Writer, editor, and curator Antwaun Sargent joins to talk about his remarkable career, positioned at the center of the explosion of interest in art made by Black Americans.
Antwaun Sargent:
I think that in the other sort of parts of the culture writing space, so music, even film, theater, have been a lot more open to new voices, younger voices, voices of color than even the art world is today. Still right now.
Speaker 2:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman 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, curator and art writer Antwaun Sargent talks about his career and about the late great Virgil Abloh.
Antwaun Sargent:
What he had to do is redesign the world to meet him where he was at.
Debbie Millman:
In recent years, there’s been an explosion of interest in art made by black Americans. At, or very near the center of this explosion is Antwaun Sargent. He’s a writer, an editor, and a curator. He has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Art in America. And his books include The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion. One of his recent projects is a show featuring the work of the fashion designer, Virgil Abloh at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He’s here to talk about that, about contemporary black photography and art, and about his career as a writer and curator. Antwaun Sargent, welcome to Design Matters.
Antwaun Sargent:
Hey Debbie, thanks for having me.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Antwaun, I read that you don’t really believe in seasonal style, but you do have one sartorial rule, give a look and always wear a matching hat. So I want to talk about your hats. When did you first start wearing them?
Antwaun Sargent:
I started first wearing hats maybe five or six years ago. I started with this wide brim hat, wool hat, black hat from a brand called Westerland. Then I got a white one from Westerland. And then they stopped making them. And so I had to sort of figure out something else. There’s a designer, a hat designer who lives in New York but is from Chicago like I am named Rodney Patterson who runs a brand called Esenshel. He’s been making my hats for the last several years. I wear a style that he makes called a Russian cuff hat. It’s made actually from this sort of Japanese paper. And so it’s actually a paper hat. And so if it rains, or sweat or whatever… So I get them sort of remade every now and again. I sort of mostly wear one that’s off white.
Antwaun Sargent:
I slowly started to shape the whole entire sort of outfits and my aesthetic around this hat. And so I wear a lot of browns and things that can sort of match the hat. And because it’s basically white, it’s versatile and goes with anything. But yeah, I love this hat and I wear it all the time.
Debbie Millman:
You mentioned that it’s primarily an off white hat. Is that a nod to Virgil?
Antwaun Sargent:
Instead of saying tan or beige, I thought I would use off white just because of the current show with Virgil. Yeah, that was intentional.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Good. Actually I was hoping so. And we’ll talk a lot more about the show with Virgil in a little bit. You grew up in Cabrini-Green Homes in Chicago. I understand your mom sent you to a Catholic school and managed while working at a Walgreens to what you’ve referred to as subsidized your youthful ambitions. I was wondering if you could tell us more about your mom and her influence on you?
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah, no, I mean, my mother is so influential in so many different ways. We went to pretty great schools. It was just at the time being a kid, you don’t really sort of think about this sort of sacrifice one has to make for that to happen. And so we went to Catholic schools most of our lives. I even went to Georgetown so I even completed the circle at a Catholic school. But it was definitely, I think I didn’t realize then, but now that so many sacrifices that particularly my mother made to make sure that we went to really great schools, got really great educations, but also did the things we wanted to do.
Antwaun Sargent:
And so I somehow became fascinated with German. And in high school I was like, “I want to go to Germany.” There was a exchange program and she figured it out, you know? Again, when you’re a kid, you’re sort of in your own little bubble and you don’t really sort of know the sacrifices your parents make, right? And so now in reflecting on that, I’m like, “Wow, that was a totally unusual opportunity,” largely because my mother made the sacrifices on her salary. I mean, she has moved up over the years at Walgreens, but the only job my mother’s ever had was that Walgreens. Everything from when she was 16 being a cashier, rising up to management, you know? And so it’s just sort of extraordinary thing to sort of think about in relationship to the work that I did do, but also the way that it shaped my life.
Debbie Millman:
I understand that by the time you were 15 years old, you discovered i-D Magazine.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And would take a 45 minute bus trip each way every month to get to the one bookstore that sold it. And if it wasn’t there, you’d go back the next week to see if it had arrived.
Antwaun Sargent:
I would go back. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You said that you didn’t know there were people making the kinds of images you saw at that time in the magazine. What kind of images intrigued you the most?
Antwaun Sargent:
I mean, i-D was like such a Bible for me. I would go get the magazine, take all the pages out, put them up on my walls. My whole like bedroom was covered in these images from i-D. I think more so than just the type of images, it was really about sort of the type of people. I just was like, “Wow. Who are these people?”, you know? And more so the point of who are these people was like, “These are my people.” I don’t know where or how, but I know that these are my people and I just love the way that folks style themselves. I love reading the interviews and just sort of having… Because at that time i-D was super young people, right?
Antwaun Sargent:
So in 15, these folks were maybe 5, 6, 7 years older than me. And so the power I think of that magazine really sort of wanted me to sort of be a writer and sort of be someone in the culture because you have artists, you had musicians, you had all of these different sort of folks who were young and had something to say. And I just considered myself one of them. Yeah, looking at those i-D magazines, it so ordered a lot of my decisions in life I must say.
Debbie Millman:
What’s really remarkable to see is when good parenting meets extreme creativity.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah. There was never any, which I really sort of love in what my mother did, I don’t remember ever being told, “You got to do this or you got to do that.” We were very sort of supervised, but also very independent in that sort of supervision. So there was broad parameters. There was never a curfew, but you also probably knew if you have school the next day that you weren’t going to be out to… You know what I mean?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Antwaun Sargent:
It was a really sort of a trusting sort of relationship. I remember I went in the 6th grade, we had moved away from sort of a downtown neighborhood, the Cabrini sort of old town neighborhood. The school that I was going to, which was St Joseph’s, which was a private Catholic school that was two blocks away from the building I was born in essentially was just so far from the new neighborhood, right? It was like 45 minutes each way. And my mom was like, “The public school is fine in this neighborhood. You’re going to go to a public school.” And so I went to a public school. My Catholic school was so strict that you couldn’t sneeze. It was a real sort of strict. And so you go to this public, and I’m like I had so much freedom. So much freedom in the sense that if you didn’t do your work, there was no like… I don’t want to do science because I didn’t like the teacher.
Antwaun Sargent:
I had great sort of academic background in that regard. I was a straight A student basically my own life. I got a D in science because I didn’t like the teacher and I refused to do the work. This was in the 6th grade. I remember my mother was just like, “Okay, great. So you will not be leaving this house until the next report card.” And the report cards were 12 week into… This is not weeks away. So she was sort of tough in those ways where it was like if you did sort of do something that was beneath what you were capable of, you were definitely disciplined. You know when you sometime push parents to do… There was none of that in my household. It was like, “This is the decision. This is what you’re going to do. You’ll not be leaving the house,” you know? For 12 weeks I went to school, came home. Went to school, came home. And I have learned that lesson well into adulthood.
Debbie Millman:
How did you do on your next report card in science?
Antwaun Sargent:
Straight As. [inaudible 00:09:48]. He’s the best student ever. It was like really like…
Debbie Millman:
It was so interesting what people do or how people respond with teachers that they don’t like. My nephew is 14 and has been tortured over this last year in 9th grade hating his math teacher and was really happy to be able to call her Karen because she felt she was a Karen and that’s her name. The more he hated her, the more he disengaged from the class. And I’m like, “No, no, no, you can’t do this. This is bad for you. You have to win her over. You have to figure out a way so that she doesn’t punish you for not liking her.”
Antwaun Sargent:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
And it was a really challenging year. I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that this school year is now over him and he’s going into 10th grade with a different teacher. But it’s so amazing. It’s that like cut off to your nose to spite your face when it’s only in the grand scheme of things going to hurt you.
Antwaun Sargent:
Exactly. And you have to learn how to deal with people, right?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah.
Antwaun Sargent:
You have to learn how to deal with people you don’t like. And I think that was probably my mother’s sort of point was like, just because you don’t like someone, it cannot throw you off your game. You have to sort of figure out a way around it.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You were involved in the slam poetry scene. You were writing. You were also simultaneously interning for judges doing mock trials and working for organizations in the community. All at that point with a focus on becoming a lawyer.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
What motivated you? Given all of your artistic interests, given all of your interests in fashion and style as well as sports, what motivated you to want to become a lawyer?
Antwaun Sargent:
I think it was just like you saw people who did traditional jobs. I didn’t know any artists, right? Although I would hang out at a new art in Sunda, Chicago. MCA, Chicago is a good seven blocks from where I grew up. I went to those places all the time. Obviously I had extraordinary creative friends. But I just didn’t know any of that was possible for me, coming from a family that you didn’t have that representation in my family. My brother was the first person to go to college. I was the second person to go to college. That was within a few years of each other, right? Had I known though that there was a pathway, say in the arts or literature or whatever, I don’t know if I would’ve gone to Georgetown. Because when I got there, the first two years were literally like, “I cannot do this. I cannot do this. I cannot do this.”
Antwaun Sargent:
And I actually flew home quite a lot because I was in some ways extraordinarily miserable the first two years. I was like an out gay black kid. I had been out and gay forever. And then to go there and then there was like, everyone’s in a closet. They dress really differently than I do. It was all of these things that I was just sort of like, “Wow, how did I end up here?” It was just mostly because I had heard that the School of Foreign Service was the school to go if you wanted to go into politics or if you wanted to be a lawyer. And then I end up there and I’m like, “Oh wait, I don’t know if this fits my personality. Maybe I should have went to a liberal arts school.” That was sort of the first two years. And then I sort of met a friend group that were somewhere at the school and somewhere at Howard University. And that is how I sort of navigated.
Debbie Millman:
How did you get the internship with Hillary Clinton?
Antwaun Sargent:
I just literally applied online. Usually those internships are highly like you got to know somebody or whatever. I saw the application open and so I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll just apply and see.” And yeah, and I got the internship and I was just on the Hill. It’s kind of funny because that was the moment I was like, “Hmm. I don’t think I want to do this,” you know?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Antwaun Sargent:
Not because of anything that happened in the office or anything like that. It was just sort of like I don’t think that politics or American politics in this way is for me. That’s what happens in internships. You sort of come to realizations. There was several times that I met her. She, at the time she was really… I think three or four days a week she was on the trail for Obama, but she was there sometimes. The only thing I sort of really remember is that she would be there all day long. There was lots, and lots, and lots of constituent stuff we had to do for upstate New York farmers. I mean it was just really sort of retail politics. And I was like, “I don’t want to be involved in this. Thank you for the experience.”
Debbie Millman:
After you graduated from Georgetown, rather than go on to law school you decided to move to New York city and work for Teach for America, teaching kindergarten. You were teaching kindergarten students how to read.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to do that and what made you decide to choose kindergarten?
Antwaun Sargent:
So sort of a funny story now that I look back on it. All of the people that I know are moving to New York and so that’s sort of how it started. And then I had like, “Well, how am I going to pay to move to New York?” Because it’s not cheap. It’s not like there’s some family wealth or anything like that. It was like you figure it out, you know? And so I applied for two jobs. One was at Goldman Sachs and one was with Teach for America because those were the two things that my friends were also doing, right? And so I thought Teach for America was the better thing to do.
Debbie Millman:
It’s like flipping a coin though, Antwaun.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah, for sure. I mean-
Debbie Millman:
It’s like, “Heads, I go to Goldman Sachs. And tails, I go teach”
Antwaun Sargent:
The hours are better at teaching than they were at Goldman Sachs. And so I sort of agree to do Teach for America. But I agreed and I said, “I really want to teach history. I want to teach high school history because I can do that in my sleep.” And they were like, “No, you’re needed in east New York, Brooklyn. You’re needed at this new school. You’re going to be a kindergarten teacher.” And then I was like, “Well, kindergarten, I remember kindergarten. You take naps half the day, then you go.” And so I was like, “Fine. This is cool. Whatever. Go nap. We’ll do the ABC song. It’d be good.” That was sort of my impression. But education has changed a lot in New America. And in kindergarten you expected to read, you expect to do basic math. You expect to be able to do all these things that used to have to do in the 2nd and say 3rd grade or the 1st, 2nd sort of grade.
Antwaun Sargent:
And so they were like, “You’re going to be the reading teacher.” And I was like, “Oh, I don’t know how to do this, but I’m going to sort of figure it out.” The first year I had a co-teacher who absolutely hated me, like hated everything about… Because what I didn’t understand then was that it’s an extraordinarily altruistic, but in the end a really sort of insane proposition to send, I guess “highly educated” kids into our most struggling communities who have no education background by the way and then say that they’re going to transform those communities, right? That was the ethos right at the time.
Antwaun Sargent:
And here I come, had gone to Georgetown and [inaudible 00:17:48] and whatever. I’m paired with a teacher who had studied education, been teaching for 15 years, had won all these awards. And then suddenly I’m her equal, right?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Wow.
Antwaun Sargent:
I mean I knew nothing about education at that point. I just thought that I wanted to figure out a way to give back because I had been given so much through the education system and given so many opportunities, and not say that I did not sort of rise to the occasion because I did. I taught for four years. All of my kids came in, couldn’t read and they sort of left well above grade, really reading at 2nd and 3rd grade levels. It was such in every way possible eye opening experience for me in terms of just it really firmed up what I wanted to do, because I was teaching from 7:00 AM. I was at a charter school from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM and then I would get off work and then I would have all this time basically.
Antwaun Sargent:
I’m a person with a lot of energy, have always been a person with a lot of energy. I was like, “Okay, what else?” And then I met my best friend and still to this day roommate, JiaJia Fei, who was at the time at the Guggenheim as the digital person. Basically bringing the Guggenheim into the 21st century. She made me her plus one. And so every night I would go to her to all these really great art parties and all of these, because in Chicago this is what I did. I was hanging out with artists. And so I just sort of start meeting artists. She would take me around and I’d meet Kehinde Wiley and I’d meet Mickalene Thomas and I’d meet Thelma Golden. I would just meet all these people who I didn’t actually could not place really because I didn’t know the New York art world. I just knew I was meeting these people. They were complimenting my outfits. I was having a great time with them.
Antwaun Sargent:
And then at some point someone was like, “Well, what do you do? You’re always around. You’re you come to all the things. What do you do?” And I was like, “Well, I’m a teacher actually.” And they were like, “No, you’re an artist. You’re an artist.” And I’m like, “No, no. I’m really a teacher. I just dress insanely,” you know? And so that question sort of inspired. I’m like, “Well, what can I do in this world?” In this world that I clearly have a really great affection towards. I like the people. I’m going to people’s studios, doing studio visits seemingly for no reason other than my own curiosity. I was like, “Is there a contribution I can make here?”
Antwaun Sargent:
And at the time I think this 2011, 2012, the art world has changed dramatically in the years in between. And I mean dramatically in the sense that at the time there was maybe one or two black art shows every 12 to 16 months and then we would all have to sort of show up. And so I got to know everybody because there was only so many shows that happened. And there was a far fewer people interested even in the black community, in black artists, right? It was like a weird language. Like, “What is art? What do you do?” My mom, I remember being like, “Wait, what are you like? What’s going on? What are you writing about? Didn’t you want to be a lawyer?” Those were the sort of the questions.
Antwaun Sargent:
I think it was also at the beginning of sort of Instagram. That also was sort of interesting. So we would just go around and I would see JiaJia like taking photos of everything. I was like, “Well, I guess I’ll take photos of everything,” you know? It was just sort of how it started. And then Teach for America was a two year commitment. I had [inaudible 00:21:19] I was like, “Okay, I’m going to stop this because I have to wake up at 5: 45 in the morning every day, get on the CTrain, go out east New York, but then I’m partying until 2:00 AM in the morning. And so I’m like, “This maybe is not… I have a lot of energy. I don’t know if I have this much energy,” you know? And then I’m with literally four and five year olds for eight hours.
Antwaun Sargent:
I completed the program. It’s sort of an odd thing to say. It’s like I think I grew up in that environment over those years. If you can convince a five year old to sort of do what you need them to do to meet their goals, then you can talk to anybody. You can talk to anybody.
Debbie Millman:
Good point. Yeah. That’s really true.
Antwaun Sargent:
I’m like, “You can literally speak to anybody.” And at the time it’s like I’m a little wiped because charter schools also go, I think, 11 months out of the year in New York.
Debbie Millman:
And you were also getting your master’s degree.
Antwaun Sargent:
Exactly. And so I was getting a master’s while I was doing… I mean, I look back at 21, 22, I’m like, “How did this… How?” This was when New York and New York clubs were still a thing. And then also in New York, Tuesday nights were a big thing. And then it was Wednesday night. So it wasn’t even the weekend. Because going out on a weekend was not cool then. And so we would just be going out Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday night and then I have to get up at 5:00. Even thinking about it now, I’m like, “I don’t know how I did that.” But yeah. And so I decided to stop after my two years were up. Saved some money and was like, “Well I’m going to write.” The Huffington Post had given me a blog at that point. In those days those were the coolest things, a Huffington Post blog.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah. You also had an internship at… Or no, not an internship. A fellowship.
Antwaun Sargent:
At Buzzfeed.
Debbie Millman:
Right?
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah. And so I was writing for my Huffington Post blog and then from that got a fellowship at Buzzfeed. And I did that for six months. I hated every single day of it in a sense that like I was not a pop cult. That sort of thing was just not my thing.
Debbie Millman:
Well, they don’t cover art, right?
Antwaun Sargent:
Exactly.
Antwaun Sargent:
You weren’t covering what you wanted to. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
They didn’t cover any of my interests, which were art and fashion.
Antwaun Sargent:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
And they didn’t cover, especially in those early days, right? It was like cat videos and they were like [inaudible 00:23:40]-
Antwaun Sargent:
Right. Clicks.
Debbie Millman:
Clicks and all of that stuff.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I was making memes. A lot of people don’t understand. Those early day, Buzzfeed employees, a lot of them have gone on to do extraordinary things who are extraordinarily talented people. But we were like, if we wanted to put a meme into an article, that didn’t exist. So we were cutting the footage, making the meme, overlaying the text. You know what I mean? It’s tedious if you’re doing that for 40 things on a listicle or whatever. And so I was just like, “This is not for me.”
Debbie Millman:
And so I started freelancing on the side. I was just started pitching things, pitch something to Vogue and then pitch something to… Then there was an editor at The New Yorker who read something that I did. I’m 23 by the way, you know?
Antwaun Sargent:
I know.
Debbie Millman:
This is insane. 23 year old. And then I started writing for The New Yorker Online. And then my beat sort of in the art world was just like, “Since all the artists that I know or mostly that I know and that I hang around with are black artists, I’m just going to write about them. No one else is doing it,” right? And so just did that just religiously. But I wasn’t making enough money doing… I mean, New Yorker Online at the time paid $325 for an article.
Debbie Millman:
And then I was writing for VICE and VICE paid me a little bit more money, but I had to produce so many stories to sort of make it. And so I called my principal and I said, “Hey, here’s an idea. If you give me back my salary, I’ll teach all my classes, but I need to not do any of the other things,” right? And he was like, “Absolutely.” And so he gave me back my salary, my benefits, the whole sort of situation and I taught just my classes. And so I had to be there I think at 8:45 to 1:45. And so in that chunk, I did all my classes and then I could write and I can sort of do that. I did that for two years before I was like, “Okay, I think I’m ready to go out and do this.” Meaning I had enough money to make rent. I figured out enough of a freelance sort of scenario where I could make rent, I can eat. There was enough free dinners in the art world that you could… That was sort of the way that it was sort of happening.
Debbie Millman:
And then people just sort of started to take notice, like artists would be like, “Antwaun, come write about the…” It was like that sort of vibe. And then the thing that I remember to be like, “Oh, I could really do this” was Mnuchin Gallery was doing Ed Clark catalog. He asked me on really short notice one summer would I write the catalog. And I was like, “Yeah, sure. I’ve never written a book or a big essay like this.” I’m just like, “Absolutely.”
Debbie Millman:
And then it was also challenging because Ed Clark was an abstract artist and severely overlooked, but he had been in shows and stuff, but there was not a lot of scholarship on him. There was no research essentially, right? And so a lot of it was talking to his daughter, reading every possible thing that you could find, talking to artists who had known him or collected the work, talking his… It was this sort of truly large research project, because I just didn’t really know that much about his work. And that was sort of the challenge. And I remember them being like, “Well, how much do you want to be paid for this?” And I was just like, “How much do I want to be… What? I’m usually paid nothing for anything,” you know? And so I called some friends and was like, “Well, what do you… when you do this for the gallery and whatever?” And they’re like… Well, somebody told me Ed Clark’s work, I forget the price but it was hundreds of thousands of dollars at that point, you know?
Debbie Millman:
And I was like, “Well, if that’s what’s happening on one piece of art, then I can maybe use this to pay off my student loans.” And so I looked at my balance and I think at the time it was like $21,000 something, something. I asked them for I think 22K or something. Right above that number. They gave it to me and I just took the money and I pay off my student loans. That was the only sort of debt I had had and I was like, “Well, now that I don’t have any debt, I can do whatever I want.” And so I just kept writing and freelancing, but it was a lot of fun though. I was learning something every single day.
Debbie Millman:
I was getting to spend time with the most interesting people I had ever met, thinking about questions of identity and race and representation and material. All of these. Artists think in ways that no other humans and any other profession think, and that was just so exciting. I was able to be endlessly curious and endlessly always just asking questions. And I think that being in a world like that where it’s endlessly creative has been just so… I get up every day and I’m just like, “This is so fascinating.” There’s no shortage of artist or… Even the shows. I think this year Virgil is the fourth show I did this year, which is admittedly sort of insane. It’s just like I have so much energy. I worked that way because I did have so much energy.
Debbie Millman:
But in those shows, so you have Virgil Abloh, an artist who sort of really did not care about sort of the separation between commerce and art and then who was thinking about sort of sneakers as sculptures. You just have that sort of part of an artist who’s doing that, then you have someone like Amanda Williams, also a Chicago-based artist who also was a trained architect. I was thinking about the similarities between them because both of the shows [inaudible 00:29:52] right now.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, actually Virgil and Amanda. Both.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah., they’re both Chicago, both trained as architects, both became artists in their own ways, right? But she’s sort of expressing that artistry through abstraction, the way she sort of treats and attacks surfaces. And then before that you had someone, Awol Erizku, the image maker who made light boxes of… He grew up in New York, but has an Ethiopian background and is thinking that his… He totally created his own sort of vernacular through images and he made these light boxes of all of these different animals, right? And sort of it’s called Memories of a Lost Sphinx, the show. Just thinking about sort of the component parts of the Sphinx and then doing this installation that he did at our gallery, I was like, “I could have never thought of that.”
Antwaun Sargent:
And so it’s those three different artists. You have Alexander Smith, the queer black artist who sort of has just completely created her own sort of universe of characters that sort of center black fem identity. Who could do that in the span of six months? All of these different artists, really different concerns and being able to be in conversation with them and to sort of bring their visions to the world in that way really it’s just like, “Sign me up. I have two other shows this year.’
Debbie Millman:
Antwaun, you’ve said that you didn’t know you wanted to be a writer until you started writing.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah, exactly.
Debbie Millman:
And you’ve talked about how, as recently as 10 years ago, really when you started writing professionally, the media landscape was mostly white.
Antwaun Sargent:
Oh yeah.
Debbie Millman:
It was almost impossible to get a foot in the door. And there was also no effort to do anything to change the system or the institutions. The people working in it were just trying to preserve the status quo. How different do you think it is now?
Antwaun Sargent:
I think that in the other sort of parts of the culture writing space, so music, even film, theater, have been a lot more open to new voices, younger voices, voices of color than even the art world is today. Still right now. Meaning that all of the critics that when I was 21 who were the head critics of magazines and whatever are still in those jobs right now today, 10 years later. At the Times, the New York, any of these places that we sort of go to as papers of record or whatever, there’s no consistent black art critic at any of those places. None of those places has a staff critic, not a freelance person who but a staff critic, right? I don’t think there has been one at the New York Times quite frankly.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, it’s astonishing. It’s astonishing that this is still something that needs to be discussed, that needs to be pointed out. When you worked on your second book, when you worked on Young, Gifted and Black, I read somewhere that somebody asked you why were you doing a book like this. And you replied that you think that the art world has an old way of doing things that excluded a great deal of people. And you’re not satisfied with that old way of thinking because it was racist and sexist and got us an art world where 90% of the fucking artists in museums are straight white men.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yep.
Debbie Millman:
So thank you for saying-
Antwaun Sargent:
Still to this day.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah.
Antwaun Sargent:
We like to make… And that’s the one thing that I think that is still extraordinarily frustrating in this moment, that we are supposed to have all this change. There’s a lot of [inaudible 00:33:31] of women artists, of black artists, of queer artists and all of that, but they’re not collecting those artists. Still to this day and with all that has happened and transpired the last several years in the last decade, you still have an extraordinarily reluctant sort of white guard making the decisions. One of the things that motivates me is not sort of this sense of the only one or… Because to be clear, I have somehow figured out how to get into these spaces that a lot of folks that look like me are not in, right?
Debbie Millman:
Well, that’s why you see it firsthand.
Antwaun Sargent:
But for me it’s about opening that. I mean, it’s not even a savior complex. It’s just sort of like at the end of the day, I would like to show artists of interest that I find interesting. I’ve spent last 10 years really sort of thinking extraordinarily, critically about black art production. I would like to bring that knowledge to the places that I sort of walked through, right? And I think that for me, that’s just it. That it is simple as that. I have spent this amount of time doing this thing and this thing is valid. Yeah, I’m getting a lot of attention, but there are other people who should also be in these spaces, even in the critical sort of establishment. When you have black writers write in these spaces, it’s like, they always have to have PhDs. It’s like they almost happen to be overqualified. Not just like, “I have this interest.”
Antwaun Sargent:
I even struggle with that. I remember asking my best friend JiaJia. I was like, “Do you think I should go to Yale and get a PhD in art history or whatever?” And this was two years ago and this was after The New Black Vanguard came out. It’s successful in the sense that an art book does not sell 25,000 copies in a year and a half. You know what I mean?
Debbie Millman:
Not at that price point. Not at all. Yeah.
Antwaun Sargent:
$50 a book. You know what I mean? That just does not happen, right? And so snowing that success and all of this stuff and having the Times clips and the New Yorker clips and having people, all of these different things, the fashion company, all of that stuff, I go, “Do you think I should go get a PhD?” Because in some way I think I felt inadequate in some way. Like, maybe if I had this other thing, maybe I’ll be able to be seen differently. And she just turns to me and she goes, “You’re doing everything that the PhDs want to be doing,” you know?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, good. Good advice from JiaJia. Good advice. Good advice.
Antwaun Sargent:
My point in all of that is, even when you are “allowed” in, it’s not going to change if you are not sort of on a mission to make sure that artists… And it’s so layered. Artists and collectors and writers are all sharing in that. And so it’s not about sort of at the gallery for example, it’s like I’m the director at Gagosian. It’s really great. People made a really big fuss about that. It’s really amazing. It’s a great gallery and it’s a wonderful platform, extraordinary resources. Larry is amazing and sort of the inventor of this sort of modern gallery system that we’re in. And I just was like, “Well, I can learn a lot from him.”
Antwaun Sargent:
I had a lot of conversations about sort of the work that I do and how it’s not just about me. It’s about sort of making sure we have on the magazine black writers, making sure that we have black artists, making sure that black collectors get access. It’s all of these other things. Making sure that museums also are a part of the equation, right? And not just sort of wealthy black or white or whatever collectors, but making sure that there’s a public component to this, right? And so every show I have done at the gallery, several of the works have gone into museum collections. It’s just important thing to mean to the artist, to sort of the popular imagination and the public function of those spaces, right?
Antwaun Sargent:
The art world, the art gallery system is largely predicated on sort of the private buying and trading of artworks, right? And for me, as someone who is sort of in this from a communal standpoint, I love when works go to museums so that work can be seen by folks who don’t have whatever. To sort of have an opportunity to also experience that work. And so that’s also very important to me. And so in the conversations that I have with artists, it’s always like even before we do shows it’s about, “So what are the goals here?” And now I’ll tell you, I’ll share my goals. You share your goals. And then we’ll work towards that.” Because also, I mean, frankly you make way less money selling to museums than you do to private people, right? So if we say art has this sort of magic thing that it’s something about more than who we are, then you have to be willing to make sure that that work is able to be appreciated by the public.
Debbie Millman:
Working at Gagosian as a director has not hindered you in any way from continuing to do the work you want to do outside of the gallery. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the exhibit you curated that just opened at the Brooklyn Museum titled Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech. It is a stunning major survey of the work of polymath Virgil Abloh. One of my great, great regrets Antwaun is that I was invited to interview him by his folks. We were working out a date in November. He was very, very busy as you can well imagine.
Debbie Millman:
They asked me to do it on the day I was set in stone to interview Ai Weiwei. I knew that I couldn’t do both in the same day. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them. I wouldn’t be able to give them the kind of in depth, robust interview that I would want to do and felt that it would be disrespectful to Virgil actually, and asked if I could have another day. And they said, “Absolutely, we’ll get back to you with a new day.” And then he passed away. It’s one of the great, great regrets now of my career.
Debbie Millman:
I’m so happy and honored that I get to talk to you about this show, which I’ve seen twice and is just stunning. For those that might not be aware, Virgil Abloh was an artist, an architect, designer, an entrepreneur. He was the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s men’s wear collection from 2018 to 2021. He was also the CEO of the Milan-based label Off-White, hence our earlier joke about Antwaun’s hats. He entered the world of fashion with an internship at Fendi in 2009 alongside Kanye West, which kicked off a prolific artistic collaboration. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2018. Tragically, Virgil passed away from a very rare form of cancer in December of 2021. Did not see the opening of his show now.
Debbie Millman:
Antwaun, you and Virgil met in 2019 on a call with the Brooklyn Museum’s director Anne Pasternak with plans to bring a version of the exhibit to the museum following iterations at MCA, Chicago, Atlanta’s High Museum, ICA Boston, in an exhibit in Carter’s Garage gallery. What was that first meeting like with the three of you together talking about what was possible for the show?
Antwaun Sargent:
Anne called me before and said, “I have a crazy idea.” Would you guess curate our Virgil Abloh show?” And this was before actually I was even at the gallery because this show was supposed to open before the pandemic and I was like, “Yeah, sure. But first I need to talk to him.” I wasn’t the type of person to sort of just take a show. I wasn’t sort of interested in that. And I was just like, “I’m way too young. I have way too many ideas. I’m a black man actually from Chicago. I know who you are.” I know the work. I had spent some time at RSVP gallery which was the popup shop that he did, inspired in part by Colette. It was in Chicago. And so I had those sort of experiences. And then at MoMA in 2015 during Yoko Ono’s exhibition there, she did this sunrise piece. It was at 4:00 AM. He played the opening of that piece.
Debbie Millman:
He was a prolific DJ as well. Yeah.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah. Exactly. He was a prolific DJ. I mean, totally. He played the opening of the piece. It was 4:00 AM in the morning. He puts on Kanye West’s song that was like, “4:00 in the morning and I’m zoning,” you know? I have video of this still to this day. You have all these kids, who I had never seen at museums at that point, jumping on MoMA’s furniture. Literally it’s like a club in Berlin or something. I was like, “This guy. We need this guy in the art world because I’ve never seen kids my age at that point, early 20s, like this. This is the sort of change we sort of need.” And so I had those two experience, the RSVP Gallery. I knew to work from the Kanye days, then that MoMA moment. I was like, “Oh, this is sort of interesting.”
Antwaun Sargent:
And then over the years he had blown up and has been doing all this stuff and had moved from architecture to design, to fashion, to art, to speaker. You name it, he had imprinted himself and his ideas on that sort of creative industry. I was just sort of more selfishly thinking, “Man, I really would love to know how he works,” was the true motivation. It was sort of like, “Yeah, I’ll do the show. Fine.” But what I want to know is how he does this. There’s not been a black artist who have worked this way before and has been this prolific in so many different-
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It was completely fluid,
Antwaun Sargent:
… creative spaces. I agree that he operated with such a fluidity and I just needed to know how that worked just from my own sort of black artists writer position in the art world.
Debbie Millman:
So what did you discover? Tell us how he did that.
Antwaun Sargent:
So I take the job. Anne is like, “Come with some ideas around the show.” My first idea, which we didn’t end up doing, which answers your question, I go, “How about we just sell everything off the walls for seven months just continuously?” Right? It’s art, it’s commerce. You don’t give a shit about the distinctions. I don’t care about the distinctions. The art world pretends to care about the distinctions. Let’s just sort of do this thing, but we can also do this thing around consumption. And I was just throwing these ideas.
Debbie Millman:
So a cash and carry kind of thing?
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah. The reason why that didn’t happen was because one of his collaborators, Takashi Murakami, had set up a Louis Vuitton store at the Brooklyn Museum during his retrospective in 2008. And I was like, “Oh, it’s too close.” But he was like, “Yeah, I’m game.” And from there, I was like, “Oh, we’re going to have some fun. We’re going to collaborate and we’re going to talk.” And then he quickly threw me in six different WhatsApp groups. It was just curating by WhatsApp is what I call it. That’s what his mode of communication. I’ve never exchanged an email with him ever. It was all WhatsApp.
Antwaun Sargent:
In the main WhatsApp group, it was me, Mahfuz Sultan, the Harvard train architect who helped us conceptualize the exhibition, and Virgil. We just threw ideas all day long. I mean, all day long. We had changed this show seven or eight times. He just moved with great fluidity and it was hard to pin him down because he had so many ideas. And so every meeting it was just one idea after the next, one idea after the next, one idea after the next. And you’re just like, “Okay, this is how you’re a genius.” The creativity was so magnetic and constant and relentless.
Debbie Millman:
You have to print if… Well, you don’t have to. I would love it. I think the world would love it if you printed that whole WhatsApp exchange.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
It’s like a book.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah, you know he’s doing that, I heard. I met an editor at the opening who is doing a book similar like this. Virgil was so ahead of the game. He had already thought through that already.
Debbie Millman:
Oh good.
Antwaun Sargent:
And then also there was in his monograph that he published for Figures of Speech, it’s unusual in the sense that it’s not sort of a catalog of an exhibition. It’s just like an archive of all of his stuff.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It’s an extraordinary book.
Antwaun Sargent:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
Everything about it from the spine to the side pages.
Antwaun Sargent:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
To the end pages, to everything. Everything about it is magnificent.
Antwaun Sargent:
And then his own voice is in it, but it’s his whole archive. And so in that archive, you have all of these WhatsApp exchanges. I mean, he would draw literally right onto things in the WhatsApp. He just sort of moved in a super fluid way. That was the way for him to be able to be a part as many conversations as he possibly can. Because then I met people and they were like, “I was in 15 WhatsApp chats with Virgil.” And then you would go to his studio in Paris, I remember being there in February right before the shutdown. I walk in and Takashi Murakami’s in one corner. There are some rappers in this other corner. There’s Mahfuz. There’s Ohana. There’s just all of these people who seemingly come from all of these different worlds. And not to mention the vast majority of the staff that were working for him were these black kids that he had seemingly met around the world and on Instagram.
Antwaun Sargent:
It’s like one guy was from… He liked the way he was dressed on Instagram, lived in Harlem. He was 17. And he was like, “Do you want to come style the show?” And so he flew into Paris to style the show to see this kid on Instagram. Another kid was from I think Sudan Towanda who runs his design studio today, Alaska Alaska, guessed his email address and emailed him and said, “I want to work with you.” Now he’s the head of his design studio. The first project they worked on is the Ikea collaboration. So I needed to see that because it really offers a real way that artists could be in the world.
Antwaun Sargent:
As a curator and as a writer, one thing that I do is often sort of share knowledges, right? From artists to artists or in a museum or in a gallery or in a book or whatever. I just wanted to have the opportunity, selfishly, totally, admittedly, selfishly, to be able to share that knowledge, to sort of share the way that Virgil Abloh worked as an artist, right? Because I think there is something in the sharing of his practice that others can learn from, right? Maybe that goes back to the teaching. But I take that really to heart when I’m doing any of the creative work, is to make sure that there are ways for folks to take something from it.
Antwaun Sargent:
And so at the Brooklyn Museum what you see is really an artist’s journey from beginning, really early ideas to being on the world stage. One of the things I remember asking him was like, “You make things in funny materials” is what I think I had said or something. And he just told me serious as he always was, “It’s about the materiality what I’m trying to communicate. When you see the foam, when you see the paperclip jewelry and all of these things is what I’m trying to communicate is that you can be creative. It’s in your vicinity to be creative. And so when I was a kid and I took the paperclips and I made the necklace, that was me using the materials around me.” And so when I build the city out of styrofoam, like he did with Chicago, and he opens the exhibition, what he’s saying is you can go to home Depot or you can go to a ACE hardware or you can go to a hardware shop and you can get some foam and you can build some shit too.
Antwaun Sargent:
He had such a democratic spirit in that way. That is sort of what I want more than anything for the public to sort of understand, is the way in which he operated. Because a lot of times what you saw was the final product, right? You saw a sneaker, you saw a runway collection, you saw a speaker system. You saw the in product, right? And I think that what this show allows is for the accessing of his prototypes and how those prototypes led from one idea to the next. It might have shown up, say as a chair, that then influenced a jacket, right? I wanted to show the fluidity, but I wanted to… He used to always say that everything’s a prototype. And so what he meant by that was, one idea leaves to the next, and he’s never finished with an idea.
Antwaun Sargent:
And boy, was he never finished with an idea. I mean, sometimes I must say it was extraordinarily frustrating to be like, “But we settled on this show. We have a show. Here’s the floor plan. This is the pathways through. We have these beautiful sight lines. This work speaks to that work. It’s good. We are great.” We worked down to the wire on this exhibition. It’s generally not the way that museums work. Usually, museum exhibitions are set long, long, long, long, long in advance. I mean, we were moving things until the day before. I mean, we had the show notes that guide you through. I mean, we had to totally redo those the day before. I mean, thank God for Anne, the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Museum team, because I don’t know another museum on this planet that would allow an artist to change things that they had signed off on, was set in stone.
Antwaun Sargent:
Even the social sculpture, the sort of middle sort of piece in the exhibition. “Can we see some plans? Can we see some plans? How are you going to build a large scale house in a museum? It takes some time.” I think we got the plans three months ago, three months from the day that we were sitting here having this conversation.
Debbie Millman:
Wow. The show opened like three days ago.
Antwaun Sargent:
And so I was just like, “We have a wood shortage. This is not possible.” What I loved about Virgil and what I love about his wife and his team is that they so believed in his ideas that they were willing to do whatever it took. So once you settled on an idea, it was like, “We are getting this made.” It was a gazillion dollars. We did it in New Jersey. I mean, I had several meltdowns. But they got it done. We got it done. It becomes his last architectural sort of project as a living artist. it’s just so special to have that work because it really is about the two things that Virgil, I think at its core as an artist were about, which is community and collaboration.
Antwaun Sargent:
And so yes, he was someone, he was an architect and he was an architect in fashion, in design. In all of the spaces that he moved through, he kept sort of the central sort of tenant of what architecture is, which is to create space, right? And so he created space, literal space, but he also created spaces for collaborators and friends and for people he didn’t even know, right? And in the space of the social sculpture, he was like, “I want kids to come and take the space. I want artists to come take the space. I want my collaborators to come teach classes and all.” And so that’s what’s happening in that space. It’s a space that through collaboration and creativity, he helps sparks other ideas for other people’s then to go on and do other things, right? And so it’s a real sort of living sculpture in that way. And that, for me, I think out of all the works of art in the exhibition, that one I think speaks the most clearly to Virgil’s ethos.
Debbie Millman:
He said over and over again that everything that he did was for the 17 year old version of himself.
Antwaun Sargent:
Mm-hmm.
Debbie Millman:
And in many ways, I think that helps us understand how he’s going to live forever.
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah, no, I think about that quote a lot. And I think about that in relationship to sort of what he meant, right? This was a 6’4, dark skin, black man, right? The world was literally not built for him. Literally. Like, physically his body. And so what he had to do is redesigned the world to meet him where he was at. When you talk about the 17 year old self quote or the, “I sell” ideas. Those sort of quotes were the Abloh-isms, right? You think about what he was trying to do not only with objects, but also with language, right? He had a language, he had names for everything and he had ways that he thought about and he had principles and all these things. What he was trying to do is construct a new way of being of scene. It was just like one that was extraordinarily considerate, right? Like the Nike shoes, he dressed the guards in the show, right? And so the Nike-
Debbie Millman:
Swanky sneakers.
Antwaun Sargent:
And he did the whole uniform. But the Nike sneakers have garnered a lot of attention because they’re unreleased. What a gesture for the people in museums who are often overlooked and undervalued to sort of be the first folks to wear those sneakers, right? As Virgil intended, it’s about sort of like… Which I think he did a lot with sort of trying to transfer value, to confer value onto those who had been all but rendered valueless in the systems in which they operate, in the cultures in which they operate, right? And that’s why when he write Sculpture on a Handbag, it’s about sort of not just being funny or ironic or do champion or [inaudible 00:56:09]. It was about sort of making sure that folks who prize save their handbags or something else as a sculpture were taking as seriously as sculptures on a plan in a museum, you know?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Antwaun Sargent:
And so he was about sort of trying to make sure that the people where he came from that he knew mattered as much as like the things that regard as high culture or whatever.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. One of the my favorite things that I own is his Ikea clock that says temporary.
Antwaun Sargent:
Temporary. Yeah. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Because you know, what is time?
Antwaun Sargent:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Right? Antwaun Sargent, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for joining me today and talking about so much work you do that matters. Thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Antwaun Sargent:
Thanks for having me. This was such an amazing conversation. I really appreciate it.
Debbie Millman:
You can find out more about Antwaun Sargent at antwaunsargent.com. That’s A-N-T-W-A–U-N-S-A-R-G-E-N-T.com. You can see the show that we’ve been just talking about that he curated for the Brooklyn Museum titled Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech through January 2023, but go soon. It’s an amazing experience.
Debbie Millman:
This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Speaker 2:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded 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.