew one kind of great art, and it was music, because my father said so. That’s what the literature of the house was, although my mother read a lot of literature aside from that. It was a very active passion for my father, and it was a very involving atmosphere. I didn’t really know that it applied to anything I did till about 1999, when I had a traveling show that originated at the Newcomb Museum there.

Deborah:

The Warhol project started in New Orleans, the show. It was because I had to give a talk to the trustees of the big opening, and I had to prepare some remarks. It never really occurred to me that I had in any way assimilated that point of view, except there I was in New Orleans, which in my family was like Mecca.

Deborah:

There I was having done all this Andy Warhol work, this work that looked just like Andy Warhol’s. I realized that I had been doing exactly what my father had been pointing out these great musicians had done, which was taking a pop standard and named Andy Warhol and making it mine, doing it my way. I never realized that I had made this connection between art and music or interpretive art versus creative art or … But to me it was all the same thing. I didn’t realize I had any connection to it till I had to give this talk and it was like the light bulb went off.

Debbie:

Was there ever a time in your life where you thought you might want to be a musician or a performer?

Deborah:

No, I did have a little acting flirtation in my teens, but–

Debbie:

Didn’t we all?

Deborah:

Yes, I guess we did, but I got the real bug because someone I knew from summer camp was in a Broadway Show when she was about 16 in the chorus of Henry Sweet Henry and Eileen Schatz was in the chorus, and it just blew my circuits. She ended up being a really famous soap opera actress, Eileen Kristen. But Eileen Schatz inspired me. I was very taken with this fact that someone I knew was doing something professional like that.

Deborah:

I started going to the theater a lot. What I would do is, I would take the long island railroad and on Saturday mornings and go to the art students league. I started at like 14 and draw from the model, and then in the afternoon I’d … This was all with babysitting money and none of this was supported.

Deborah:

My generation, our parents weren’t interested in creative children. They just said, “Turn off the light and go to sleep.” They didn’t care that I was interesting, which I was. But if I had me as a kid, I’d be fascinated. I would go to this theater thing in the afternoon on Broadway, but I quickly spread out to off Broadway because I was a little snotty, intellectual.

Deborah:

I actually went through my calendar from a few of those years. I’m still very close to my best friend from the time. At her surprise 60th birthday party, I gave a list of all the things we did, all the art we saw together and all the shows we saw them together.

Debbie:

Wow, that’s amazing.

Deborah:

It was fantastic. It was like a living theater, paradise lost, it was crazy, it was Nicol Williamson and Hamlet. It was like an unbelievably rich. I did have a little acting Jones for a while.

Debbie:

You knew that you wanted to be an artist or certainly had artistic talent, pretty early. From what I understand, fairly early in your life, you received a letter from Peanuts cartoonist’s, Charles Schultz, and he was actually a responding to a letter that you wrote to him. Before I share the contents of his letter to you with our listeners, what did you write him to motivate his response to you?

Deborah:

Well, I sent him drawings.

Debbie:

What did you draw?

Deborah:

I drew a comic strip, it’s so unusual for me based on his.

Debbie:

No, why I’m I not surprised?

Deborah:

I had my own comic strip with little kids called Apple Sauce based on Peanuts. I had found my first Peanuts book at A&S, Abraham & Straus Department Store in Hempstead. I remember there was like a pile of these books. I must have been eight years old, maybe nine. I don’t think I was nine, but then I started collecting the books. I was completely obsessed, and I copied them endlessly. I perfected Lucy and then I went on and did my own based on them.

Deborah:

I sent him a bunch of drawings and that’s all I know. I don’t know what I said, I don’t know what I wrote. I just know he responded, and it went back and forth a few times. I have quite a few.

Debbie:

So you have a whole correspondence?

Deborah:

Yes, I do. I have about six letters from him.

Debbie:

Well, and did you ever correspond with him when you were older and an adult?

Deborah:

No. One of the things I said, and I couldn’t find, “Go fly a kite, Charlie Brown.” When it came out, and I knew it came out somehow. I was very exteriorly motivated. I still I’m. Like the world was of enormous interest to me as a kid. I’m not like an internal artist who has like churning emotions that have to get out, I never was.

Deborah:

Even as a little kid, I was very interested in the world, and somehow I knew this book had come out, and it wasn’t at A&S yet. I’m sure I bothered my mother endlessly to take me there. I sent Charles Schultz a dollar for the book because that’s what they worth. He kept the dollar, and he sent me back the book, and he drew me a Snoopy.

Debbie:

Please tell me, you still have this.

Deborah:

I have it framed. I pulled the page out, and it’s framed, and it’s like Brown now, and it says … I should know what it says. I look at it a lot like, “To Debby, best wishes.” With Snoopy, in a blue ballpoint pen. It’s so great. That’s amazing.

Debbie:

Well, his letter back to your first letter to him was, “Dear Debbie, thank you for your letter and cartoons. I enjoyed seeing your drawings, and I think you did very well with them. It is very nice of your teacher to display your drawings as she does. If you enjoy drawing cartoons, I would suggest that you keep at it. You can never tell what it may develop into. Kindest regards, Charles M. Schulz.”

Deborah:

I know so dear, and I did only write him one more time when he was dying. There was something about if you want to write your Charles Schultz, do it now. There was some way to email him regards and I quoted that to him and I said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m an artist in New York and I’ve made my life this way. When I was a kid you wrote this incredibly encouraging thing and told me to keep at it–

Debbie:

“Keep at it because you never tell what it will develop into.”

Deborah:

-keep at it because you’ll never know what will happen.” I sat and I took your advice. “

Debbie:

Wonderful.

Deborah:

Yes.

Debbie:

In addition to sneaking out of your art students leagues classes to going to Broadway plays.

Deborah:

I was not sneaking out, they were done at 12:00 okay. I wouldn’t sneak out. I’d paid for them. I would want to be in them.

Debbie:

Well, you also would go to Moma.

Deborah:

Yes.

Debbie:

That is where, while still in high school, you first saw the work of Frank Stella, and I know that, that was a really profound experience for you. Can you talk a little bit about that first experience?

Deborah:

Yes. I haunted Moma to try to figure out what this was. This thing I wanted to do, even though I don’t know why I wanted to do it, I don’t know where I got the idea, and I certainly didn’t know anyone else who … These were doctors, lawyers and manufacturers. That’s what dads did, Mom’s taught. I don’t know where this came from. I was really on a search for a mission to find out what is this thing? What is art and what’s being an artist?

Deborah:

I would look at this work all around, and I didn’t really get a lot of it. I remember the first person I actually, I loved Ta Connie. I think most people end up painters probably fell in love with Ta Connie as a kid in some way.

Debbie:

Why do you think that is?

Deborah:

Gushy paint, just gushy paint. So beautifully fabulous gushy paint.

Debbie:

Now I read that, seeing Frank Stella’s work convinced you, you could be an artist, because you understood what he was doing.

Deborah:

Right. The thing that was so great about it was Stella’s first retrospective, I was 17, he was 44. It was whatever year that was 69, 70. It was the logic of Frank Stella that I understood. I understood how he got from that very first painting to the second painting, like what was going on in his head?

Debbie:

You just felt that way?

Deborah:

It’s clear in the work, it’s very logical. It’s logical work. How the jumps between the series, where what utterly fascinated me because they seemed completely logical, but they were obviously intensely, they’re creative jumps. They’re like not what you expect, but they make sense. It was being able to follow someone for 20 years of changes in their work and how they were changing. It was more in my head than it was emotional.

Debbie:

It sounds like figuring out a code.

Deborah:

Yes, like that. I understood his thinking and I understood the relationship of the form to the content, that the form was the content, that was a big deal.

Debbie:

Did it give you a sense that you could do this with your life as well?

Deborah:

Yes, I was already committed. I probably already gotten into Carnegie Mellon. No, I knew I was going to be an artist, but it was the first time I understood motivation within a body of work.

Debbie:

While you were at Carnegie, you also applied and were accepted to the Whitney Museum’s independent study program, which was only about four to five years old at the time. I actually applied and didn’t get in. What was it like going there?

Deborah:

My father had just died. I was in a completely altered state because it was unexpected. Amy is only 47, so it was a very weird time. I’m not sure I could describe much other than, I was kind of on another planet. I was living in the studio there I’d every now and then go home. It was a real shock when my father died. It was fun to be with really ambitious people my age.

Debbie:

It was at this time that you made one of your first paintings, would it be fair to call it appropriated paintings?

Deborah:

Yes, I guess after Apple Sauce, my appropriation of Charles Schultz, this would be my next major appropriation.

Debbie:

Ophelia’s Death after Delacour, can you describe it for our listeners?

Deborah:

Yes, it’s actually a very large rendition of a small oil sketch by Delacour called Ophelia’s Death. I think his was like, eight by 10 inches, a very small little thing. Mine was maybe five feet by seven.

Debbie:

Six by eight.

Deborah:

Six by eight, even bigger. It was redo of this painting, and I just repainted it.

Debbie:

Deb, you’ve written about how David Dao, the Chinese American artist and your teacher, saw the show of student work at the Whitney, and was so freaked out about your painting that he literally hit his head against the wall. Why was he so freaked out about your work?

Deborah:

I don’t know and I was really young, I was 20. I didn’t know what it meant. Listen, I still don’t know what it means when people react to my work, but I certainly didn’t understand what it meant then and I never asked him. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to ask him.

Debbie:

Your time at school was rather interesting, I guess is the word I could put it, and they found an interview wherein you describe your time there as total chaos and actually said this, this is a quote, “This is how crazy it was. Here’s an actual assignment. Our teacher got video cameras and said, “We’re going to hitchhike to Lexington.” One of our coolest teachers, the one who had studied with Kaprow was then in Lexington. We were stoned. We were tripping. We have video cameras. We went from Pittsburgh to Lexington with our thumbs out on the road. A lot of those students would transfer to Carl Arts. A few people went to Denmark to do primal therapy. This was undergraduate school. I did a ton of acid, smoked a lot of pot. I was such a bad girl and Oh, I had the best time.”

Deborah:

That is all true. It really was. I was out there and I had a ball.

Debbie:

It sounds like it was perfect.

Deborah:

I have to say, and I was madly in love. I was madly in love. I feel like I had the world’s best first love affair. The worlds maybe not best to art education, but for somebody dying to break out of Long Island and being a nice Jewish girl, I did it in spades. I had a ball and it was something else.

Debbie:

You started your art history paintings in 1989, and in this work you combined frames lifted from Disney cartoons with segments of paintings from Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock. It was here that you established appropriation as one of your primary techniques. What gave you the sense that this was something you wanted to pursue?

Deborah:

To answer that question, I should establish a little context, which was in the 70s, when I first came to New York, after the Whitney program. When I came to settle down, find my loft, start my life, become a famous waitress. In the mid 70s, what was happening in the art world was thrilling.

Deborah:

It was the height of second wave feminism. The art world was way smaller. The most interesting work, particularly painting, was being done by women. It was the intersection of New York school painting and feminism. The art that was being shown in Soho, which was a new thing, was Elizabeth Murray’s work, which was incredibly important to me, so was Pat Steer’s work, Mary Hileman’s work, Susan Rothenberg’s work.

Deborah:

All of these women, we’re really talking about abstraction and representation at the same time, but more what was interesting to me was how they were injecting their own personal point of view, or … I’m not saying this well, but after all those years at Moma, not understanding what any of it might have to do with me, basically.

Deborah:

I wasn’t necessarily the audience. I didn’t feel like the subject, these particular women’s work, paintings were the first time I felt like I was the intended audience of a piece of work. They were abstract paintings. I don’t know how that was communicated, but it was communicated extremely strongly to me who was already obsessed with Post-War painting, because of all of my time at Moma.

Deborah:

You can understand why, if I loved Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray would be a huge revelation. I said to Elizabeth once, I said, “You’ve ruined abstraction.” And she said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, before you, it was universal. Once it was you, it became specific.” That was a really big change.

Debbie:

I felt the same way when I looked at her first, the big giant canvases, a lot of portion and shape and it was incredible.

Deborah:

Yes, and Pat’s work, the fact that she broke picture making down into these parts. Now, Jasper Johns had done it, but it felt different. Just felt different. I don’t know. Something about seeing a little bird on a grid felt different. Mary Hileman’s relationship to the edge in those paintings and the casualness, only Mary would make a mark in that way, but it was still an abstract painting. Joan Snyder, I put into this category too, making operatic operas with that work.

Debbie:

How did that influence the kind of work you were doing at that time?

Deborah:

I’m not sure it influenced me specifically in terms … I never made a Frank’s Stella painting except when I use Frank Stella, but it was never to me about, “Well then I’ll make a piece of work like that.” It’s more what it meant philosophically or what it could mean–

Debbie:

What it opened up in you.

Deborah:

What it opens up, period and where you can go with that information. Then I go back to the early, late 70s or early 80s when Neo-expressionism happened, which also happened along with Ronald Reagan, but in that particular group of artists, you had to be a white man. There were simply no women my age, who got any traction for being painters. Women my generation got traction by being on the outskirts of the then very new and exciting market, following closely to Ronald Reagan’s reign, and the people who were doing critical work in relationship to the culture and representation, us painters called them ‘The photo girls’.

Deborah:

It was Laurie Simmons, Sarah Charlesworth, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine. What I’m getting at here is it was the content of that work, that weirdly in my head connected to what these women had done. Painting in the 70s, breaking open a system like abstraction and figuring out new ways in and new subjectivities, somehow getting them in there. Here were all these women doing critiques of photography and media and inserting their subjectivity and seeing what it looked like from their point of view. That was incredibly interesting and radical.

Deborah:

The art history paintings, came from a combination of those 70s women and what they’d done with the history of abstraction in Post-War painting, and what Barbara, Cindy and Sherry as I love to say, we’re doing in terms of sort of cultural critique and media critique, and putting them together into the art history paintings, which was me looking at the history of painting in a certain way or there’s certainly the one I loved and knew starting with Saves Son. It’s like the stuff I just loved.

Deborah:

Through Post-War painting, through Andy Warhol, and putting that kind of critique that the photo girls were putting towards the culture, towards the history of painting.

Debbie:

Your fascination with Andy Warhol began when you were about 13, and you saw a reproduction of his 1961 painting titled Before and After. Can you describe the painting for our listeners?

Deborah:

He reproduced and paint a widely distributed advertisement for a nose job. It was a little drawing, not his. From the advertisement of the profile of a woman with a nose, a big Schnoz.

Debbie:

Are you drawing it?

Deborah:

Here I am drawing it. Then the after the nose job …

Debbie:

I read that you took subversive joy in that image.

Deborah:

I did because nose jobs were really important and on Long island.

Debbie:

Especially in the 70s and 80s.

Deborah:

This was the 60s.

Debbie:

Yes, I guess that’s why, right?

Deborah:

Yes.

Debbie:

You said that your decade of Andy Warhol started in 1992 and ended in 2000, and then you began a new body of work in 2002. Let’s talk about your decade of Andy Warhol. It began when you borrowed the format of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy silk screens, and used an image of Barbara Streisand. You titled it Jewish Jackie. Why? Why did you make this painting?

Deborah:

Well, in the art history paintings, I got up to Warhol and I used Andy a bunch of times, including before and happily ever after, making men, puff painting to name a few. There I was with Andy. Those paintings particularly, we’re really about my absence in art history. That’s what they were about. It’s like, here’s our history, here’s how it’s written, here’s what’s valuable, here’s what’s not. I’m really missing in here, in this whole equation.

Deborah:

I was having a conversation with a friend. It was about the sexism in the art world, which was my common theme. It’s my theme. I was screaming like, “Jerry, you’re interested in every single thing that’s in the inside of adolescent boy’s head. You think it’s valuable? Anything a guy does, even if it’s like from when they’re 13 years old.” And he said, “Well, I’d love to know what 13 year old girls think about.” I was fascinated. This is why you talked to your friends. It really got me thinking.

Deborah:

Also at that time, it was another contextual thing about that particular moment, late 80s. This was really the beginning of women’s studies in academia and black studies and critical race theory and queer theory. This was all the beginning of what became academic 20 years later.

Deborah:

I was reading a lot, a lot, a lot about subjectivity and objectivity and specificity and fluidity of gender and Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick and before then Goober and Gilbert, The Madwoman in the Attic, Elaine Showalter, The Pembroke Aeries, the Columbia University press, Gender and Culture series, Nancy Kei Miller edited with Carolyn Heilbrunn. There was enormous, enormous amounts of intellectual activity around identity. But this was the stuff that was working in Barbara, Cindy and Sherri’s work. This is what their work was really engaged with and engaging.

Deborah:

Women’s studies came out of a lot of really smart women. Most of them Jewish, a lot of them Jewish. Let’s just say, a lot of them are Jewish, who were really good girls older than me. Who were brilliant children, who became brilliant women, who did nice girl things like major and get their PhDs in French literature and English literature and something cracked in the 70s.

Deborah:

Then in the 80s, began to re-examine their own history of their own topics and subjects, French literature, English literature, American literature through the lens of feminism. That is what I was doing with the art history paintings. I was re-examining my beloved history of art Post-War painting through a lens of feminism, because I was reading these women. It looked like no one had done this in painting and I really wanted to do it. They were just starting to do it in English literature.

Deborah:

Then it became critical race theory and black scholars looking at the law through the lens of race. When I have that conversation with my friend and he said, “I would love to know what 13 year old girls think about.” I was thinking about my work as I always do, and I realized that that work had really been about my absence, that the art history paintings had been about my absence. What would my presence look like? What would my presence look like? Then he said that thing about being 13 and those two things just exploded in my brain. What I was thinking about a 13 looked a lot like Barbara Streisand.

Debbie:

Yes, I actually read that. You talked about how Barbara Streisand changed your life as a Jewish girl growing up in suburban New York and stated that her sense of herself, her ethnicity, glamour, and her difference affirmed your own ambitions and identity. She did the same exact thing for me, exact thing for me.

Deborah:

That is the power of being Barbara.

Debbie:

Absolutely.

Deborah:

I was really obsessed with my parents nostalgia. My father had the music thing, which was major and my mother was a great reader and a great movie person, like those girls were, they loved the movies, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s.

Debbie:

Are you kidding? My mother told me that she and my father were getting a divorce, she took us to see Hello, Dolly, starring Barbara Streisand. Seriously, now you understand my fascination with Barbara, but in any case you were saying …

Deborah:

That’s like Rosie O’Donnell story. When her mother died, her father threw out everything her mother owned. She hid Funny Girl, the album, and that’s what Barbara means to her.

Debbie:

Yes, of course.

Deborah:

That was her last piece of her mother. Well, so having been obsessed with my parent’s nostalgia and movies and I knew everything about Hollywood in the 30s and 40s. My mother would talk endlessly, Leslie Howard was Jewish and Ashley Wilks and Rita Hayworth’s electrolysis on her hairline. I mean she knew it all. She knew it and she was great. I had a whole theory when I was probably 14 about 1939 being the best year of movies ever.

Debbie:

Of course, and it still is, to this day. [crosstalk 00:33:30] The Wizard of Oz, Gone With The Wind, I mean please.

Deborah:

Goodbye Mr Chips and Wuthering heights. It was an amazing, yes.

Debbie:

Never to be repeated.

Deborah:

But for a 13 or 14-year old to know this was like, “I mean really, I was a gay boy.”

Debbie:

That’s so funny that you should say that. I often say that about myself.

Deborah:

Yes, I was a 100%.

Debbie:

I’d be a much better gay man.

Deborah:

I am, I have to. That’s a part of my work and this has been under theorized. Anyway, so Barbara was so obviously different than any other of these movie stars. I was completely in love with Marilyn Monroe, I just adored her. I adored Jane Russell. I adored Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was like my favorite.

Debbie:

You knew that by heart?

Deborah:

By heart. It was very clear when Barbara showed up, that she was different than any woman who’d ever been a movie star. She looked like people I knew. She looked like a New Yorker. She looked like the Jewish girl.

Debbie:

Is it true that Barbara Streisand declined an offer from Warhol to sit for a painting?

Deborah:

That’s the story. I know the same story, so that is my understanding.

Debbie:

But we don’t know for sure?

Deborah:

But Barbara wouldn’t, because Barbara controlled her own image.

Debbie:

Right.

Deborah:

I have to tell you, when I was painting my celebrity portraits, and I would ask Barbara Kruger my heroes, I asked some of my heroes.

Debbie:

She did Elizabeth Moran, Pat Steer?

Deborah:

Yes, but they said “Yes.” And Barbara Kruger said, “No.” Because Barbara Kruger controls her own image. It sounds crucial to Barbara Kruger as it is to Barbara Streisand, but Barbara Streisand, did a damn good job of controlling that.

Debbie:

Yes, absolutely.

Deborah:

My guess is she didn’t want someone else painting her, when she’s too busy creating herself.

Debbie:

You also painted portraits of yourself impersonating both Warhol and Elizabeth Taylor in a series you called The Debs. Don’t think I don’t want one of those. What was it like inhabiting somebody else’s spirit in that way?

Deborah:

It was great. It was like the best marriage. I always feel really grateful that I got to partner with Andy for as long as I did. I learned so much stuff about making things and ideas and making ideas multiply, literally and figuratively. It was just the best partnership.

Debbie:

We touched a little bit on women’s roles, or a woman’s role in the art world. Do you think that women can or ever will be able to be equal in the art world? Do you think that they’ll have to be granted art world equality by men? Or do you think that this is an uphill battle that will not be won in our generation?

Deborah:

The only way that, that will be resolved as when women make the same amount of money as men.

Debbie:

Does that what gender equality in the art world looks like to you?

Deborah:

I mean in the big world, because it’s the big world that pays for the art world. Women need to make as much as men.

Debbie:

In the world?

Deborah:

In the world for enough generations that art is something they feel like investing in, and till women make a dollar to a dollar, women in the art world don’t have a chance, I don’t see it, I don’t see how till there’s financial equality, anything is going to be equal.

Debbie:

After the Warhol project, your plan was to take some time off. I think you took about a year off. When you take time off between periods of work, do you ever worry about ideas and having something new to say?

Deborah:

Yes, always.

Debbie:

Is there any way that you manage that fear or that stress?

Deborah:

Every break is for a different reason in a way, but it does tend to come at the end of a series. After Warhol, which I always knew it would come to an end at some point, I don’t remember exactly what happened anymore, but if you’re telling me I took a break, I believe you. But I do know when I got back to work, there were a couple of things I just had been thinking about a lot, and I didn’t know what it would look like or what it would mean or anything. It was really still wanting to say what I say in a different way.

Debbie:

Your next body of work Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times, consisted of paintings of phrases from musicals and movies is a reaction then to the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq. Those were indeed feel bad times, but it’s hard for me to imagine how the world now is affecting the work that you want to be making.

Deborah:

That’s a really good question that I am in no way prepared to answer.

Debbie:

What was the intention of using the phrases from the musicals and the movies? Was it this sense of joy that you experienced in observing those or participating in those types of art forms and wanting to bring that into the work to cheer people up, to distract them, to create a sense of a dichotomy between realities?

Deborah:

Well, the whole thing was very tongue in cheek in every single phrase was double edge.

Debbie:

Right. I think everything in your work is double edged.

Deborah:

I guess it is. It must be astrological.

Debbie:

[inaudible 00:39:37]

Deborah:

It’s my sun-moon opposition. I was turning 50, and I really wanted them to be about turning 50. It was also that idea about identifying that I was playing with and nostalgia and weaponizing nostalgia and …

Debbie:

They were biting, the phrases were biting.

Deborah:

Yes, but nostalgic. But nostalgic only if you’re a person like me. But again, that’s where the specificity comes in. I love musicals. I love the old musicals. I don’t love the new musicals. I loved Hamilton, but my whole middlebrow attachment to middle class entertainment is to me one of the more radical things I do in art, because art’s supposed to be this other thing.

Deborah:

Yet the middle class, is the thing that has, it made the greatest art, it made the greatest movies. We made the greatest, a lot of great stuff. Let’s face it, working class, middle class, it’s where the action is. But that great middle class made us. That great middle class was the thing that was being attacked so directly by Republicans and by Bush in particular.

Deborah:

The dismantling of the middle class is one of the most tragic things that’s happened in my lifetime. To embrace this middle class stuff like musicals, it seemed really like a good idea.

Debbie:

Let’s talk about OY/YO, because it has so much embedded in. I mentioned what it looks like a little bit in my intro, so very large, big yellow letters, OY, YO, you can look at it from two different directions. You first developed the idea, I believe, through paintings and smaller scale pieces that were inspired by Picasso’s, Yo Picasso and Edward Roche A’s, Oof. How did they sort of infiltrate into your psyche?

Deborah:

Well, I was walking around Moma, as I do still, not as often as I did when I was a kid though. There was Ed Roche A’s Oof, and I just saw OY, so I made the painting the exact same size, same color. It was up at the gallery, and a friend saw the reflection and said, “It says YO in the reflection.” This is like an Andy moment where I went, “Should I paint it?” Which is exactly what Andy would have said. She said, “Yeah.” So I made the YO, so I painted the YO.

Deborah:

Then, it takes a village story. My print publisher Robert Lococo, Lococo Fine Arts who I adore, said “What if we made a little sculpture out of it? That way you could see it at the same time.” We did. Then this opportunity came up to do that, a large scale sculpture and it was completely [inaudible 00:43:04]. Who wouldn’t want to see that eight foot tall?

Debbie:

Especially in New York City.

Deborah:

Yes. That’s how it happened. There was a lot of people with a lot of good ideas and a great opportunity.

Debbie:

It’s a modern day version of the ‘I heart New York’ logo.

Deborah:

That and love.

Debbie:

Yes, Robert Indiana, absolutely.

Deborah:

It is totally those two things combined with Tony Smith.

Debbie:

Yes, absolutely.

Deborah:

When it went up, when it was installed, I knew it.

Debbie:

Is it going to become a permanent part of the New York City landscape?

Deborah:

Well, one can hope. There’s a lot of conversations going on. Hopefully, there will eventually be a great New York City spot for it to stay permanently.

Debbie:

It has to.

Deborah:

It really was a remarkable experience.

Debbie:

It’s such a Mashup of the culture of this city, this wonderful melting pot that still does exist and should be expressed in this way.

Deborah:

I’m still shocked, but t’s not like I planned for it to be an instant icon.

Debbie:

Yes, sure.

Deborah:

But even I knew it was the minute it was installed. It was just so obvious. That’s what happens when you have opportunity, which is the thing that is lacking to specific groups of people that, this is an example of [inaudible 00:44:37]. There’s not a lot of public art by women, and there’s virtually no permanent public art by women.

Debbie:

Well, hopefully this is going to change and help move that.

Deborah:

Thank you. I hope so, but given that opportunity, it just worked out really well and it was so much more than I ever thought about.

Debbie:

Charles Schultz would be proud.

Deborah:

He would be proud, yes.

Debbie:

I have a final question for you. You’ve had a remarkable career. You’ve had extraordinary longevity. There are a number of artists today, but not many that you can look at the trajectory of their work, and feel like they haven’t even peaked yet. They’re doing the best work of their career. I think that you’re an artist in that category that’s just continually doing things that are really important and making a really important contribution in statement.

Debbie:

In a recent interview you were asked if you had any advice for young artists today and your response was classic Deborah Kass, you said, “Don’t be an asshole.” Why that advice? Aside from the obvious why that specific advice?

Deborah:

I guess because at this point in my life, I know more about human nature and I know that people don’t forgive and they don’t forget, and that’s why you should mind your P’s and Q’s.

Debbie:

Deborah Kass, thank you for making our world and our city, a more painterly and provocative. You can see some of Deborah Kass’ work on deborahKass.com. This is the 12th year I’ve been doing Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. 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 talking to you again soon.

Speaker 1:

For more information about Design Matters or to subscribe to our newsletter, go to debbiemillman.com. If you like podcasts, please write a review on iTunes and link to the podcast on social media. Design Matters is recorded at The Masters in Brand New Studio at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. It is produced by Curtis Fox productions. The show is published exclusively by designobserver.com. You can subscribe to this free podcast in the iTunes store or wherever you get your podcasts.

Debbie:

Okay. She’s here to talk about her long and extraordinary career. Deborah Kass, welcome to Design Matters.

Deborah:

Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Debbie:

You should see you.

Deborah:

You should put that in. This should be it.

The post Best of Design Matters: Deborah Kass appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

Longtime listeners of Design Matters will know that over the years I have interviewed a lot of gay men and women. I’ve always been interested in hearing how someone has negotiated their sexual identity in a world that is not always open to it.

Longtime listeners will also know that while I am gay, I didn’t come out until I was 50. Ten years later, I’m married to a woman, and more comfortable in my own skin than I ever have been. But it has been a journey.

Since it’s the end of Pride month, I feel like celebrating by sharing some excerpts from interviews with some of the LGBTQIA guests  I’ve had on Design Matters in recent years.

First up, the amazing MacArthur genius Alison Bechdel. Alison Bechdel is the author of groundbreaking graphic novels like Fun Home and Are You My Mother? I spoke with her in 2016 …

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Debbie Millman:

I understand that one of your all-time favorite Mad magazine cartoons began with a first grader’s “what I did last summer” report about visiting a farm and seeing pigs. Why is this your favorite?

Alison Bechdel:

That’s such a perfect first question, because it ties in with the work and life being the same thing. So, this little boy writes his “what I did this summer” report about going to a farm and seeing pigs, and it evolves over the years. For every school paper, he rewrites a version of this until he’s an animal husbandry student and he’s writing scientific papers about pigs. There’s these same little throughlines that keep showing up.

Alison Bechdel:

What excited me about it was this idea that there’s just one thing you’re passionate about, and you can just keep doing it for the rest of your life.

Debbie Millman:

Over and over.

Alison Bechdel:

Over and over, on a slightly higher level each time, hopefully.

Debbie Millman:

Hopefully. You were born in Lock Haven, PA. Your father was a high school English teacher, and also operated a funeral home. Your mother was an actress, and also a teacher. I believe you were about 4 years old when you saw your first butch lesbian. What happened?

Alison Bechdel:

I was out with my dad on some funeral home–related errand in a larger city. We grew up in a very small town, so I think we might’ve been in Philadelphia. And he took me to lunch in a little luncheonette, and a woman came into the place who just blew the top of my head off, this big woman wearing men’s clothes. But I just remembered seeing this person who I recognized as a version of myself, and my father recognized her, too. He turned and saw her, and he said to me, “Is that what you want to look like?”

Debbie Millman:

Well, he was so adamant about you wearing barrettes in your hair and dresses at that time.

Alison Bechdel:

Yeah, and of course that was exactly what I wanted to look like, and I didn’t know that it was possible, or that anyone else did it. But simultaneously, I was getting the message that that was not OK.

Debbie Millman:

In your intro to The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, which is a compilation of all of the comics over the 25 years of writing and drawing this amazing universe, you write about finding and reading your kindergarten report card, and this is what your teacher wrote about you: “Speaks hesitantly and seldom uses good grammar, but seems to prefer silence most of the time. Quiet. Restrained. Introversion. Obsession with detail. Contempt for leadership. Inability to handle criticism. Bad judgment. Performs well where speaking is unnecessary. Draws detail in realist way.”

Debbie Millman:

How much of this is still accurate?

Alison Bechdel:

Pretty much everything. Spot on.

Debbie Millman:

While working on your book Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, you ran across a cardboard-bound compilation you made of your best stories and drawings when you were 12, and you titled it An Odd, Strange and Curious Collection of Alison Bechdel’s Works. You felt that the parallels were alarming, from the background details in the drawings to the use of marginal comments on the selected pieces. Were they really that similar, or was it just this sort of startled realization that you’d had this desire to draw and communicate in this way since you were really little, like from the time you were 3?

Alison Bechdel:

What was interesting to me about seeing that childhood compilation was not so much the drawings themselves as the act of compiling, as the act of self-archiving, culling my stuff into some kind of structure that made sense to me, and you know, prizing it, investing it with meaning for my own purposes, which I continue to do. It’s like an active memoir, just making sure my stuff is presented in a way that makes sense to me.

Debbie Millman:

Dykes to Watch Out For first cropped up in the margin of a letter you were writing to a friend, and you titled the drawing, “Marianne, Dissatisfied With the Breakfast Brew,” and you’ve stated that for some reason, you were moved to further label it, “Dykes to Watch Out For: Plate Number 27,” as if it were just one in a series of illustrations of what you referred to as mildly demonic lesbians.

Debbie Millman:

I believe this was your first published cartoon, and it ran in the 1983 lesbian pride issue of a feminist newspaper. So how did it get to the newspaper? How did that happen?

Alison Bechdel:

I had worked at that newspaper. I was a volunteer at this feminist monthly called Women News, and I showed up just because I wanted to meet people and do something interesting, and a newspaper sounded fun, and then I got involved in the production end of the paper, and we were a collective. So, we just all put this paper out together. No one got paid.

Alison Bechdel:

And I was doing these cartoons for fun, and showing them to my friends, and someone said, “You know, you should show these to the collective and see if they want to put them in the paper,” and they did. So, I started doing one a month for this newspaper.

Debbie Millman:

In The Indelible Alison Bechdel, one of your books, you write, “The concept of a series, although initially a joke, begged for continuation. I found myself drawing more and more plats in my sketchbooks over the next several months. The captions grew increasingly complex, and the drawings more finished and deliberate. Eventually, I had a small sheaf of dykes to watch out for, that I would whip out and display to acquaintances at the slightest provocation.”

Debbie Millman:

It was at this time you begin doing a cartoon for every issue of the newspaper, and then began sending them out.

Alison Bechdel:

There was this gay and lesbian subculture happening in the ’80s that I was so excited by, this whole like sort of parallel world where gay people were making their own art, and newspapers, and had their own bookstores and bars, and I loved that world, and I wanted to document it. I wanted to like, not just be part of it, but to show it. So I started doing that with these comics. Like, I just wanted to see images of people like me, which I didn’t see anywhere in the culture at that point.

//

Debbie Millman:

… That was Alison Bechdel, from an interview I did with her in 2016. In 2016 I also interviewed the great Eileen Myles, who’s been a prominent figure in American poetry for decades now. Here are some excerpts from that interview …

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Debbie Millman:

You moved to New York City in 1974 to be a poet, and you said that all of your life people have asked you what you do, and you say that you’re a poet, and they just kind of look at you like you said you’re a stripper. Still?

Eileen Myles:

No, they look at you like you said you were a mime. It would be cool if they looked at you, if they thought you were a stripper. I mean, they were just like, “What does that person do?” I mean, even early today, I had a conversation with somebody, and there was somebody taking pictures, and he was like, “Well, what do you do all day?” I just thought, That’s so strange. Well, what do you do all day? You know?

Eileen Myles:

Part of what’s interesting about being a poet is that nobody knows. You know? That it’s sort of like, what people don’t get is it’s almost like you’re a professional human.

Debbie Millman:

In what way? What do you mean?

Eileen Myles:

You know, in the same way that there are epic poems, right? And there would be a hero, but really the hero of the epic poem was the poet. The one who wrote the story, you know? Who gave mind to the saga, kind of. And I think that you’re still that person. Except that the saga is kind of a day, is kind of a Postmodern day, and you’re sort of in it, kind of telling the story of it, you know? And it doesn’t have to be a linear story, but you’re just kinda saying what’s—I’m make a mime gesture—you’re kind of saying what’s here.

Debbie Millman:

You are.

Eileen Myles:

Yeah. And I think that’s a very ordinary, but a very necessary and sort of completely surreal and phenomenal job. And yet I think that is the job of the poet.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve written about how you walked into the Veselka Café in October of 1975 and met the late New York poet Paul Violi, who invited you to a workshop at St. Mark’s Church. And you went and wrote this about the experience: “Suddenly, the rest of my history came out of that accidental moment. I met Allen Ginsberg, and I thought I must be in the right place. Every situation spawns another one, and those were the ones that I had, the lives I had.” What do you think your life would have been like if you hadn’t met Paul?

Eileen Myles:

I mean, I so much wrote my novel Inferno to say what it was like to be a female coming into New York as a poet in the ’70s. You know? Because every dude had some book you should read. I mean, to quote the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, he said, I think he was talking about art in the ’80s, and he said there was no top of the heap, there was just a lot of little heaps on the top. And that’s how the poetry world sort of always was. And was then. So it was just a question of what other pile I could have wound up in.

Eileen Myles:

But Paul was my guide into all the, quote, “other” schools of poetry at the time. We didn’t consider it other, it was like Black Mountain, it was Beat, it was New York school, it was everything that was sort of not in the mainstream American canon of literature. So that was the right place, and hopefully I would have found it some other way, but Paul was the guide.

Debbie Millman:

You have said that you felt funny about being in the New York school, and you prefer, I believe you said, the Folk poet school.

Eileen Myles:

Right. I mean, I think I’m just sort of wanting to be a little more, even more vernacular; I mean, even the New York school is kinda precious, and “we’re about art,” and I want that to be less true.

Debbie Millman:

In an interview in The Paris Review, you stated, “I’ve made myself homeless. I’ve cut myself off from anything I knew prior to living in New York. I did this to myself, so I know exactly how it happened.” Do you think this was a necessary component to you becoming the writer you are now?

Eileen Myles:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that we’re always translating, right? And again, I think any of us who come from another class, on any level, can’t stay home and do or make—you have to take what you have someplace else. I mean, I’ve even, in the poetry world I’ve done that, with basically importing male Avant-Garde styles into kind of a queer or a lesbian world. So that I feel like I’ve operated a lot like a translator of styles and realities, or even bringing a lesbian reality into the poetry world.

Eileen Myles:

I think between me and Jill Soloway, we’ve brought more lesbian content into the mainstream than there’s been in a while.

Debbie Millman:

Jill Soloway, of course, the creator of the television show Transparent.

Eileen Myles:

Right.

Debbie Millman:

In 2009, you wrote a book of essays titled The Importance of Being Iceland. And you wrote that after you became sober, you began performing instead of reading your poems, and even tried talking for a while, and improvising, after being moved by performers like Spalding Gray. And talking led you to running for political office. And in 1992, you conducted an openly female write-in candidacy for president against George Bush. What made you do this?

Eileen Myles:

I’ve lately been thinking about the fact that I think I was a little unhappy. I think my girlfriend at the time decided to go to grad school. And I was disappointed.

Debbie Millman:

So you needed something to do? Let’s run for president.

Eileen Myles:

So I felt like I needed a new project. I was like, “Really? So it’s not enough to be like artists and lovers together in the East Village, you’ve got to get an MFA?” You know? And I was like, “So what is it that I need to do, exactly?” You know? And I think that all these things kinda added up to this interesting possibility. I had seen Pat Paulsen running for president, funny candidates forever. Jello Biafra running for office. Mostly men, actually, if I think about it. And it did seem like I had been really interested in figuring out how to be political in my work. Like, authentically political in a way that felt like my work, still, but somehow that I could feel comfortable with being this dispenser of knowledge or information or presence or whatever. So with all that, and the timing of George Bush and the new language of political correctness, and I was doing improvisational performance work, and I thought, My God, a campaign would be exactly that.

Debbie Millman:

You mentioned the words “politically correct,” and I know that the whole sort of appropriation of that term in culture has pissed you off. Tell me why.

Eileen Myles:

Well, it’s really funny, because it’s specifically lesbian language. That’s what it was. It was just like, in a lesbian community, “politically correct” meant the most … that would be the person who would stand up at the reading and say, “Would that person with the perfume on their body, or other animal products, please …” I mean, there was just like the most, you know, it was just like I was not a MichFest person, and I sort of wish I went. Part of the legend of it was there was a lot of that kind of energy. And so that was our language. And it was so ludicrous and shocking to see our Republican president suddenly using this lesbian language against us.

Debbie Millman:

Almost exactly a year ago, you and your former girlfriend Jill Soloway authored the Thanksgiving Paris Manifesto, “Topple the Patriarchy.” And from what I understand, you and Jill were feeling revolutionary after she saw Hamilton, and you had both visited the White House. And you’ve said that writing the manifesto together was an act of passion. Can you share some of the themes of what you wrote, and why you wrote it?

Eileen Myles:

I think we were enjoying the extreme act of creating new requirements for what art-making and … of all sorts. Like, inviting men to stop making art for 50 or 100 years. Inviting men to stop making pornography for 100 years. It was just to go out there and create a whole new space in which female work would flourish and expand, and men would think twice about going forward into that space. I don’t know, it’s like anything I say sounds like I’m taking it back, and I don’t mean it at all. But I do mean a manifesto. The nature of a manifesto is hyperbolic. Because what you’re trying to do is kind of like level the playing field and even create the playing field. So I think in different ways, both of us were wanting to have pleasure, be extreme, because I think, as in Civil Rights, and this is Civil Rights, the problem is an unequal starting place. I mean, that’s what the theory of justice is about, you know?

Eileen Myles:

And so there’s never been justice for women. There’s never been a place where men actually aren’t making work. So why don’t we start there?

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Debbie Millman:

… Eileen Myles. In 2017 Kenny Fries came on Design Matters. Kenny is a disabled gay Jewish man who has written deeply insightful books about the devastating effects of discrimination against the imperfect …

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Debbie Millman:  
What makes a life worth living? Do looks, ability and talent make your life more valuable than someone else’s? Kenny Fries has made it his life’s work to understand just that, and he should know better than anyone. As a disabled Jewish gay man, he has spent years thinking about things as an outsider. He’s transformed his personal journeys into deeply insightful books shedding light on the devastating effects of discrimination against the imperfect. Today I’m going to talk to Kenny Fries about his desire to understand the undesirable and the connections between his personal and our political situation.

Debbie Millman:  
The word disabled itself feels like it has real pejorative connotations. It’s not an objective word. It’s a word that is embedded with judgment. How do we as a culture try to shift that perception?

Kenny Fries:  
Yeah, we’re stuck with that word, aren’t we, and the history of the word? Which is why I think, in a lot of ways, when groups try to reclaim words in the disability community, it used to be crip and cripple. I don’t know. I think we’re stuck in this dialectic of disability and what I call non‑disability—most people call able‑bodied, but I don’t use that term. 

Debbie Millman:  
Non‑disabled?

Kenny Fries:  
Yeah, I use non‑disabled. As long as we’re in that dialectic, I think we’re in trouble and we can’t get out of it because it’s not a fixed category. At any moment, we will all be disabled. Whether it’s from a virus, or a slip in the bathtub, or old age, we will become disabled in some way. It’s something that everybody has in common.

When Body, Remember came out, I was asked on a radio show, “Why would somebody who’s not gay, disabled or Jewish want to read your work?” I said to them, “Well, my book is about the relationship between the body and memory. We all have bodies and we all remember.”

We’re stuck in this dialectic between disability and non‑disability, and it’s defined by the word that comes at the end of what we’re supposedly able to do, but that’s really not accurate because—it goes back to Darwin again—the whole “survival of the fittest,” which is the term that Darwin did not use.

It was coined by somebody else, and he didn’t use it until the third edition of On the Origin of Species. We get it wrong because we cut off the last part of the sentence: “It’s the survival of the fittest in a particular environment.” I can be more “able” than somebody else in certain situations.

The big example of that is the scene in The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, where I’m climbing the mountain with my then-boyfriend Ian, who’s six-foot whatever, but he is having a lot of trouble, whereas my feet and my specially designed shoes fit right into what should be handholds, but I can use them as toeholds, and so it was easy for me, or easier.

You never know. When I’m in a group of people, it depends on what the disabilities are. Sometimes I’m more able to move chairs than they are, but when I’m in a group of people that are non‑disabled, they could move chairs more easily than I can. It really depends on the context. It’s really the context that defines what disability is.

Debbie Millman:  
You tackle the subjective identity around several themes. You talk about being Jewish, being gay, being disabled, but what about being a writer?

Kenny Fries:   
[Laughs] That one again. I would love to just be considered a writer, to be honest with you. I would love somebody to just talk to me about how I put the words together or how the narrative works, but because of the subject matter, I’m always … it’s about the content, which is fine. There’s a lot of content there.

The joke I’ve been saying, I tell people, is that when I was younger I think I was looked at more as a gay writer, and now I’m looked at as more as a disabled writer, but, no, I haven’t changed. It’s just whatever the …

Debbie Millman:  
The circumstances around …

Kenny Fries:  
… and the zeitgeist, yeah.

Debbie Millman:  
In one of your poems, a poem titled “Body Language,” you turn the idea of body and memory into a metaphor, and ask, “What is a scar if not the memory of a once-open wound?” That really moved me. I was wondering if you would read that poem today, here on Design Matters.

Kenny Fries:  
Sure.

Body Language: “What is a scar if not the memory of a once-open wound? You press your finger between my toes, slide the soap up the side of my leg, until you reach the scar with the two holes, where the pins were inserted 20 years ago.

“Leaning back, I remember how I pulled the pin from the leg, how in a waist‑high cast, I dragged myself from my room to show my parents what I had done. Your hand on my scar brings me back to the tub and I want to ask you, ‘What do you feel when you touch me there?’ I want you to ask me, ‘What are you feeling now?’ But we do not speak.

“You drop the soap in the water and I continue washing, alone. Do you know my father would bathe my feet, as you do, as if it was the most natural thing? But up to now, I have allowed only two pair of hands to touch me there, to be the salve for what still feels like an open wound. The skin has healed but the scars grow deeper. When you touch them what do they tell you about my life?”

Debbie Millman:  
Thank you. Absolutely beautiful.

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Debbie Millman:

… Kenny Fries. Last but not least: Saeed Jones, poet, memoirist, cultural critic and TV talk show host. I spoke to him in 2019, just after he released his memoir How We Fight for Our Lives.

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Debbie Millman:

Saeed, is it true that you often fantasize about having sex with Paul Newman’s ghost?

Saeed Jones:

Absolutely. We’re doing it right now. That’s why it’s very convenient being in a very complicated relationship with a ghost, because you just never know what’s going on. No one can see.

Debbie Millman:

When did this start?

Saeed Jones:
You know, I think I remember probably in college starting to see some of Paul Newman’s films or films featuring him, and I think that’s around the time I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, baby.

Saeed Jones:
My goodness. What I find really, truly … I mean, he was very handsome, certainly, but also, I think, as far as we know, he was a good man. He stood up for some really important causes that matter now. You know? I think he would be a part of the cultural conversation now in a very contemporary way. He was very kind, had a wonderful reputation. He loved his wife. He loved his dogs. It’s a real delight that as we see all of these men in Hollywood now, in 2019, it’s just like, God, you too? You’re a jerk? You’re a monster? You’re a … you know? And to see this guy who’s like, “Oh, no. I’m super dead. Nope. Still pretty good.”

Debbie Millman:

You were raised by your single mom in Lewisville, Texas—not Louisville, but Lewisville.

Saeed Jones:
It really confused me when I went to school—

Debbie Millman:

I know.

Saeed Jones:
… in Kentucky. I was like, “Oh, no.”

Debbie Millman:

She had a job with Delta as you were growing up. She was also a Buddhist, and her mother, your grandmother, was rather religious, but she was not a Buddhist. What was that like for you to be between those two sort of fierce points of view?

Saeed Jones:

You know, unfortunately I think this is true for a lot of people of faith, religion in our families, it is such a source of division often. Some of my earliest memories as a little kid, probably a toddler, actually, are my family arguing with my mom about faith—you know, “You’re going to go to hell.” By the time I was a little older, early teens, the conversation had kind of become the silence, where people weren’t … they just weren’t talking anymore. People weren’t close. No one would explain why. It just was the way things were. You know? I remember at one point as a kid my mom ended up in the hospital, and it was really serious, and her family didn’t immediately come to take care of her. In retrospect now, as an adult, oh my gosh. That says a lot. You know?

So by the time I was a teenager, then it became, “Well, we’re not going to have this argument with Carol anymore. She’s an adult. She’s really set in her ways, but here’s Saeed. He’s a teenager. He’s acting worldly. He’s starting to talk back. He’s effeminate.” I think, in an interesting way, the worldliness, the sarcasm, the “You’re just being too much of a teenager,” allowed them to not have to say head on, “We think you’re going to be gay, and we want to stop that.” Instead, it was kind of framed as like, “You’re going to go to hell, like your mom.” I was like, “What does that mean?” Yeah. It was really awful, and it led to a lot of hurt, more silence, because I think it just got so painful that I also distanced myself from those family members. We have since made up, and we have a better relationship, but we will never be as close as we could have been, had this conflict not been a part of our lives.

Debbie Millman:

You realized you were gay at quite a young age. You’ve written about how as a kid you realized that being Black can get you killed, and so can being gay—and combined, being a gay, Black boy is a death wish. So, you felt you needed to hide who you were.

Saeed Jones:

Yeah. You’re right. I mean, from my earliest, most vague, kind of blurry fantasies, it was always boys and men. You know? I just didn’t really fantasize about women’s bodies. I thought it was rude, actually. I remember—

Debbie Millman:

So polite.

Saeed Jones:

Yeah. When I was hosting AM to DM, the morning show for Buzzfeed, which I did for a couple of years, I got to interview Tyra Banks. I told her that I was like, “I remember when you were on the Sports Illustrated cover, because that was history-making. My guy friends at school were like …” I remember I checked myself, but I remember thinking, “It would be rude to see any more of Tyra.” That’s when I was like, “Oh.” Yeah. I didn’t have question about attraction. It was always like, how is this going to work, in terms of a life?

Will I ever have love? Will I ever get married? Because at the time, this is 2000 to 2004, for example, that’s when I was in high school. Marriage equality certainly wasn’t even on the docket. Would I ever be a father? If I do have a family, if I do find this man, will I be able to introduce him to my family? Will I be able to bring them home for Thanksgiving? I don’t know. It felt like America’s already perilous. You have people like Matthew Shepard or James Byrd Jr. being killed just for who they are anyway, but also even if I’m not killed, am I just signing up for misery by being myself? That just seemed like a, and it is, an unfair choice. That’s not a choice.

Debbie Millman:

I know that you were really impacted by the deaths of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. I read that you stated that, just as some cultures have 100 words for snow, there should be 100 words in our language for all the ways a Black boy can lie awake at night. How did you cope? Were you always in a state of fear?

Saeed Jones:

Not necessarily. I don’t know if I would have said that if you asked me at the time, like, “Saeed, are you scared?” I would be like, “What are you talking about?” I was a very creative kid. I was reading very, very passionately, particularly when I was in middle school. We didn’t have the internet, dial-up. Then dial-up comes right at the beginning of high school. Of course, it was so slow, and you couldn’t actually use your landline phone and be on the computer. It took a while before that was even a part. So, I was just reading a lot of books.

I started writing. I had a really rich creative life. I think, though I didn’t realize I was coping, I think my reading and what became my writing life as a kid manifested in this rich interiority I had. I have such an overactive imagination. That’s just why now I’m married to Paul Newman’s ghost. I just had elaborate fantasies and everything and a world to myself. So, I think that kept me from feeling dead inside and kept me from feeling that the way America was outlining the borders of my identity in barbed wire, that they were never going to get to who I really, really am.

Saeed Jones:

For a long time growing up, just admitting that it was hard to be yourself just felt like a risk not worth taking.

Debbie Millman:

Oh. Absolutely. I grew up in such a state of both cultural and personal homophobia. I didn’t come out until I was 50, so I totally understand. You said that “gay” wasn’t a word that you could imagine actually hearing from your mom, that if you pictured her moving her lips, AIDS came out instead. You finally came out to her in 2005, when you were 19 years old. You were on the phone. You were walking to class. You described the experience this way. You said, “I had come out to my mother as a gay man, but within minutes I realized I had not come out to her as myself.” Can you elaborate? What did you mean by that?

Saeed Jones:

Well, as a queer person, I just feel that the coming out narrative is so simplistic. It’s so limited, because what does it mean? What kind of gay? It is certainly a vital bit of information, but it is far more important to the straight person than it is to the person saying it. To them it’s a, whoa, this is a huge bit of information. I know so much more about you now than I did before. Maybe that’s true, but we know we’re coming out constantly. You’re at the doctor. You start a new job. You’re kind of reading the room. Someone assumes you and your partner are girlfriends or best friends. It is literally queer. It is fluid. It is an ongoing kind of dynamic. Of course, because I believe in intersectionality, it’s just part of who we are, and no one says, “I’m Black.” We don’t have this commandment binary, “you’re not and then you are” dynamic for any other part of identity, really, I think. Even gender we have a little more space, because it’s even like there’s space to say, “I’m a girly-girl,” as opposed to whatever.

Yeah. I came out to my mom. I said, “I’m gay.” She asked me some … “Do you use protection?” I was like, “Yes.” “Have you had experiences?” “Yes.” “OK. You used protection?” “Yes.” I did appreciate that, because there was no judgment. She didn’t say, “Why are you having …?” It was just I think two of the more essential questions an adult should ask their child about sex: “Are you having it? Are you well-versed or getting healthcare for it? Yeah. OK. But are you in love? Are you dating good men? Who are these men? Do you like them? Do they take you to dinner?” Like, those questions about the richness of experience that are actually far more important. Right? “Are you happy?” I wasn’t. You know?

We didn’t get to talk about all that, both because I don’t know if I felt comfortable or I felt that I had the vocabulary to articulate it, but also I think my mom and many other people of her generation, I don’t think they try or want to be homophobic or transphobic, but if they haven’t done the reading—and at the time my mother just had not—if they haven’t done the work, it’s just like a bridge that just ends with a sudden drop off, and they’re just kind of like, “I don’t know. I guess I wish you well, but I’m going to wave from here, while you’re in your little boat, going off without me.” They think they’re helpless, as opposed to they are abandoning it, because that’s what it means to say, “I’m not going to figure this out.”

Debbie Millman:

What would you have told her if she had asked you those questions?

Saeed Jones:

Yeah. I would have said, “I’m a mess, and men are trash, and I’m really attracted to them. What were some things you learned about dating in your 20s?” Even if it’s just, “Men are weird, right?” And her being like, “Yeah. They are. Welcome.”

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… Saeed Jones, and before that Kenny Fries, Eileen Myles and Alison Bechdel. You can listen to the full interviews, and sign up for our newsletter, on our website Designmattersmedia.com. This is the 17th 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 to you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Celebrating Pride appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

Which of these vocations apply to you? Dancer, fashion designer, entrepreneur, designer, sculptor? If you answered “all of the above,” congratulations, you must be the artist Nick Cave. Nick is perhaps best known for his Sound Suits, which are fantastical, wearable fabric sculptures. Bob Faust is an artist and designer, though he has described himself as part artist, part designer, part mediator, and part therapist. So we’re going to have to investigate all of that.

Debbie Millman:

Bob runs Faust, a cultural branding and communication studio, and their work has been exhibited in places such as MASS MoCA and the Chicago Design Museum. I’m interviewing them together because they live together, they work together and they’ve even been censored together. Nick Cave and Bob Faust, welcome to Design Matters.

Nick Cave:

Hi.

Bob Faust:

Great to be here, Debbie. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Gentlemen, I understand that you have a very large preserved wasp nest on the rooftop of your home in Chicago. So what’s that about?

Nick Cave:

We found this building. We were looking for a building for maybe, I would say five years, maybe six years ago. We had designed the space, and sort of we’re in the process of the construction of the rehab. So in the process, in the sort of sun room, in the ceiling as they were pulling the boards away, was this hornet nest. I was out of town. They are sending me images, and I was like “build around it.” And of course they were like, “He’s crazy.” But it felt for me, it was sort of the epitome of it and everything. It was like the fact that that was built by insects, and that it was sort of natural. And it was everything that I believed in. So I wanted to preserve the authenticness of that idea.

Bob Faust:

It’s totally a designed object to the minute you like start looking up at it, you see this pattern that can’t possibly be made by a machine, and that’s the most exciting thing.

Nick Cave:

Yeah. So we sort of liked it because it was attached to the property as well as, like, in the building there’s areas as you walk through the studio where a graffiti artist had come in and marked up the building in that sort of way. We sort of held onto these elements that somehow found their way as part of the history of the property.

Debbie Millman:

Nick, let’s talk about your background first. You were born in Fulton, MO. The third of seven brothers. Your parents divorced when you were very young and you lived with your mom and brothers. Your maternal grandparents lived nearby on a farm. You credit your mother with kickstarting your career by responding so enthusiastically to your handmade birthday cards. Tell us what kinds of cards you were making. What were you making them with?

Nick Cave:

It was not only just birthday; every holiday I would make her cards. It was sort of me sort of thinking about her and how do I sort of think about her in relationship to this particular holiday, and what does that look like? What does that mean in terms of building a handmade card? So for me, it was really sort of thinking through all of that, and thinking through the last card, and how do I sort of amp up to the next one? And the thing that was amazing is that there was that sort of commitment of honoring a process that I sort of like decided that this is what I’m going to do every holiday. And just that commitment sort of paved the way for responsibility and emotion.

Nick Cave:

For me, you think about this two-dimensional sort of handmade paper assemblage and the impact that it has on one’s emotion was like unreal and yet real. I was thinking like, Wow, this makes you feel that way. It was magical because I could not really sort of identify in a tangible sense like what in this process is received in this enormous way. So that was the beginning of me sort of thinking about the impact of doing the impact of making an impression, the impact of one responding to something.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve stated that when you’re raised by a single mother with six brothers and lots of hand-me-downs, you have to figure out how to make those clothes your own.

Nick Cave:

Oh, honey. Right?

Debbie Millman:

My mother was a seamstress also, so I did a lot of that. How did you go about making these things? What did you make for yourself? How did you reconstruct some of the hand-me-downs that you were foisted upon?

Nick Cave:

My mother comes from a family of 16, and she was the first. And so I was—

Debbie Millman:

She’s the oldest of 16 siblings?

Nick Cave:

The interesting thing is that I’m surrounded by like makers. My grandmothers were quilters. My aunts were amazing seamstresses. My grandfathers were carpenters, furniture makers. So you’re just surrounded by all of this sort of making. And not that they taught me any of it, I was like this person that was like this voyeur from a distance. I was like observing and curious and interested in it. But I think I took my first sewing class in high school and weaving class in high school. So I was very much interested in this process of building—to build a cloth, to weave your own fabric, was just interesting to me.

Nick Cave:

So when you’re raised with seven brothers, hand-me-downs were part of just what happened. And to know that I could sort of remove a sleeve or I could add a pocket or I could embroider onto an existing garment was really sort of the beginning of claiming and establishing your identity through this sort of material, sort of object.

Debbie Millman:

Nick, you said that looking back at your childhood, you find it amazing that you were in the presence of so much unconditional love. And I have to say in doing this show for 16 years now, and interviewing upwards of 450 people, I’ve never come across someone that said that they were brought up with unconditional love. And it’s an extraordinary thing to realize about the way you’re brought up, and so unusual.

Nick Cave:

Well, yeah, it’s interesting because I would always hear from my friends, like, “Ah, the holidays,” and just the drama around that. I had never experienced absolutely any drama. When we would all gather, it was hugging, kissing and we somehow knew that all of that drama had to be left at the front door. It was all about respect. Even when me and my brothers would fight, we would have to say to one another “sorry,” hug and kiss, and make up.

Nick Cave:

It was never like drug out for three days. It just never was part of my upbringing. I don’t know that sort of
side or that sort of behavior of rivalry. Even today, yes, I sort of like, “Oh, I gotta step out of the room, collect myself.” Because that’s just part of being able to be in this sort of space, shared space. How do we sort of embrace one another and respect one another?

Debbie Millman:

Bob, I believe you grew up in a huge Italian family.

Bob Faust:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Your grandmother was the oldest of 20 children.

Bob Faust:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

That’s got to be some sort of world record.

Bob Faust:

We put on a caveat on that because she had two sets of twin siblings. So her mom only gave birth 18 times, I guess.

Debbie Millman:

Only 18. OK. Thanks for clarifying that.

Bob Faust:

Only 18 times.

Debbie Millman:

That’s good for our listeners to know. We want to be real accurate here with the number of births.

Bob Faust:

It’s different than the number of bodies I guess. But it always kind of threw me off as a kid as to like most people have a general understanding of what an aunt looks like, how old they are, where they fit into the rankings.

Debbie Millman:

Right.

Bob Faust:

And my mom was older than many of her aunts. She babysat her aunts. So all of a sudden like an aunt doesn’t look like an aunt for me. It took me a long time to figure out kind of what that all meant because some aunts were more like cousins and some cousins were more like people you’d babysit, not peers. We’re all just like in different generations, kind of mixed up.

Debbie Millman:

As you were growing up, you said that blocks were your thing. What kinds of things were you—

Bob Faust:

Where are you finding that? Where would I ever have said that? Oh my god. They were my thing. I loved blocks. I think that was kind of the equivalent of like Nick doing this making. That was a place where you could dump out a room full of blocks all different colors and literally just like lose yourself for days. And not necessarily lose yourself for days like an architect building the perfect building, it was like building the stories. It was about proportion, but proportion is needed for this kind of thing to happen in it and this kind of thing to happen in it. So it was very much in keeping with my life today. I think it absolutely was a precursor to how I think a designer works, right?

Debbie Millman:

I love when I come across people that have that kind of background. My brother has a son who’s 13, my nephew, and he’s just super happy by himself building things, whether it be with LEGO or any sorts of things. My brother is really worried. He’s like, “Why does he just like to sit in his room all day and build things?” And I’m like, “See what can happen when you do that?” I point to people like you.

Bob Faust:

As a little kid, that’s what I did. As I got older, my parents were super cool about the idea that your room is your room. With lack of lots of friends and social life, you find really cool things to do on your own. I would repaint that room in like a thousand different ways. That’s what Saturday and Sunday might be. All of a sudden the room would be a totally different place—reorganizing the furniture, bringing like stealing stuff from the brother’s room to put into my room. But all about that.

Debbie Millman:

You said that at that time in your life if you could play sports and if you could be perfect, your life would be, as well. You stated that you got so good at being good that you believe this person you made up was actually who you actually were. I’m wondering what gave you that sense that you needed to be perfect, and that sports would be the sort of gateway to that perfection?

Bob Faust:

I think that’s just like every single influence that’s outside of you. It’s everything you see from school to, I guess, TV to magazines. I too would actually say that my family was full of love, but we didn’t touch subjects. There were subjects that were like maybe not off limits, but they ended up being off limits because of things we built up in our brains that made those associations or ideas bigger and more impermeable.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. You declared that you lived a picture-perfect life for 45 years this way, all obtained in full denial of who you were, and I can relate. I didn’t come out until I was 50, so I totally get it. But you said that these fears helped you hone your design skills. I want to know in what way?

Bob Faust:

Now, I know where you found all this and I’m trying to take myself back to that conversation.

Debbie Millman:

Aha, your diary.

Bob Faust:

But yes, I absolutely do because design is all about problem-solving for lack of a better phrase, and that means parameters. So the more parameters you have, the more inventive you need to be in order to make something that’s wonderful and special. To this day, as much as I love someone saying, “Go do whatever you want,” I love to find the parameters because that’s where the invention happens. I think that’s where I’m getting at with that. The more walls, the more you have to really think about how you live without those walls.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. When did you first realize you wanted to be a designer?

Bob Faust:

Well, I’m not 100% sure of that because I didn’t know what a designer was until college. At that time there was this thing called commercial art, I think it was called, and that meant you worked for an advertising agency. You like might draw things, is what I thought. We had to do a time capsule in grade school and it actually was sent back to you when you were 20 years old. So right after college, right? And the time capsule said that I would be a commercial artist living on a boat on the lake in Chicago with a dog.

Bob Faust:

I was a graphic designer at the time that this thing showed back up at my parents’ address, graphic designer living a block from the lake because you can’t live on the lake in a house boat in Chicago, and I had just gotten a dog.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Bob Faust:

So I guess I kind of always had an idea.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, talk about a 10-year plan. Nick, you attended the Kansas City Art Institute, w
here you continued to sew. Nick, you attended the University of Illinois and got a BA in graphic design. Bob, one of your first jobs was as a design manager for Playboy magazine. What kind of work were you doing for Playboy and what was it like working around all those naked women?

Bob Faust:

Hilarious. That job actually came because it was a brand-new position and it was called the “manager of design and production services for corporate communications.” They’d never had that position before. It was part of the company’s restructuring in order to eliminate the budget line of sending an annual report out to be done by a design firm. So as you can imagine, back in the day, those were giant budgets, and they thought, Oh, we could hire a young person to do our annual report for less money than it would cost to send that thing out, and they could do all these other things. I read it as, Oh, I get to be the next RuPaul, because I’m still a young kid. I’m like, Oh my god, the opportunity is huge.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely.

Bob Faust:

So I took that job, and it was a really awesome job because your … not your direct report, but the second to direct report was Christie Hefner at the time.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Bob Faust:

Her office was literally a stone’s-throw away. And there was a lot to learn. Part of my plan was work at a boutique design firm, work at a big agency, work in-house and then figure out what you want to do. So that was my in-house kind of idea.

Debbie Millman:

Right. Nick, I understand that the first garment you made in school was a very sort of flamboyantly designed pair of pants and a shirt with a “harlequin sensibility.” What is a harlequin sensibility?

Nick Cave:

I think back then I was really sort of into Grace Jones.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, of course. Who wasn’t, right?

Nick Cave:

So I was really sort of like going through my Grace Jones drag phase. So that was really what was influencing my first sort of hand-printed garment was really sort of diving into this persona. So I was like Grace Jones doing my Grace Jones drag for a minute there. Just sort of in that space of in between androgyny and sort of exploring all of that and just sort of using the cabaret, which is the nightclub as this sort of platform. It was an extension of school. How do you bring drag into this sort of public arena.

Nick Cave:

So I would be making these wearable objects, costumes, and then presenting them in this sort of setting. So it was sort of me just, again, always sort of like outside of the studio. It’s this open canvas. So I would just be creating these spectacles on the streets. Why not? And just really just purely out of impulse and gathering friends and making something happen. It’s really just cycling through again through the opportunity of looking at space as a space to occupy, in a sense.

Debbie Millman:

You went on to get an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. You were the only African American in your class. You’ve said that this was the first time you had to look at yourself as a Black male, and it was a struggle to find your place. How did you manage?

Nick Cave:

In Detroit.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Nick Cave:

Thank god for Detroit. I mean, I really say that in the most sort of sincere way. For me, not only Cranbrook was amazingly beautiful, but it’s also very isolated from everything. So I need that urban environment to balance my sort of self out. So Detroit was there. It provided that opportunity for me to sort of step off of the grounds of Cranbrook and to be in this urban setting to be around my people, to be engulfed in house music, the club scene, and to be able to be refueled in order to get to get back on campus and get back to work.

Nick Cave:

I think that when you … I just never had been in an educational setting where that would even ever occur to me that I could be the only … so you’re just sort of like, all of a sudden, your whole being is just in shock.

Bob Faust:

And you had never visited that campus prior to showing up.

Nick Cave:

No. I had never visited the campus prior. So it was just this sort of great awakening. It forced me to talk about that moment, that experience right now. So it was difficult to talk about or to talk about that in my work or to find its way in my work, but yet it was something that was very much in the forefront, and in order for me to move accordingly and to get past this reality, I had to sort of dive in.

Nick Cave:

I thought it was hard for me, but my colleagues it was very hard for them because they didn’t know how to talk about the work from my perspective. It was very interesting, and that was really sort of this moment where I had this awakening sort of moment that, whoa, this space that I’m occupying does exist without the sort of expansion of diversity.

Debbie Millman:

Can you talk a little bit about the impact in first seeing Barkley Hendricks’ painting Steve had on you? I know that that was a sort of one of the defining moments in your journey to being the kind of artist you are now.

Nick Cave:

When I saw that painting it was in this exhibition called “A Color,” which was the first black expo. Look, I had no money and I was like dying because I wanted this fucking painting. And I was like, “I don’t have $10,000.” I mean, back then—

Debbie Millman:

That’s all it was back then?

Nick Cave:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Oh my god.

Nick Cave:

Yeah. But you know, girl, $10,000 back then it’s like a million dollars to me because I’m like broke.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I have a similar story about Jean-Michel Basquiat. I saw a show of his drawings on paper in, I don’t know, maybe the early, early 1990s, and it was $16,000.

Nick Cave:

Right?

Debbie Millman:

I’m like, oh my God.

Nick Cave:

And you’re just trying to put it together like it was just not possible. Nothing I was imagining trying to put together a scenario that was working. I think to be able to see. No. 1, to be able to experience that expo and to be surrounded by artists of color was like a
real big awakening that we’ve arrived, that we’re here and that I am not the only one that’s making art that’s an artist of color. So that was an extraordinary moment, but to be able to see Barkley’s work and to be able to see the Black male as this symbol of power, a stoic and standing with dignity was in style.

Nick Cave:

That’s when I really was able to tap into style. And the influence of dress and the impact of what that is within the community of color is a big deal. It really identifies one’s sort of stature, one’s clout. So it was really sort of interesting to be able to sort of see that in this grand gesture and to be proud in that sort of moment of clarity.

Debbie Millman:

In 1992, after the police beating of Rodney King, you were sitting on a bench in Chicago and you started to think about yourself more and more as a Black man and as someone who was discarded, devalued and viewed as less than. You saw some twigs littered on the ground in a new light. You suddenly thought that they looked forsaken. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what happened next.

Nick Cave:

I think I had just accepted a position at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago from Cranbrook. So that’s how I arrived to Chicago. I remember when that incident happened and I was in the office, and my colleagues were … I could feel that they were avoiding me, heads were down. I could tell that they didn’t want to have this sort of discussion. And I was literally just going through it because I didn’t understand it. This is the first time we had documentation of these brutal incidents on tape.

Nick Cave:

So it was really sort of like finally, we were able to show what we have been dealing with. So for me, I was just trying to understand how to process. I could be profiled. That could be me. I’m looking at that and thinking these sort of things. Then I’m in the park just trying to find a way to connect to talk about this. I happened to look down on the ground and there was this twig. It became something insignificant, something less than devalued. But for some reason, I started collecting the twigs.

Nick Cave:

So then I went home and got a shopping cart and then started just collecting all the twigs, took them back to the studio, started to build this sculpture. I didn’t think that I could put it on. I don’t know why I wasn’t thinking that. I think I was thinking more about just building this sort of coat of armor, something that I could wrap myself in to protect my inner spirit.

Nick Cave:

Then once I realized I could put it on and I started to move, it made a sound. So that was the beginning of Sound Suits. Sound at that particular moment was protest for me. So in order to be heard, you got to speak louder. So that was the beginning of creating these sort of instruments, these suit of armors that were hiding gender, race, class, forcing you to look at something without judgment.

Nick Cave:

Because in order for us to understand something, we want to put it into categories or find its place. So it really was all of these things sort of combined into one protection. I was reading about how they described Rodney King as larger than life, worked out with prison weights, and I’m sort of like imagining, “What does that look like?” So building something larger than life, building something that could be threatening that is daunting in a sense, scary.

Nick Cave:

So that was the first time that you think your conscience is awake and you’re present and you are pretty much sort of like on top of it, but that was that moment that situation awakened my consciousness in the most profound way.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve talked about how the Sound Suits obscure race, and class, and gender. Was that something that you felt you were doing consciously, or was it only after when you realized you could actually put on the suit that it accomplished that?

Nick Cave:

I think a lot of things in that series of work all sort of came afterwards, or in the process of doing, because I think that I didn’t know what I was making. I didn’t know the power that it had until I gave birth to the first Sound Suit. And when I did and I looked at it, I knew. I knew when I saw it that my life would never be the same.

Debbie Millman:

And it wasn’t.

Nick Cave:

That was the one thing that I knew. I built this sort of body of work and I hid it in the closet. I sort of was getting attention around the works so rapidly that I as a human being was not ready. So I basically hid it in the closet for probably a decade.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Nick Cave:

Building, and making them, and putting them away until I knew what I was doing.

Debbie Millman:

When did you know what you were doing though? How did you come to the realization that this is the moment I know what I’m doing? “Here’s my intention.”

Nick Cave:

Because I think once you start to bring research to the work and understand how it sort of has manifested and starting to understand what it means to be shrouded in a garment of sorts, what it is to be shaman, what it is to be sort of hidden, concealed. All of these, it just takes time. And to be able to put on a Sound Suit and then to move and understand how you become something other, the idea of transformation and sort of stepping into that and surrendering to this otherness. Honey, that takes a whole bunch of time.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Nick Cave:

I just wanted to give myself that in order to be able to talk about it.

Debbie Millman:

Bob, I know that you’ve said that when you put the suits on, they require a lot of you. In what way?

Bob Faust:

Just a lot in all kinds of ways. I mean, in the most basic way, physically it requires a lot, because they restrict your movement. They add considerable heat. You’re supposed to move, so you’re already building heat, and then you’re now in this little oven. So there is this thing that you have to do, and when we are working with a performers or dancers specifically, we try to acclimate them by just sit … This is your suit. Sit in front of your suit. Get to know your suit. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What might it feel like under your body? And then put it on and then sit quiet in it.

Bob Faust:

And that’s so that you don’t freak out because it is limiting your movement, but it’s also limiting your eyesight. So people who are like claustrophobic will totally understand how that takes so much of your energy, but even if you’re not claustrophobic, it’s an entirely different way of existing in the world once those parameters are shrunk. So you have to
settle in it. And then when you settle and you know how you start to take little movements and then bigger movements. And suddenly you know how to operate within it.

Bob Faust:

Then you start to think, Wow, this little movement I’m making is having this gigantic effect outside of me. And all of a sudden that starts to switch the feeling. Now, you’re feeling empowered by it, right? You’re being given energy instead of that fear part, which is taking energy away. That’s when the performers become really good is when they realize that the object is not taking, it’s giving. It’s a surrender. I think that’s another big thing. Aren’t we the most empowered when we’re the most vulnerable?

Bob Faust:

That is when we have the most power. I think that that’s what they do, but it also takes somebody who wants to be there, being present and purposeful and believing and trusting in the person who made them that he wants you to be as big a part of this thing as the object. You’re not just activating them, you are them and you’re bringing yourself to them. So there’s just so much to that question.

Debbie Millman:

Nick, in 1996, you started a namesake fashion line for men and women that lasted a decade. And that is sort of how you inadvertently met Bob. Bob, I believe you first crossed paths with Nick when you happened to stop by a sample sale of Nick’s clothing designs a few years after he started his fashion line. But a bit before his art career took off. Bob, can you describe your first meeting, please?

Bob Faust:

So I was in—

Debbie Millman:

Oh, they’re both smiling, listeners. They’re both smiling.

Bob Faust:

I was invited to this apartment sale, apartment sale of sweaters. If you could imagine walking into a room where you don’t know anybody, and there’s maybe three or four people there and a rack of clothes, and that feeling of being an outsider hits you real hard. And then you’re like, everybody knows I’m in this room. And all that there is to do here is to buy sweaters.

Bob Faust:

So you now know you have to buy one of these things to get out. Oh my God, all of that stuff comes rushing over you. You’re like, all these things have to happen. Boom, boom, boom. So you approach the sweaters and you start going through them, and you’re like, This one is crazier than the last one. This one’s arm can reach the floor. This one has an extra back. If there could be an extra back …

Bob Faust:

Then you start to look at the prices, and you’re like, He’s trying to make rent. And these things are expensive. I’m trying to make rent, but now I have to buy one, so I’m like, What is the simplest one that I can manage? And I did find one that was like really me if I wasn’t so nervous and scared. So I grab it and I just want to get out of there. He comes up and he’s like, “Well, why don’t you go into my office and try that on?” And I said OK.

Bob Faust:

So I went in there. I’m putting on the sweater and in he comes with a stack that has to be 20 tall. He’s like, “You’re going to try all of these on.” So he just had me start putting these things on. What that did was it changed everything because now we’re in a separate room, talking about these things and it’s kind of funny and a bit ridiculous, and the conversation of what do you do came up. I’m like, “Well, I’m a designer and I just live around the corner.” And he’s like, “Well, I just got my first solo show with a publication budget.” I said, “So why don’t we look at doing a trade? If you like what I do, let’s do a trade.”

Bob Faust:

He came over the next day and he gave me the most amazing prompt after I think he was pretty certain I would do the project. It was the best client brief I’ve ever gotten, and it was just, “I need a book but I want an object.” I’m like, wow, that is so many parameters and so open at the same time. It goes right back to that block conversation we had—possibilities are absolutely endless but so hard and exciting to get to.

Debbie Millman:

After that, you collaborated on a project every year for the next six years and gradually became friends. But the nature of your relationship only really changed after 11 years of friendship. And Bob, you’ve said that the collaboration allowed you to know each other on a deeper level than a typical romantic relationship might allow for.

Bob Faust:

Oh, yeah. Well, remember, at this point, I’m living a totally different life.

Debbie Millman:

You were married to a woman.

Bob Faust:

I’m married. I have a 1-year-old. My life and what I believe it’s supposed to be is totally laid out exactly … and I’m going down that path. So it never entered my frame of reference that this would be anything more than a work relationship, and a friend relationship just kind of came naturally as it does with a lot of creative collaborations, right?

Bob Faust:

So that never entered my frame of reference. I think it was really lucky for us, because you don’t have any phoniness, like if you were starting a new dating scenario where you’re trying to put on your best light for that person. There was never any of that. So we got to know each other and confide in one another and worry with one another way before we ever had anything to do with each other.

Debbie Millman:

I read an interview with you about the start of your romantic relationship, where the interviewer asked you both, “who crossed the line first?” And Bob, you answered, “that’s blurry.” And Nick, you stated that the feeling was just there. We both knew it. So I have to ask, you both don’t remember who made the first move? It’s so romantic.

Bob Faust:

That’s such a perfect place to leave that question, Debbie.

Nick Cave:

Oh, we know.

Debbie Millman:

Inquiring minds want to know.

Bob Faust:

I could add a little to that. So I think the reason that all that opened up is because the year that that happened, my mom passed away. I think that that was like this linchpin thing about that was holding all that story together. And when that linchpin got loosened, and she was no longer someone that I had to worry about, and this is made up of disappointing—

Debbie Millman:

Sure, sure.

Bob Faust:

That I was able to tell myself a different story about myself, and that story explained a lot of stuff that didn’t make sense to me. So I just confided in him one day when we were together doing a project out of town. I just said, “I think that I’m gay.” A
nd he said, “Of course you are.” And that was—

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I love that.

Nick Cave:

You were mad.

Bob Faust:

I was so mad.

Nick Cave:

But that changed everything.

Debbie Millman:

The theme of overcoming fear came up quite a lot in the preparation I did for today’s show. I thought that was a fascinating common denominator that I found this theme in individual pieces about you in my research. Bob, you’ve said that when you decided to confront your fear, it created a shitstorm. You had been married to a woman, but ended the marriage and came out. Was that something that was difficult for you?

Bob Faust:

It literally was. It was that, that’s why I used the word “shitstorm.” It was a confluence of everything and you just couldn’t get under yourself. There was amazing things that were happening and opening up, and then there was all of the things that you worried were going to happen were actually happening. And you’re like, “how do you navigate not hurt people and at the same time honor what you know will be better for everyone someday? And how long is someday?” I mean, it’s a confluence. I’ve looked up so many words trying to figure out what it was, because it wasn’t all bad, it’s just it was all hard.

Debbie Millman:

I came upon something that your therapist told you that you’ve written about, and it blew my mind. He told you that fear is not real, it is only a feeling assigned to predictions of the future. Bob, I honestly think that’s one of the most profound things I’ve ever come across in my research. I have to say it again—fear is not real, it is only a feeling assigned to predictions of the future. Right? Mic drop. That’s it. It’s like, OK, thank you very much for the most profound thing I’ve ever heard.

Nick Cave:

You’re right.

Bob Faust:

It’s everything. Every time I get nervous it comes right back up. Oh, I’m so glad you feel the same way because for me that got me through so much. You just say it over and over again. I mean, there’s nothing in reality that you can put that word on. There’s nothing.

Debbie Millman:

Nick, you’ve stated that fear is probably the most powerful thing that cripples creative people. And when asked about how to step up to fear, you’ve said that you just have to push your shoulders back, stand up stout, be bold and just go in. And then thinking about that, I really felt that it takes courage and it’s also kind of a gamble. Did you ever doubt yourself in that sort of moment where you stood up stout and moved forward? Did you ever worry about what happens if I hit a wall?

Nick Cave:

Yeah, but I think that how doubting yourself is fear. It’s that place that is sort of the most seductive for me. I think about the way in which I work now, we all stand on a foundation, period. So you’re able to fall and get back up. You’re able to fall and get back up. It’s not that it’s pitless and you don’t have that foundation. So I think that allows that comfort for me. I know what I know, but what I don’t know is what I’m more interested in. So to be able to step up to it, I know that I’m going to be OK.

Nick Cave:

So you can rely on yourself, you can just sort of like … we can always go back to what was. No matter what, however long we live. We will always be moving forward, ready or not. That’s just part of human nature. So knowing that, what do we have to lose?

Debbie Millman:

You now work and live together in a space you call Facility, which was originally an abandoned building you found on the Northwest side of Chicago, and it is where the hornets’ nest lives. I understand that when you first saw it, it was in rather rough condition. Portions of the roof were collapsing, windows were broken. The basement had water damage. What made you decide to purchase this building in that shape?

Bob Faust:

It was the only building that fit everything. When you think about everything that his studio needed to be and how it needed to function, we looked for years and years to find a place or a plate that would allow that to become the most seamless that it could be. This allowed that as well as ticked off the few boxes that were really important to me, and those were outdoor space.

Bob Faust:

So when you think about a big warehouse building, that does not come with outdoor space or the ability to live in it, generally. And this one had all these little secret nooks and opportunities to be outside, from the terrace to creating a little courtyard to this indoor/outdoor place where the hornet nest lives.

Nick Cave:

And the storefronts.

Bob Faust:

It just had everything.

Nick Cave:

It’s not like that the other buildings that we looked at were in more or less the same sort of condition, it was really, as Bob said, it really provided us with the exact kind of footprint—

Bob Faust:

And the opportunity of a possibility.

Nick Cave:

—of how we imagined these businesses functioning, to be able to have all of the studio all on one level, versus three or four levels. We can’t make this project up here because we can’t get it out of the building. It was really just about flow.

Bob Faust:

And again, to be able to be surrounded by creativity, art, your destiny, to be able to wake up to your destiny, it was everything. So it was able to provide us with all of that and more.

Debbie Millman:

After you renovated the building, you mounted an installation you titled “Love Thy Neighbor.” Can you describe what you did?

Bob Faust:

Yeah. That was the first installation in the storefronts. Again, it was a great Nick prompt, right? The prompt came from him and it was, “how do we introduce ourselves to the community?” And I love the idea that when you move somewhere, someone brings you a pie. I’m like, “OK. So that is what happens in Mayberry.” But when you’re in a big warehouse building across from a high school, “Ain’t nobody bringing us a pie.”

Debbie Millman:

Nobody has ever brought me a pie.

Bob Faust:

But instead of putting up a big sign that says, “We’re a facility. This is what we’re doing.” Kind of making a deal about staking who we are, we wanted to go the opposite direction. So we reached out to the chamber of commerce and we partnered with all the businesses in the neighborhood. We found neighborhood liaisons that were like block
leads. Then we also worked with all the schools all the way through high school in the neighborhood within like a six-mile radius.

Bob Faust:

We asked them each to introduce themselves to us by taking a name tag and putting at a minimum their name on it, but they could also illustrate it or decorate it however they wanted to embellish it. Randomly, we gave out, I don’t remember what the number was, but let’s say there were 4,000 white tags, and there were 3,000 red tags. I had those worked out so that when you hung them in the window, you could use that red and that white in order to spell “love thy neighbor.”

Bob Faust:

And because it’s this macro/micro thing, these tags are only like two-inches big. Up close, it was just an installation of all these mini artworks from the community members, but across the street where the high school is, when you walk out of that door is where you see the monumental “love thy neighbor.” So it’s this dual read that is made by the actual hands that live in the neighborhood.

Nick Cave:

I think it also was the first opportunity where we were able to talk about Facility’s mission and purpose.

Bob Faust:

But in this backward way, as opposed to presenting it. We were able to say, “We’re asking you to do this. And this is who we are.”

Nick Cave:

So that kind of positioning the civic work that we strive to move ourselves forward in terms of purpose, and why are we here and what are we here to do?

Debbie Millman:

I want to talk to you about two projects that I think also really reflect those same questions of purpose. The first is an installation called Until. It really got its start in 2012 when Denise Markonish, the curator at MASS MoCA, invited you to do a show in their Gallery 5 space, which is the size of a football field. The show opened in 2016 and has since moved to several other museums and galleries. Can you talk about the concept of the show and why the name Until?

Nick Cave:

When Denise came to the studio, she came with this invitation, and she said right before she left, she goes, “there’s only one stipulation.” And I said, “What?” She said, “No Sound Suits.” And I said, “Girl, perfect.” Because I was really sort of moving, expanding and moving in a broader direction in terms of what’s next with my practice. So she goes, “I’m going to go away for a year and then I’m going to come back and sit down with you and talk about what you’ve come up with.” In a year I really wasn’t thinking about it for probably quite some time. And then Michael Brown happened.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Nick Cave:

That was the catalyst because as I was working in the studio, that incident happened. This idea of “is the racism in heaven” came to mind, and that was the catalyst for that show. The title Until came about because I think Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, it was just one incident after the other and yet, we are sort of hearing these stories. We are getting all of this propaganda from the news and yet these individuals are made to feel as if they’re guilty. So Until sort of like “guilty until proven innocent” or “innocent until proven guilty.”

Nick Cave:

So that was really the beginning of that. I created this crystal cloudscape that allowed the viewer to sort of … part of the installation you’re able to climb up to the top of the crystal cloud and ask yourself that question, “is the racism in heaven?” Which was this sort of landscape that was built from this sort of fabrication of just extraordinary making of objects, and about a dozen iron lawn jockeys were all holding dream catchers that were elaborate and blowing through the wind. That was really sort of the beginning of the project.

Debbie Millman:

Talk about your relationship to the found objects and how that became one of the centerpieces of this installation? Where did you find them? How did you construct them into the show so seamlessly?

Nick Cave:

I think the found object really, the beginning of that goes back to the hand-me-downs, sort of the deconstructing. That is really the beginning of that. My mother was the one that turned me on to second-hand stores, and I was just like at the age of 16 totally into all of that, this sort of retro garments and just looking at style and fashion in that way.

Nick Cave:

But I think it then led into the Sound Suits. Again, it was from twigs to bottle caps to other sort of materials. And to think about buttons, and to think about excess and surplus that’s here and that’s available to use to reclaim to identify was always part of this sort of making vocabulary. So for me, the found object I’ve always sort of viewed as the things that I was interested in were things that had the possibility of having multiple readings depending on how they were used.

Nick Cave:

I was very interested in this whole idea of reclaiming the discarded because, remember, that was the twig that was viewed last night, and giving value back to these objects. So it’s always been part of the sort of building of the work. It’s always been rooted and grounded in nostalgia, memory, which then allowed the viewer to sort of find their way into the work.

Bob Faust:

I think that’s a really critical part that memory piece. Especially when you’re asking questions like, “is there racism in heaven?” Or “what’s my role in racism?” If someone sees something from their past in that space, well, no longer are they looking at a story from an artist that they’re supposed to learn something from. All of a sudden, they’ve got to start identifying what their own role is in that story.

Nick Cave:

Yeah. So I think that memory and history and making connections and finding ways in which people can find their way into the work, because it’s really about … my work is always about me being able to invite you and take you by the hands on this journey.

Bob Faust:

Yeah. And it’s not just that invitation, but with until specifically as well as most of these newer large-scale shows. There is a real desire to use the show in its most impactful way. So if you think of where Until came from, “guilty until proven innocent” or “innocent until proven guilty,” we stripped all that other stuff away and left only the word Until. So that it was more of a space that anybody could go to and interpret as they need to. And then that also became the starting point for a platform of performances or responses to the installation itself.

Bob Faust:

So we had invitations to well over a dozen artists in their own right to do works within that about how they interpret Until, but also from a community’s perspective reached out to local organizations to use it as a gathering space or a meeting space or a presentation space
. So we even had in that case two of the local police chiefs who came together to have a meeting with the community underneath that crystal cloud. Remember, they’re in a place that’s about gun violence, specifically police gun violence, and that only happens if you’re thinking about how to use it to its greatest ability. There’s lots of strategy even though that’s not written down in any kind of a way. There’s no denying the fact that every project does come with a purpose that’s bigger than itself.

Nick Cave:

And how do you create safe space for difficult conversations? How do you sort of create spaces and experiences in spite of the trauma that speaks about optimism, and hope, and enlightenment?

Debbie Millman:

Another recent project that you created together was called Truth Be Told, a large-scale text installation featuring 25-foot tall black vinyl letters covering the 160-foot-long facade of the school, a gallery in the village of Kinderhook, New York. Apparently, it created quite an unexpected ruckus in town. Bob, I was wondering if you can share what happened when you mounted that installation?

Bob Faust:

Sure. Well, Truth Be Told was originated right after the George Floyd incident as part of a series of projects that were going to go up in response to that, but it happened to be one of the last projects that we actually got to mount because of its scale and because of its complexity, and that was to put it up at Kinderhook. And the timing led to it being right before the election. As you can imagine, right before the election, with all the energy that was going on around Trump specifically, the word truthstarts with TRU, and it takes a long time to put these letters up, and that’s where they started.

Bob Faust:

So you start to see T-R-U and people are going nutty, nutty, nutty, nutty. So that was the first thing, was like, what’s this going to be? and people were up in arms about that it might be pro, that it might be con. They didn’t know what it was going to be. And then all of a sudden when truth showed up, and be toldshowed up, they all immediately interpreted that as anti-Trump. Not necessarily the case.

Bob Faust:

Of course, we’re not unhappy that that is the interpretation. But the minute that it had that interpretation by some was the minute that the village absolutely said, “No way can this be up there. It’s a sign.” We had to go through all these legal channels as to what makes a sign. It needs to have date, time, place. It needs to direct you to do something.

Bob Faust:

Truth Be Told has none of those things there, but they were not going to let that go, even though the gallery had an approval to use their building for art however they want to. So this went on for months. Months and thousands of dollars of fighting to prove that this is the only legal thing they could stand on that it’s not a sign.

Nick Cave:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

So the mayor of Kinderhook ordered the artwork to be removed because the town didn’t think it looked like art.

Nick Cave:

Yeah.

Bob Faust:

Right.

Debbie Millman:

They thought it was a sign.

Bob Faust:

That’s what they’re using as the reason to take it down. I believe that the reason that they wanted it to come down is that it felt like it was a political statement that was anti-Trump, and this needed to not be in our town.

Nick Cave:

It’s interesting how people show their faces.

Bob Faust:

But that’s how they’re able to do it, is by just calling it a sign. They weren’t going to come clean and say why they were upset about it.

Nick Cave:

And the truth comes out based on communities, neighborhoods. This is right before voter repression in Atlanta. So there was a lot of damn truth that was literally, who’s going to win the election? That was another whole thing. So there were so many layers and conflicts that was sort of built around that.

Bob Faust:

I just don’t understand how the word truth could have a problem for anybody. If you had to pick a single word—

Debbie Millman:

Well, it’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy: Truth Be Told, and then you’re sort of confronted by the truth of what these people think.

Bob Faust:

Isn’t it wild?

Debbie Millman:

But you know, again, at the election it was all based on like false truth. So just that.

Bob Faust:

But if you had to pick like a single word, all of us at this table right now, if you had to pick a single word that shouldn’t be controversial, what would it be? If it’s not truth, what would it be? I guess love.

Nick Cave:

Pray.

Bob Faust:

OK.

Nick Cave:

But even that’s …

Debbie Millman:

Hope.

Bob Faust:

Hope.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, that’s true. There’s lots of interpretations. Well, in the end over 3,300 people signed a petition in support of Truth Be Told and it did stay up until its end date, so at least justice prevailed.

Bob Faust:

Yeah, justice prevailed.

Debbie Millman:

Man, oh man, you think something as beautiful as just the notion Truth Be Told, which could be anybody’s truth, really would be pretty, pretty benign.

Bob Faust:

Totally, you would think so.

Debbie Millman:

Is it going to go anywhere else?

Bob Faust:

Yeah. It’s going to be at the Brooklyn Art Museum in April. It’s going up at MASS MoCA in about two weeks.

Debbie Millman:

Wonderful. I think you should make a vinyl letters kit for people to be able to put the letters on their own homes, because I would do that in a second.

Nick Cave:

Oh my God.

Bob Faust:

I love that.

Nick Cave:

That’s divine.

Debbie Millman:

Right? I was fantasizing last night, thinking I want Truth Be Told letters on my house.

Bob Faust:

I love this idea.

Nick Cave:

That’s so cute.

Bob Faust:

OK. Let’s figure that out. If anybody’s got funding for this cool project …

Debbie Millman:

Listeners, you heard it here first on Design Matters.

Nick Cave:

Oh my God.

Debbie Millman:

Gentlemen, I have one last question for you before I let you go. One of the things that also kept coming up in my research was your love of sneakers. So I have to ask the question, because I couldn’t find the answer anywhere: How many pairs of sneakers do you both really own?

Nick Cave:

Oh, God. I don’t even know.

Bob Faust:

It’s ridiculous because they’re not just like … you can’t even go count them because they’re too deep. They’re stacked too deep.

Nick Cave:

But I think for me it’s more built around how my feet need to feel when teaching.

Bob Faust:

Oh, please.

Nick Cave:

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

Debbie Millman:

I’ve read enough today that Bob is like rolling his eyes.

Bob Faust:

That’s full of BS. “How my feet need to feel while I’m teaching.”

Debbie Millman:

On create floors. I can’t wear a real hard shoe. I have to really think about, like, I’m going to be staying for eight hours in the classroom. My feet, not only do they need to look good—

Bob Faust:

The truth be told.

Nick Cave:

But it really is, really just sort of being able to have something comfortable. And sneakers today are really quite fabulous.

Bob Faust:

It’s full on all about fashion. It’s about having the right color for the right thing and the right level, height for the right thing. It’s all about fashion.

Nick Cave:

Fashion is comfort.

Bob Faust:

The sneakers you’re buying these days, they’re hard. They’re not even comfy.

Nick Cave:

No.

Bob Faust:

Looks like a pump, feels like a sneaker, is not how you live.

Debbie Millman:

Oh my goodness. Nick Cave, Bob Faust, thank you for making the world a better place with your work. Thank you so, so much for joining me today on Design Matters.

Bob Faust:

It was super fun.

Nick Cave:

It was great.

Bob Faust:

Thank you.

Nick Cave:

Thanks so much.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. You can find out more about Bob Faust and Nick Cave at facilitychicago.org. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I would like to thank you for listening. 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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