Debbie Millman:
How does something come from nothing? How do creators actually create? These are the questions Adam Moss has long been asking. They also happen to be some of the questions that I try to investigate with every guest on every episode of this podcast. How did you become you and how did you make that? Adam Moss is the former editor of New York Magazine, and before that, he was the editor of the New York Times magazine. He has left an indelible mark on those magazines and on the many others he’s worked on. Adam Moss is also an artist. He came late to the fine arts and he’s a little reluctant to call himself an artist. We’re going to talk all about that and how he wrote and created his brand new book, The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing. Adam Moss, welcome to Design Matters.

Adam Moss:
Thank you, Debbie. Glad to be here.

Debbie Millman:
Adam, I understand you have really tiny handwriting.

Adam Moss:
Yes, I do. Do you want to see it?

Debbie Millman:
Was it always really tiny, or did that evolve from your work as an editor?

Adam Moss:
Oh no. It was always that way. I don’t know, can you really change your handwriting?

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting. I look back at my handwriting when I was younger. It was much neater than it is now. Now I scribble more. But I’ve also noticed that my mother’s handwriting has never changed, ever. From the time I remember first seeing it till now.

Adam Moss:
I don’t think my handwriting has changed. My signature did after I spent a good deal of time trying to perfect it and make it look lovely.

Debbie Millman:
And why did you do that?

Adam Moss:
Because I’m vain and because I hoped one day that somebody would want my signature on something other than a check.

Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah, an autograph maybe.

Adam Moss:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
You were born in Brooklyn.

Adam Moss:
That’s true.

Debbie Millman:
But your family moved to Hewlett, Long Island when you were a little boy, when you were a junior in high school. I understand you were a bit of a theater geek.

Adam Moss:
Oh my God. Where did you get that information? Yes, but actually it was earlier.

Debbie Millman:
Even earlier.

Adam Moss:
Yeah, it was my geek-itude. Theater geek-itude was exhausted by the time I was a junior, largely because I didn’t really have the aptitude that I had fantasized having as a younger person. I was actually a pretty good actor when I was 11, and then I hit puberty and it really just all just vanished.

Debbie Millman:
Were you more of a dramatic actor or a musical actor?

Adam Moss:
I aspired to be a musical actor. I aspired to be at chorus boy, that’s what I wanted more than anything.

Debbie Millman:
The reason I was mentioning junior high was because I understand that when you were in junior high every year in your school, a student got to direct the annual play and you wanted that job. You wanted-

Adam Moss:
You have such excellent researchers. Yes, that is true.

Debbie Millman:
Because of your experience at the time and your passion for theater, you thought there was no one else even remotely qualified to get the job of director of this play. I’m wondering if you can share what happened next.

Adam Moss:
I did look around and I was an actor. Also, I had been in the school play over and over, and I had done a million parts. I must have played every part in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in camp. I loved it. Yeah, I thought it was just my turn and it wasn’t. There was one day when they were supposed to tell you whether you… There were three finalists and I was one of the finalists, and I invited two of my friends to be with me when I got the big phone call, and they did a very cruel thing, which is that they made the person who did get the job call the person who didn’t get the job. So I got that phone call from this lovely girl who did a great job to tell me that I had failed to get this job, which was crushing.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I can understand. I was also a theater geek in high school, and remember when I didn’t get parts that I so desperately wanted.

Adam Moss:
Yeah. But they gave me as a consolation prize, they were doing Fiddler on the Roof and they gave me, I was Motel that year. So that was fine. I got to sing Wonder of Wonder, Miracle of Miracles, and all was fine.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t know if you’re going to want to talk about this and we can always edit it out, but I understand that when you didn’t get the part-

Adam Moss:
Oh. My mother ran into the principal’s office. Is that what you want to talk about?

Debbie Millman:
Not so much that part.

Adam Moss:
It was an amazing thing because my mother did not have a history of standing up for me this way.

Debbie Millman:
That’s why I was going to ask you about it.

Adam Moss:
But she was horrified and moved, I think, by my terrible sorrow. Yeah, went to the principal and said, “Why didn’t he get this job?” Or whatever you want to call it, this assignment. And the principal said, “He’s not a leader. He does not have the ability to get other people to rally around something,” which I don’t know if it was true at the time, but it certainly in retrospect was a very helpful thing to me, even though it was cruel and crushing because it spurred me to be the person he didn’t think I was.

Debbie Millman:
You have written about how you thought that maybe it was the beginning of your real ambition.

Adam Moss:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:05:39] always had a ambivalent feeling about ambition. I think I was always ambitious. In fact, the signs of my ambition are very, very clear if I do a retrospective look at my life. But I came of age in the 60s and ambition a dirty word, even though ambition just really took different forms. But the notion of ambition was somehow tied to capitalism, even though that was not at all what I wanted, but I was afraid of wanting something too much. So I struggled with that as a way to identify myself, and then at some point I had to concede that I was a very ambitious person.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t want to go too far into the future, but I do want to ask you this question about when you left New York Magazine because you stated that your plan for the future was to try living with less ambition.

Adam Moss:
That’s true, and I think I have succeeded. It took a little while to get used to that, but ambition is exhausting. I had just had it as a habit for so long and I was kind of wiped out. I did try for the first months after I left the job to try to live a life of simpler pleasures, not needing the dopamine of the things that ambition gets you. I started to paint and I started to paint just for myself, which was a kind of ambition, but also not a public ambition. Then it really wasn’t until I wrote this book and even this book that I wrote, I wrote it for myself. I did not write it in order for it to be a bestseller or something. I wrote it to just satisfy a curiosity that I had and actually a kind of obsession that I had that was not an ambitious obsession. It was more of a personal obsession. So I think that I do live with less ambition now and I’m happier for it.

Debbie Millman:
Your book is very much a deconstruction of how people are artists and how people make art, and it occurred to me when I was thinking about the role of ambition in your life, the role of ambition in my life. I was wondering if there was any type of common denominator that you began to understand in the artists that you spoke with about the role ambition plays in their lives?

Adam Moss:
I think ambition is very important in an artist’s life, particularly an artist of the kind that I talked to for this book, this dataset of 43 of them, because ambition is one of the things that fuels drive and that you need a kind of superhuman drive to accomplish what these people have accomplished, but also the creative life is just full of obstacles. There are just bits of self-sabotage, landmines everywhere you step and in order to persevere through them, you need fuel. And that fuel can be a lot of things. It could be outrage, it could be sorrow, it could be loneliness, but it is often propelled by ambition. Now, that’s not mean necessarily ambition to sell a million dollar painting, although that comes into it. It’s the ambition to make something, but then we can talk later even about that because it’s really more the ambition to make rather than the ambition to make something.

Debbie Millman:
The one thing that you said about that experience that I thought was really compelling was you telling yourself, “Fuck this, I am strong enough. I can do this.” And it made me wonder if the very seed of ambition is about proving something to oneself.

Adam Moss:
I think that’s absolutely true. Even if it’s the kind of ambition that requires validation, the reason you require that validation is that there’s something that’s missing in you and that you’re trying to fill.

Debbie Millman:
Going back to some of your-

Adam Moss:
Long Island?

Debbie Millman:
Origin story. Yes. As you were growing up, you discovered what you’ve described as your own piece of library paradise in the stacks of magazines at your local library where you perused old periodicals from World War II. That really surprised me. You described these as stimulants for your imagination. What interested you in that particular time period?

Adam Moss:
It was really just the availability of it, but also the magazines of the 40s are wonderful and the advertisements of the 40s are wonderful, and I would spend as much time perusing those as I would reading stories. But I suppose if I was going to be in a shrinks chair, it was also my parents’ era, so I was interested in the life that they lived. It’s a kind of just way to live history, to rediscover history, but also I got very entranced with the magazine form, which was complemented by a kind of simultaneous worship of the magazines that came through the mail slot in my house, and that I would read at other people’s houses.

My parents were charter subscribers of New York Magazine, which opened up the world of New York City, which was enormously appealing, especially considering how uncomfortable I was in the suburban life that they had put me in. So this was a kind of a exit door, exit door of the imagination, but it was an exit door. And also magazines in like 1966, ’67, ’68, ’69, ’70, ’71 were fabulous laboratories of storytelling experimentation, in addition to being very exciting because the times were very exciting. So the dual action of visiting magazines of history and visiting magazines of the present or then present, just really excited me. I was just into magazines as early as I can remember.

Debbie Millman:
Was it just magazines or was it also newspapers? Long Island Newsday was quite good in the 70s.

Adam Moss:
Yeah, I wasn’t actually into newspapers. In fact, later I would get a job through strange circumstances as a copy boy at the New York Times, a job that any person who aspires to be a newspaper reporter or editor… Well, no one aspires to be an editor, but reporter would love, and I was blasé about it. It was interesting. I found it interesting, but it wasn’t actually what I wanted to do because I didn’t find the newspaper itself as a form to be as compelling to me as what was going on in the more subjective and visually enthralling world of magazines.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you got the job as a copy boy or a copy… Copy-

Adam Moss:
Copy boy, that’s what it was called, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Under Strange Circumstances. And I’m wondering what those were because I couldn’t find out. I really searched for the way in which you entered the world of the New York Times. I know you went to Oberlin College, and I know you had an internship at The Village Voice, but I could not find out how you got to the New York Times.

Adam Moss:
Well, I’ll tell you.

Debbie Millman:
Okay. Yay.

Adam Moss:
I graduated from college. I had worked at The Village Voice the summer before. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life though I was, as I say, very excited about the prospect of journalism. No more magazine journalism, the newspaper journalism. And my father has a friend, still alive, who was dating a Swedish woman, and that Swedish woman was very interested in marrying my father’s friend. And that Swedish woman, having never met me, vouched for me to her friend, her other Swedish friend who happened to be married to Sydney Gruson, who was the vice chairman of the New York Times. And so without inviting this call, I got a call one day from Sydney Gruson’s office and said, “He would like to meet you and would you come up and see him?” So I did, and I got stoned before I went, but that was-

Debbie Millman:
As one did at that time.

Adam Moss:
As one did at that time. But that was the kind of level of it didn’t matter to me really. He had two children, one child who went to Oberlin, and the other child who went to Harvard, and I had had a short stint at Harvard as well. He was very interested in the establishment, non-establishment, duality of his children’s experience, but also of my own life. We got along great, and I walked out of there with a job.

Debbie Millman:
Did the Swedish woman marry your father’s friend?

Adam Moss:
She did not.

Debbie Millman:
Oh.

Adam Moss:
Sad story.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Adam Moss:
But anyway, I did meet her at one point and she was a lovely person. And I’m very grateful to her for that, even though it was a bit of a surprise, but I should probably say… Do you know what a copy boy was? It’s a great old vestigial job. It was back before computers, of course. A newspaper had editors and writers, and when the copy had to go from editor to writer, the writer or the editor would raise their hand and yell, “Copy,” and you would run and grab the piece of paper and run to the other, the reporter or the editor, and run back and run back and run back and run back. It was a crazy fun job that just vanished like so many others.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it sounds like the ball boy or girl at a tennis.

Adam Moss:
Yeah. It’s similar. It’s similar, yeah. But during this time… So I worked there at night and I worked at Rolling Stone during the daytime because that was a magazine and they were starting a new magazine for college students. So I really, I had a life of working one job, then working another job and never sleeping and was wonderful time.

Debbie Millman:
You worked at Rolling Stone putting together a magazine called The Rolling Stone College Papers, and then from there I believe you were simultaneously at the New York Times, but then went on to Esquire–

Adam Moss:
That’s correct.

Debbie Millman:
To work on their annual college publication. But that magazine was killed the day after you arrived at Esquire?

Adam Moss:
I believe it was the day I arrived.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, the day of.

Adam Moss:
But in any case, it was too late. They had me. They had hired me as a pipsqueak editor, and it was a wonderful time to be at Esquire because Philip Moffitt and Chris Whittle, who had bought the place were somewhat insecure about their abilities to edit a big city magazine. They had come from Tennessee having done a very successful startup thing there, which gave them the money to buy Esquire. And they had brought back the great editors. One of, I talked about the New York Magazine, but one of the other, of course fantastic magazines of the 60s was Esquire, probably the best run of a magazine ever. That was really my dream job. So there I was, and they had brought back all these editors and the editors weren’t much interested in working, and they were very happy to have a young editor to do their jobs for them.

Debbie Millman:
So before you were 30 years old, you worked for The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and Esquire?

Adam Moss:
That’s true.

Debbie Millman:
What did you make of that trajectory?

Adam Moss:
I didn’t think about it. The only thing I realized was that I was the only one of my college friends working, and because you just didn’t do it in those days. You would go through Europe with a backpack or-

Debbie Millman:
Peace Corps.

Adam Moss:
Yeah, Peace Corps and work on a farm. And I had a very unusual career trajectory. And it never felt like it was any decision I made. It was just the way things happen. Of course, in retrospect, you see all the decisions you actually did make to make it happen, but it was not how I experienced it.

Debbie Millman:
In 1987, Leonard Stern, the owner of The Village Voice, was looking to start another and invited you among many others to pitch ideas. I read that Leonard didn’t have a strong sense of what he wanted to publish other than he wanted to create a magazine that was, in his words, less pinko. Allison Stern, Leonard Stern’s wife, was particularly interested in what you pitched, although it seemed when you were pitching that Leonard was not as interested. Can you talk about what you pitched and how you developed the original idea for the pitch?

Adam Moss:
At Esquire, I had been working on this other magazine, I think it was called Manhattan. It was-

Debbie Millman:
Manhattan. Yeah, Jay [inaudible 00:18:26].

Adam Moss:
It was nothing.

Debbie Millman:
I just have to interrupt you for a second.

Adam Moss:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
It wasn’t nothing at the time.

Adam Moss:
Where it went was something, but my pitch, you asked me what my pitch was. My pitch was like… It was really… I thought there was a place in the market between The Village Voice and New York Magazine, and I had this half-assed idea of what that could be. And I had presented it to a consultant, a guy named Jack Berkowitz, great guy. And he told me my idea was terrible and that it would never make any money because he was looking at it from that perspective. But he was also the consultant on this project, and he had said to me, “Hey, just pitch it. They’re having a bake-off. Just pitch your idea.” And I pitched, and I really don’t think the idea had much merit at all. But I think my own eagerness was probably winning.
And yeah, it was 10 o’clock at night in skyscraper, in 50s I think, in Manhattan, and I pitched the thing, and there was utter silence. Allison had just injured the room. I think mine was the only idea that she’d heard, and I think she thought the whole thing seemed fun. Really out of shame because the silence was so awful, I went to the bathroom. This is the story you’re looking for, I’m sure. At the urinal, I was doing my business and Leonard came in to do his business and he said, “Yeah, we’ll do your magazine.”
And then I got a bunch of people together and hired, well, I think a bunch of children, which was all I could afford, and thank God for it because there was just a kind of youthful passion and somewhat organically Seven Days emerged, which was basically a function of our own naivete about what a magazine should feel like and look like. But it became this kind of conversational collage that reflected the week. It was different and probably fresh. We got a lot of incredible talent work for it. Yeah, it was all wonderful.

Debbie Millman:
It was a wonderful sliver of time in the world of magazines at that time.

Adam Moss:
You have to remember that that was a period when there was a lot of optimism [inaudible 00:21:03] magazines and there were starting up all over the place.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. New York Woman, Egg-

Adam Moss:
Spy.

Debbie Millman:
Spy, of course. I remember very vividly Seven Days, and not just Seven Days, but also this sense that Adam Moss had arrived. And he was now-

Adam Moss:
Oh, You’re nice.

Debbie Millman:
No, no. I don’t want to fawn. That’s not what I want to do. But because it was such an important moment in my life as well. Living in New York surrounded by magazines, I was working at a number of different magazines. Nowhere as near in the stratosphere is the ones that you were working on, but it was still a great, great passion. I had a friend that worked at Manhattan, inc. and a friend that worked at New York Woman and a friend that worked at Spy. So I was very immersed in this world. And for our listeners, when Seven Days came out, it really did change quite a lot of the way in which you thought about and considered a magazine. And it’s interesting you said that you think the entire history of Seven Days is the history of people who didn’t know any better doing all the things that their elders had dismissed, because most of the time it didn’t work. But it did work for a while.

Adam Moss:
I still believe that.

Debbie Millman:
I still that it did work for a while.

Adam Moss:
Yeah, and it worked. It was a kind of accidental explosion of naiveté that yes, somehow worked. And prefigured a lot of storytelling forms that would emerge later around the internet in particular. But that kind of conversational, very subjective, personal expression, filter of experience of news experience, but also personal experience that was related to exactly that moment in time, that was what animated the magazine. And yeah, I look back on it, some parts of it I cringe at, but for the most part I’m just as excited. But it’s very much of its time so that somebody might chance upon it in a library, just the way I did those magazines of the 40s. And they will instantly know what the world was like in 1989 in New York City for a certain demographic.

Debbie Millman:
Despite only lasting two years. Two weeks after the magazine closed, Seven Days won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, which is a highly competitive accolade. And this propelled you to begin working at the New York Times where you were brought in to quote, “Decalcify the place,” unquote. And you’ve said that in doing so at the time, you got a lot of grief. They didn’t want to be decalcified?

Adam Moss:
No, they certainly did not want. The rank and file did not. The rank and file, they were very invested in the establishment traditions of the New York Times. That’s why they worked there, and they were very important. But there were some leaders of the Times, Joe Lelyveld, the man who hired me in particular, who thought it needed some breaking down. Not entirely, didn’t want to change it. Tremendous reverence for the institution, but felt that it had some cobwebs. And so he assigned me this absolutely preposterous assignment, which is to go in there and make trouble. I was 30, and I learned very quickly to ignore my brief. Anyone who wanted to bend the place a little bit, I was there to help them do that. And there were some interesting projects. They were all pretty small.

But the one piece of the institution that I wanted to participate in, because it’s the only one that I had an idea about was the magazine. And the editor at the time was not interested in my being there for excellent reason. And eventually there was, this guy named Jack Rosenthal, and he asked me to come on first in this wrecker role, and then eventually as his partner, editorial director, and then I became editor of the magazine afterwards.

Debbie Millman:
How did you feel as a wrecker? Did you feel courageous at the time? Were you tentative nervous, ballsy?

Adam Moss:
Foolhardy. Naive. Naiveté is really, it’s a theme in my life. I think it maybe still is. I just didn’t realize how many traditions I was trampling on. But on the other hand, I also knew what I didn’t know. I was not particularly cocky. I was more like a child in a room of adults, and I acted like a child, and I played as a child, and that had benefits and that had a lot of problems. But I grew up fast there and they taught me a lot. And in fact, I feel very much formed by what I learned at the New York Times and very grateful for that education. I really became a journalist there. And before that, I was faking it.

Debbie Millman:
The magazine still has a lot of your imprint in it now, all these years later. It’s still very much influenced by how you reimagined it. Could be. It’s a magazine, it’s not an insert.

Adam Moss:
Yeah, I’d like to take full credit for that. But that was really… Like many of these things, that was really a confluence of a lot of things happening at once, largely economics. The Times was really making a national push into national distribution, but also a business model of national advertising. A lot of that advertising was magazine-like advertising. So there was a desire for the magazine to be a gatherer of that kind of advertising. And so there was a kind of… I don’t want to call it an open check because it really was not that large, but there was permission given to detach it from its history as a supplement and to turn it into a freestanding magazine that happened to be distributed in the New York Times and that had the New York Times DNA, which was a really interesting brief, and one that Jack and I worked on. And then later I worked on with the staff as the editor.

Debbie Millman:
You left the Times in the early aughts, but not after more accolades awards and increase in readership, a whole different way of really assessing the magazine. And you went on to New York Magazine as editor, and you were brought in again to remake it by then, owner Bruce Wasserstein. I read that you approached it as a kind of restoration project as opposed to a re-imagination, and you wanted to bring back some of the values of the original co-founders, Clay Felker and Milton Glaser while still pointing it to the future. What were the values you deemed most important to restore?

Adam Moss:
One of them was both Clay and Milton had a perspective that what the magazine was really about was not New York City, but a New York City way of looking at the world. And that there was a filter that could be applied to Washington, could be applied to Hollywood, could be applied overseas to London, other places, that it was really a magazine of the cosmopolitan world. New York Magazine inspired a lot of city magazines, but it actually never was a city magazine. And the owners of the magazine before Bruce took it over, very much remade it themselves in the mold of the magazines that were imitators of New York. So I was trying to go back to that original idea, which I thought was bigger and more interesting and more adventurous, and to remake the magazine in 2004 to feel like it was a magazine of 2004, but it had the values that animated its founding.

Debbie Millman:
Adam, we could do a whole series, a whole series on Design Matters about the relaunch of New York Magazine. But I do want to get to your glorious new book. Suffice it to say that since the redesign and relaunch in 2004, New York Magazine has won more national magazine awards than any other publication, including the award for General Excellence in 2006, ‘7, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2016, as well as the Society of Publication Designers Award for 2013 Magazine of the Year. Most recently, the magazine won a George Polk Award in Magazine Reporting for the Bill Cosby rape investigation. And it’s also been awarded several Pulitzer prizes.

Adam Moss:
Many after I left, I just should say.

Debbie Millman:
Okay, but still-

Adam Moss:
But yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
So congratulations.

Adam Moss:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
You not only re-imagined the print magazine, you also embraced the magazine killer called the internet and knew digital-only brands, five of which Vulture, the Cut, Intelligencer, The Strategist, and Grub Street are now considered heavyweights in modern online editorial. And New York Magazine is now as much of a digital company as it is a print company.

Adam Moss:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
When so many editors couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt their publications to the digital world, what gave you the sense that this was going to be the game changer it ended up becoming?

Adam Moss:
It wasn’t that I thought it was a game changer, it was that I thought that it was interesting. And I had come from the New York Times just recently, which had… They were making a few mistakes, but basically they were getting it right about how to create a digital newspaper. And I found that very exciting. And there were several experiments, even at the very early NewYorkTimes.com that I did with the magazine that were exciting to me. I wanted to bring that spirit. I just wasn’t scared of it.

And also, the owners of New York Magazine were not scared of the internet for reasons that really, I’ve told this story too many times and it’s boring, but they were making money on their own digital site for arcane reasons, but they were. That became a business imperative too. I just keep saying this, not because I’m an economist, but you need the right conditions on the ground to do anything creative really. And in all these instances, the right conditions, the right economic conditions enabled the creative things that we were able to do.

But I was just crazy interested in it, and each experiment we did trying to build out a sort of satellite, not a satellite, but a constellation really of digital magazines, was interesting to me and interesting to my colleagues. It spurred us on to do more and more and more. We started with this thing called Grub Street, and then… [inaudible 00:31:54] food. And then we realized, “Okay, if these things were vertical as opposed to horizontal,” which is to say about one subject, “That could be wonderful. And maybe the voice should be the same voice as the print magazine, but sped up for digital purposes.”

And gave a lot of license to the early writers who helped create the voice. Grub Street became Intelligencer, which eventually became Vulture, on culture and entertainment. And Intelligencer went through several iterations, but eventually became a news site. And then The Cut, which was a kind of women’s magazine, but a very different kind of women’s magazine than it had ever been made before. And lo and behold, we had this fleet of magazines that were built for the internet and had the DNA of New York in them. And that proved to really work.

Debbie Millman:
In 2019 after 15 years of nonstop growth and innovation, you decided to leave New York Magazine. At that point, you had also somewhat secretly taken to painting. Did your new fine arts pursuit influence your departure?

Adam Moss:
No, I don’t think so. I had always loved the visual parts of magazine making, and I have a house in Cape Cod that used to be an art school just by coincidence. And there is just a feeling of being there that you can see the ladies with their bonnets painting en plein air on the dune. And I found that interesting. And then one summer I just decided to try to do a painting a day without any… I had no experience, I mean like zero experience doing this, and I just started to experiment, started painting at three and ended at five, whatever it was it was. And that was crazy fun to me. And then when I got back to New York, someone made a gift of giving me an art teacher, and that was the first time I got a teacher, but I was still working in New York at the time, and…

No, I left New York because I felt that I could only edit the magazine for myself and that I was no longer the reader. I had seen the ways in which an editor who didn’t have themselves as a compass could screw up a magazine and how it could become contagious. I just didn’t want to do that, so I had to get out of the way. So I left without any sense of what I’d want to do, except as you’ve mentioned before, to try to do something with less ambition. It was more like, “Okay, let’s see what happens” without any true sense.

But I did enjoy painting enough that I thought, “Maybe I should paint full time. And I had a problem, which is that I actually was kind of good at the beginning. My first six months, I would say painting, I was a much more successful painter than I ever was again.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Adam Moss:
Because I was looser, because I was naive. I didn’t know better. Really, it’s really, I can’t believe how thematically consistent this all is. And then as soon as I did know more, as soon as I took more classes and that kind of thing, my work started to just stiffen up and fall off a cliff. So that was deeply, deeply upsetting to me, and though I enjoyed it, it scared me.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Adam Moss:
Because I really wanted it and I didn’t know how to get there, and I didn’t have any roadmap whatsoever to get there. I could acquire skills, but I was already, I think, aware that skills training wasn’t the problem. I did lack skills, but you can always get skills. I really felt that there was a way of thinking as an artist and a degree of courage and risk-taking that I did not have in solo activity. I’d had it in a group because the group is safe, and the group eggs you on and making something together in a group is really still the greatest thing in the world to me. But here I was alone and not making enough progress.

So that’s really when I realized that I just wanted to talk to people who were successful in making art. By art, I mean any kind of art. Novels and poems and visual art. And then I was afraid that they wouldn’t be truthful with me. They wouldn’t know how to be truthful with me because so much of the process of making art is secretive and people are afraid of jinxing the muse. So they develop a kind of set spiel, and that’s how they talk about their art, and it’s about the project and all of that stuff, but that’s not what I wanted to know. I really wanted to know how something is made and what goes through a person’s mind when they’re making it, and what goes through a person’s emotional makeup, what kind of person is successful at this?

So that’s when I devised this idea of concentrating on a single work from each of these people and asking them to trace the evolution in as many different layers as they could, both practically what they did, but also very much their kind of emotional journey. And then also part as a go to help them remember truthfully, and also just because I love this stuff, to accompany it with a gallery of the artifacts of the making of the thing, the notes and the sketches and the doodles that were their tools making the work. Then I looked at all that and I kind of had a book, or I had a structure of a book, or I knew what the book was.

Debbie Millman:
Before we talk about the book, I want to ask you another question about your own journey as a painter. Was it hard for you to suddenly not be good at something when you’d been so good at so many things for so long?

Adam Moss:
I think so. I had actually taken up piano earlier in my life, and in part because you have to listen to yourself play the piano, and I was really a bad piano player. I gave that up, and my thinking at the time was that I couldn’t tolerate not being good at something. It was just too painful to me. And I realized how many things over my life I had discarded that I wasn’t good at. I’m not good at most things. And because I’d had this one moment when I thought, “I maybe could paint,” it wasn’t the same thing. It wasn’t something I was just going to throw over.

And also because I really physically enjoyed making art, I enjoyed the physical sensation of it in a way that was new to me and was exciting to me. And so I didn’t want to give it up, but I think it was more vexing to me because in a kind of group… There’s a chapter in the book on David Simon where somebody observes that he needed the bounce, this great phrase, the bounce to make television, to make the wire, which is what we were talking about. And I recognized in that that was really how I had worked my whole life, is that I had thrived in the bounce. The ricochet between creative people was really… That was the environment in which I was successful, and here I was just by myself, and it was an environment that I was not being successful, and I was trying to capture the inner dialogue. I knew what the group dialogue sounded like, and here I was trying to capture the inner one.

Debbie Millman:
So the struggles to understand your own voice as an artist is what led you to… That was a driving force behind-

Adam Moss:
Yeah. My voice, how you endure through failure and frustration, a very, very big part of it. How you… Some simple things, really actually not at all simple things, but simple to describe, where to start, where to end. What gives you the faith that you can do this. These were all questions that were questions of temperament and personality. And so in some ways, I don’t really usually describe it this way, but I was trying to understand the artistic personality.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that first attracted me to this effort was the title, the Work of Art, which I think is one of the great book titles of all time, I have to say. This subtitle is How Something Comes from Nothing. But is it true that the original title of the book was Editing?

Adam Moss:
Yeah. Well, originally-

Debbie Millman:
It’s so different.

Adam Moss:
I know, it’s so different. Although the original idea of it was to try to claim for editing a much wider sense than we usually have for it. So I wanted to talk about editing as what I’m doing right now and choosing this word instead of that word or how we dress, or basically how we make artistic decisions, make decisions, and that was what the book was going to be, and it was going to be as applied to creative people and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. Eventually that just became too limited because the editing, which is kind of this mid-zone, I think, between the imagining and the shaping, there’s a kind of judging aspect, which is similar to the function of editing. Editing just seemed too limited a term. But in some ways, the book is still about editing. It’s just not editing the way I think anybody thinks of what the word means.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, in many ways, editing is about choice-making.

Adam Moss:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
And this is a book about how you made choices to create this thing that you created.

Adam Moss:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s exactly true. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I read that you hate writing and that you think you’ve been a terrible writer for most of your life. How is that even remotely possible, Adam? I can’t even come up with the right kind of question to ask you about this.

Adam Moss:
Just think of it. If you’ve been an editor all your life, you have a very keen sensitivity to what is off, and that applies to your own work as well. I was super self-conscious, and I had this overly wound up editing scrutiny of my own work, and it got me nowhere. I had to really teach myself to write for the book, and that was a wonderful process actually. Although agonizing. I wrote the book really in a voice that was just completely not me. It was a voice that I just made up, is what I thought a book should sound like. It was really pretentious. And everything was an overreach. And then I-

Debbie Millman:
Did you decide that, or did an editor decide that?

Adam Moss:
No, I decided that it was just, I had this wrong-headed idea about what… “Okay, I’m an author now, how should I sound?” Terrible. A good enough editor recognized how bad it was, and then I went back and rewrote the whole book once I actually did find my voice. I think why I hated writing so much is because I just hated what I was writing.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote that you decided to create a book deliberately in a way that would be writer-proof.

Adam Moss:
Writer proof, yes.

Debbie Millman:
And that the writing would be the least important part.

Adam Moss:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
But I don’t think that that is the result at all. I think that part of… Some of my favorite parts of the book are your musings and candor in looking at what you were looking at and coming to the decisions that you did. My favorite parts are the parts that you actually wrote,

Adam Moss:
And you know what? Those were all the parts that I added at the end. So at the beginning, it was very much the artist’s voices were the driving force of the book, and I had a conversation with a wonderful editor friend of mine named Susie [inaudible 00:43:57], I’ll give her a moment here. And she said, “Where are you in this book?” I had to reluctantly concede that she was right, and she had the idea that the footnotes were a particularly good way to impose myself on the book in a sort of Talmudic way. But I also rewrote into the book. At that point, the book opened up. It really became a different book and a much better one, I think.

Debbie Millman:
You were invited by Frank Rich, a writer from the New York Times and New York Magazine, and also an executive producer of the television program Veep to visit the show. And that became a real impetus for writing this book, and I’m wondering if you can talk about how that happened.

Adam Moss:
Sure. I went to the set of Veep and I sat with the writers who all sit in little director’s chairs behind David Mandel, who was the showrunner of the show at the time. And I watched them do a scene that probably didn’t last more than five minutes all afternoon or a good deal of the afternoon. And there was one joke in there that landed on a Jewish holiday, and Dave Mandel did not think it worked exactly. So he had summoned the group to come up with what are called alts, which was alternatives to the joke to calibrate the joke and fine-tune it and make it funnier. One after another that he just barked an alternative out. He changed, he just kept changing the holiday. It was like Hanukkah, and then it was like Purim and Simchat Torah.

Debbie Millman:
[inaudible 00:45:32].

Adam Moss:
Simchat Torah because it’s the funniest. And Purim. And the group would laugh or they wouldn’t laugh. And finally he came up with the thing that he liked best. I can’t even remember what that was. He can’t even remember what that was. And I left just in awe of the kind of rigor that they brought to a joke that would be an absolute throwaway moment in a television show that nobody would notice. It was just like it’s wallpaper. I love that. I’ve always been a Calvinist. I’ve always been an admirer of work, and I’ve always really been an admirer of creative work. I walked out of there. It wasn’t at that moment that I decided to do the book, but it was one of the seeds that spurred the book on.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I like so much about the book is how the process, so to speak, and I hate the word process-

Adam Moss:
Me too.

Debbie Millman:
But the magic of creating art is revealed, and so many times, because great works of art, whether they be great jokes or great puzzles or great sandcastles or great paintings or poems feel effortless. It takes so much work to get to that loose.

Adam Moss:
Absolutely. Effortless. So much effort to make the effortless, yes.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. And that example of trying out the different jokes… I also learned a lot. I had no idea that that’s how jokes-

Adam Moss:
Yeah, me neither.

Debbie Millman:
Can be constructed, that you try all these things out. It just seems like they’re so effortless that they’re just fully formed. And that’s not the case in the 43 case studies in this book. Just to give our listeners a sense of this opus, it features interviews, sketches, scripts, drawings, drafted pages in journals, song lyrics, story outlines, and all sorts of intriguing never-seen-before ideas in the making of some of the most preeminent artists of our time. They span genres and mediums. They include filmmakers, songwriters, painters, playwrights, composers, poets, chefs, a puzzle maker, a sandcastle maker, a cartoonist, a newspaper editor and designer, and even a radio pioneer. And you interview more than 40 people. You ask them to take you through the process of making one specific work and drawing on what you call process artifacts to chronicle their thinking. How much fun was this project?

Adam Moss:
Enormous fun. Two parts of it were really fun. The first part of it was the conversations with the artists themselves. I loved that. I am intrinsically a worshiper of creative people. I just really admire it. And so that I just love that and I learned so much. And then I also loved the physical construction of the book. I worked with-

Debbie Millman:
Like Hayman.

Adam Moss:
Luke Hayman and his colleagues at Pentagram, and he was very generous in letting me play with him and his colleagues to make a book that we both wanted to be a book that didn’t look or feel like other books. So I really enjoyed that part too. Now, we had talked earlier about the part that I didn’t like, which was sitting in a room and writing the damned book. I just found that to be agony.

Debbie Millman:
You write about Elizabeth Gilbert and how in her TED talk on the subject, Elizabeth Gilbert speaks about how in Ancient Greece and Rome people believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source for distant and unknowable reasons. And it reminds me of something Rick Rubin wrote in his book, The Creative Act. He stated that, “If you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it’s not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker.” And this isn’t because the other artists stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come. And I’m wondering, speaking to so many people about the way in which they approach their work, do you feel that that muse is sort of out there for an artist through hard work and sitting in the chair every day will come to them, or is it something that they conjure? I really struggle with the idea about whether ideas come through the artist or from the artist.

Adam Moss:
It’s got to be both, don’t you think? That’s when it really works, is that if the artist brings what they have inside them to the table, or those that feel that it’s otherworldly, if they’re struck at that moment by some otherworldly inspiration. It must meet the moment. There’s really many, many instances in this book of work that I don’t think could have been made if it had been made at a different time. That’s true of historical circumstances or economic circumstances. But it’s also true of just the artist’s experience. The artist gets to a point where he or she can make the thing. And before that, it would’ve been impossible. Or a medium has changed. I mentioned David Simon. David Simon could not have made The Wire if HBO hadn’t existed. So there are all sorts of things that create opportunities and the opportunity meets the internal churning of the artist, and that’s when the greatness happens.

Debbie Millman:
You mentioned earlier in our conversation that artists can sometimes be secretive about their process, and I’m wondering, is it really being secretive or is it being unaware and not necessarily being able to admit that?

Adam Moss:
I think both. I think that’s very true what you say. A lot of them are secretive, A lot of them are superstitious. There’s a tremendous amount of superstition involved with this because people fear that it’s fragile. Whatever their connection is to however they identify the muse, it’s tenuous and easily broken. And if they look at it too hard, the whole thing will just dissolve in front of them. So it took a certain kind of brave person or a foolhardy person, or just a really introspective kind of person to want to participate in this project. And there were a lot of people who said no, and it was a sorting of the sort of like, “This sounds interesting to me,” because to your point, I never think of this before, and now you’ve just made me interested in where these ideas come from. Tony Kushner, who’s a very introspective person, said, “As I’m writing something, if something good comes out, it’s like, where did that come from?” It is a question that they don’t necessarily know the answer to. So a lot of these artists felt that our conversations were akin to therapy.

Debbie Millman:
You write that in your view, there are three stages of making art. The first is imagining, and the final one is shaping, which are somewhat self-explanatory, but the one in the middle and the one most interesting to me is judging. Can you talk a little bit about what that is?

Adam Moss:
We’ve talked a lot about judging in this conversation, so that the judging is what someone else might call editing, it’s bringing intelligence to bear on part one, which is what has the imagination brought, which generally is a kind of big mess that happens if you think of a first draft of a story or you think of a first pass of a painting. It’s kind of just a this and that kind of jumble, but under there, somewhere there is something worth working on. And it’s not the latter part, the shaping, that’s as you said self-explanatory, I think that’s true, which is the technique, the whittling, et cetera. It’s really, what is this and what could it be? It’s more of a thinking process. It’s the engagement of the brain. It’s not necessarily a conscious engagement of the brain, but it is something that the brain is doing to try to make sense of what they have in front of them and what it might turn into.

Debbie Millman:
As I was thinking about this, it felt like this was the manifestation of an idea, and that to me seemed like the most interesting part of the work. The imagination part, you get the spark, you don’t. You get the idea, you don’t. But the making part is the most fun.

Adam Moss:
I think so. I think it’s the most important stage, and it’s a stage that no one gives a whole lot of thought to. Technique is fun and there’s all sorts of wonderful pleasures in making anything physically. But the really crucial moment is the evaluation and the strategy, which is what this middle part is about.

Debbie Millman:
Many artists in the book also talk about getting into a flow state, which I often compare to an athlete getting in the zone. That period you describe as one of utter absorption where all the distractions in life disappear. Time even seems to evaporate. Did any of the artists in the book have tips for igniting or expediting or extending that state?

Adam Moss:
No, unfortunately they did not, but they all, almost to a one, talked about it in terms of exaltation. It’s the reward. I thought of it very much akin to almost a hallucinogenic experience, and it has that same kind of body high to be in it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s magic. At the beginning of the Art of Work, you state that you’re a painter, but you feel ridiculous saying that.

Adam Moss:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You feel ridiculous saying that. After all these interviews and this deep examination of what it means to be an artist, do you still feel ridiculous?

Adam Moss:
I still don’t know that I would call myself a painter. I don’t feel ridiculous painting. There’s something that actually I heard on your podcast that was really very helpful to me, and it was Lynda Barry was on. And she talked about how nobody, when they get on a bicycle… Do you remember this? How nobody when they get on a bicycle thinks that they can win the Tour de France. They ride a bicycle because A, they’re trying to get somewhere, or B, they’re just trying to have a good time. And why do we think differently about art?

There was something at the end of this project about people’s insistence that the piece, the work, the physical object that they were making, whether it’s a book or a poem or a painting or joke, was not actually the most important thing to them. In fact, they were largely indifferent to it. They were proud of it. It was good. It was nice. It was the end. They weren’t dismissive of it typically, although sometimes they were. But they did feel that it was not the point. That the point was the, what I like to think of as the verb, was the making.

And once I got that, I had a different attitude about my painting. That sense of critical punishment I was inflicting on myself disappeared, and I felt the pleasures… Whether they were flow state pleasures or not, I felt the pleasures of the making, and that gave me delight. And now I actually really do love painting. I know it sounds pat, but it is true that it gave me back my love of painting. I’m painting obsessively again, but I’m not painting obsessively to make good stuff. It’d be nice if good stuff happened. I have no problem with that, and I am getting a little closer to maybe showing my painting-

Debbie Millman:
That was my next question. I know that the only two people that have… Well, I think… Did you show it to one interviewer?

Adam Moss:
Yeah. I let Ari Shapiro from NPR. He wanted a scene, and I understood that as a magazine editor. And I thought, “It’s radio. I can let you into this room and no one will ever see what you saw. So okay, you’ll see it. And you’re lovely, generous guy. And I’m sure you’ll think it was fine. But the audience won’t see it.” So I did let him in, yes.

Debbie Millman:
So he’s one of three. Your husband, your art teacher, and now-

Adam Moss:
Although someone else reminded me that they’re number four, because it’s someone that I had been sharing the studio with for a while and I kind of forgot that he worked within. When I wasn’t there, he worked within the world of my work.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I hope the world gets to see it at some point. My last question isn’t really a question. It’s really more of a quote. I want to quote something that you said. You were asked about finishing the book and being out in the world, and if you have a better understanding of the mystery of making art, and you said this, “I’ve gotten one part of the answer, which is that the work of art is the work. It’s the most banal observation, but that it’s not about the thing you make, it’s about the making. It took me three years to figure out that that was actually true.” And let me tell you, it has changed my life.

Adam Moss:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Adam, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for making so much work that has mattered for so much of my life, my adult life, and thank you so much for joining me today on Design Matters.

Adam Moss:
Oh, thank you, Debbie. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much.

Debbie Millman:
Adam Moss’s latest book is titled The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Thank you.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Because design does matter.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
You were born in Houston.

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Horses.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Why horses?

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Why?

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Absolutely.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
I did. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
What inspired that evolution in your work?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Sojourner Truth.

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
To support the substance. Yes.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Oh, god.

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Good. Good.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Nothing?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Nothing.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

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

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, sometimes.

Debbie Millman:
A lot of times.

Nell Irvin Painter:
A lot of times. Yeah.

Debbie

Millman:
More often than not, it feels.

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Their children.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Their pets.

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
I think nothing.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Oh, my god. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. I am an artist.

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

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes. It did.

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Oh, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Oh, really? Okay.

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Especially true now. Especially true.

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

Debbie Millman:
Does it feel different?

Debbie Millman:
Nell Irvin Painter:

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Okay.

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

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

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

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

Debbie Millman:
Conception.

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
This is true.

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah, really.

Debbie Millman:
But tell us about the project.

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

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

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

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

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

Debbie Millman:
In 2003, the artist Es Devlin’s career took a turn. She’d already made her name as a theater designer where her conceptual and sculptural stage designs had long impressed the London theater world. But when her work turned some of her attention to concert set design, she pretty much impressed the entire world. She’s done concert sets for Beyonce and Jay-Z, for Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus, for opera festivals, the Olympics, and even the Super Bowl. She also helped launch this Sphere in Las Vegas with her artistry with U2. There’s currently an exhibition of her work at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City, and she joins me today to talk about her truly extraordinary career.

Es Devlin:
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I love this podcast so much. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, thank you. Is it true you’d like to buy your shoes in terminal five at Heathrow Airport?

Es Devlin:
Oh my goodness. Do you know what? I haven’t bought a pair of shoes for a long time. I probably said that at a time when I did buy shoes. I reckon I’ve got enough shoes now. There’s a pair of shoes I’m really into which are Converse with a really deep sole and I just bought five of them and I wear them on rotation because they make me a bit taller and I don’t fall over. So shoes is sort of… Yeah, I don’t even buy them anymore. Got enough.

Debbie Millman:
Your earliest memory is of a line of light through dark water when you were about two years old and you accidentally fell into the River Thames and remember voices and bright light penetrating a medium other than air. What was that like for you and how were you rescued?

Es Devlin:
Do you know what? I was probably only in there for moments, but the odd thing is that I remember it. I think I was paddling, I fell in. I think my dad noticed pretty quickly that I was nowhere to be seen and scooped me out. But weirdly, I really remember it and I know it was only two. And I remember, I wasn’t aware of what drowning was or anything, but I just remember seeing particles of light from a source of light above me. I remember this deep greenish brownish color of the Thames and rocks and little particles and things, and I just remember I was being observant. I was observing and taking it all in, even though it was obviously a condition of not being able to breathe. But I guess because I didn’t understand it, I was just living it and it stayed with me. And that light is something I seek out now, I think, in any form I can find it.

Debbie Millman:
It seems as if this experience contained the five ingredients often found in the process of your work. And you’ve talked about space, light, darkness, scale and time.

Es Devlin:
Do you know what? I’ve never heard it put like that before, but you’re absolutely right. It probably did include all of those things and encapsulated in a very brief span of time, but one that I still think about and write about even now, 50 years later.

Debbie Millman:
You were born in Kingston upon Thames in England. Your mom was a teacher, your dad was a journalist in education at the Times. And you’ve said they were education obsessives and I’m wondering if they inspired your work ethic.

Es Devlin:
I think they did. My mother is from Wales and her father was a physics teacher and his father was a coal miner. Her mom was a hairdresser, and I think my mom, her story was that through her education at the local school, she managed to go to a university in England, which was unusual from that small mining town. And I think they really impressed upon me the value of practice, the idea that if you were patient and if you played a violin scale every day, it would sound bad on Monday, but on Friday morning it might get a bit better.

Debbie Millman:
In 1977 when you were six years old, your parents went on a romantic weekend to Rye in Sussex on the advice of your Aunt Prue, and they impulsively bought a house and you all moved and the house had a history. Apparently T.S Elliott played his first game of ping-pong there and Henry James lived up the road. Did you feel their ghosts at all?

Es Devlin:
Well, funny enough, the stories about ghosts were written by a lady called Joan Aiken, who was the daughter of a man called Conrad Aiken who owned the house for a while, and they were written and staged in the house. So because I was six, and I do think from subsequent reading that something happens in a child’s brain when it is six years old and that certain habits that its form start to crystallize into beliefs. And so I believed that houses were the sight of stories and that houses told stories. So to me, I just thought that was what houses did, that stories were written them and that a place could tell a story.

Debbie Millman:
One of the landmarks of Rye where you grow up is a handmade one to 100 scale model of the town during Victorian times. And you’ve written about how Rye had a way of telling its stories.

Es Devlin:
Oh, I think so. I was six years old when we moved there and we would go, I think the practice was a bit like going to church. So we would go to church on a Sunday and on Saturday we would go to this model. We’d seen it, but because my parents had moved away from the suburbs of London, which is where I was born, their friends were coming to visit. And every time a friend would come to visit, they would be taken next door to see the model and we would go. And it became a little ritual. And I guess in my mind because I was six, it was more confirmation that buildings told stories because it was little models that spoke. I think they had little lights in them and little speakers in them, and each one would tell its own story, but it was also somewhat conflated, I think in my mind, we’re going to church where objects also spoke because we were ringing little bells. It was in Latin, at our church.

And there was a little theater in the church with a little curtain, and then there was a chalice, and there were these wafers that were standing in for much bigger things than wafers and objects were standing in for ideas. And the idea of objects being protagonists in a ritual felt quite normal. That’s just what was happening in my weekend, I think.

Debbie Millman:
Isn’t that a beautiful way of understanding your origin story and how you’ve become who you are? It’s amazing how these little vignettes and our histories impact our futures.

Es Devlin:
I think that’s so true, and I think through practice of 30 years of doing various different things from theater to opera to concerts to art installations, I guess what I’m finding now, you ask about shoes. Is just I’m beginning now to practice that objects are protagonists in life, not even just in ritual, but just anything we touch. And I’m really interested in the etymology of every object, like what went into it? Where did it come from? Whose hands touched it? Where did it travel? And I think more and more as we start to question the complex systems that we’re all entangled in, I think we are really interested in the stories of our objects and how can we make sure we’re aware and that we honor them and notice them and allow them to resonate or not have them in our lives at all as an option. Like shoes, what do we need? What do we want? What’s the story of it? What do we really bring into our house when we order an object?

Debbie Millman:
And what does it say about who we are? And even I think more interestingly, what do we think or want it to say about who we are to others and what does that telegraphic projection doing?

Es Devlin:
I read something really interesting, which I really recommend if you have time. It’s a book by Peter Frankopan, and it’s called The Earth Transformed, and it goes through the history of civilization, eastern, west and various forms of civilization across the 4.6 billion year history of the planet. But it takes each chunk of history and views it through the lens of climactic shift. So it says, for example, the first totemic objects that humans made on various sides of the planet independently that were made in honor of cosmic deities may have been made at a time when the sun was particularly busy with solar radial activity, like the northern lights. So it may have been that cultures were observing cosmic deities because they were literally observing great streams of light of performance art light coming down from the sun. And I found that a very interesting thing to consider.

Debbie Millman:
And I also find it so endlessly fascinating that people were doing this all over the planet without knowing that other people all over the planet were doing it. And the same with religious symbols. We were creating religious symbols almost at round the same time about 10,000 years ago. And there’s really no recorded history of any culture, not having some religious symbol that was created around that time.

Es Devlin:
Another one in that book actually related to what you just said is that around the same time in various sites in the Lascaux caves in Northern Spain or the Blombos caves in South Africa, these first drawings in caves that we know, and especially the ones that are half animal, half human, there’s a thesis in this book, the Peter Frankopan book, The Earth Transformed, that possibly this was during a time 40,000 years ago when conditions climatically were pretty hazardous, and the humans that did survive were the ones who were living deep in the caves. And it may have been that in those depths of the caves, there was a diminished level of oxygen. So if you are deep, deep, deep in a cave and your brain is somewhat deprived of oxygen, the thesis is perhaps this somewhat hallucinogenic state of shamanic sensibility of recognizing the continuity between human and animal might have been attained because of a diminution in oxygen level, which I find really interesting as well. Just looking at it through that lens.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely, yes.

Es Devlin:
Do not try this at home, callers. Don’t try this at home.

Debbie Millman:
Actually, I was imagining thousands of listeners running to the caves experimenting. As you also avidly studied music and learned to play the piano, the violin, the clarinet. Were you considering pursuing music professionally?

Es Devlin:
I loved practicing and I loved playing. I wasn’t ever good enough, but I did love being part of an orchestra, so I would sit at the back on my violin. I wasn’t actually good enough to get into, I got into a wind band, but not a big orchestra because there’s only a food clarinets, but I’d be at the back scratching away. And I learned that I could be part of a really beautiful big sound, and my small part in it, it was unbelievable to me that this overall sound could be so majestic. And yet I was just going… With my bow, and yet I was part of something way bigger than I could ever do on my own. So that was the big teaching that for me.

I did go to the Royal Academy of Music on a Saturday and take junior lessons. It wasn’t like you had to get in, to be honest. You had to just pay, and my granddad paid for me. So I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I was brilliant, but I did work hard at it and went every Saturday. But I learnt there, I saw people who really were gifted way beyond what I was. And I did have this revelation moment that I mentioned in the book where I was, I guess even I was only 11 years old, I was probably thinking, “God, there’s something about these people who are way beyond me. This is not my league or my tribe.” But when I was walking down the corridor, hearing a lot of very young, very gifted people playing a bit of clarinet, a bit of violin, a bit of jazz over here, I do remember perhaps not consciously, but something in me holds onto this memory of a corridor and this light coming in and this mixture of music.

And something landed in my head going, “Well, actually this corridor is kind of cool. The light in here is cool. I really like the way this music is all meeting, and maybe this corridor is itself quite an interesting place to be, even if I’m not in one of those rooms specializing in one.” I learnt if you wanted to really excel in music, you had to just make that decision to specialize, specialize, specialize and practice so hard. So I liked being in the corridor. That’s where I still am, I reckon.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You’ve talked a lot about the importance of the corridor to your practice, to the way you approach your work. What do you think it is about that space between? A corridor is almost like the space between two separate rooms or environments.

Es Devlin:
Well, there’s an essay actually, or a conversation in the book with a woman I really admire called Dorothea Von Hantelmann. She’s a German art historian, and she taught me a lot about synaesthetic ritual, and she made me see something which I hadn’t taught before, which is, maybe when we look back at this period of time, this last 500 years or so or more, we might look at it as a bit of an aberration. And that actually up until now, these last five centuries, it would’ve been normal for humans as their birthright along with sleeping and eating to have attended, at least weekly, a collective ritual and attained a collective flow state and a synaesthetic flow state. And it would’ve been unusual until this chunk of 500 years to break down that ritual into musician, composer, artist, architect. It would’ve been considered a synaesthetic ritual, and you wouldn’t really have asked who wrote the music in the church.

You would’ve just said, “I am feeling this with every atom of my body. I’m smelling the incense. I am feeling the light coming through the windows. I’m reading the colored light through the stained-glass. I’m listening to the text of the liturgy.” So maybe that fusion of things is me perhaps wanting to try and restore something perhaps instinctively, that I think the human body and species really responds positively to, is that I think, I haven’t read much Emil Durkheim, but people keep telling me to, and the things I’ve read about it are that he talks about a effervescent flow state that when humans all sing together or engage and focus together, a state of flow can be attained, which is very positive for the human species. And I’m finding that in my work, that people really respond well to collective ritual.

Debbie Millman:
You considered going to Maidstone Art School for college, but went to Bristol University and studied literature. What made you decide to do that?

Es Devlin:
I didn’t feel ready yet to make art, to write my own thesis for the art. I didn’t feel I had enough to say. I didn’t feel I’d learned enough. And the people at my school who were ready to go and were all ready to form their discourse, I didn’t really relate to their discourse. It wasn’t at the level that I wanted to speak. It was a different type of engagement, and I wanted to learn a lot more before I tried to form an analysis or a thesis in my work. So I really just wanted to read and learn. I felt there were so many lacunae and gaps in my knowledge, so I really relished reading for three years.

Debbie Millman:
I really recommend that path to anybody that I can. I also studied English literature in college, and in many ways it’s become the foundation of everything that I do. Not that I teach literature at all, but that it gave me a way of understanding the world in I think ways I could not have otherwise been able to experience. And many, many people that I talk to that have that same background seem really grateful that that’s what they did. However, unpractical it might seem now, and certainly with the numbers of people majoring in English literature going down so precipitously, but I wouldn’t change that for anything in the world.

Es Devlin:
I totally agree. And I think this quality of internal landscape, just the act of reading, again, we talked about practice earlier, but the practice of reading, I think particularly now, I feel really challenged in my reading since the advent of the ubiquitous companion of the telephone. And I got quite worried about it for a while. And I made a work of collective reading actually, to see if we could gather people to read together, because I think that sense of what the brain does when it takes just black and white print on a page and conjures imagery and atmosphere and place, that process that goes on in the brain seems to me so precious to us. It seems that that’s what we’ve got to fall back on. I went to see a lecture about poetry and the wonderful author and poet, Jeanette Winterson was there.

And a young sixteen-year-old girl put her hand up in the audience, and she was quite timid. And she said, “Look, this might be a silly question, but what is a poem?” And Jeannette Winterson said, it’s not a silly question. She said, “A poem that you learn by heart is something that nobody can take from you, even if you house burns down and you’ve lost all your belongings.” And I just think that aspect of, what is inside you? What is internal? And there’s a book that I recommend, sorry for the book recommendations, by a guy called Byung-ho Chan called Psychopolitics. And he talks a lot about the internal, that internal landscape that humans can generate and grow and how resistant it needs to be to this flow, I guess, of stimulation that we now get. So I’m really about cultivating that internal compass landscape, things that we grew ourselves in the brain rather than just imbibe through the eyes.

Debbie Millman:
Are you worried about our, or humanity’s, I guess the best word for it would be addiction to our devices?

Es Devlin:
Yeah, I am. I don’t like how I feel when my hand keeps creeping away to my phone, and I know it’s my hand wanting a little rush of dopamine. And it used to come, I remember when we… I’m going to sound like a real old granny now, but I remember when the phone used to ring in my house, it would go ring, ring, it was the phone, and of course it was attached to its place in the house, and there was a little dopamine rush that the house got because, “Oh, it might be my friend. It might be my grand.” That was what the phone meant when I was growing up. And then when I was a young adult and the phone was still attached to the wall and I was first working, it was like, “Oh, somebody might want me. I might get a job.” That was what the phone. It was ring, ring, maybe there’s a project for me.

Those little dopamine rushes were few and far between. The phone didn’t ring that often during the day, but now suddenly it is just on tap. So I think, am I worried? I guess. I think we’re in a corridor moment. We’re in a liminal moment where we are all as a species having to adjust. And we know that our evolution, the evolution of our bodies is so much lower. Our chemical evolution is so much lower than the evolution of our tools, which is way faster than our chemical makeup can keep up with. So we’ve got this torrent of chemical stimulation that we… If we get through it, we will be more resilient as a species. I guess I had a choice with my own kids. Do you just take the phone away or do you say, “No, listen, you’re going to have to develop some resistance to this, otherwise you’re just going to long for it.” So I guess me, my kids, my mom, all generations we’re trying to develop strategies and skills to grow our inner selves as a bulwark against the torrent is how I feel.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Dan Formosa, the designer, Dan Formosa, he is one of the world’s tech pioneers, and he said that he doesn’t think that people are really addicted to their devices or the technology. They’re really addicted to the feeling that they get through the technology. And I try to hold onto that when I’m doom scrolling, and that maybe I just really need better connections with humans than this specific device. And I’m just using it as a stand-in that’s not quite as successful as I’d like it to be.

Es Devlin:
Yeah, I think we’re in a moment, aren’t we? But I’m optimistic that we’ll find somewhere good. We just need to keep having conversations like this. We’re all talking about it. We’re all having the same conversation. And that does lead to change in my experience.

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 meant that when Johnny Ive designed the iPhone, in a way, he’d reached the Nebulous ultra of design of that object because it was this infinity pool, this beautiful black thing. And in a way, no one’s really gone any further with it. 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 synaesthetic move where the speakers, and I can’t remember how many thousands of them 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 out 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 Weeknd concert, Abel Tesfaye, The Weeknd, 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 what 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 Dura 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-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 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 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 EVD?” 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 show’s now finished, but when you walked in. And then very purposeful, the 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 Taddeo, 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 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 the sources to 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 The 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 400s 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.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I really would like to see Darren Aronofsky’s film that’s playing there now. What gave you the sense after Bristol that you were now ready to be fully immersed in studying art?

Es Devlin:
Well, actually, I was such a slow bloomer. So anyone who’s listening to this podcast who considered themselves to be a slow bloomer, please join a very big club. I didn’t have a clue, honestly. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew I liked reading and I loved making artwork. That’s all I knew. But what I did do was, I listened to advice and somebody said to me when I had just come back from visiting this beautiful room at St. Martin’s College, because I had a place to go into another, I was going to do another three year degree. I had done my three years of English, I’d done one year of foundation course, which is very general, lovely course, and I was about to do another three years. It was only really a phone call from my then boyfriend’s dad who said, “When are you going to earn some money? Because my son-“

Debbie Millman:
I still can’t believe that he had the nerve to say that to you.

Es Devlin:
My son can’t support you anymore. Well, it gave me a bit of a wake-up call anyway. I did think, “I better get a job because I might be out the house.” So I was all set to do another three years. I was just curious. I said, I want to try photography. I want to try printmaking. I want to keep honing my painting skills. I was very privileged that I had this boyfriend who was older than me. Anyway, I walked into another room on the advice of several tutors. You know when three different people send you to the same place you go, “Okay, well, I better set this out.” And I just walked in and it was a room I felt at home in because it was an extension of that corridor, I guess. It was a lot of different things happening at once. There was people reading poetry and listening to opera and making costumes and making little models with cardboard. It had a fug of people who hadn’t slept or washed often, which I-

Debbie Millman:
Is this the Motley Theater design course that you did?

Es Devlin:
That smell definitely defined it for you. Yeah, the old pot noodle. It just felt suitably feral and that people are so passionate about what they did that they weren’t going to leave. And actually, I’ll be honest with you, I was still uncertain because it was a theater design course, and I hadn’t really been to the theater very much. To be honest, I’d been a few times been to Pantomime when I was a kid, a few musicals, Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 80s, I liked. But I didn’t go to the theater much, so I wasn’t like, “Oh, I want to do theater.” I thought it was a bit old-fashioned, to be honest, people shouting and stuff and acting. So I wasn’t obsessed with that. So the thing that swung it for me was that that studio never closed. And I knew that whatever I did, whenever I was making anything, I would work all night at it.
And I thought, well, at least the studio, even if I don’t like the theater thing, I’ll have an all night studio. Whereas that Central Saint Martin’s one, they kicked you out at 6:00. I was like, “Oh, that’s the decision then.” but it was literally that arbitrary. And I think that’s worth saying as well, that sometimes decisions that you make, even if it feels a bit arbitrary, that you make a decision based on what time the studio is going to close, whether you like the feel and smell of it. I think trust your instincts on things like that because it adds up to a day to day and it adds up to a life, and it adds up to your life. So I do think those choices about how you will spend your day are pretty vital in the detail.

Debbie Millman:
You designed six pieces at Motley, and at the end of the program you competed for the Linbury Prize for stage design and won. This gave you your first professional commission, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II at the Bolton Octagon Theater in 1996. And you built a giant white bathhouse for the play and wanted the showers to run red with blood, and the plumbers at the Octagon said it couldn’t be done. And I love this story because I feel like it’s a wonderful snapshot into your drive and persistence. What was your response to the plumbers?

Es Devlin:
Well, to understand the context of this, I’m from the south of England and I had a privileged upbringing in my way, although there wasn’t so much money, there was a sense that here I was still in education, and here I am arriving in the north of England and I’m being thrust into this position because I’ve won a bloody competition. And then there’s people there who really do know how to do the job. They know how to do set design, and they know how to do plumbing. And there’s this little thing showing up, knowing nothing but mighty determined to have the plumbing in the way that I wanted it to look, even though it probably was not the way that it should work.

So there was a kind of, the beginning of what I guess has persisted throughout the practice of showing up in situations where I really don’t know the techniques. I don’t know how to build the things that I design and make. I don’t know how they work in detail. And I am absolutely more and more humbled and respectful of those people who know the intricacies of how some of the technology works and know how to build things and know how things work. But yeah, at the very beginning of my career, probably if I look back now and saw that person opening, closing their mouth and going on about plumbing, I’ll probably slap myself to be honest. But anyway, they tolerated me. So thank God.

Debbie Millman:
You spent the night, I think, going through plumbing manuals to figure out how it could indeed work. And ultimately you were able to get it to work. Is that correct?

Es Devlin:
Yeah, we found a way. Many, many people helped.

Debbie Millman:
Is it true that you got your first job with the director Trevor Nunn by writing him a letter?

Es Devlin:
Oh my God. I was the arch letter writer. I would write to everybody. I had done a few little things at the beginning and I had lovely pictures of them, and I put them in an envelope. And I remember one designer I wrote to saying, “Please give me a job, anything, anything.” And he very sweetly, when he saw me, he said, “Look, those photocopies must have been quite expensive to make, do you want them back?” He sent them to someone else. But yeah, I was just persistent and I guess I was really longing. I had a taste of what it might be like to make work then. Having not really thought about it, once I started making work, that quality, I can still remember the smell of the angle grinder of the steel in the workshop at the Bolton Octagon. If I go into a workshop now and I smell angle grinders and wood saws, the smell of people making stuff, it makes me so happy. And I guess I got quite addicted to that pretty quickly.

Debbie Millman:
One of my favorite pieces that you’ve created is the work that you did for the 1998 production of Harold Pinter’s play, Betrayal, which has really been one of my favorite plays since I saw the film in 1983 that starred Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley, which I think is truly one of the great movies of, I don’t know, last hundred years or so. I think that it’s just a magnificent, magnificent play and movie. Harold Pinter employs reverse chronology in the play, so time goes backwards. And in every production prior to yours, the sets were very sparse. I saw a production in New York recently with Tom Hickleston where there was just a chair. It was a chair, that was it, a black box and a chair. It is really amazing to see what you did.

Harold Pinter said that you didn’t pay any attention, any regard to the stage direction, and you designed the fuck out of it, which I think is the best compliment you could get from somebody like Harold Pinter. You use projector images of children between the scenes and conveyor belts. And you said you were inspired by Rachel Whiteread’s monumental 1993 sculpture, House. Talk about how you approached that play and the courage that it took to do something that really flew in the face of everything that had come before it in regards to not just betrayal, but just stage design.

Es Devlin:
The thing is, it was all founded on utter instinct and ignorance, honestly. I think it was a convergence of me literally skipping. I skipped when I came out of the meeting with Trevor Nunn and realized I was going to do this project. For me, it was such a dream having just graduated and done this prize project that really pretty much a couple of projects later was for me, the epitome of what I wanted to do at that time was to work at the Great National Theater of Great Britain. So I was excited beyond belief. And I had a sense, and this is very odd when I look back at it now, it’s very strange. But weirdly, the thing that I thought was most appropriate when I read the play was to perform it at somebody’s sculpture, literally. And it is interesting that that was my thought.

I just thought, where does this play need to happen? And it was very much in the press at the time, because Rachel Whiteread, a phenomenal artist. It was a moment in the 90s where Britain was emerging from 20 years of conservative thatch dry politics. And there was an emergence of artists. They were called the YBAs, the young British artists, and we felt a real sense of hope, I must say. We felt really that the tape modern was being planned. It was to open in 2000. There was a real sense that our country was finally changing, real sense of positivity. And we all got behind the sculpture that she made, it was so beautiful. It was a monument in the stand. She filled a house with concrete, and then she took the house away. This was a condemned house that was about to be knocked down anyway.

She took the house away, and it was this exquisite sculpture of the volume of time and space inside a building. And it was everything that, what we’ve been talking about on this podcast, about houses having life and voice. And it was pungent, it was sad as well as potent. And to me, the piece that Harold had written, Betrayal, was a series of rooms speaking. It was rooms to me, I think it’s quite a particular take on it, but to me it was rooms remembering. Rooms remembering time, and humans passing through rooms. And I said to Trevor, “Why don’t we do the play at this installation?” And of course, we couldn’t because it was outdoors and it was about to be knocked down anyway, or maybe it already had been knocked down. So I wrote to Rachel, and it was an odd thing to do seeing as I was just beginning my practice, one would’ve thought I might’ve wanted to make my own mark, but I actually didn’t. I just wanted this thing to happen.

I said to Rachel, “Can we make a wall that remembers all of the locations in this play in the style of what you do?” And she said, “Oh, absolutely. You have my blessing. Put it in the program.” So we made a ball of plaster, and I went and researched around London and found, and I didn’t go to it, but I looked at pictures, found exact photo reel references of where we thought the play probably happened. And then I made impressions of them onto this concrete wall. And then we also had the wall remembered by projecting onto it. We filmed, we made a film actually. And remember this was in the 90s, it was very unusual to put projection in a theater. They weren’t departments for that. You had to get an advertising agency to come, and it was very expensive to pay for someone to come and make a film to put on your theater piece.

Projectors were big and noisy. It was all complicated. And we filmed Trevor Nunn’s children and the actor’s children. So we made a whole family movie out of it. And then we had the furniture passing through. And actually the floor of the piece, because in my mind, again, because my instinct was to just associate. And because the National Theater is made out of shuttered concrete, the National Theater bears the imprint of the making of the National Theater. It’s got that shuttered ply impression on the concrete. So to me, it was already halfway there. So I was conflating the architecture of the building with a piece of concrete that could remember places. And to me, it just seemed like obvious that this is how it had to be done, but obviously it was probably the last thing that poor play needed, but it survived, I think.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I love the fact that after the play, Harold Pinter introduced you to someone on opening night and said, “Have you met Es Devlin? She wrote the play.” It’s the best possible compliment I think you could get.

Es Devlin:
I think it was was definitely a backhanded one, a slap, more of a slap. But anyway, I’ll take it.

Debbie Millman:
In the New Yorker, writer Andrew O’Haganan wrote that each of your designs is an attack on the notion that a set is merely scenery. And when you first started in this industry as set design was not supposed to be its own character, give the story away or turn everything into metaphors that could take the audience out of the play. You don’t do that, but your sets are very much of the play. And in the play, how were you able to avoid taking the audience out of the play?

Es Devlin:
Really that question as it goes to the essence of the mystery, I guess, or the technique or the practice of what we’re trying to do. And yeah, the way I was taught was definitely, don’t shout too loud, do less. But equally, I was also taught that the answers will be in a process. So if you read the text, if you research and if you start with nothing and see what you really need. And I guess adding a layer, not just responding to the text and what it needs, but also being cognizant of what the space needs. I walk into a room and treat each space as a patient. My family laugh at me, because when I come home, I immediately go around the room and move just a few things that really annoy me, or the lights have to be a certain way. So I think spaces look for correction or help medicine.

So I think you can respond to the space as well as the play and how the play meets the space, or the music or the artwork, whatever it is you are putting into a space. And I think you respond to a moment. It’s not just the moment when the piece was written or the song was written, or the artwork was written, it’s the moment that you are communicating with a group of people. And I think more and more, actually, I realize how precious. I sort of fell into theater, but now after 30 years, I realize having done many other things. How unique, rare and precious it is for a group of people to gather together. And as my friend Lindsay Turner, the director says, “Still the ego for the greater good.”

That’s so unusual that we, and she puts it like this very brilliantly. She said, “We all agree, the actors agree that they’ll pretend the audience aren’t there. The audience will agree to pretend that they’re not there. Everyone agrees to do it at 7:30, we all still the ego for the greater good.” And when you are sitting watching a play or any performance, really the opportunity for things to go wrong at every single second is so multifaceted. The opportunities for humiliation for all concerned, and the fact that we all keep the balloon in the air, we’ll keep blowing the balloon up together. It is a very beautiful human thing. I really more and more value that presence, even to be honest. Even if I go to a theater, it’s not very good.

I went to see a play straight after lockdown. I was just so excited to be in a theater. The play wasn’t very good, but the audience was so beautiful. I was like, “I’m loving this audience.” It doesn’t really matter about the play. They were so quiet. They were so connected to one another. Sometimes an audience is doing something which is just tolerating. Sometimes you can hear the sound and the beauty of an audience tolerating a second rate bit of work from a first class artist. They know the artist is brilliant. They put faith in them, they believe in them. They’ve all turned out for them. They know that this night just isn’t quite working. But there’s a beautiful sound of audiences being patient. And it’s so rare.

Debbie Millman:
As you’ve since gone on to design more than 50 theatrical productions that does not include hundreds of other projects in opera, dance, film. And as I mentioned in the intro, ceremonies like the Olympics and the Super Bowl. You’ve collaborated with Jay-Z and Beyonce, U2, Billie Eilish, Adele, Miley Cyrus, Shakira, The Weeknd, Lenny Kravitz, Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga. What is it like going from a small black box theater to creating sets for audiences of what can sometimes be 100,000 people?

Es Devlin:
Well, the logistics of a touring concert are brutal because the main thing that has to happen is people have to be able to put it in a truck in a really tight amount of time and get it out of a truck in a really tight amount of time and get it up and get it safe. And it has to do a job of broadcasting the music and often an image of the performer. So there’s quite a lot of constraint to that aspect of my practice. That said, when you are among a crowd of up to a 100,000 people all going off, we just did the Bad Bunny concert open in Salt Lake City recently and is now touring America. That audience, I must say, I hadn’t experienced that particular audience before. Every audience is a different species in itself, and this audience was so joyous, so joyous.

It was luminous to be there. And yet the concentration that you get when everybody’s focused on a text in a small theater like The Hunt we have on at the moment, actually in New York at St. Anne’s Warehouse, I think that only seats about 250 or 300 people or something very small. And the concentration, no one’s breathing barely. And then actually, there are some plot points in that that are somewhat shocking. Not in a terrible way, but they surprise you. And the audience, you can hear them go ah all together. It’s very beautiful to be part of an audible gasp, just in a plot point.

Debbie Millman:
It’s wonderful. As I want to talk to you about your book, your first Monographic Museum exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum has an accompanying 900-page monograph. Both the show and the book are titled, An Atlas of Es Devlin, and it’s a survey of the last three decades of your practice. Is it true that the book took nearly seven years to complete and was much harder than you expected to make?

Es Devlin:
It did. It took seven years. My kids kept saying every day, as we got close to the end, they said, “Have you finished it yet? Have you finished it?” It was such an immense undertaking. And it’s shocking in a way in that if you think of these big stadium things, and this is just one little book, but it was like an implosion.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s almost like a show in and of itself. It’s in this box, so you take it out of the box. There’s a wonderful video on your website of some of the making and the gluing and the inserting. And the book was designed by your cousin Daniel Devlin, and it includes 700 color images. It documents 120 projects. It includes pullouts, acetates, accordion, folds, and even a limited edition print, which was a big surprise and very exciting for me. You’ve described the book as a sculptural object that required you and your team to get under the bonnet of how a book works. What did you discover in that process?

Es Devlin:
Oh my God. Every time I feel that humans are out there most vibrant when they don’t, they’re curious and they don’t quite know. You don’t quite know enough. You’re just a little bit out of your depth. And certainly I was, because there are a whole set of rules to making books. And actually, it’s a little bit akin to learning music, because when you learn music, you have to learn what the bass clef does, and the treble clef and a 4/4 time signature. And literally in the books, as you probably know, they’re made up of signatures, and it has to be a multiple of eight or 16 or four. And so you have to get yourself into this time signature of eights. I had a sense seven years ago, I made a mock-up of this book seven years ago, which didn’t look that different to what we have.

So I knew the sculptural object, but of course, that was just the shell of a book. I needed then to work out how I was going to organize the stuff in the book and how I would make it look like the object I was dreaming of with the stuff that I had. And every version that I made of it, we made beautiful mock-ups, but they were just exhausting to experience. You would open it and you’d go through it all. And the way we were originally organizing it was for each project, we would show a little bit of text, a little bit of drawing, a little bit of photographs, and then we’d go onto the next one. And it was like going breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner until you want to basically vomit. So I scrapped that. And said, “Actually, let’s treat it like event like a day.”

Let’s say you start in the morning and you are in a studio and you are just looking at the drawings. So you keep a unity of type of material that’s in that first part of the book. So it’s mainly stuff that I’ve drawn in the first chunk of the book. And then I became obsessed that I couldn’t deal with the white area around the object that I wanted to show in the book. So if I had a drawing, I didn’t understand what the white frame was around the drawing, just I couldn’t figure it out. So I figured out that I needed portrait pages and landscape pages and square pages to accommodate different items, and that there were some drawings that I didn’t feel were good enough or made sense on their own, but they were interesting if you could see them in sequence as a storyboard, as a graphic of unfolding of time.

So I wanted to have these unfolding long landscape presentations. And that was, of course, all impossible to do within a book that I was keen to cost. At the beginning, I wanted it to be 50 pounds, which weirdly on Amazon I just checked and it was like $88, which isn’t far off, 50 pounds. So I’m pretty pleased about that, but-

Debbie Millman:
Well, just the limited edition print is worth-

Es Devlin:
I think it’s a bargain, right?

Debbie Millman:
Run to Amazon, folks, run.

Es Devlin:
So then I realized that first it was all impossible. But then Thames and Hudson and Daniel figured out that we could maybe do the things I wanted as long as they rigorously stuck to this time code signature of the foldouts could happen as long as they only happened every 16 pages. But then of course, the stuff that I had chronologically, I didn’t happen to have a project with a beautiful set of storyboard images every 16 pages. So I had to really fiddle with the chronology to make sure it stayed chronological pretty much, and fit it into the different rigid chronology of the book. Anyway, you get through the white part, then you get to this hiatus, which was the lockdown, because of course, mass gatherings, which is my practice across any genre, is pretty much mass gatherings. And as you know, they became temporarily extinct for a number of years.

So that’s a chunk of the book, like a missing tooth, and that’s just me talking to colleagues and friends. And then you come out the other side and you go into a segment of the book that’s all really comes back to the beginning of this conversation. That line of light I saw when I was a kid, just going through different forms, all emerging out of darkness. And then the final segment is just color, an organization of works as if you’re finally having been in the studio, you’ve gone to the theater or cinema, and now you’re finally in the art gallery or on the stage, you’re sublimated in color at the end of the book. So once I got that organizing principle at last, you could read it and only be somewhat exhausted, not completely exhausted.

Debbie Millman:
Your exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt features many many project models, a remarkable replica of your studio, which is very interesting to see you in your studio now and have seen you in your studio there. Hundreds of sketches, multiple screens of motion graphics and films and you and the curators map through lines connecting your teenage paintings to your stage designs, to your contemporary installations. And it also features archive material that had been living in storage. Now, is it true that some of the work in the show was discovered in the many garbage bags full of art you got back from your long-ago ex-boyfriend whose father told you to go find a job? I love this story. I love this.

Es Devlin:
I know. May he be greatly thanked and remembered. Clive Martin, my boyfriend of 13 years. When we very amicably parted ways, I moved on and didn’t think about stuff, objects. I was moving on to different places and things. And years later when he sold the house that we had been living in, he came round to my house with two giant garbage bags or more, there probably more, were like six giant garbage bags. And he said, “Oh, I was just clearing out the attic and I found this stuff. Do you want it?” I said, “Oh, sure.” And I just put it in another storage attic where I was living next. But it was everything that is in that show, everything that is in that second room with all the stuff I made when I was 13, 14, 15. So the moral of the story is, don’t chuck your kids’ stuff away, parents. And don’t chuck your own stuff away, kids. Keep your stuff.

Debbie Millman:
When I saw you speak at the Cooper Hewitt when the show first opened, you stated that most everything in the show no longer exists in physical form and that most of what you’ve created over the last four decades doesn’t really exist anymore. How do you hope your work will endure?

Es Devlin:
It’s such a good point, and I think that is the great medicinal quality of the book for me, it has had such a positive effect on me personally. I think I’m just calmer having made it because it’s a way to gather the threads of myself that I have, I think, quite purposefully threaded in life and time. And to view, to actually see really, it’s a lens. The book has become a bit of a lens to see what I’ve been doing. So in many ways, I think the book’s most important thing for me that I’ve made, even though it’s very small compared to the big things.

Debbie Millman:
The last thing I want to ask you about is something you stated about how we name ourselves. You state, “Pay a lot of attention to how you name yourself and don’t limit the naming of yourself. You can be multi-hyphenate, anything can be encapsulated between the hyphens of the title that you give yourself and you can change it daily.” And I love that. I think it should be on a T-shirt. How has naming yourself over time helped you form who you are now?

Es Devlin:
I think you’re so right to pick up on this. And I think it’s not just naming of self, which I will come back to answer your question, but it’s also a daily practice of naming, learning people’s names and of naming projects as well. I’m a real stickler for changing the title of an email. If an email has started to just thread on and on and it’s called something that doesn’t really honor and express what the endeavor is, then I change the title and give it a name that I consider to be honorable and consider to be communicative of what the endeavor really is. And in terms of one’s own name, you feel, I think quite nervous about trying to have a bearing on what people call you and how people express what you do. So we’re sometimes a bit trepidatious about it. I know I was, when I made a first project in 2016 that really was a big mirrored art installation and they put a little sign outside it, the commissioners, and they said about the artists.

And I was really flustered. I said, “Well, you can’t say that. People call me some jumped upset designer. It’ll be really embarrassing. You can’t do that.” And they said, “No, no. We’ve paid for this art and you’ve made us a piece of art and you’ll be the bloody…” They were like, “No, no, we need an artist.” And they were also very nice about it. They said, “No, you should just…” And no one batted an eyelid in such a world where when you do stick your head above the parapet, sometimes quite easy to get shot down. But no one has had a go at me about it. So I just pressed on and it makes you feel different.

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

Es Devlin:
It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
You can see the exhibit, An Atlas of Es Devlin at the Cooper Hewitt through August 11th, 2024. To read more about Es Devlin, you can go to Esdevlin.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:
When Suleika Jaouad was a young woman, she wanted to be a foreign correspondent. That career plan was upended by a cancer diagnosis when she was 22 years old. But in spite of being told she had only a 35% chance of survival, her creative spark didn’t diminish. They turned inward. Suleika wrote about surviving cancer in Life Interrupted, her Emmy Award-winning column and video series for the New York Times. She’s also written a New York Times bestselling memoir about the experience, titled Between Two Kingdoms. More recently, her cancer returned, and she had a second bone marrow transplant. That experience is chronicled in the multiple award-winning Netflix documentary American Symphony, which also features her husband, the celebrated musician, Jon Batiste, as he composed his first symphony for Carnegie Hall.

Suleika Jaouad, welcome to Design Matters.

Suleika Jaouad:
Thank you, Debbie. I’m so honored to be here.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, Suleika, I am so thrilled. I have an unusual question for you as my first question. I understand that you have an irrational fear of sharks, and I kind of want to know how any fear of sharks could be irrational.

Suleika Jaouad:
Thank you for this. I feel the same way. I’m someone who, every time I go on vacation to a place where there is any body of water, I immediately Google the number of shark fatalities in that place.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Suleika Jaouad:
And it’s something I’ve had from the time I was little. It doesn’t matter if I’m in an ocean, or a lake, or a pond, I have a deep fear of what’s beneath the water, and what I can’t see.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I do too. I really, overall, have a somewhat irrational fear of the ocean. In that, I really like to be able to see my feet in the water. Something about being grounded, I guess.

Suleika Jaouad:
I love it.

Debbie Millman:
In any case. Like me, you were born in New York City, but you were constantly on the move in your early childhood. You moved from the East Village to the Adirondacks, followed by stints in France and Switzerland, and Tunisia. By the time you were 12, you had attended six different schools on three different continents. Why did your family move around so much?

Suleika Jaouad:
It’s an excellent question. One that I asked myself quite a bit, when I was little, because like a lot of little kids, all I wanted was to feel normal. Whatever that meant. My dad is originally from Tunisia, it’s where his entire family lives. It’s where, actually, my parents and my brother now live. My mom is Swiss, and they both immigrated to New York in the ’80s, and I think they were really trying to figure out what home meant for them. My dad was a complet professor at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, and my mom was a painter.

And so, in those early years, I think they were shuttling between their respective homelands, and the home that we were trying to make for ourselves in upstate New York. And the truth is that shuttling has continued happening, so home was really an elusive concept for me as a kid. And it’s only pretty recently in my life that I’ve been someone with a fixed address, who doesn’t live out of a suitcase. And it certainly was a slightly destabilizing way of growing up, but I think it also forced me to become a chameleon. I was an expert new kid on the first day of school, and I look back on that experience and I think, for so many children of immigrants, especially when you speak one language at home and another at school. You become a kind of translator between your family and the world. And those skills, I think, have made me a writer. Those skills of observation, of customs, of idioms, of all kinds of things.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I think it gives you a very particular kind of awareness, as you’re trying to make sense of how and where to fit in. And when you first came back to the United States and started kindergarten, you actually didn’t speak a word of English, and have said that the curse of the mixed child who grows up betwixt cultures and countries, creeds and customs, is too white, too brown, too exotically named and too ambiguously other to ever fully belong anywhere. And I understand that, at that time, you wanted to legally change your name from Suleika, which is your name in Arabic, to Ashley. Is that true, to Ashley?

Suleika Jaouad:
The coolest girl in my fourth grade class was named Ashley, and her nickname was Ashtray, which was-

Debbie Millman:
Oh, gosh.

Suleika Jaouad:
… even cooler to me. So not only did I want to legally change my name to Ashley, but I wanted my parents to call me Ashtray, which of course they refused, and rightfully so.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It reminds me of the character from Euphoria. Is the Arabic pronunciation that I attempted the correct way to say your name in Arabic?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yes, that’s right. So both my parents pronounce my names differently. Suleika, In Arabic. Suleika, in French, in English, or as my husband who’s from New Orleans says, “Suleika.” So there is always confusion around the pronunciation of my name, but I remember that first day of kindergarten so distinctly, the terror of being in a place where you don’t understand what people are saying, where people are laughing when you’re attempting to speak the language. And I think I had a self-consciousness around language, and around English specifically, from such an early age.

I’m still someone who, whenever I hear a turn of phrase or an idiom that I’ve never heard before, I immediately write it down and then proceed to try to use it as much as possible in every single conversation for the next couple of days, until I’ve mastered it. But I think that feeling of otherness really felt like an albatross. The tyranny of cafeteria lunchrooms, when you’re the kid showing up with couscous-

Debbie Millman:
That’s a good word, tyranny.

Suleika Jaouad:
… and tajine. And at that age, all I wanted was a Pop Tart, or very orange American mac and cheese. And I think at some point, by the time I turned 12 or 13, I realized that as much as I wanted to assimilate, as much as I would have loved to inhabit the Ashleys of the world, that just wasn’t going to be possible. And so, embracing that otherness, and I guess leaning into that difference, became my ammo.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that hustle is your family’s defining trait, and I’m wondering if you can share why you feel that way, or in what way?

Suleika Jaouad:
So my dad is someone who grew up in a family of 13 children, both of his parents never learned to read or write, and he is the only one of his siblings to have left Tunisia. And he worked all kinds of odd jobs while he was embarking on his studies, from a bell hopper at a seedy motel, to all sorts of things. And my mom, in particular, I think is someone who embodies that sense of hustle. When she first came to the East Village in the ’80s as a young aspiring artist, she was trying to figure out how to pay the bills. And so she started what she called the International Language School, and hired all of her friends as language tutors to wealthy business people uptown. And of course, this wasn’t an actual school, it was her landline and her apartment. And she would answer the phone and pretend to be a very official sounding secretary.

But I think that instinct to survive, to figure out how to make things work, to pivot as needed, and to adapt and move forward at all costs, was really a guiding tenet in our household. And we were firmly middle class and upstate New York, but there also wasn’t any sort of security blanket beneath us. So even when it came to college, I was fortunate to have the option of attending the school where my dad taught free of charge, but my parents made it very clear, “If you want to do something beyond this, that’s on you, you’re going to have to figure that out. You’re going to have to pay for your own way.”

And because nobody had helped usher their way, relative, especially to the way my dad grew up, we had immense privilege. We were living in the United States, and going to a good public school, and had access to education in a way that wasn’t so easy for him. And so there was always this sense that, given the leg up that we’d had, it was our responsibility to make something of that. To figure out who we were, and what we wanted to contribute to the world.

Debbie Millman:
You started piano lessons when you were four years old, at the urging of your parents, but it wasn’t until fourth grade that you chose music for yourself. And your music teacher at Lake Avenue Elementary School stood in front of the class with a dozen stringed instruments lined up at the front of the room, and asked you to choose your instrument. Tell us what you chose and why.

Suleika Jaouad:
So as well-intentioned as my mother was, she was very sort of stereotypically Swiss about her approach to my piano lesson. So I was forced to practice every single day. I studied the Suzuki method. I hated it. I wasn’t very good at it. And I remember that day in that fourth grade classroom so distinctly, because everyone was clamoring for the popular instruments. For the violins, for the cellos. And no one, with the exception of a couple of supernaturally tall boys, were interested in the double bass. And I immediately felt drawn to it, for two reasons. One, because I liked the fact that my teacher had told me that no other girl had expressed interest in playing it, and it seemed like its own kind of outlier in the orchestra, which was very much how I felt. But also because the mischievous part of me liked the idea of picking the instrument that would inconvenience my parents the most. And so, that’s what I did. And to my surprise, and I think to my parents’ surprise, I fell deep in love with the bass.

Debbie Millman:
And I believe you gave your bass a name?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yes, Charlie Brown.

Debbie Millman:
And why is that? Is it, I was trying to imagine why it was Charlie Brown, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the round nature of the instrument, or the sort of wah-wah noise that the parents made, sort of as a way of being more defiant with your parents.

Suleika Jaouad:
Exactly. I think all of it, and it was a totally ridiculous sight. I was too small to carry this very large instrument, so my dad would have to shuttle it around for me. And in those early years, I would have to sit on a stool in order to reach all of the places on the base that I needed to reach. But I loved it, because it’s also the only instrument that you hug with your whole body when you play it, and you hear every note vibrating through your chest. And there was just this grounded feeling that I had, whenever I got the chance to play it.

Debbie Millman:
You went to band camp at 13. I sort of had this vision of it being like an episode of the TV show, Glee. I have no idea if that’s accurate or not. What was that like for you?

Suleika Jaouad:
It was far more awkward, I can tell you that than anything that might ever have appeared on Glee. So I was in the orchestra camp and I loved it. I had gotten a scholarship to attend, and I felt like this portal had suddenly opened onto a world of possibility. I’d never considered playing music seriously, but I remember feeling for the first time, the deep sense of satisfaction that comes when you’re building a muscle and you see it getting stronger.

Debbie Millman:
Isn’t that remarkable?

Suleika Jaouad:
And I could actually watch that incremental progress happening, in real time. And I decided, pretty much after that summer, that I was going to become a double bassist, and I wanted to play in the greatest orchestras in the world. And that was my big dream, at that age.

Debbie Millman:
And this is where you met your now husband, the Oscar and Grammy winning musician, Jon Batiste. What was that first meeting like?

Suleika Jaouad:
Correct. Jon was in the jazz camp. He was all braces and gangly limbs. And I don’t think he would mind me saying this, because it’s how he described himself at the age, but he was just sort of shockingly, gloriously awkward. And I remember, the first time I encountered him, I tried to speak to him. And he was so shy, that he barely said a word back. But what I remember most distinctly was the end of summer concert, where all of the parents are invited to come and to pick up their children. And Jon played so extraordinarily, so virtuostically, despite only having played the piano for a year or two at that point, that everyone in the auditorium leapt to their feet and gave him a standing ovation, which is not something that happens at end of summer band camp recitals. And I just remember thinking, “This is someone extraordinary and intriguing,” and that was that.

Debbie Millman:
No crushes?

Suleika Jaouad:
No crushes.

Debbie Millman:
No chemistry?

Suleika Jaouad:
No, I think, intrigue. The crush came later. The crush came about three years later.

Debbie Millman:
Now I understand, and I don’t know if this is correct or not, but I found in my research that he wrote his first song for you, at that time. Is that true?

Suleika Jaouad:
No, it’s not true. And it’s also a point of discussion between Jon and me, at this very moment. So what I remember, which is not what he remembers, is that he dedicated a song to one of the ballet dancers, because there was also a sort of parallel ballet camp. And there was mass giggling at the top of the auditorium. But he told me, recently, that it wasn’t him who dedicated the song because he was far more interested in video games and jazz, than he was in girls. And he would never have dared do anything so bold and forward, so I’m clear.

But what he did tell me as we were discussing all of this is that if the jazz musician dedicates a song to you, don’t get too excited about it, because they can improvise anything on the spot. It only counts if the dedicated song makes it onto an album.

Debbie Millman:
Ah. So, Butterfly counts.

Suleika Jaouad:
Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
When you were 16, you won a scholarship to attend the pre-college program at Julliard School, in New York City. And for the next two years, every Saturday morning you got up at 4:00 AM so your dad could drive you the 45 minutes to Albany, to catch the Amtrak to the city. And after a long day of orchestra rehearsals, masterclasses, music theory, and auditions, you began to struggle with the schedule at school. And ended up striking a deal with your parents about the rest of your high school education, and I was wondering if you can share what that was?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah, that experience, that pre-college, I think was one of those fork in the road moments that we all have, but that was a big one for me. I was really struggling at my high school in upstate New York. I was getting mixed up in the wrong crowd, I was rebelling. I was a terrible student. And at one of these end of summer band camps, I had the opportunity to play a bass solo, and someone in the audience approached my parents afterward, and invited me to come to New York City and to meet someone by the name of Homer Mensch who was the principal of the New York Philharmonic, and to bring it back to sharks, he famously played the opening sequence of the movie Jaws, on his bass, that duh-duh, duh-duh.

Debbie Millman:
Wow, that’s incredible.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. And it was extraordinary. I mean, it really changed my life. For the first time I was meeting kids who had a kind of ambition I’d only really read about in books, who had the discipline to spend seven, eight hours a day alone in a practice room. And who wanted everything, who wanted the world. And coming from a small town, I wasn’t used to being around people like that. I had this sense that I wanted to sort of thrust myself into the greater expanses of the world, but the how of that was completely unclear to me.

And so by the end of that first year, especially because of Homer Mensch and his mentorship and support, he really made me feel like I had the possibility of actually seeing this dream through. But with the commute, and with the number of hours that I needed to practice in order to keep up, it was becoming completely untenable. Because not only was I waking up at 4:00 AM on a Saturday, I was waking up at 4:00 AM every day of the week, to get in three hours of practice before I went to school, so that I’d have time to do three more hours when I got home.

And so the deal with my parents was that I could drop out of high school, but that I had to take at least two days of classes at Skidmore College, where my dad taught, and where I could attend for free. But the one thing that I look back on and marvel at is, they didn’t say to me, “You have to take pre-calculus,” or you have to take whatever the equivalent of your high school classes were. They gave me ultimate license to choose whatever I wanted. And so what I thought was my way of minimizing my schoolwork actually became the very opposite, because I was taking modern dance, I was taking a Women in Literature class, I was taking a class on Nabakov. I was reading all kinds of things that I hadn’t really had the opportunity to study in that way. And over the course of that year, I realized that while I loved music, there was so much more that I was hungry to learn about.

Debbie Millman:
I read that you loved the literature classes so much that you were taking, you started looking up English syllabi at different schools, and assigning them to yourself. I thought that that was sort of a wonderful example of how you assimilated your family hustle.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah, totally. Actually, I remember it so distinctly. A few girls from my high school had gone to a very fancy boarding school nearby, and I desperately wanted to attend, because I had just watched the movie Mona Lisa Smile. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Suleika Jaouad:
But all the girls show up on the first day of class, and they’ve already read the textbook, but not only are they smart, they’re fabulously cool and funny and fierce. And so, I wanted to inhabit a world like that, and that wasn’t a possibility for us. And so what I did was, I looked up the syllabus at that very same boarding school, and tried to teach it to myself.

Debbie Millman:
I love that.

Suleika Jaouad:
I’ll just add that, you asked me about my crush on Jon. My very first day at Julliard, I was on the 1 train going to the campus, and I was with my friend Michelle. And we saw this young man who was behaving kind of strangely, and people were sort of looking at him. This young man was singing, and playing air piano, by himself. And I looked at him and I turned to my friend and I said, “I know that guy. That’s Jon Batiste from New Orleans. I went to band camp with him.” And then I said, out of nowhere in the way that 16 year olds do when they just run their mouths, I said, “That’s the man I’m going to marry someday.” And then I completely forgot about it, only to discover that he was also a student at Julliard.

Debbie Millman:
I just want to let that sink in for a second. You applied to Princeton University where, you not only got in, you got a full scholarship. And while there, you played in the university orchestra, but you also applied to the creative writing program your freshman year. And were rejected. And you’ve said that you took that rejection particularly badly. Why is that?

Suleika Jaouad:
I felt a huge sense of being an imposter, when I went to Princeton. I remember when I was thinking about leaving Julliard, my teacher, Homer Mensch had died, and I had been reassigned to the only female bass teacher at Julliard, and I was so excited to finally get to study with a woman. But rather than the kind of mentorship I’d had with Homer, it was the very opposite of that. She was tougher on me than everyone else, and she could be quite cruel. And I remember coming back from a weekend with a friend, visiting her brother at Princeton, and saying to her, “I visited this school and I never even considered that I could go to a place like this, but I’m interested in applying.” And what she said to me was, “You should do that. You should go to Princeton. You’re pretty enough that you’ll marry a wealthy man by the time you’re 22, and that’s a far better career path for you.”

I felt such rage in that moment, and such humiliation. That was the thing that propelled me away from music, because I did not want to continue studying with her. And that left a kind of chip on my shoulder, that proved to be useful, in the sense that it lit a fire under me. So when I did get accepted, I felt equal parts excitement and terror. I remember watching every episode of Gossip Girl in preparation for what I imagined a school like Princeton to be. I also read Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld, but I had no sense of this world I was about to walk into. And so to receive that rejection first semester was confirmation of something that I feared, and hoped wasn’t true, and took to be true. And so after that, I would write for myself. I would write little fictional stories. I wrote obsessively in a journal, but I put the idea of pursuing writing seriously to the side.

And the irony is, there are a couple great writers from my same class who published beautiful books, and I’ve since learned that they too were rejected from the creative writing program. So I think, at that age, rejection can be devastating, it can be motivating for some. But I didn’t have the kind of confidence in myself, and my ability to look beyond that sort of outward validation, or outward confirmation of my failure.

Debbie Millman:
In your junior year, you came across a journalism class in the course catalog titled Writing About War, and it was being taught by the journalist Thanassis Cambanis. What gave you the strength or the courage to try again?

Suleika Jaouad:
So I was a near Eastern Studies and Gender Studies major, and I was studying Farsi, I was studying Arabic. I had spent every summer traveling to the Middle East, and traveling back home to Tunisia, and doing research. And so I felt not a sense of confidence in my ability to write, but I felt confident in my knowledge of this region and its complexities, enough to apply for this class. And I loved everything about it, from moment one. And writing about war is easier said than done from Princeton, New Jersey. But even that proved to be such a fascinating challenge.

Debbie Millman:
You traveled across North Africa and the Middle East to study women’s rights through narrative storytelling and oral history, and this led to your writing your senior thesis about the subject. I believe that one of the chapters was titled “Voices of the Voiceless,” and it detailed the under-reported stories of women in Tunisia, and it also included your grandmother. Your thesis won several awards, including a prestigious award called the Ferris Prize. Did that change your ambition to be a musician? Was that when you sort of had to decide, “Which direction am I going in?”

Suleika Jaouad:
I knew pretty much as soon as I left Julliard that I did not want to be part of the classical music world, even though I continued to play, and to love music. But it changed my sense of confidence. I had started school feeling so unsure of myself, and unsure of my own merit and right to inhabit this world, and there were so many things about that school that proved really challenging. I mean, if you’re on full financial aid, you have a work study. And the very first job I was assigned was serving fellow students in the dining hall. And I’m not above serving anyone, but there was such a clear sense of divide, even optically, because a lot of my fellow work study colleagues were fellow students of color.

And to sit there, and to serve the richer students, was just such a bizarre way of being put in your place. And there were so many examples of that, during my time there, but more than anything I just flourished in this environment, where there was so much to learn. There were so many extraordinary professors. There were unlimited research and travel grants available to me. And by the time I graduated, I knew not necessarily who I was, but what my potential might be. And so those awards, for me, meant something. Because I started out as a struggling student academically, and I had worked really hard to get to a place where I felt I had steady footing.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written a lot about bridging the gap between what you found interesting, and what might actually be practical or possible, especially at that point in your life. Did that have any influence in what you were choosing to do, in terms of what your parents’ expectations might’ve been for you at the time?

Suleika Jaouad:
When I graduated college, I knew I wanted to be a war correspondent, but how to actually do that, how to get your foot in the door felt completely mysterious to me. And so in a strange version of my own coming of age rebellion, I decided to do the opposite of what my sort of artsy-fartsy parents had always done, and to get a job at a corporate international law firm. And the notion of 12 hour days, and wearing a power suit, was very intriguing and exciting to me. Although, that excitement was very short-lived once I actually started that job. But I think like a lot of people at that age, I had this sense of time, time to figure out who I was, time to bridge that gap between my reality and those daydreams. Time to do it all.

Debbie Millman:
You went to Paris, you rent an apartment, you started working as a paralegal in this law firm. But then, you developed a high fever, painful sores in your mouth, and wrote this in your journal. “Something is terribly wrong. I can’t put my finger on it, but it feels like there is a deadly parasite growing in my body.” But it was worse than a parasite. And is it okay to share what happened next?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. So after a year of feeling sick, of going to see various doctors, who would treat whatever ailment I showed up with without really assessing the full picture, I started to feel like I was unraveling. One doctor prescribed me an antidepressant, another after a week long hospital stay in Paris, where they ran every test they could think of except for a bone marrow biopsy, which they felt wasn’t necessary for someone of my age, released me with a diagnosis of burnout syndrome. And essentially told me that I needed better work life balance, and to take care of my mental health.

And so I felt this sort of cleaving happening inside me, where I knew something was wrong, but no one seemed to be taking me seriously, and people were telling me it was literally in my head. And I started to wonder if I was a hypochondriac. I started to wonder if I was going crazy, in some kind of way. And so in a sort of perverse way, after a year of this, I ended up in an emergency room and learned that my blood counts were so low that I needed to immediately get on a plane to fly home to upstate New York, otherwise I wouldn’t be allowed to fly at all. I arrived to Paris in very high-heeled boots, and I left in a wheelchair.

And when I got my actual diagnosis, I felt relief. I had a very aggressive form of leukemia, a kind of blood cancer. And while that wasn’t welcome news, it was terrifying news, it was gutting news. I felt relief to be believed, to have an actual diagnosis that I could wrap my tongue around, and hopefully do something about.

Debbie Millman:
The doctors in the United States told you and your parents, point-blank, that you had about a 35% chance of long-term survival. So overnight you left your job, your apartment, your independence, and became patient number 5624. At one point, your doctors told your parents to hurry to the hospital, because they weren’t sure you were going to make it overnight. And in your memoir, you write this. “How do you react to a cancer diagnosis at age 22? Do you break down in sobs? Do you faint, or scream?” What were you telling yourself about what was happening in that moment?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah, I remember feeling a kind of bifurcation, a sense that there was my life before, and now everything that would come after. And that the person I’d been, the dreams I’d had, were buried. I’d never experienced anything like that. I was at an age where most of my friends had never dealt with serious illness. But that being said, I also had a kind of helpful naivete about what it means to be very, very sick.

And so, when I entered the hospital that first summer, I packed all kinds of books, and I very cheerfully told my parents I was going to use this time to read through the rest of the Western Canon.

Debbie Millman:
And then War and Peace, when you were done with that.

Suleika Jaouad:
And War and Peace, which, of course I never read any of those books. And by the end of that summer I learned that not only was the chemotherapy I’d been doing not working for me, but that my leukemia had become much more aggressive. And at that point, my only option was a clinical trial that had not yet been proven to be safe, or even effective. And I think it was the first moment where it occurred to me that I might actually die, and imminently. And that the sense of infinite time to figure things out had been an illusion, an illusion that we all live with. I’m not special, because I got sick at 22. Our time here is short and fleeting, but to confront my mortality in that way, and at that age, was a sort of world shifting change for me. And I spent those next couple of months in a deep depression.

I remember closing the blinds on my hospital room window, which overlooked the park. And when I’d entered the hospital, I felt really excited about that. It seemed like a great asset. But looking out the window, seeing people going to work, seeing teenagers making out on park benches, all of that was a reminder of a life that I no longer could participate in. And I felt profoundly terrified, and profoundly stuck. And I think worse than the brutal side effects of the treatment, worse than the weeks and months spent in confinement in a hospital room, was the sense that I had spent my entire 22 years on the planet preparing for a life, without actually having lived it. But in those early months, it was hard to imagine what I could possibly do from the confines of my hospital room, from the confines of my bed. And I really struggled with that.

Debbie Millman:
It was there in the hospital that you wrote, “time stalked you like prey” and, go on to write that “there’s a tipping point, a special kind of claustrophobia, reserved for long hospitalizations, that sets in around week two of being locked in a room. Time starts to elongate, space falls apart, your desperation begins to border on madness.”

And so I guess somehow, in the face of all of this despair and suffering, as you’re facing some of the most difficult challenges of your life, you decide to start on two creative projects. A 100-day project wherein you and your family members all participate in undertaking one small creative act every day. You started journaling, which was really a return to a creative act you had started pretty much since you could first hold a pencil. Why journaling?

Suleika Jaouad:
So I had started and stopped enough projects in the hospital to know that I needed to set the bar very low for myself, otherwise it was going to result in further defeat. And so, I decided to return to the thing I’d always loved. And the reason I’d always loved it is because to me, the journal is such a sacred space. You don’t have to write beautifully, or even grammatically. You’re not doing it for anyone other than yourself. And you have this invitation to show up as your most unedited, unvarnished self. And so that appealed to me, especially at a time where I was feeling so many things that I couldn’t say out loud.

And this is a thing that happens to a family when they get sick. Everyone is trying to put on a brave, stoic face for one another. And the byproduct of that is that everyone ends up siloed in their own private fears and anguish. And so having this place where I could write down all of the things that felt impossible to talk about. What it was like, falling in love while falling sick. The sense of being a burden that can accompany being a person who requires a significant amount of care. Sexual health and infertility caused by chemotherapy, the social awkwardness of being sick at an age where your friends are outplaying beer pong, or doing whatever else.

And in the course of keeping that journal, I felt both a kind of catharsis, but I also felt my excitement and my ambition come back to me. Because I realized, at some point during that hundred-day project that I was using my journal as a kind of reporter’s notebook. I was observing this new kingdom of the sick, this new hospital ecosystem, that once again, I was the new kid, and that I was having to figure out how to navigate. I was having to learn to speak medical-ese. I was befriending the fellow patients in the cancer unit. I was getting to know my nurses. I was learning about the body. And while it wasn’t war correspondence, it felt like a kind of reporting from the front lines of a very different sort of conflict zone.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote this about your biggest fear. “What scared me more than the transplant, more than the debilitating side effects that came with it, more than the possibility of death itself, was the thought of being remembered as someone else’s sad story of unmet potential.” Nevertheless, by the end of the 100 days, you realized as long as you were stuck in bed, your imagination would have to become the vessel that allowed you to travel. And though you couldn’t be a journalist in the way that you imagined after graduating, you were actually reporting from a war zone, in a different kind of conflict zone. You then went deeper and launched a blog called Secrets of Cancerhood.

Suleika Jaouad:
Oh God, so embarrassing.

Debbie Millman:
Not at all, not at all. And you stated-

Suleika Jaouad:
And I must, I’m very impressed by your research abilities.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, good. Thank you. And you stated, “Cancer isn’t something that makes you want to share. It’s something that makes you want to hide.” And this, Suleika, is sort of my big question for the whole interview. Did it scare you at all to be so candid and so direct? So raw, so real. You put it all out there.

Suleika Jaouad:
By the time I started that blog, I had spent almost an entire year in total isolation, shuttling between my childhood bedroom in upstate New York and the hospital. And the few friends I had told about my illness hadn’t… Not all of them, some were wonderful, but some of them hadn’t responded in the way that I’d hoped. And I think when they couldn’t figure out what to say, or how to show up, they stopped showing up at all. And so, I didn’t talk about what I was going through. On my Facebook profile, it still said that I lived in Paris, and people were still posting on my Facebook wall asking if they could crash on my couch.

But at some point that isolation became more painful than the risk of opening up. And I was preparing for a bone marrow transplant, which I knew I might not survive. And in the weeks leading up to that, I felt this force within me, to try to do some of the things that I had always wanted to do in whatever way I could, big or small. And the big one was writing. And while I always imagined myself as the kind of writer, who either through reporting or through fiction, would help other people tell their stories.

The story that was available to me, within my limitations, was my own. I remember my mom giving me a hardcover copy of Frida Kahlos’ diary, and pouring through it and feeling so deeply connected to her. Both because she had suffered a kind of life altering accident, at approximately the same age as my diagnosis, but because she had managed to find purpose in her pain. And that, for me, became a kind of guiding light. That the material that was available to me, even if it made people uncomfortable, even if it made people want to look away, had a power in it that I could tap.

Debbie Millman:
Your blog became immediately popular. And one of your journalism professors from Princeton shared it with an editor at the New York Times, and you were offered to write a piece about your experience. And in a moment of utter brazenness, you said you’d rather write a column, and in an effort to make it as accessible as possible, include video. That’s sort of the moment to me where it was like, “Ta-da!” Where did that courage come from? Where did you manifest that?

Suleika Jaouad:
You know, the funny thing is, I would never have dared be that brazen pre-diagnosis. I would’ve been thrilled for a fact checking position at any newspaper, let alone the New York Times. But I had lost so much, and I knew that within the next month, I might lose it all. And so it felt like there was very little left to lose. And for the first time in my life, I asked for exactly what I wanted, because nothing could be scarier than what I was already experiencing. And so, that’s what I did. And the fear came when the editor said yes, because suddenly I was like, “Oh crap, how do I actually pull this off?”

Debbie Millman:
Well, bent over your laptop, you wrote about how you traveled to where the silence was in your life. You wrote about your resulting infertility, and how no one warned you of that outcome. You wrote about learning to navigate our absurd US healthcare system. You wrote about guilt. You wrote about how we talk, or don’t talk, about dying. On March 29th, 2012, your column and the accompanying video series called Life Interrupted made its debut, and just a few days after that, you underwent your first bone marrow transplant.

And you said this about the experience. “The confluence of these impending milestones was dizzying, a dream and a nightmare dancing the tango.” Which seems to be a little bit of a pattern in your life, which is really cosmic and mystical and mysterious, in every possible way.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah, I feel like I’ve been the recipient of immense good fortune, and the recipient of immense misfortune, and often exactly at the same time. And that was a big one, for me. I was entering the most treacherous phase of my treatment, but at the same time, overnight upon launching the column and the video series, I went from being extraordinarily isolated to waking up the next morning to hundreds and hundreds of emails from people all around the world. People who were not necessarily sick, but having their own life interrupted experiences, be it losing their job, or going through a divorce, or grief, or some other kind of upheaval that had brought them to the floor.

And for the first time, too, I was hearing from people like me. I heard from a young man, a few doors down from me in the bone marrow transplant unit, who had my same type of leukemia. And just to know that there was another human, roughly my age, a few doors down, brought a sense of comfort and companionship that I hadn’t had in a long time. And one day when I was being wheeled out of my room to get a CT scan of my brain, I remember pausing in front of his door. And there was a little tiny window, and I wasn’t allowed to step inside because the germ risk was too high, but I knocked on the window. And he waved, and I waved.

And just that moment of connection, that realization that you are not the only person suffering or struggling in that particular way, that in fact all of us struggle, all of us have our hearts broken, all of us will confront our mortality at some point or another, suddenly made me feel less like a freak, and more like I was just part of the human condition and experience.

Debbie Millman:
Your work on Life Interrupted won a news and documentary Emmy Award, and after 1500 days, working to survive, 1500 days. You were discharged from the hospital on May 16th, 2014. And yet, when you finally emerged from your nearly four years of treatment, you learned that surviving is not the same thing as living. While you felt that it should have been a celebratory milestone, you wrote that you never felt more lost. Why is that?

Suleika Jaouad:
You know, we talk about the challenges of reentry with regards to veterans returning from war, but for whatever reason when it comes to surviving a traumatic experience like cancer, the expectation is that you’ll immediately and gratefully and joyously return to the world of the living. And I wanted that more than anything. I knew how lucky I was to be alive, but I was also reeling from those four years, I had been in survival mode for four years. And I hadn’t really given much thought to what would happen if I did survive, what would happen after.

And it took me a long time to understand that I was grieving. I hadn’t had the time to grieve, I hadn’t had the privilege of having enough energy to even allow myself to fall apart. And I was grieving so many things. I was grieving my 20s. I was grieving a relationship, that hadn’t survived my cancer treatment. I was grieving my best friend, Melissa, who I’d met in treatment, and who had died only a few weeks earlier. And so as much as I wanted to be this happy, healthy,

26-year-old young woman that the people around me wanted me to be, I just couldn’t. And so, to my surprise and with a great deal of shame, I felt whatever scaffolding that had propped me up during those four years collapsed, and I just went inward.

I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t a cancer patient. I couldn’t go back to the person I’d been pre-diagnosis. My career, albeit what felt like a miraculous one, was anchored around the experience I was trying to move on from. And I was still physically struggling with the long-term side effects of my treatment. And so, more than anything, I desperately wanted to move on from all of that, only to of course realize that moving on is a myth. As much as we want to, we can’t stow away the most painful parts of our life, and skip over the hard work of healing and grieving. And that while moving on wasn’t going to be possible, I had to figure out a way to move forward with what had happened, and that became my work.

Debbie Millman:
You talk very eloquently about Susan Sontag’s book Illness as Metaphor wherein she writes, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well, and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later, each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

And Suleika, one of the things that you write about so beautifully in your book, is that space between the two kingdoms, which became the title of your subsequent 2021 memoir. Can you describe that space between, a little bit?

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. So on paper, I was better. I no longer had cancer, I was cured. But off paper, I couldn’t have felt further from being well. And so I was in this kind of liminal space, where I was no longer part of that hospital ecosystem. That cavalry of doctors and nurses and family that had surrounded me were no longer there. Yet, I couldn’t have felt further from relating to or being able to inhabit the kingdom of the well. So much so that in that first year, I remember missing the hospital, wishing I were back in treatment. Not because I wanted to have leukemia again, of course, but that was a world I understood.

That was a world I knew, I had built a home for myself within its confines, and it was the outside world that had become disorienting and terrifying to me.

And so, I began to look to the language of ritual, to these rites of passage that help us move from one place to another, that help ease that transition between no longer and not yet. And we have all kinds of rites of passage. We have funerals, and weddings, and baby showers. But I realized that for me, and at least at that time, there really wasn’t much in the way of survival. There wasn’t going to be any treatment protocols to help guide my way forward, and that I was going to essentially have to create my own. And so that’s what I decided to do, in my own kind of way.

Debbie Millman:
Your memoir Between Two Kingdoms is about not only your experience with cancer, but the aftermath, which includes this sort of between space. And then the 15,000-mile road trip you took to kind of find yourself again, through the people who wrote letters to you and people that you had met in this journey. As you wrote the book, you kept a Post-it note above your desk, and it stated, “If you want to write a good book, write about what you don’t want others to know about you. If you want to write a great book, write about what you don’t want to know about yourself.” How hard was that to do?

Suleika Jaouad:
I felt slight terror, even just hearing you read that line from the Post-it note. It was extraordinarily challenging. I had read so many illness narratives that sort of mirrored the hero’s journey arc, where the final act was being cured, and people seemed to return from that experience better and braver and wiser for what they’d been through. And because of that, I think I had this expectation of what that would look like for me. And because of that, I also had an immense sense of shame, when my lived reality did not sync up with that. I felt like I was somehow doing healing wrong, or recovery wrong. I knew how lucky I was to be alive, and wanted to make the most of that.

And so in writing this book, I really more than anything, wanted to talk about aftermaths. About what is required of us when we survive, and that large gap between surviving and living. And I wanted to tell the truth of that reckoning. And it was interesting. My first drafts, I used to jokingly say, were full of lies.

They were full of aspirational lies of what I hoped that process of recovery might look like, but that just wasn’t the truth for me. And so, writing that book forced me to really excavate the truth beneath the truth, beneath the truth. And I struggled especially with part two of the book, with the road trip, with that chronicling of the recovery. And it took me a year of just banging my head against the desk to realize that the issue was I was writing about recovery in the past tense, and it wasn’t past tense for me. Recovery was and is an ongoing process.

And once I understood that I was allowed to change tenses midway through the book, which I did, and to write that part in the present tense, I felt like I was finally able to access the truth of it. Which is to say, that there wasn’t some neat, tidy bow at the end of that story. That road trip was the best decision I made in my 20s. It forced me to inhabit the world again, to figure out how to stand on my own two feet, to find out what was on the other side of my fear. But the lingering imprints of my illness, especially on my body, didn’t go away. I didn’t return from this road trip magically healed, somehow. And so, I wanted to figure out how to put into words what it to exist in that messy middle, where you’re neither well or unwell or happy or sad. But you’re existing in that chorus border.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I find so remarkable about your book is that you don’t have to have experienced a bout of cancer, to appreciate the will that you have to survive. And that survival could be against any type of injustice that’s endured by the body. And there’s so many ways that we are confronted by that now. And so, it is a book of hope for anyone that’s experienced any type of injustice to their body.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
While you were writing your book, COVID descended upon us, and you quarantined at your parents’ house. Jon joined you for this, because you had had now, a blossoming romance. He joined you with your family, and that’s when you first started on an online project you titled The Isolation Journals, wherein you invited some of the most inspiring authors, musicians, community leaders, unsung heroes you knew, to write a short essay and a journaling prompt. And on April 1st, 2020, you began sending it out as a free newsletter. And within a month, 100,000 people had joined you from all over the world.
So here in another instance of creating a whole community, and with beauty out of tragedy and longing, sort of the world tragedy, that effort is ongoing. Talk about what the Isolation Journals mean to you now, and the kind of work you’re doing with it.

Suleika Jaouad:
So my friend Liz says that whenever you’re deep in a project, inevitably another idea for a project appears, and she calls these other ideas her mistresses, and they’re doing the dance of the seven veils-

Debbie Millman:
I love that.

Suleika Jaouad:
… and trying to beckon you over. So the Isolation Journals was that for me, I was in the final throes of finishing my book. I had no business doing anything other than that task, but I couldn’t help but feel that so much of the pandemic, especially those early days of quarantine, felt familiar to me. The isolation, the face masks, the sense of hypervigilance, the kind of creative workarounds that were needed in order for us to continue existing within these new constraints. And so I wanted to share this creative practice, and really it’s a spiritual practice for me, of journaling, that has helped me through all of my most difficult passages.

But I knew that I wanted there to be a connective piece, to try to mirror the experience that I had 10 years earlier in that hospital room when I launched the column, and opened my inbox to all of these messages. And so I invited this community, we called them the Isolation Journalers to, if they wanted, and there was no pressure whatsoever, to share some of the writing that they were doing. And it was extraordinary. It’s, I think the work I’m most proud of, because to share your most vulnerable self, I think is one of the most terrifying things that we can do. But so often, when we dare to be vulnerable, it creates a reverberation, where vulnerability begets vulnerability, begets vulnerability. And of course, we learn that we’re more alike than we are different.

And so to watch that happening in real time, to watch people sharing their stories of love and struggle and sickness and grief, at a moment in time where the entire world was between two kingdoms, was just breathtaking. And that project continues strong today, I never know what to call it, because newsletter doesn’t quite do it justice, even though that’s the form it’s delivered in.

Debbie Millman:
Your book Between Two Kingdoms came out on February 9th, 2021. Was an immediate bestseller. November of 2021, two things happened. Your husband Jon earned 11 Grammy nominations, the most of any artist that year. And you also learned that your cancer had returned. How were you able to manage this dichotomy?

Suleika Jaouad:
It was such a surreal gut punch. It was the thing I’d always feared. It was my biggest fear, for a decade. And the thing is that when the ceiling caves in on you, you no longer assume structural stability. And so, for so many years, I’d been afraid of rebuilding my life, afraid of falling in love again, only to have everything collapse. But I’d done that. I had built a career for myself, a life for myself, a love for myself that I was so proud of, and I’d finally regained this sense of safety in my body. And to have a relapse of leukemia, a decade out from transplant, is so rare. There’s less than a 1% chance of it happening. And once again, overnight, our world changed. We packed up our house, we had to re-home our dogs, which I think was harder than even the news of the recurrence itself, and we basically moved back into the hospital ecosystem.

But again, great misfortune, great fortune. I felt like I was lucky to have been through this once before, because I thought a lot about how I’d want to do it differently. So with regards to Jon, that’s the kind of thing that could lead two people to split apart. When one person is on a meteoric ascent, and the other person is suddenly confined to a hospital bed. And one of the very first things I said to him was that I didn’t want him to press pause on his life and on his work. I have watched him work so hard and for so long, that I wouldn’t have felt good about him missing out on this huge moment. But also, I learned to be a caregiver can be as challenging as it is to be a patient, sometimes more so. And I wanted to protect our relationship.

And I had spent the last decade building a beautiful community of family, and chosen family. And I wanted to not just lean on Jon, but to do the hardest thing, I think for most of us, which is to ask for help and for support. And so I was really fortunate this time around to have my parents with me, to have my very closest friends, and to have Jon there. And we navigated it in our own strange way. We got married on the eve of my bone marrow transplant, which as Jon put, was a kind of act of defiance. A way of saying we had a plan, and while it may look very different, we’re going to keep moving forward with that plan. But also, I think for both of us, having our own creative practices was the thing that both kept us individually grounded, and allowed us to come together.

Debbie Millman:
The dichotomy, both the sublime and the sad, is documented in the stunning documentary American Symphony, which was released last year. And the film follows you both, as you’re going through your bone marrow transplant, and Jon is creating his first composition to be played at Carnegie Hall. Going to the Grammys for his 11 nominations, as you watch, while you’re in recovery. Once again, you’re skating between the sort of beauty, and despair. How did you get to such a level of trust with the director, Matt Heineman?

Suleika Jaouad:
It was an ongoing process. I mean, Matt was a friend of Jon’s, and a collaborator, so he was a known entity to us, which helped. But it was really challenging, and Matt was so willing to reimagine the contours of this story every day, every week. And we would have conversations all the time about where the boundaries were, and those would shift, depending on how I was feeling. But ultimately, we knew that we wanted to capture this, not because we had any idea of what the outcome would be. I didn’t know if I was going to survive long enough to see this film come together, but to document what it is to navigate those peaks and valleys in real time, not just individually, but especially as a unit, felt like a worthy exploration and project. And it really took a massive leap of faith for both of us, and for Matt included, because we did it without funding, without a distributor, or anything like that. And we wanted the freedom to figure out what this could be, without any sort of directives coming from the outside.

And so I think what helped was that it really was often just the three of us. And because my immune system was so compromised, it was just Matt holding the camera. It’s not like there was a giant film crew there. And so we really built a deep friendship, and went through so much together, in the course of that time. Although Jon jokes that he had to draw the line one day, because our safe space was the bathroom. We knew that if we went into the bathroom, the camera would not follow us. So we would take bathroom breaks, just to kind of get our heads together.

And one day Jon was taking a shower, and he saw the door crack open, and he saw the camera lens come through. And Jon went, “Hello?” And he said, “Don’t worry, I’m just filming you from the waist up.” And that’s when we were like, “Okay, we need to reassess where the lines are, here.”

Debbie Millman:
Suleika, you just celebrated the two year anniversary of your second bone marrow transplant, and joyfully you were able to join Jon at the recent Grammys, where he was once again nominated for a pile of awards. There’s something about this that feels incredibly full circle, and I read that lately, you’re forcing yourself to make more necessary optimism. And as a result, I understand that you’ve committed, in that necessary optimism, to write two more books. And I was wondering if you can tell us about those.

Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. So unlike the first time, I don’t have, and I never will have, a clear end date in terms of my cancer treatment. I am in treatment indefinitely, for however long or short that may be. And so, in a way, it’s been wonderful because I am more present than I’ve ever been. And it makes that sort of big, bold daydreaming about the future, a scary exercise, because I don’t know if I’m going to get to exist in that future. But I know that I don’t want to be someone hemmed in by fear. And so I’ve had to force myself to make long-term plans, like a book, which as you know takes a very long time not only to ideate and write, but for it to come out into the world. And I’ve had to kind of find ways of planting a flag in the future, as an act of optimism, as a way of saying, “I will be here. I will see this through.”

Debbie Millman:
After the transplant. Your doctor advised you to live each day like it’s your last, but you embraced an alternative approach. And I’m wondering if you can share what that is.

Suleika Jaouad:
So it’s a thing people say a lot, that you need to live every day as if it’s your last, and of course they mean well. But it’s also a phrase that has always filled me with a sense of panic, the sense and the pressure of needing to make as much meaning out of every moment, which honestly is fine in the short term, but an exhausting way to live. And I’ve come to believe that if we were all to live every day as if it were our last, our planet would implode. We’d be emptying our bank accounts, and declaring bankruptcy, and we’d be cheating on our spouses and eating ice cream for every meal.

And so, rather than doing that, I needed to find a gentler way in. And so what I decided was that instead, I was going to try to live every day as if it were my first, to wake up with a sense of curiosity and playfulness and wonder, that a newborn baby might. And it’s shifted my whole mindset, when it comes to the idea of indefinite treatment. It’s removed the pressure, and rather than figuring out how I can get the most out of my life, it’s shifted me into a place of thinking about what I can give, what I can give to my beloveds around me. What I can give to my work, what I can give to my body, to nourish it in this moment. And it’s really helped me also feel the sense of permission to do absolutely nothing. To have unstructured time, to doodle, to nap, to take the pressure off of feeling like there needs to be a sizable output. I think it’s what’s really helping me, figuring out how to swim through this.

Debbie Millman:
I’m wondering if you would be willing to read a short excerpt from Between Two Kingdoms. It’s one of my favorite passages in the book, and I was wondering if you’d share that with our listeners?

Suleika Jaouad:
I would love to.

“I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works. Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts, and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now, instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss. Catherine’s experience and her insights sit with me. She went through something she thought she could never survive, and yet here she is, surviving. ‘You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,’ she told me before bed. That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life sorrows than loving.”

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

Suleika Jaouad:
Thank you, Debbie. This was a joy, and let me just go ahead and say it on the record, but my favorite interview ever. You are a wonder, and I’m so, so grateful to have gotten to have this conversation with you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. I’m going to cry.

Before we go, I do want to let people know that adding your name to the Bone Marrow Registry is quick and easy, and painless. You can sign up at jointhesymphony.org, and all it takes is a swab of Q-tip to get your DNA. For cancer patients around the world, it could mean a lifesaving cure.

Suleika Jaouad’s memoir is Between Two Kingdoms, and the Netflix documentary she’s featured in and executive produced is titled American Symphony. You can see lots more about Suleika on her website@suleikajaouad.com. That’s S-U-L-E-I-K-A-J-A-O-U-A-D.com. And that is also where you can sign up for receiving the Isolation Journals weekly newsletter.

This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

TED Audio Collective.
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Announcer:
This archival episode of Design Matters originally dropped in May of 2021.

Futura:
After everything I saw, what could I now do? I knew I was arriving to the scale in which the gold standard was of that moment, which is a whole subway car.

Announcer:
From the TED Audio Collective this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 17 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, graffiti artist Futura talks about the art scene in New York in the 1970s and about technique.

Futura:
The simplest thing I could say is all you have to do is turn the can upside down. Seems pretty simple.

Debbie Millman:
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Leonard Hilton McGurr was a young artist writing graffiti on subway cars in New York City. Then he joined the Navy and was overseas for four years. When he came back, the graffiti scene was beginning to merge with the East Village scene and generating art stars like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. McGurr started working on canvas, became integral to the movement, and over the years, his lush and lyrical paintings have turned him into the art star we know as Futura. He’s also designed album covers and performed on stage with The Clash. And if that wasn’t cool enough, he’s also designed sneakers and automobiles. Futura, welcome to Design Matters.

Futura:
Thank you. Glad to be with you, Debbie. Thanks for having me.

Debbie Millman:
I know you go by Lenny, so I’m going to try to call you that. I’m a little bit awestruck here, so I’m going to try to calm my nerves. But Lenny, you grew up on 103rd Street and Broadway in Manhattan. What is your first memory of being creative?

Futura:
Well, I’d have to tell you, I think it was the World’s Fair in 1964 or 1965. And it’s funny because I heard Seinfeld mention that or someone else of my same demographic, numerics. I think the World’s Fair was huge for me in terms of the time span that it existed out there in Flushing, Queens. And the fact that as a result, the New York City Board of Education at the time was looking at it as this unbelievable resource right in town. And so I remember being bussed out there a lot as far as trips. But it was a very inspirational and eye-opening in seeing the globe. Because I had been looking at TV and the only thing I knew about the world other than what I read in books was what I saw on television, and it was basically sports and Olympic Games. So I was always excited about the internationalness of the world.

Debbie Millman:
Knowing this now has suddenly put your body of work utilizing the atom iconography-

Futura:
It makes sense.

Debbie Millman:
In a whole new perspective.

Futura:
Yeah. That’s the thing.

Debbie Millman:
Completely new perspective.

Futura:
Yeah. Because you’re also at the dawn … Well, not even the dawn. We’re in the Atomic age. I’m going to school and you know the whole drill of what good is it going to do for a little kid to get under a desk? We grew up with drills like that. Now okay, that’s just the ’60s for you. For me, the atomic symbol and atomic energy was obviously a thing. We were at war or basically holding a war at bay over the threat of such an attack. So I was very aware as a kid about a lot of those things. I was curious about science. I’m a big Kubrick fan, as you probably have heard, and Dr. Strangelove.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Futura:
So I’m a child of all of that, but the World’s Fair specifically, and the nuclear age was the impetus for some of my symbolism, sure. And for me, that symbol personally, it’s just the energy within me and I motiffed it. I found something to symbolize that for me.

Debbie Millman:
You were first introduced to graffiti riding the subway back and forth to school. What kind of work do you remember seeing at the time and what kind of impression did it make on you?

Futura:
Well, it was like amateur hour. All of that initial timeline. Because it’s just one level up from a magic marker to a can of spray paint and it was very primitive. It wasn’t as if it had evolved. Now, there were the Phase 2’s and the RIFF 170s, and the Flint 707s. Some writers of the early ’70s who were already expanding beyond what we thought a spray can could do, i.e. replace a marker or a pencil or a pen in your hand and just write something. Some stylized version of your name, but now elaborating on that. And the first book of our culture is called The Faith of Graffiti with a foreword by Norman Mailer and has a European title called Watching My Name Go By. There’s a great graffiti writer, rest in peace, named Stay High 149. He was an inspiration for me in his sense of what his tag, his signature looked like on the wall inside a subway car, on the outside of a sub. Wherever he put his name, it just looked amazing. And he had a backup name called Voice of the Ghetto. Voice of the Ghetto and Watching My Name Go By. Those two phrases or combinations of words are everything for me as far as how do you explain what it all is.

On one hand, yeah, it was the voice of the ghetto. And Wayne, a.k.a. Stay High, had really immortalized a sensibility because that’s what it was initially. And Watching My Name Go By is this idea of later looking at trains, riding through our system from rooftops in the Bronx, street corners in Brooklyn. Anywhere where there was an elevated train. Now sure, you could see trains roll through the system underground, but they look better upstairs. I still know what that feels like, although I’m far beyond that sensation. I do miss being that young artist doing things like that just for the fun of it. Because I think initially it was just a thrill of writing your name. And when I took the train, those names spoke to me. I wanted to be part of that bigger movement.

Debbie Millman:
You picked up your first spray paint can in 1970, and you started spraying the subway system as well as the entrance to the Statue of Liberty. Did you have any sense at that point of what you wanted to create and did you get in trouble for painting the entrance to the Statue of Liberty?

Futura:
See, what happened was TAKI 183, okay, he’s the recognized godfather here in New York. T-A-K-I 183. A Greek kid. Just to say TAKI was immortal in the sense that he got published in the Times, I think in 69. This is way before Faith and Graffiti, which I said was like ’74. So TAKI was already being written about in New York, locally. And then in a public service announcement, I believe it was an anti smoking commercial, of a family walking up the torch of the statue … Because back in the day, you could literally walk up her hand and look out on the torch. I think that’s all been closed right?

Debbie Millman:
I remember that. Yep.

Futura:
Back then you could walk up the spiral staircase and there was a TAKI tag on that spiral staircase. Because I think the smoking PSA was the father’s trying to walk up the stairs and he’s stopping and coughing. It was one of those things. Very subtle, but wow, dude shouldn’t be smoking. That TAKI tag to me was like, oh, wow, okay, well, I’ll never have the balls to do that. I’m not going to go up in there and get caught. But I’ll write on the fence or some … As a homage actually, to him. But yeah, I was trying to join. Like I said, I wanted to be a graffiti writer. And Futura 2000, the name, the tag I had at that time was elaborate. It had arrows. I look at it now, I’m like, wow, very aspirational. But my tag I felt was also very important, as was my name. TAKI was using his own name. He lived on a 183rd Street. A lot of the kids were not being very clever. It’s like a Joe 136. So-and-so.

Debbie Millman:
That meant Joe lived on a 136th, right?

Futura:
Pretty much. Yes. Exactly. As did Joe 182 and Mike 171. So there was something like you are the guy up on the North Pole. You just put your flag down.

Debbie Millman:
You own that territory.

Futura:
Yeah. That’s your spot. But then the kickback or the reward with the graffiti community is, well now go out and do that as many times as you want. Increase over space and time and visibility and stuff. That’s the whole premise behind Getting Up. Getting Up is another book written by a man named Craig Castleman. His idea was basically just putting your name up there as a sense of there I am, this is my identity, I exist.

Debbie Millman:
And maybe I belong here.

Futura:
Yeah. Well, the taking over of public spaces … I think in the beginning there was a code. We had rules and we frowned upon private property in a sense of let’s not be destroying people’s stuff, but the city’s open game. But then that just got out of control. Kids tagging on everything. But me personally, I would never do that. And I’ve always been offended actually when I go, I don’t know, to Europe at a time in the world when one could go to Europe and then see Italy just tagged horribly. As is France. And Europe has a graffiti problem for sure. As does I guess New York as well.

Debbie Millman:
But is it really a problem? Who is it a problem to?

Futura:
Well, I feel like it’s very difficult to control the lowest level of what’s happening on the street. Whoever’s a 14 to 20-year-old in any of these areas that have a graffiti community that’s not really based on any, at least for now, thought of advancement and rise up out of that into something else where one might be more creative and could financially benefit from their creativity in some way. But at the moment, I’m talking about the core kids that are the real graff heads that just bomb. They’re tagging up, they’re doing throw-ups, they’re going over each other. It’s pretty easy for me, even 50 years later to read the writing on the wall. It’s just all there. You see it. And I think that’s a bit of an eyesore in society that is always going to be the demerit to the greatness of what this culture has become. Because on face value, there is nothing really interesting about that. But it’s hypocritical or almost paradoxical. But I can’t not understand their … I don’t know what. Their angst, their feeling and where they are in the position. I get it. That’s why I don’t really want to ever tell young people what to do. I think they got to figure that out. But I do think there’s still a community that’s not interested in really making art.

Debbie Millman:
Lenny, you said that as a light-skinned teenager raised by interracial parents, you grew up confused about where you fit in. You didn’t find out that you’d been adopted until you were 15 years old and stated that while this revelation helped you make sense of some of your innate confusion, it also robbed you of your identity, and that’s really when you turned to writing graffiti. How did you find or discover your identity through writing graffiti?

Futura:
Bingo, Debbie. Yeah. That’s it. Because I get that information. “Hey, honey, we’re not …” Blah, blah, blah. And I was already confused because I was growing up as a mixed kid, so I assumed. But I never was like a woe is me. There were plenty of other kids who were certainly less fortunate, and I had a lot of love so I appreciated that a lot. Fortunately, somebody got me in the right hands, and then these guys took care of me. And then as a result of my, oh wow, who am I? What am I? I’m not them. I’m not who I thought I was. Graffiti just lent itself to, okay, I’ll create an identity. I’ll join this. And I know that I’m Futura. I know I am Futura. This is much I’m sure. That was my impetus, I feel, to become the graffiti writer.

If I could take something that I’ve always felt was to most people quite important, their whole upbringing and family and all that … Well, hey, when my mom passed in ’75, and I just picked it up from there and dealt with my grieving pops who was super distraught. And for another 10 years he was on earth. And when he passed, well, it was a okay, that’s … You know what I mean? I just had a way of removing myself really emotionally from it because, well, duh, I’m on my own. I’m on my own so I need to get on with my own life. And I did have dreams. Not about being a famous artist, blah, about being a father actually. And trying to succeed in that part where I felt some things weren’t necessarily in that classic … Not like Rockwell, but the family, whatever that is. And as a result, I think of my own desire to ultimately get that done in my life, I did. And whatever my art career was, as I balanced that along the way. I’m of the good fortune, I think, not just of my own labor, effort, talent, whatever. Maybe it was my upbringing. My mom was very strong with me.

Debbie Millman:
But she did make you a jacket you could put your spray paint cans in as I understand.

Futura:
She absolutely did

Debbie Millman:
Not only for being able to take them into the subway, but also for taking them into stores to potentially acquire spray paint cans in a manner that wasn’t necessarily legal.

Futura:
You’re right. My mother was very supportive actually in a lot of ways, and creative too. Way more than me. I think you had asked about my creativity and I mentioned the World’s Fair. But my mom was really great with her hands and could just whip up stuff, not just great food, but any number of almost MacGyver-y things in a sense of putting stuff together. I really loved my mom growing up and the beauty for me and my mom was that she was actually 40 years older than me. Her wisdom at her age, I feel was awesome because it was very much antiquated in an old-fashioned way, but with these value systems that I still think are … It’s some really good stuff there. So I’m grateful for that upbringing. Strangely enough, when I went in the military for four years, those guys were nothing compared to the regimentation that my mom delivered to me throughout my life.

Debbie Millman:
So she really was the one that taught you discipline.

Futura:
Oh, without question. And responsibility and all of these qualities that I feel most individuals should have just on face value. The same things I tried to impart to my kids like being decent, obviously. But beyond that, being helpful in ways in which you can and stuff. So I’ve carried all of that and I also learned a lot in the military too. That was my four years of a university. And when I came back from that experience, none of my friends … Well, some have been educated locally at colleges and whatever, some went out of state, but some had never even left the block. So it was remarkable how I felt I had matured as a man, as a person, just in that experience and having the ability to tell someone if they were interested, “Oh, I was in Mombasa, Kenya,” or something, and they’re like, “What?” So that was amazing as a 22-year-old, I guess, coming back with all that new information, which back to the World’s Fair was why I chose to … The expression at that time was Join the Navy, see the world. And I was like, hmm, that works. And I did wind up traveling, I could say extensively and went to a lot of different countries.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I saw you went to Kenya, Pakistan, Australia, Asia.

Futura:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You came back and then moved to Savannah, Georgia.

Futura:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
You were a shrimper, a truck driver. You even gigged at a radio station.

Futura:
Wow.

Debbie Millman:
Well, first, what sent you to Georgia, and then what summoned you back to New York?

Futura:
Well, I came out of the military and I wasn’t ready for a civilian life, if you will. It was just too abrupt. You come out of that system, you’re back in the world, and I just felt out of place in New York. My friend had moved to South Carolina and I was like, “You know what? I’ll drive down.” I had a car. I was like, “I’ll drive down there and come hang out with you.” And that’s how it started. I went down to see him and then he’s like, “Oh, I’m moving to Savannah. I got a job at a radio station.” And so I just followed my friend, actually. But then my friends in New York, they’re calling me like, “Hey, you should come back.” And I heard a lot of stuff about what was happening on the street, even though I had no idea how I was going to re-enter, and it would be through my friend Marc and The Soul Artists, and that’s how we got the ball rolling in ’79.

Debbie Millman:
Your work evolved quite a bit after you came back to New York. You began to shift to abstraction. You weren’t using words or specificity. You included shadows and shading, three-dimensional perspectives. How did your work evolve so thoroughly given you had taken such a long break from graffiti writing?

Futura:
Graffiti in 1980 was a famous wall that Lee had painted at the time. However, in 1980 the SC Studios project went down during the summer months. May, June, July of 1980. So that year, myself and Zephyr, one of my contemporaries and another artist of that era, were asked to organize and curate a bunch of artists who were modern-day, real-time bombing subway artists, come in to a controlled environment, paint on canvas in which this collective would be saved. Zephyr and I ran that studio. And over a two-month period, we saw maybe 35 different artists come through and paint for us. It was that observational period of watching all these young boys … And Lady Pink may have been one of the only females who participated. But watch all these kids paint, do their thing. And painting on canvas had already been realized a couple of times and had been tried in the early ’70s with the United Graffiti Artists, the UGA, and later with a group called NOGA. Nation of Graffiti Artists. So we were attempting to do the third version of what had been done now. And it was powerful because we got some great paintings through that whole studio session and I learned so much.

And so after watching everyone do letters and characters and drop shadows and all these … Every trick in the book. I was like, “Hmm, all right, well, I think I want to abandon the letter.” So my arrival at abstraction was after everything I saw, what could I now do? And what I thought of doing was what I didn’t see being done. Right after the SC Studio, I go out and paint my abstract, what I’ve called my Opus. Because I knew I was arriving to the scale in which the gold standard was of that moment, which is a whole subway car in the same way Fab 5 Freddy painted Andy’s soup cans on the side of his train to talk to the … Not sophistos but anyone who thought this was just nonsense and garbage.

Well, hey, wait, whoa. Whoa, wait a minute. That’s Warhol’s soup cans. Something that was in the popular culture that was being yanked out. By Freddy doing that, he was speaking to the art world. By me doing the “Break Train,” I was speaking to a new audience. And because truth be told, like the graffiti writers of that moment were like, “Yo, what’s that?” They weren’t necessarily on the same wavelength, which of course is fine by me because this was also my moment of discovering where maybe I could be and what type of artist Futura could be, even if it wasn’t accepted at that time.

Debbie Millman:
Well, that mural is now considered a defining moment in street art history. It’s been described by the New York Times as an ecstatic explosion of cadmium and white marking a stylistic rupture in the field and is still referred to mythically.

Futura:
Wow. That’s very wonderful. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I love that quote.

Futura:
We have to make mention of Martha Cooper who took the epic photograph of that train running in nature on an elevated track with a wonderful shot of a tenement building blurred a little bit. DOF in the background. To me, that’s wonderful. It’s like, oh, did you see a panther? Did you see a cheetah? Things that are rare. Rare sightings. Because it’s a big jungle and there’s a lot of territory, and so there’s only one or two of them. They can’t be everywhere. So the fact that you catch it. And that’s what really makes for mythology and folklore. Let’s be clear.

Debbie Millman:
Did the New York Transit Authority clean that train? Do you know what happened to “Break”?

Futura:
Yeah. Break got cleaned a little bit because it was also what was called the buffing. B-U-F-F. Shout out to Buff Monster. Buffing is what we call cleaning of trains. It’s like a car wash. But normally what happens is … Once again, what I was talking about before about the streets talking and people are very active in the street. If other riders come into a yard and they see my train, they don’t care. It would have to be fresh paint. You walk into a yard and you smell fresh paint. Oh wow, that’s amazing. You would dare never go near it. But you might see something that’s like half buffed and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t like this guy anyway.” You see what I mean? So there’s no law to what’s going to happen to the car. And it did get gone over. I believe it got buffed, and then it got gone over. The real fever was ’78, ’79. I have a quote in a record I sang with The Clash. I have a song called “Overpowered by Funk.” It’s on The Clash album. I don’t mention the other-

Debbie Millman:
I was just about to ask you about that.

Futura:
I don’t mention my other recording performance, but I did sing on a record called “Overpowered by Funk” on Combat Rock that I’m very proud of. And one of the things I said in the lyrics is the the TA blew 40 mil they say. The TA meaning the transit authority. The TA blew 40 mil they say. We threw down by night. They scrubbed it off by day. So back to the buffing story and the expense that the city was spending to clean graffiti at that time. It’s pretty amazing. So yeah, the buff is the inevitable, I think, finale to the “Break Train.” As I said, more artists just going over it. And once again, I wasn’t there. I don’t know if it’s Ill will. It’s the way it is out there.

Debbie Millman:
You mentioned The Clash. At this point in your career, in your life, your circle of friends was expanding, and another new chapter of your life was getting ready to be written with Joe Strummer and Mick Jones and the punk rock band The Clash. You mentioned singing backup vocals on one of the tracks, Overpowered by Funk. That was from their legendary groundbreaking 1982 album, Combat Rock, which you also designed. You designed the cover and wrote out the liner notes. So talk a little bit about that, because you’re also a designer.

Futura:
Yeah. Well, that was the beginning of that career, but I was mostly hired on to paint for them on stage. So you had the “Break Train” in ’80, you had me meeting The Clash in ’81, go on tour with them, do some live performances on stage while they performed. ’82 is the making of Combat Rock. At this point, I was doing graphics for them. I’d done some posters. I used to do backstage passes. Little zines we would design for just some events and stuff. Very, very primitive, all done by hand, all cut and paste. It’s only 1982. Art wasn’t my thing as much as design was my thing, actually. It’s strange. But I always had more of a design interest. And even when I tried to go to college, it was as a graphic arts major, which was a pretty broad topic, but I felt that it involved basically some level of mocking stuff up. I was really into making fake magazine ads for companies that didn’t exist. I’d just make up the name of a place.
Very George Lucas in the sense of how I used to think as just inventing things. Like show an image of a planet, give it a name. All imaginary stuff. And so that’s the core also of the yin yang inside of my creative flow. Is that one side of me is very design orientated to the point where Coca-Cola, IBM, certain things just marked my design aesthetic as a child. And then, yes, the abstract painting part of me where it’s completely free and I don’t have to worry about the size of stuff and stuff fits into a space.

Debbie Millman:
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Debbie Millman:
You hinted at another dabbling in rap that you did. You created an early rap record featuring a mix over a dub piece by The Clash titled “The Escapades of Futura 2000.” And the track expressed some of your artistic manifesto at the time. I think you stated, I guess I must admire the need to set things on fire.

Futura:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Did you ever consider doing more work in the music industry at that time?

Futura:
No. I did not. Because actually what occurred in 81 should have just stayed there. But as a result of what I did with The Clash … And actually Joe Strummer, rest in peace. It’s sad that a lot of my-

Debbie Millman:
Rest in peace.

Futura:
My good friends over time are no longer here. But Joe was amazing individual, as was Mich, as was the group, as was Don Letts, as was everyone associated with that experience. They were all proper gentlemen in the pure form of having Brit friends and having that experience really was incredible for me. But yeah, the rap record was just something I was inspired by. Obviously what was happening in New York, Wild Style was being filmed. Style Wars was being filmed. This is ’81. And when I went on tour with the boys, I asked Joe, “Hey, would you guys mind laying down a track? I’d love to just do this … It’s a homage to the whole story back home. And that’d be wonderful. I just want a cassette tape, Joe.” And that’s all I wanted because cassette tapes went in boomboxes. I could take that home. I could play it to Fab 5 Freddy or one of my other homies. Dondi. Anybody that would listen. “Yo, I shouted out a lot of people. Want to check out my record?” The following year, the French organized the New York City Rap tour, and that’s when my record got released as a proper record, if you will, along with four other records as a five record package. So sadly, my record did get released, and fortunately, no, there was no future in that because I knew that-

Debbie Millman:
I thought it was terrific. I love it. You could find it on YouTube now.

Futura:
Please, let’s not. But just to say that, yeah, it was fun. And of course, I painfully listen to it, I guess. It’s sincere. There’s nothing-

Debbie Millman:
And it has a good beat.

Futura:
Yeah. Well, the beat is amazing, of course. You got The Clash making a music pad for me, it’s incredible. But what happened was we go on tour, we’re in Paris, the first gig, it’s all set and rehearsal, Futura is painting in the background. And Joe comes to me and Joe says, “Oy, Fut.” I’ll never forget. “Oy, Fut.” Because Fut was the nickname they used to call me for Futura. Fut. “Oy, Fut. So we’re going to break after such and such a track.” They were performing the Sandinista double album at the time. Combat Rock was not created yet. “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” “Rock The Casbah,” none of that had happened yet.

I forget which song it was, but he said, “Okay. And then we’ll bring you out and we’ll do your record.” And I was like, “No. No we won’t. Joe, what are you talking about?” “Yeah, yeah.” He’s like, “We love it, mate.” And I was like, “Wait, what?” It was like a wait, what moment. And then basically I was out there and it was the worst performance. Really, I wasn’t prepared, ready. It was a catastrophe.
So the good ending of that story is the finale of the tour, I was going to meet them in London for a big performance at the Lyceum there and the one thing I was encouraged about was I would be singing in English to an English-speaking audience. So I must admit I ended on a high note because I did actually get an applause. And then I remember thinking like, “Wow, that’s it Lenny. Your on stage career … As you’re walking back to your painting and your back’s now to them, that’s the last time you’ll ever face an audience.” And it was actually.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it was from that side of the stage. You’re now facing audiences that are watching you make art or when you’re showing your art.

Futura:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Shortly thereafter, you began exhibiting with Tony Shafrazi and Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery. You were showing alongside your friends, your graffiti friends, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Sharp.

Futura:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
You were included in an era-defining exhibition of young artists at PS1 titled New York/New Wave.

Futura:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And you stated that these were the wonder years in New York. And at that time, you weren’t surprised by the fame Jean-Michel Basquiat experienced. One thing that I read in my research that I was really struck by … I am also a very big fan of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work as well, and have been since the ’80s. I was surprised to read your statement that no one understood he was interpreting Cy Twombly. That was the first time I’d ever read that, and I just thought that was so interesting.

Futura:
Well I think it was more than Cy Twombly. It was Pank. There were other artists who were scratching and doing something. And the thing about Jean, I always respected about him even more than Keith … Because Keith and Jean were great friends, and I spent time at both of their studios, and I used to watch them work. It’s still, for me, one of the fascinations is to be around an artist when they’re actually working. Some people don’t want you there. At that time, it was pretty carefree, and Jean was always … I don’t think it was a performance for him, but he certainly didn’t mind. And I know for Keith it was a bit of a performance, and he certainly didn’t mind. But yeah, Jean would tell me about stuff. He’s like, “Yeah, when I was being compared to people …” And this is early days still. New York/New Wave, that’s also 81. Jean was already coming with the, “Yeah, the comparisons to Kandinsky. Don’t worry about that. You should read up on constructivism and stuff.” So he was always ago-to art Google for me. Because yeah, I didn’t know a lot about that at the time.

But I think Jean was looking at a lot of other artists. It’s also beyond those guys. I think it goes back to African art. And something he also said about trying to get that back. What had been taken now could be re-appropriated by a black man. So at the time who was a young black artist of our generation? We didn’t really have any. Not on any level that Jean had arrived at. So I think he was brilliant in how he appeared to be naive and like, oh, I’m a little off. But I think it was a lot of calculation also. Something I don’t possess, but I admire because I see like, wow. It’s not Good Will Hunting, but it’s a little something Good Will Hunting about him. He’s just very smart. And maybe some of everything is just a front for other reasons. You know what I mean? I think we’re all like that, obviously, but he was really good at it. I think.

Debbie Millman:
So many of your contemporaries from that time are no longer living. Jean-Michel, Keith, Haring, Joe Strummer. To what do you attribute your staying power and your longevity?

Futura:
Well, not knowing my biologicals, I’ll say it’s my DNA. I’m going to be 66 this year. It sounds ridiculous. I don’t feel like I’m … What is that supposed to be? The way I would think of it, it’s like … I don’t know. I should just feel, look, act older. I don’t. If anything I’m embracing this time I’m in. Yeah. There’s a lot of sadness out there with what’s going on. The political climate has changed, and that’s helpful. So just to say that I don’t know. I don’t know how I’ve survived, and I just know it’s a blessing. At this moment in my life, I can look at it like, wow, it could really just be beginning for me in a way. This other level now that I can arrive at.

Debbie Millman:
Which is great and so deserved.

Futura:
That’s what I was saying. Back to just basic humanity and hope that I treat my success with the humility I know it deserves because I’m very, very lucky. I’m one of thousands of individuals that came out of this place, and I’m certainly one of the more celebrated ones. Right?

Debbie Millman:
Well, it was hard though. By the mid ’80s, you stated that the house of cards, that was the New York art scene crumbled. And by 1985, you could put a tombstone on the New York scene. This also coincided with the New York Transit Authority’s big time effort to clean subway trains as soon as graffiti appeared, even if it meant service delays, which in the past it wasn’t doing. And you essentially at that point removed yourself from the art world, and that’s when you took a series of jobs, which included bike messenger, gas station attendant. You moonlighted for a gypsy cab service, and you sorted mail at the post office across the street from PS1 where you had exhibited some of your work. Yeah.

Futura:
Yeah. That was heartbreaking.

Debbie Millman:
What was that time like for you to go from these huge exaltations of your talent and your ability and your pioneering use of a whole new genre to then suddenly having such a hard time making a living?

Futura:
Yeah. Well, it wasn’t easy, but the little gem was even by ’88, ’89, I had a 5-year-old son, and that was-

Debbie Millman:
Timothy.

Futura:
Yes. Timothy, of course. And so that was beginning to fulfill something that obviously I had expressed that I needed in my life, and once that was accomplished, well now I just have to get on with living and how do I support them and feed people and all that? So I was working multiple jobs. Just my thing. I don’t have a problem hustling and working and trying to get more than maybe I even need just so we can enjoy ourselves occasionally. So I was always driven like that.

And luckily, I met a dealer, Philippe Briet and then I found Agnès B as a patron of my work. And she was very helpful, obviously, in ending my job at the post office and giving me a little bit of confidence moving into the next decade as to what was going to happen with my work. Trying to get me back into painting, which I had abandoned for a few years at that time. And by ’90 my daughter is born. Then I really had to buckle down, if you will. However, I was never more happy. And even in the hard times that followed, I was always optimistic and I was encouraged because now I had my kid. It was just a great feeling. By ’90 I’m only 35. I’m not out of the game. I’ve just been sidelined. If anything, there’s the constant understanding of what my responsibility would be in order to do something creative, however, to take care of those guys.

Debbie Millman:
Fab 5 Freddy, a.k.a. Fred Brathwaite, your friend, said this about you, about that time. “I’ve always been impressed with how brave, elegant, and honorable he was when he became a bike messenger. True to form, he was the flyest messenger and adopted a road warrior bike messenger aesthetic.”

Futura:
I used to see everyone on the street during that couple year period I was out there. And yeah, I was really into it. I used to ride a bike. It’s called a fixed bike. It’s got no brakes. It’s just dangerous for sure. But I went from the subway cars of New York City to an aircraft carrier Launching airplanes at night in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and then I wound up on a bike with no brakes probably going like 30 miles an hour down 5th Avenue. I don’t know. It was just in me. And even at that age, yeah, I’m close to 35 now. I certainly wasn’t afraid. The fact is I did get injured. I got squeezed by a bus and a cab and I broke my foot. And that got me out of it, actually. But as timing would happen in my life, something rolled right through.

Debbie Millman:
But it’s so interesting how each phase led almost organically into the next. Your cycling skill qualified you to participate in the inaugural Cycle Messenger World Championships held in Berlin in 1993, and this is where you met James Lavelle who owned the British record label Mo’ Wax. Is that correct?

Futura:
Yeah. God, if I don’t go there, I don’t meet James.

Debbie Millman:
Right. He was a big fan of your work. He commissioned you to create artwork for many of the Mo’ Wax’s releases as well as on his own debut, Uncle album, Psyence Fiction. What was it like going from painting on wide open spaces and trains to a more confined space of an album cover?

Futura:
This was now, for me, I saw the potential of a new audience, though. A lot of people who have come to know me now, that’s really the Mo’ Wax moment. And after that figures that we would’ve made and the book that we would’ve done, that’s all a result of my relationship with Mo’ Wax. They were enormous in the sense of almost taking me from what people had known in the ’80s, but yet reintroducing me now through my artwork to a new audience in the ’90s.

Debbie Millman:
Lenny, let’s talk about Pointman. Where and when did he originate?

Futura:
So the Pointman goes right directly to where we were with Mo’ Wax. Because ’94-5, I had sketched out some characters that appeared either on canvases or in some drawings, and James had the idea of making a figure. And then the figure lent itself to the titling of it, and subsequently, everyone refers to that pointed head character as the Pointman. For me, it was a … Not a self-portrait at all, but that’s the name I was giving myself … And it comes from the military. In terms of someone who’s on point. Not like in the street, yo, he’s on point, he’s dope, or he’s good. But on point, meaning I’m ahead of the group. I’m out in front of everyone else. I’m reconnaissance. I’m looking around. I could draw maps for you. I could see stuff. Then I come back and I tell you what I see as we’re going in that direction.

So as the older one … Whether it’s The Clash trip, me in the Navy, whatever I have been doing in my life, I was always out in advance party of everyone else. And to self describe. I’ll volunteer to go do that. So the Pointman was a metaphor for me being out here in advance of the group. And then it just became wordplay and oh, his head is pointed. And I was like, okay, yeah, whatever. So if you want the truth, that’s the truth. And that’s basically the genesis of it. And all of the characters, all the point men I draw, it’s all part of that world and those guys.

Debbie Millman:
There’s quite a underground market for it in the auctions and online.

Futura:
I’ve seen that. It’s crazy.

Debbie Millman:
It’s really interesting to see. Yeah. They’re really popular. Lenny, you said it wasn’t until the early ’90s that you started to consider yourself an artist. What changed either externally or internally to allow you to feel that way?

Futura:
Well, it’s a lot to do, not just with how you’re making your art or what it is you’re doing at any one moment, but it was also I think the arrival of computing in the ’90s and technology as it was really going to become something I felt, yeah, I could do something here. I could be a graphic artist. I could create a portfolio perhaps, and I could go shop that portfolio and some agency might want to work with me. So artists in the sense of, I was confident in my creativity to the point that I could even consider myself to be an artist. Whereas I think in the ’80s it was a lot of just going through the paces, being with the crew, following other people’s leads, but lacking a bit of the self-confidence. So I would say that it’s more self-confidence really in what I was able to do now, plus I’m getting older. It’s also a natural, okay, I’m feeling much more secure and assured or whatever about my work.

Debbie Millman:
No one can draw a line like you do with spray paint. Thin perfect straight line. Any secrets you want to reveal on how you do that?

Futura:
The simplest thing I could say is all you have to do is turn the can upside down. Seems pretty simple.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It’s not that simple, but okay. Simple for Futura.

Futura:
That’s the starting point. I know it sounds crazy. Like what? But yeah. Try turning the can upside down.

Debbie Millman:
Alongside your art practice, you’ve also collaborated with a range of brands. They include Nike, Supreme, Motorola, G-Shock, BMW, the New York Yankees, and the New York Mets. Is there a difference between how you approach your corporate work versus your art practice?

Futura:
Well, fortunately, the corporate collaborations, brand packaging with someone else on a product, we have a whole team there with me that’s able to help me realize that. So that makes that task or project quite easy as far as how we’re all working together. The painting world, once again, it’s a little more isolated. It’s just me off on my own little island, and it gives me more freedom, I think. It is not like a dance between yourself and a client or yourself and other partners, if you will. But I enjoy both a lot. But I compartmentalize a lot too. I don’t let things spill off, and I try to keep it just for me. It’s just easier how to approach stuff when I’m not all cluttered and I just see one thing for what it is, and I try to do the best I can and then immediately could switch over and do the other thing.

Debbie Millman:
Your most recent shows, which I believe just closed, were a show aptly titled Futura 2020 at the Eric Firestone Gallery in New York City, and an installation at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, where you created a suite of hand-painted Akari lanterns. I’ve been trying to get my hands on one of those lanterns. I’m assuming that they’re all sold out.

Futura:
Actually, the exhibition at the Noguchi Museum with the Akari lamps, the museum decided they would not be for sale.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, that’s why I can’t find them.

Futura:
Yes. Yes. That was a good sign though, in meaning that they wanted to retain them for their own collection.

Debbie Millman:
Well, they’re stunning.

Futura:
Yeah. Well, thank you.

Debbie Millman:
The body of work that you’re creating right now. Congratulations on two such epic shows. Your work has just evolved. You are a master, and it’s an incredible thing to see the body of a person’s work evolve in the way that it has for you over the last 50 years. So I have two last questions for you. Probably more than anyone in the world, you’ve seen an extraordinary evolution of the art of graffiti over the last five decades. What do you think of the current street art at the moment?

Futura:
I think it’s amazing what’s happening in street art globally, because there’s a whole world of space available. And seemingly there’s festivals on what used to be almost like a bi-monthly basis in some city around the world where artists are being invited in. And then those group events set off what happened in SC Studios, where you’re there with other individuals painting. The global vibe is positive. Like I say, if I was a young artist right now, I would want to maybe join that place like Powwow in Hawaii that sponsor large group events from artists around the world to come to various cities and do large works. I think it’s headed in a wonderful direction as far as giving artists a chance to get their work seen.

Debbie Millman:
Lenny, my last question for you is this. You mentioned Norman Mailer before. In May of 1974, right at the peak of phase one of your long career, Esquire magazine ran a cover story written by Norman Mailer titled as you spoke about the subsequent book, The Faith of Graffiti.

Futura:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
The illustration on the cover was a riff on Norman Rockwell’s, The Old Sign Painter, which at one point was a cover of the Saturday Evening Post. It was designed by Jean Paul Goude. The illustration is of a young, skinny African-American man with a close-cropped haircut and round wire rimmed glasses, painting an easel with a spray can.

Futura:
Yes. I reposted that image, if you will. It’s very famous.

Debbie Millman:
But that’s you. It’s you, isn’t it? Wasn’t it based on you?

Futura:
Oh, no.

Debbie Millman:
It has to be. There’s no one else at the time that looked like that.

Futura:
Oh, no. I wish-

Debbie Millman:
I’ve done research here.

Futura:
I wish I could take credit.

Debbie Millman:
No.

Futura:
It’s funny because-

Debbie Millman:
No. That has to be you.

Futura:
No. You’re too kind. As you say, the art director, Jean Paul Goude, who I wound up meeting.

Debbie Millman:
Goude. Okay.

Futura:
Later in the ’80s, I met him. Wonderful man. Super genius. And I referred to him … I was like, “Oh my god, Jean Paul Goude. You did the cover of Esquire back in ’74.” And he’s like, “Ah, oui oui,” or whatever. But wonderful guy. And yeah, that’s an epic photo. No, it’s not … I certainly don’t think it’s intended to be me. Anyway, we could do a remake of that Debbie and I would sit in for that reenactment.

Debbie Millman:
Let’s do that When normal times resume.

Futura:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
I am still going to maintain … I need to, for my own sense of reality, maintain that it is you. I’m going to go ask my listeners to … It’s very easy to Google Norman Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti Esquire. And then Google Futura 2000 and 1974. You tell me, listeners-

Futura:
Oh boy. Oh boy.

Debbie Millman:
Whether or not you agree that that is indeed Lenny Hilton McGurr. Lenny.

Futura:
Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you so much.

Futura:
Thanks for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Futura:
And I look forward to-

Debbie Millman:
Doing that reshoot.

Futura:
Yes. Yes. Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
Once the world returns. Yes.

Futura:

All right.

Debbie Millman:
Leonard Hilton McGurr, a.k.a. Futura, thank you for making the world a better design place, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. You can find out more about Futura and see some of his work at the websites of the Eric Firestone Gallery and the Noguchi Museum. 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 with you again soon.

Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. In non-pandemic times the show is 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 Zachary Pettit, and the art director is Emily Weiland.

Debbie Millman:
Welcome to Creative Mornings. I’m Debbie Millman, and today I am conducting a live episode of Design Matters with one of the most acclaimed designers of our time, Stefan Sagmeister. Stefan was born in Austria, but has been based in New York since the early 1990s. Over the course of his illustrious four decade career, he has created unorthodox, provocative, multi award-winning designs for campaigns, for album covers, posters, and books that upend the status quo and have taken the design discipline in new directions. He’s won two Grammy awards. How many designers do you know who’s won two Grammy awards? And he has received the 2013 AIGA Lifetime Achievement of Medal. Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted all over the world.

This is my fifth interview with Stefan. Seems to be endless amounts to talk about, and today we’re going to be mostly talking about his new book titled Now is Better. The book combines art, design, history, qualitative analysis, and data sets into beautiful visualizations that are part artwork, part infographic. And in doing so, Stefan presents unexpectedly optimistic statistics about improvements in life, expectancy in education and the future of humanity. We’re going to talk all about that today. Please join me in welcoming to the stage Stefan Sagmeister.

Stefan, after five interviews together, I actually discovered something about you in my research about your history that I had previously never come across.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Oh, my.

Debbie Millman:
Is it true you got your first job in design at 15 years old when you went to work at an Austrian youth magazine named Alphorn, which was named after the traditional alpine musical instrument?

Stefan Sagmeister:
That is true. But this was a tiny magazine, I started to write for them. Not very well, but then the guy who, or the person who used to do the layout for the magazine left and nobody else wanted to do it and so I tried and it turned out that I liked it much better than the writing and it was a start. Also, I think importantly because the magazine also did some cultural events like music festival or a demonstration against something and all this stuff then needed graphics, needed a poster, needed this and that, and so considering I already did the layout, I did those too, which really was important early on because let’s say we would do a music festival and I would design a poster, not very well. One of them I totally ripped off a local designer, not because I was nasty, because I knew so little that I didn’t know that you couldn’t rip off another designer.

Debbie Millman:
Well, imitation is sort of the sincerest form of flattery, right?

Stefan Sagmeister:
But it was great because when you did the poster and we, of course, put the posters up ourselves with wheat paste and then 500 people would show up to that concert and the only information that they had about it was that poster so you really saw the effect of the work that you did, which was fantastic, and I think a super great learning experience for later on that the stuff that you do really matters.

Debbie Millman:
One of my favorite tidbits I found about this experience at 15 was you originally found out about the magazine from a sticker on a friend’s bicycle, and you subsequently joined him and the rest of the magazine staff for an editorial meeting in the boys basement.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
So very official.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Yes. Oh, totally.

Debbie Millman:
And I believe it was at this early stage of your career that you discovered your proclivity for using your own handwriting, mostly because most of the headlines you were writing at the time, or designing, you were using Letraset, but it was used Letraset that had been donated and all the E’s would be missing.

Stefan Sagmeister:
It just turned out that it was easier to write the whole headline by hand then to painfully carefully reconstruct all the E’s of whatever. I think Cooper Black was a favorite typeface at the time. Does anybody know what Letraset is?

Debbie Millman:
So that’s my next question because I was thinking about this.

Stefan Sagmeister:
How about Cooper Black? Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
So for those young ones in the audience that might not know, tell them about Letraset.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, Letraset used to be a extremely important company on the, this was a brand on as well known among graphic designers as Adobe.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Stefan Sagmeister:
The Letraset catalog meaning was the holy grail, was the Bible. And basically, it was sheets of rubdown letters that you did headlines with. You couldn’t… It was too time-consuming to do body copy, but headlines were ultimately body copy you had to send out to be type set. But headlines, you did yourself with Letraset and they were quite expensive so we, as a magazine, we were so small we couldn’t afford it. That’s why we had donated Letraset sheets from small advertising agencies from the area. But if you could afford it, they had their own custom cabinets with the various typefaces ordered by alphabetically, and there always was a sheath in between. There was a certain smell to it, meaning I’m not nostalgic about them.

Debbie Millman:
No, not at all.

Stefan Sagmeister:
They were a pain in the ass. But when they were old, they crackled or the…

Debbie Millman:
Well, when you burnished the letter down, it would have a bump in the plastic sheet. I found one of those files on eBay and I have it. It’s this yellow boxy file and you open it up and there are all the sheets with the blue paper in between. So I have a lot, if you want. The E’s are there if you want to use them.

Stefan Sagmeister:
No.

Debbie Millman:
You grew up in Austria. Your parents had a big store in a small town, and you described it as the place where you could buy work clothes if you wanted quality work clothes, but also your Sunday suit for church. Did you also work in the store?

Stefan Sagmeister:
I did not. Well, we helped out for, let’s say now, before Christmas on Saturdays, the whole family was in the store, everybody, because everybody had to help out because Saturdays before the holidays were the busiest time of the year. But my parents were full time, full-blooded salespeople. Not so much my dad, my dad was doing in the back, but my mom loved it. My mom’s dream was to have a store was a good reason why she married dad because he had a store and she was…

Debbie Millman:
Ah, love.

Stefan Sagmeister:
She would be the first to say so. I had a discussion with her once where I told her, “You know that among scientists, or artists, or educators, they don’t think having a store is the best thing.” She said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, like, you know…” my sister is an educator, and I asked her, come over like, “Among educators, teachers, they think teaching is the most valuable thing.” And my sister agreed and my mom thought about it for a second and she said, “Yeah, but having a store is best.”

Debbie Millman:
I love the idea of thinking that what you do is the best. So many people I know want to be somebody else or want to do something else or have this vision of what they will be in the future. How remarkable that both your mother and your sister are utterly content with what they are and what they do and who they are in the world.

Stefan Sagmeister:
I think my dad was not quite there. I think my dad took over the store from his parents who took over the store from their parents, and there were at least two generations, my granddad, who actually was educated as a sign painter, meaning a graphic designer. At that time graphic design didn’t exist and he was not allowed to really practice sign painting because he had to take over the store. And my dad-

Debbie Millman:
Couldn’t he do sign painting for the store?

Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, you know what, if he did, then those signs didn’t survive. But I have a big sign of his hanging in my apartment here on 14th Street, and he was very conservative at that time, but sign painting also meant you had to carve the wood with the ornaments. I mean, this was real craft. This was not something trivial.

Debbie Millman:
This wasn’t electricity.

Stefan Sagmeister:
So I think that my dad allowed everybody to do what they wanted from his own experience. And so my sisters went into education, two of them. Two of my brothers took over the store, but they didn’t have to. And because they didn’t have to, they actually did so successfully and they now have, I don’t think they probably have 20 stores among them.

Debbie Millman:
Is it called Sagmeister?

Stefan Sagmeister:
It is called Sagmeister. So if you go to Western Austria it’s the store that’s the big deal.

Debbie Millman:
What was your relationship like with your parents as you were growing up?

Stefan Sagmeister:
I liked very much the whole situation that I was in. I was the youngest of six kids. Both of my parents worked, so I had a lot of freedom, specifically, as a very young boy. My mom didn’t know when grade school stopped. So as long as I was home for dinner, it was completely fine. She had no clue if we had school at the afternoon or not.

Debbie Millman:
So she wasn’t a helicopter parent.

Stefan Sagmeister:
She was not, which served not so well for my oldest sister who thought that she was getting too little. It served me fantastically. It was exactly… Like I felt incredibly privileged that I didn’t have to be home at any time until it was 6:30 when dinner never served. I think, in general, growing up in a small pretty town, we were middle class possibly in the town, probably even upper middle class as far as not money is concerned, but definitely as far as status is concerned, because my mom had status. If you went through town with my mom, everybody was like, “Oh, [inaudible 00:12:17] Sagmeister…” You couldn’t get anywhere, everybody knew her.

So it was a good time to… It was… Yeah, no, I definitely won the lottery by… Austria is a very, they of course, are complaining like crazy, but in general, specifically seen from the outside, now it’s a very well-functioning country with high rates of overall satisfaction. Vienna routinely is voted the most livable city in the world. I think their kind of social democratic system is actually one that I specifically, with a distance, really think works very well. There’s relatively high taxes. People are complaining like crazy, of course. But I think, ultimately, that seems to be a good system for a society to live together.

Debbie Millman:
Your parents encouraged your creativity and you went to art school.

Stefan Sagmeister:
They were completely supportive. I think because of the granddad example who kind of went in that direction but couldn’t. So when I showed some interest in there, and I had, at that point, when I graduated from high school, I had a portfolio of printed pieces. They were not very good, but they were out there. But I still didn’t get into the school that I wanted to, The University for Applied Arts, meaning I failed the entry exam and I went for a year to a small out school to basically train myself to get through the entry exam of the school that I really wanted to and then the second time around I got in.

Debbie Millman:
After university you got a job in the Hong Kong office of Leo Burnett and then came to New York City to work for the late great Tibor Kalman at M&Co. And you specifically came with that ambition working for Tibor, who in many ways was really at the top of his game at

that moment in time. What would you say was the biggest thing you learned in Tibor’s stewardship?

Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, Tibor had this fantastic knack to give you advice that you could hear, better than almost anybody I’ve ever met.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Stefan Sagmeister:
Yeah. The way he worded it, the way there was always a put down somehow in there as well. But I’ve seen him once at the Whitney Museum where he designed the exhibit about Keith Herring and there was a long line of people standing in line to talk to him and he was holding a little court. And I stood next to him and it was unbelievable. He had something interesting and advice and clear to say to everybody. And so to answer your question, an important one… Actually, I’ll tell you two things. When I went to Hong Kong, I already knew him before, so we had sort of like a loose friendly relationship. When I went to Hong Kong, he said, “I know they’re going to pay you a shitload of money and don’t you dare spending that money because you’re going to be the whore of the ad agencies for the rest of your life if you do.” Excellent advice.

Debbie Millman:
Pithy.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Excellent advice. And I didn’t. I saved it. But almost all of my colleagues in Hong Kong are still working for ad agencies, and I’m sure many of them very unhappily. When I opened the studio after M&Co, he said, “The only thing that’s difficult in running a design studio is to figure out how not to grow. Everything else is super easy.” And I took that advice too. I definitely took it. Then of course when I partnered with Jessica, she sort of wanted to grow and we got some growth anyway. But for me, I think that’s the three to five people studio is the most pleasant. It just seems that that’s a studio size that is able to get maximum quality together with maximum joy.

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting. I was expecting you to say something about how Tibor was able to identify the right kind of people to come work with him. So he did have a small-ish studio, but he hired Alexander Isley and Emily Oberman, and the list goes on of just extraordinary designers still working today and you in many ways have done the same. You had Hjalti Karlsson and Jan and Matteas Aaronsberger, really extraordinary people working for you, Jessica, of course, Jessica. How did you know that those people would be the right people to not only help you support your vision, but then go on and do great things on their own in the way that so many people did with Tibor?

Stefan Sagmeister:
I mean, I think that Tibor was in a specific situation as in that he really couldn’t design. He had an unbelievable vision of what good design is, but he couldn’t do it himself and that freed him, that freed a lot of time up for him. And I think that also installed a lot of confidence in the people who worked for him because they really did it. And so I don’t think there ever was a design company like M&Co in New York where are so many other design companies came out of meaning a dozen easily, I think.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you now have four, five and you’re still going.

Stefan Sagmeister:
But I think that that’s not as many as M&Co. And I think that had to do with the people being quite autonomous with the design.

Debbie Millman:
Let’s talk about this brilliant new book. There’s so many things that we can talk about. I took a peek at my watch in horror and realized, oh, my God, we’re halfway through. So fast-forward what you’re doing today. You have, undisputedly, had a career that has influenced others, inspired others, and in many ways defined a sort of benchmark in what design is capable of being able to do in our culture. You’ve created extraordinary work. You’ve won hundreds of design awards, you’ve made several films, mounted countless art exhibits, and published what I believe is now six books. I think your latest is your most conceptually and visually ambitious. It’s titled Now is Better and it is a visual exploration of human progress over the last several centuries. Why this book at this particular moment?

Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, there is a story how it started. I was at the American Academy in Rome as a design fellow or as-

Debbie Millman:
You won the Rome prize.

Stefan Sagmeister:
And it’s a great situation. You get a fantastic studio, view all over Rome, and the best thing about it really is that the food is great which means other than it’s good food, but much more importantly is it means that everybody comes for lunch and dinner. And it’s 70 people there, archeologists, filmmakers, artists, architects, designers, and so you have a salon like thing twice a day and that in combination with you working in the studio all day is just a fantastic situation. You are sitting next to somebody else all the time. And one evening I was sitting next to a lawyer, he was the husband of a invited artist, and he told me that what we are seeing right now in Poland, in Turkey, in Brazil, really means the end of modern democracy.

And I kind of thought it was interesting, didn’t really comment much, but looked it up that night. And when I Googled it, when did modern democracy start? How did it develop? It turned out that 200 years ago there was a single democratic country, the U.S., a hundred years later, right after World War I, there were 18, and now the UN officially says we have 86 Democratic countries that the UN says these are democratic countries. In 2016, we reached the absolute peak of democracy. It’s the first time in the world that more than half of all humanity lives under a democratic system so my lawyer could not have been more wrong and that seemed like a very juicy situation to pursue as a communication designer because so many of my friends feel like the lawyer.

And when I looked into it just seemed that there really are two opposing ways to look at the world. One is from the short term, which is basically how all media looks at it. The media cycle has gotten much, much shorter allowing things, by design, to be more negative to come through because to shorter the cycle, the more negative the news because negative things happened very quickly, catastrophes and scandals, and there is a completely different way to look at the world, which is long-term like what I did when I looked up democracy. Yes, it is true in the short term, at that point, Poland, Brazil turned into a non-democratic direction. But even now, five years later, both of those countries are actually turning in the other way again. So from the short term he was correct. It went a little bit less democratic, but from the long term 200, he was completely wrong. And when I looked into other directions, that seemed to be true for a lot of directions.

Debbie Millman:
So let’s talk about short-term versus long-term for a moment. It’s very easy, I think a lot of us, maybe everyone in this room is feeling the intensity of the world right now.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Sure.

Debbie Millman:
And it’s very hard, in the moment, of anything, to think long-term. Whenever we’re in something we tend to think, humans tend to think this is how it’s going to be forever. Why is it that we, despite all the positive things that you point out in this book, which are real and documented and empirical, do we all feel like civilization is doomed?

Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, I think there’s many reasons. One is the amygdala. It’s a small part in our brain like the size-

Debbie Millman:
The amygdala.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Yeah, that basically is designed as a shortcut for negativity. It comes from our pre-historic ancestors that really needed to be kept safe from the lion that would attack and it didn’t really have the same need for the banana that you didn’t see because there might be another banana around the corner. So that amygdala was designed by evolution to keep us safe. Now, we developed much faster than evolution originally thought so, and I feel that if we would look as we should look at all the short-term news, but if we would look and spend more time on the long-term, we would actually get a much fuller and better informed picture of the world.

Debbie Millman:
Despite the many terrible, horrible things happening in the world right now and for many of us in our personal lives. After reading your book, I’ve come to realize that almost any data point that’s measurable, most things are better than they were 100 years ago. I’m wondering, in an effort to sort of buoy the audience a bit on this Friday morning, can you share some of your favorite statistics and examples from the book?

Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, I’ll share some lighthearted and some more important ones.

Debbie Millman:
Perfect.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Lighthearted would be amount of guitars per million people. In the sixties, that’s the earliest that they’ve been counted, 600 per million people now 11,000. There’s just a better chance that something comes out of it and you’ll see that in other numbers there’s so many more people making their living as a musician, even though it’s very difficult to do so, than ever before.

Debbie Millman:
So Spotify hasn’t killed that?

Stefan Sagmeister:
Has not killed that. Yes. But they have to hustle, sell T-shirts and whatnot. More importantly, I would say if I can quickly get the big things out, like everybody in this room I think would agree that we would rather be alive than dead. We would rather have food than be hungry. We would rather live in a democracy than in a dictatorship. We would rather be healthy than sick. And all of these things actually can be measured and for all of these things, there are excellent numbers from the United Nations, from the UN that have measured these things over 200 years and all of these things, demonstratively, have become better. And so these are kind of just the basic things. But if I go into detail, if you lived in France 200 years ago, the average calorie count of your diet was the same as it was in Rwanda 200 years later when Rwanda was the most malnourished country in the world.

So it literally means, in Europe 200 years ago, you were very much likely part of the 90% that the UN would now say is extreme poverty. Extreme poverty. Right now, I think that means you have to live your day for under a inflation adjusted dollar a day. And so 90% of Europe lived in extreme poverty ruled over by 10% of basically the king and the court. And that was reduced now worldwide to 10%. We went from 90 to 10, it used to be 9% before the pandemic. We did go up to 10. It got a little bit worse. For full disclosure, democracy also went a little bit worse the last seven years, mostly driven by India.

That was the biggest junk that got less democratic. So it’s not a… Progress, obviously, is not a straight lineup. It’s almost like two steps forward, one step back. Also, when we make progress, we tend to have side effects that we haven’t anticipated. Those side effects have to then be taken care of or addressed before we can move forward again. But it seems that on most fronts over time, we actually moved forward, specifically, on the very, very, very important things.

Debbie Millman:
Stephen Pinker wrote the forward in your book and states, “The nature of journalism combines with our availability bias to guarantee that well-informed readers will be systematically diluted about the state of the world and the way in which it’s going. The news is a non-random sample of the worst things happening on earth at any moment. A collection of lurid anecdotes and images and narratives.” And Stefan and I were talking about the role of the news before we got on stage today, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about why we have this sort of availability bias and why, for example, the nightly news always starts with the most catastrophic local event that’s occurred that day in that neighborhood or city.

Stefan Sagmeister:
It’s because we love it. It’s not because the people who make the news are particularly mean or terrible. It’s because we, and by we, I mean everybody in this audience, including myself, we just love bad news.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Stefan Sagmeister:
It’s juicier. It’s true. Look, if I go to amazon.com and look at the comments on this book, there are 16 good ones and one bad one. I zone in on the bad one. That’s the one that I really find the juiciest, my former client and definitely acquaintance, David Byrne, has this beautiful organization called Reasons to Be Cheerful. And, of course, I follow it. I never read it. It’s just too boring. It’s like all this positive news. When we…

Debbie Millman:
I love that you’re admitting that, by the way.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, when we edited for two years our film, we had sent the whole crew at significant expense to Austria to interview my many brothers and sisters. And I stayed purposefully out of those interviews because I didn’t want them to be stopped of saying anything negative for us all. We wrapped it up, went back home, looked at the footage. My brothers and sisters only said positive things about me. It was completely unusable. Not a second was bound up in the film because it was unbelievably boring. Now, if they would’ve said what a fucking asshole I was as a 6-year-old, that would’ve been so juicy. It would’ve been so good for the film. And actually, to wrap this little theme up, there is very good… There’s a beautiful study that actually Pinker has in his book from Harvard that shows that the film critic who hates the film is always seen to be much more intelligent than the film critic who loves the film.

Debbie Millman:
Yesterday on Lit Hub, there was an article that they published the 12 most scathing book reviews of the year.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Juicy.

Debbie Millman:
It’s only juicy unless you know someone whose book is on that list.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Oh. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And then it’s rather horrific. All of the cleanup that goes into having to buoy that person back up and despite 450 other good reviews, that one review is going to be one that just haunts this person.

Stefan Sagmeister:
One hundred percent. And that unbelievable article that Tom Wolfe wrote about Leonard Bernstein, I saw an interview with Bernstein’s wife and she said this review or this article in New York Magazine was the single worst event of her life of her entire life. Everybody else got a huge kick out of it because it was very funny. It was very well written. It made Tom Wolfe famous. But yeah, there is this thing in us. I’m not proud of it. It’s surprising to me that I would still fall for it considering I’ve been working for five years on this book and I’m so aware of the mechanism. But I think it’s something, yeah, it comes from our DNA, it comes from the amygdala, it’s hard wired in us. It’s not just some psychological surface.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I think one interesting thing about at least being aware of it is perhaps we can take it less seriously.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Yes. Yeah. I will have to admit, I just, literally this week, did remove the New York Times app from my phone.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Stefan Sagmeister:
Yes. And I’m still subscribed for it for the weekend, but there I find it is much more of an entertainment value because we read it in bed with breakfast and it’s very nice to have the printed New York Times there, but I just removed it from my phone. And I really do believe, when I think about it rationally, let’s take a subject. I followed the New York Times and let’s say Trump over the last eight years over every daily scandal and silliness that he was saying, I would be much better off having ignored all that. And now, reading two Trump books by Michael Wolfe, I would be much better informed about how that all developed with some distance and get a much better idea of how these years were than having followed it every day and having worried about it every day. Because, ultimately, even in something as important as our President, I didn’t really change anything. None of my actions really influenced that world one way or another.

Debbie Millman:
Do you think that this amygdala is also lit up by some of the witnessing of nastiness that seems to be so much a part of the daily news and our daily politics and our daily lives? It seems that people, and maybe this is a short-term view and it isn’t something that will pan out, but at this moment in time, it seems like people are just a lot ruder to each other and I think that started with Trump, but I could be wrong about that.

Stefan Sagmeister:

I mean, I think it’s a mixture. Also, I think that the rudeness also, of course comes quite a bit from social media simply because I’m sure that many people who write terrible things on social media would never tell that to that person in the face. Meaning you just said your partner got death threats.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Stefan Sagmeister:
I’m a hundred percent sure that that same person who sent that death threat over social media would never say this at a dinner party in the face.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Stefan Sagmeister:
And I think in that case, social media is sort of like road rage, but even more, you are even more encapsulated. You’re even further away, meaning people already behave much worse when they’re in a car because they’re in their own thing than they would to your face. And I think social media is like triple road rage. And beyond that, I don’t know if people got ruder in general, maybe they do. I mean, people on planes definitely seem to be ruder.

Debbie Millman:
And smellier.

Stefan Sagmeister:
And yeah. There I actually believe, specifically on airports I actually think that it has… But I think it has also something to do with the architecture. I, for example, feel that if you go to LaGuardia now, people are nicer than they used to be five years ago. I really think that. Check that out and see if you can see something similar.

Debbie Millman:
I think that every airport should play on repeat 24/7 Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.

Stefan Sagmeister:
You know that Haneda does that. Haneda in Tokyo, with a formerly New York designer was creative director there. They actually had Brian over and they are playing Music for Airports in the airport. I know that through my partner that in all Polish train stations, they only play Chopin, which is not bad.

Debbie Millman:
Some long-term lessons to be learned here. I want to talk to you about the artwork. The artwork in the book are compositions. They include paintings on canvases that some of which belong to your paternal great grandparents, Gerhard and Rosalia Sagmeister who open and ran that first small antique store in the 1870s. The things that your grandparents didn’t sell were stored in the attic of your childhood home, and you used some of those to make some of the work featured in the exhibits in the book on some of the fashion something that you’re wearing, for example. What made you decide to mine your family’s attic for this work?

Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, once I thought I should do a communication design project about long-term thinking, about the long-term, the next thing was what media should I do it in? The thing that went out immediately was everything digital because I can’t open my files from 15 years ago. So that was clearly didn’t seem to be a good way, both from a long term as in it doesn’t stay around for a long time, but also from a how we don’t seem to be concentrating on it for quite a long time.

Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting. I wanted to ask you about that. The last time I looked, this book was not available on Kindle. Is it still?

Stefan Sagmeister:
It’s still not available on Kindle.

Debbie Millman:
Will it ever?

Stefan Sagmeister:
I’m not sure. We actually did one book under great effort to be downloadable also for the iPad, and these books don’t do very well because they’re so heavy as far as data is concerned, and it takes so long to download it. The system is not great so I don’t think it will, no.

Debbie Millman:
I was wondering if you weren’t offering this digitally because of the long-term and the fact that chances are 100 years from now those files will be obsolete.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Yeah, I think it’s both. So when I looked for media that would work in the long term, 200 year old paintings seemed to be perfect and we had some in the attic. I asked my brothers and sisters, “Yeah, yeah, go ahead, do whatever.” And so those were the first really, and I cut them up, meaning it was not just that we over painted all of these things. They have gigantic holes in them. New things are set in. What you probably don’t see well on the pictures is that the new things are very different in surface than the old thing. So the old thing is a canvas that’s 200 years old. The new thing are highly polished pieces of wood, many, many times polished and sanded so they’re highly glossy. They almost look like a piano.

And that just seemed conceptually neat to me that these things were actually physically around when we started to collect the data.

Then we did many other very long-term things where we did a mosaic for a bike path created by a company that already worked for the Bavarian King set into concrete very much for the long term. We did tunnels for hospitals in Toronto or we did a watch that is so… Mechanical watch that’s so crazy expensive that I know just from the expense that it’ll be repaired and cared for a long time. It just made sense to do that also for the long term. And I have to say these things, and that’s why I really think that they are pieces of design. There is a goal. So meaning like this, the paintings, the goal is that they’re exhibited then shown in media and then that somebody buys this to hang on their wall as a reminder that what they just saw on X doesn’t really mean the end of the world.

And if that, let’s say we had the first exhibition, actually here you see it, this is Thomas Aerborn in Chelsea. If we would not have sold anything, I said, “Okay, this strategy is not working, let’s do something else.” But we sold all of the paintings and I like the process, so I kept going. I also, and I think we talked about this for a second before, I also love this situation that I’m now kind of allowed to really go deep in this subject, not just from a content point of view, but that’s true, I’m now much better at getting juicy pieces of data because I have more venues, strategies available, but also from a formal point of view. It’s we are getting better at making them. I have a small team in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, four people, but I can try out different things or maybe the inserts should be transparent. We just did the first one.

Or maybe the inserts can be 3D that they are C and C’d, or maybe we can even 3D print the inserts if we can get a long-lasting material so that there is some surface to them. So it’s just, from that point, it’s somewhat a bit different from the usual graphic design office because it allows us to basically keep on one subject for quite a long time and try to make it better.

Debbie Millman:
I love that you’re using the paintings that you got from your great grandparents because I also love that you include a statistic in the book that they themselves are a statistical anomaly being among the 15% of the world’s population, at that time, 15% of the world’s population at that time, your great-grandparents were able to read and write. And today, 86% of the world’s population is literate.

Stefan Sagmeister:
And I mean that’s just a couple of generations, you know. Five of their children still died. Crazy to think about. The worst thing that could happen to parents is your kids dying. And from my great-grandparents, five of their kids died completely run-of-the-mill for their time because only 60% of all children reached adulthood. Everybody else, and this includes Maria Theresa, the German Empress with the best… This was Austrian Hungary empire that basically with the best healthcare in the world, half of her children died. It was just what happened.

Debbie Millman:
Stefan, you have a section in the book titled, “The Environment is Not Totally Fucked,” and it’s really enlightening. And I really encourage, aside from the fact that there’s also a piece of art in this book, a limited edition piece of art, the information is so profoundly provocative and enlightening. But I do have this question. How do we align the idea that things are getting better and the data that shows that things are, in the longterm, getting better with the data of climate science experts that are telling us that the earth is in almost irreversible danger.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Glad you bring that up. That’s definitely terrible and it’s, without any doubt, we didn’t have a climate problem a hundred years ago. We started our climate problem 200 years ago with the Industrial Revolution. All the CO2 that came from the industrial revolution is still up there, which also means that if you look at it from a per capita point of view, Europe is the single worst polluter out of all parts of the world because they’ve been doing it the longest but the fact that it’s a problem is new. And I still think that even in a crazy situation like this, it’s beneficial to know that we’ve accomplished quite a bit in other areas that allow us to tackle this new unbelievably giant problem then from a situation of doom and gloom. I’ve actually done this talks four weeks ago in Lviv in the Ukraine. There’s a lot of caveat.

I definitely said, “I never thought I’m going to do a talk about this book in the Ukraine because as you said in the beginning, if bombs fall on your head, you might not have the space in your brain to listen to this.” But it actually went over so incredibly well. We had an hour’s worth of discussion afterwards that we are now talking about the Ukrainian version of the book and even bringing the exhibition there, meaning I was surprised that they actually had that space, but apparently it’s possible. But I’m a really big believer, and I have, it’s not just that this is a gut feeling. I actually have evidence for that. And if you look at big social change that happened in the past decades, I think one of the biggest and most incredible is the non-smoking campaigns. Unbelievable change. Many countries, including this one, cut the amount of smokers in half, even though those people were all addicted.

And when you look at what strategies led to this, it was positive reinforcements and negative warnings. So you had all the awful pictures on your cigarette pack, but you also had the promise of better health. You also had the possibility for therapy in many countries of patches and so on so it really was both the positive and the negative that led to that change. And I really do believe that if we want to tackle the big questions of our time, and climate change is definitely in the very forefront of these questions, we do need the positive and the negative. And the news are clearly doing a fantastic job both in social media and the official news in delivering the negative and I think that I and a couple of others, like Steven Pinker, and there’s a fantastic guy at Oxford called Max Roser, who has a wonderful site called Our World in Data, and some others are trying to give little itsy bitsy bits of positive injections in there.

Debbie Millman:
I can add to the reason that the anti cigarette smoking campaigns have done so well and it also has something in common with seatbelt laws, which have also really improved mortality rates and driving, children. Children are being educated at a very early age that smoking is bad and that you have to wear a seatbelt. And so when older people get into a car and they don’t put their seat belts on, the children in the car will say, “You have to put your seatbelt on,” which gives me an enormous amount of hope when looking at the data in your book that this next generation behind us, so the generations behind us now, are so much more concerned about the environment, or so much more aware of the environment, and the need for more democracy that perhaps we’re not fucked, as you say.

The last thing I want to ask you about is the content of the work in Now is Better. And you stated that since all the content is based on long-term data, it made sense to express it through a medium that can be reasonably expected to stick around for a long time. Talk about the types of paintings that you’re using as the foundation of the work. I know that not only are you using the paintings that were found in the attic of your childhood home, you’re also acquiring paintings in auctions and places like that so tell us about that.

Stefan Sagmeister:
So I buy… I’m a very good customer now from many tiny auction houses in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Holland, a little bit of northern Italy. I try to stick with Central Europe because that’s where I come from. That’s where I know the things. It’s to my advantage that 18th and 19th century painting is unbelievably out of fashion so I can afford it. I try to get the best quality that I can from the painting quality or none of these pieces is truly art historically importance of this is not about destruction. I, for myself, kind of answered the question, if somebody would buy my work, including this work 200 years from now, and it stand for sale at a small auction house in Austria and somebody in the year 2,200 wants to buy it and make a new piece out of it that makes sense for that time, be my guest and more power to you.

These paintings come to my place. I take the frames off, I photograph it, I put it in my files. I then, in batches, deliver it to our studio, the Brooklyn Navy Yards. They take it off the stretcher. We have a full-time restorer as part of our group. She basically tries to, if it’s possible, sometimes these canvases are doubled and tripled up, so you can’t really work with it so we try to get rid of the double and triple canvases. And then I designed the inserts from the composition, the shapes, the colors. We cut new stretchers out of MDF from that with a computerized machine so that we can get very exact shapes. The inserts are many times lacquered and sanded and ultimately covered with resin and then are carefully inserted. And then the whole thing needs to be restored because in handling it stuff falls off and when you bend it things come off so it needs to be restored. But the restorer, she’s fantastic, and I can’t see which part have been restored and which part have not. But when you would see some of them in the process, they look quite dire.

Debbie Millman:
So is there a benchmark of where you will allow yourself to destroy a previous work? I assume that you wouldn’t do something like that to a Rembrandt.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Of course not. But basically, the chances that I’ll buy a Rembrandt for my budget at a small auction houses-

Debbie Millman:
It’s happened. But I think it would be so cool to, I mean, maybe not a Rembrandt, but I mean there’s something so wonderful about combinatorial creativity, just as an idea, that it doesn’t necessarily have to be an unknown artist that you then collaborate with, ultimately, in the work that you’re making.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, there’s a history of that sort of idea. At one time, Rauschenberg bought a de Kooning drawing and erased it. There is a fantastic piece by Kippenberger who bought a Gerhard Richter painting and made a coffee table out of it and called it Interconte style, nastily.

Debbie Millman:
I bet people loved it.

Stefan Sagmeister:
So I’m not sure if I need to contribute to that genre. It’s been meaning specifically the Kippenberger Richter thing I think is fantastic and I don’t think I could top this, but I do have a dream of doing very, very large paintings which come to auction very rarely because these very large paintings were very expensive to have been done. Like if you had a portrait to be done, a face portrait was one price, a bust was another. A full portrait, which you’ll see very few full portraits was very expensive you paid extra for another hand. If one hand was hidden, it was a cheaper portrait than a double hand.

Debbie Millman:
Hands are difficult to draw.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Exactly. They’re pain in the ass and had to be drawn often by the master of the studio as opposed to an assistant who could do the dress or the trousers. And so they come to these kind of auctions that I’m dealing with less so, but I would love to do a big historical painting or so but most of them have been commissioned by institutions. And of course, the reason these smaller auction houses have so much work is because they come from private houses and the grandchildren don’t want what was in the attic and give it to an auction house.

Debbie Millman:
Well, maybe they will now.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Who knows? Yes.

Debbie Millman:
I love what you said about the year 2200. 2200, so yeah, 2200. Yeah. I’m not good at math. Data visualization is not my specialty. I like to look at it, but I don’t understand any of it. So it’s a hundred years from now. I’d like to think that another interviewer will be interviewing a designer and an artist about how their work was inspired by an Austrian designer working in the 20th and 21st century, who tried to persuade society that we weren’t totally doomed in 2023.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, let’s hope for that.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. Stefan Sagmeister.

Stefan Sagmeister:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you, thank you for writing. Now is Better, and thank you for being this very special guest on this very special episode of Design Matters at Creative Mornings. Tina Roth-Eisenberg. Thank you.

Oliver Jeffers:
This is the first time that we are aware of all other groups, all other cultures, really, truly. And we are also aware of everything that is happening everywhere at once instantaneously. And it’s a bombardment and an overwhelming sense of information and knowledge, and we need to grasp onto something that just allows us to know where we are.

Announcer:
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, artist and picture book author, Oliver Jeffers, talks about his career and about reframing humanity’s problems.

Oliver Jeffers:
We prioritize being right over wrong, but if we replace the words right and wrong with better and worse, it suddenly becomes very clear what needs to happen.

Debbie Millman:
Oliver Jeffers came on the podcast eight years ago in 2015 to talk about his work as an illustrator, artist, designer, and author. We had a lot to talk about back then, and we have a lot more to talk about now because Oliver Jeffers has been busy. He has written and illustrated several more New York Times bestselling books for children. Helped make an animated film based on his work, which won an Emmy Award, and has had exhibits of his artwork all infused with his particular brand of contagious optimism. His latest effort is his first illustrated book for readers of all ages. It’s called Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go, Our Human Story So Far. He joins me today to talk about that and so much more. Oliver Jeffers, welcome back to Design Matters.

Oliver Jeffers:
Thank you, Debbie. I can’t believe it’s been eight years.

Debbie Millman:
I can’t either.

Oliver Jeffers:
It’s just gone by in the blink of an eye.

Debbie Millman:
And I love how our friendship has evolved in that time too. When I first interviewed you, I barely knew you at all. I was so nervous. I’m still a little nervous, but now I’m a lot more comfortable.

Oliver Jeffers:
We know each other well and I am also prepared for how thoroughly you do your research.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I hope I don’t disappoint you. Before we talk about some of the newer things that you’ve been doing, because there’s so much to talk about, my first question is one I’ve asked you before, but I love your answer and I love hearing more and more every time you tell me. You learned to draw by looking at John Singer Sargent’s ears in his paintings.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I learned to paint by-

Debbie Millman:
To paint. Yes. There is a difference between drawing and painting. I should be clear.

Oliver Jeffers:
I think I learned to draw by copying the comic book strip Asterix.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. And even now thinking back on it, it might well be why there’s still bendy legs and arms. None of my characters seem to have elbows or knees. And then looking back, showing them to my son now, it was like, oh yeah. So I would just copy them and then figure out just the way in which I drew a line differed slightly from the way that he drew line and that I enjoyed it. But the painting thing, I didn’t really have any formal training as a painter, and I considered myself, I’m going to be a painter and was making paintings and then figured out I don’t really know what I’m doing. And I think a big part of art is just getting in and experimenting with materials to see what they can do for you.

But the way that he figuratively paints an ear, when you’re up close, it looks like it’s three simple gestures done in a burst of energy. But when you step back, it looks like a human ear. It looks like it’s alive. And I couldn’t really figure out how he did that. And it just was painting the idea of life rather than making it look like a photograph in every single tiny gesture. And years later, I learned that, yeah, he did do it in three or four strokes, but what you look at might’ve been the 50th or 60th attempt at doing so, which made me feel a little better.

Debbie Millman:
Have you figured out how he was able to achieve that type of realistic accuracy with so few strokes?

Oliver Jeffers:
I think he just was a very adept observer. He knew his materials and he could see color in pretty beautifully and unique ways. To be honest, no, I never figured it out. The man had a wonderful skillset and it just seemed to come from him naturally.

Debbie Millman:
It first occurred to you that there was power in art when you were nine years old. You were asked to step out of class to make a set for the school play. What kind of power did that give you?

Oliver Jeffers:
It gave me, I think, a bit of purpose and a bit of value. The power being that I can use art as an excuse to not do other things, partly, but then no two human beings are exactly alike. And a lot of the Western education system is teaching everybody exactly the same things. And I do believe it’s changing somewhat now, but when I went to school, it was like everybody had to do geography and English and mathematics and science and some of those things some people are good at and some of them they weren’t. And I wasn’t a great student and whenever the art came along and that had a practical application in the real world, that was that this is maybe something that I can do because I enjoy it and I’m good at it.

Debbie Millman:
How did you know you were good at it?

Oliver Jeffers:
Because they asked me to step out of geography class to help design the set of the school play. And I think back then I knew that I had an ability to be able to make something that looked like something I wanted it to and for it to be visually satisfying, even just to me.

Debbie Millman:
How did your understanding of power in and with art evolve after that experience?

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, after that experience … That was in primary school. And in secondary school, I went to school in Belfast, in Northern Ireland. And back then … What year did I start secondary school? It would’ve been 1990 maybe. The education system in Northern Ireland was divided. It was segregated between Catholics and Protestants. And the school that my parents sent me to was one of the first integrated schools where both Catholics and Protestants went together. And because not a lot of people were on board with that, the numbers were very low and to qualify for basic funding from the government, they had to take in all the kids that were kicked out of all the other schools, including all the rough schools.
So some of the toughest roughest kids in Belfast were going to this school. None of them cared about education. There was a lot of violence. And I recognized that art had currency because some of these kids were coming to me to ask me to draw their favorite band on their school bag or make a design underneath their skateboard. And then I sort of fell under, not their protection, but they’re like, “Oh, he’s okay. Leave him alone.” But it was something I had to offer to my peers, and it really helped me through school because my parents were encouraging me to be an artist. I was not mocked for it in a school where everybody was being mocked for having an interest in anything. And as I say, it was something that I enjoyed and it gave me value.

Debbie Millman:
Did being around rough kids force you to be rough, or were you able to have some sort of boundaries around who you were and what you needed to be?

Oliver Jeffers:
I’ve never had any interest in violence or roughness, but it did teach me a way to be able to speak in a way that I think somebody else will understand. So I could adapt and I could hold different ideas in my head at the same time and I learned to be able to say and show something in one way that these kids would get it or saying something in another way that these adults would get it. And so yeah, that duality really started to seep into my work back then.

Debbie Millman:
Do you think it’s still there?

Oliver Jeffers:
The duality is absolutely still there. Again, growing up in Northern Ireland, we used to joke that we were bilingual because we could speak both Catholic and Protestant. You knew how to pass the test by going through a certain area or a certain neighborhood. But even the visual language of duality is something I recognize came from back there. Like there’s a graphic nature using typography that definitely came from the loyalist militant murals that were peppered everywhere. And then there’s a whimsy and a narrative, folky charm that came from the Catholic murals that were everywhere around. So yes, the dualities … I think nothing is ever directly simple in one single thing and I could see the truth in that at an early age.

Debbie Millman:
You just mentioned your parents were encouraging of your art talent. There are a lot of creative people in your family. One uncle is a documentary filmmaker, another uncle organized festivals and wrote poetry and painted murals in Belfast. Did that give you a sense from an early age that being an artist was a viable career for you?

Oliver Jeffers:
Not really, because neither of them were particularly successful when I was young. But my mom and dad were both quite enlightened, and my dad was a teacher for years, and he always thought that the way the education system was set up there was fundamentally wrong. He always said that the two most difficult things a human being learns to do is how to walk and how to talk. And yet when you get into school, the first thing you’re told is to sit down and shut up.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I love that.

Oliver Jeffers:
He always told us that remembering a lot of facts doesn’t prove intelligence. It just proves you’ve got a good memory. And the sheer sign of intelligence in another human being is curiosity and imagination. He could see that I was interested in something and so we were encouraged. Me and my older brother both went to art college. And when I met my wife who studied engineering, I was the first person she’d ever met who didn’t have a proper job. And I didn’t quite realize the rarity of that until I was a bit older.

Debbie Millman:
You said that everything in your life changed as an artist when you learned to stop copying others and listened to the way your hands wanted to draw and paint. I find that so interesting given the very first thing we talked about was how you were copying the comics. How did your hands want to draw and paint?

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I think whenever anybody is seriously considering being an artist, you go through that phase of being inspired and imitating as a way to find what it is that you’re capable of doing. But at a certain point, you have to progress beyond that and find your own voice, really. So when people have asked, how did you find your style, I realize that you don’t really find your style, your style finds you. You just get out of the way of that. You know the way you would say sometimes, oh, that person can’t draw a straight line as a way to say that they’re not very good at drawing? Nobody can draw a straight line.

Debbie Millman:
Agnes Martin.

Oliver Jeffers:
Okay, apart from Agnes Martin. Is that true?

Debbie Millman:
Uh-huh.

Oliver Jeffers:
Wow.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Apparently she did-

Oliver Jeffers:
How long?

Debbie Millman:
All of her drawings, all of her grids she did by hand.

Oliver Jeffers:
What?

Debbie Millman:
I don’t even understand how that’s humanly possible so maybe it’s not really true.

Oliver Jeffers:
But I don’t think that takes away from the point. Most human beings’ attempt to draw a straight line is never perfect, but all those wiggles and bumps in that attempt, that is your style. That is the way your hand likes to move and how to draw. And yes, at a certain point you realize that no piece of art ever ends up the way that you think it will. And what’s important is to react to what you’re making as you go along rather than keep trying to change it so that it fits this preconceived notion of what it’s going to be. So to react to the real world. But at around that time when I was in art college, the reason that I wanted to make art was brought into question and I think it was that epiphany that changed the way that I was doing it, where yes, I was in the process of finding my style, but I was also always looking for validation externally. For the teacher to say I had done a good job or for other people to think I was cool and like me.

And at one point I put my hand up, this is an art college in foundation year and had a great art professor painter called Dennis McBride, and I’ve put my hand up trying to get him to talk about my work. And he just turned around and he says, “Oliver, you’re like a child always looking for sweets. Who do you make art for?” And it really hit home because I was stunned that he’d called me out like that. But as I thought about it into the evening, I was like, “I don’t know if I like the answer.” Because I was making art so that other people would think I was good or cool or for validation. But then I was like, “Well, why am I making art?” And I learned that I have to make art that I want to make and that the validation that I seek is my own.

Because when you think about it, if you try to picture somebody’s face is like, who’s approval is it that I need? Probably can’t really come up with anyone. And so my work shifted around then and I began really truly making art for myself. And that was hammered home in my final year of college when my mum, who had been sick for my whole life, she passed away. And at that moment, I was old enough to understand the magnitude of it, but young enough to still be malleable to have not fully become the person that I was to become. And suddenly everything fell away. All the things that I thought were important and all the issues that I thought were important and other people’s opinions just dropped away, and I could just suddenly see quite clearly what was important. And I, from that moment on, began striving towards that.

Debbie Millman:
You got your degree in college and in art school in visual communication, and did that initially in an effort to find a job, but realized in college-

Oliver Jeffers:
That I’m unemployable.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you decided that you never wanted to actually work for anybody because you didn’t like being told what to do.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I think you learned that when you were working in a bookshop in college.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. I worked at a bookstore chain in Northern Ireland, and it worked well for me for a while because I could do the shop windows. And so I was doing these displays, and then the occasion time that I was put on the floor and was sort of being ordered around, it just didn’t sit well for me. I think more than once in the couple of years that I was there when somebody asked for something, I would say, “Oh, no, sorry, it’s my first day. I don’t know. Ask somebody else.” But that was actually the last job I ever had. Because I was coming into my last year of university, and the word from head office came down that they were going to uniform the window so they didn’t get to bespoke them, each person. And so I lost that little gig that I had of going into work and actually just making these installations in these windows. And then I think I lost all interest in gainful employment at that point.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to pursue a book deal with How to Catch a Star back in 2004? Talk about how that all ended up happening. Because in looking at the trajectory of your life from your origin story to that moment in 2004 when you got a book deal based on a book you had worked on in college, it seems as if this was effortlessly meant to be, and I know that it wasn’t. So talk about the details that led you to that defining moment in your life at that point.

Oliver Jeffers:
I took a year off of art college in between my third year and my final year and in that moment I was making paintings because I thought, I’m going to go off and I’m going to be a painter. And some of the concepts I was playing around with were playing with these impossibilities but mildly believable impossibilities rather than fantasy. And this one moment happened where I started painting or concepting a painting that was of somebody doing something that was physically impossible, which was trying to catch a star. And then I started making other paintings of other attempts to do that. And when I got back to college, I was thinking about the style in which I was doing it, and I started harking back to some of the simpler illustration styles that I’d been inspired by when I was a kid reading books. And at a certain moment, the penny just dropped.

And I’d been talking to a friend who had mentioned picture books and was suggesting that my skill set might lend itself to that. And I was sort of playing about with this concept, but rather than as a series of paintings, as a book. And it did, it kind of happened quite naturally that first time. I fell into it. And for college, I decided how close can I get to a finished book? And what ended up being the final product of that when I graduated, I thought this is as good as if not better than anything else I see in the bookshops out there. Now, the late ’90s, early 2000s was not a great time for a picture books. It was, I think a pretty bland period. So the competition was quite low. So I sent off my concept to publishers expecting months and months and months of, have you read it yet? Can I speak to somebody? But I did my research and I put together a little package that was really well considered. Because whoever says you never judge a book by its cover is … That’s wrong.

Debbie Millman:
Hasn’t been in the book business ever.

Oliver Jeffers:
Or in any business. Because we all do it every day in myriad ways. And I got a phone call, I think two days after sending an note from two different publishers, one in the USA and one in the UK, saying they wanted to publish this work. At that point, I realized that the book that I’d made in my final year was in water color, and I’d never used water color before. Why I chose water color, still don’t really know. But I was like, I think I can do a better job of that. So I did re-illustrate it, and then learned as I was going and the book published. They wanted to do a two-book deal so they asked me, “Do you have other books up your sleeve?” And I said, “Yeah, of course.” And I had no notion whatsoever. So the second book that I made was probably the hardest book I’ve ever had to make because I was making it from the start knowing it was going to be a book rather than falling into it.

Debbie Millman:
I know that you were particularly influenced in something that Maurice Sendak said about how he approached creating books for children, and he said, “You cannot write for children. They’re too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.” And so you started your career making picture books without really having any sense of how to make a picture book. You weren’t studying picture books, you weren’t involved in the production of picture books. What drew you to that form?

Oliver Jeffers:
I think the book in its simplicity is just the perfect vehicle for this relationship between words and pictures telling a story. And I went back and looked at some of the books that I enjoyed and seeing some of them was like, there’s real life concepts here, but they’re distilled down into such a pure form that they have to really know what they’re saying. And then this idea of reducing things back to simplicity was something that really appealed to me. But just what is the fewest amount of words you can use and what is the sparsest artwork you can use that conveys fully the emotion and the structure of the story? It just drew me, and I did have a knack for it that I don’t particularly know where it came from. But yeah, I think the one thing that Maurice Sendak said that I really gravitated towards was, “I don’t write books for children. I write books and somebody says they’re for children.”

And I don’t exactly do market research when I’m making a book. It’s not like I think, oh, I wonder what type of stories kids want to hear and then make towards that. I just really make books that I find satisfying and just going through the motions of the narrative arc is like, does this work? Does this not? And if I can make it work for me, and both me as an adult, but also the me as a child that I have just a tale memory of, that works for me.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written that when artists combine image and words, it forms something that could be more powerful than just seeing the same content in a sentence or a paragraph or separately as a piece of art. And you said that people read images in a different way than they read words. So I’m wondering if in addition to talking about the specific form of a picture book, if you can talk a little bit about what happens in art or literature when words and image are combined in some way.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, when words and image are combined in a book, you can use the words to contradict the images, or you can use them to say almost nothing, but they are a different ingredient rather than repeating themselves. And so really truly the only full coming together of the notion happens inside the head of whoever’s reading the book. And in that way, they then become a co-creator. So they’ve got an access point, they feel a sense of ownership, and they can project themselves into that. But we learn how to read pictures. We learn how to read faces and rooms way before we learn how to read words. It becomes, I think, much more intuitive. We’re visual people. And there’s only one way really to read a sentence, which is in a linear way, but with reading an art, it’s more cyclical. We do tend to have a flow of sweeping from left to right generally, but you can play with that in a non-obvious way by having the left-hand side image sparse, and then the right-hand side busy with some sort of focal point. And so there’s an ability to be able to play with the tone, the space, and the emotion of an image that then combined with words creates this subtle flow that you don’t even notice is happening.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about your style a little bit. You talked about at the top of the show how you copied the comic and realized that your characters didn’t have any elbows and didn’t have any knees. They were very round rather than linear. But you are able to draw or paint almost anything realistically in great detail. So you have this sweeping capability. What made you decide to work in a way that is more fast, that’s more … I mean, I’m struggling to find the word because it isn’t really simplistic.

Oliver Jeffers:
Minimal.

Debbie Millman:
There’s a certain sense of ease to it.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I could have made some of those paintings with a very realistic figure of a boy and very realistic background, but then I’m filling in all the detail and the reader doesn’t get the opportunity to do that. And what I didn’t intend, but have learned since is because the drawings were so simple, kids thought that they could make that, and they would, but also because the geography was so vague and just suggestive, and what is the fewest ingredients you need to put this so you have a sense that it’s on land and it’s a rough time of day, but no more. That everywhere I would go on book tour in those early days, the kids would think that the books were set where they were from. And that’s what happens when you do make it simple and you do leave out as many details as possible so that people can apply their own sense of self and their own story to it.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you normally find that the faster you draw something, the more charming it is because the more human it is.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. At that point, you’re drawing how that image feels rather than truly trying to depict the reality of it. And it happens every time, which is, I would always revert back to some of the early sketches. Well, I have a sense of how this page will look, and I’ll just sketch it out quickly, and then I try to do it much more detailed and I trip myself up with it loses that personality and it becomes tight, and that tightness is cold and it’s off-putting.

Debbie Millman:
And it’s so interesting how you can always tell when something is tight.

Oliver Jeffers:
You can. Overworked, overthought.

Debbie Millman:
Tortured. I call it tortured. And when I’m drawing anything, even if it’s just words that I’m drawing, I have to go through that torture phase before I get to the ease. And that’s some of the most torturous experiences that I go through these days. How do you get to that other side? How do you learn or how do you know when you’re drawing charm?

Oliver Jeffers:
Oh. I think does it convey the emotion that I think it needs to convey in a simple way and then mix in with that a quality of line. Does the drawing look good? And you could do something a couple of different times. Yeah, that one works slightly better. I think it’s intuition. I think, as I say, we all understand body language. We all understand somebody else’s facial expressions and the way that they’re sitting and the way that they’re moving, and we understand momentum in art. And it’s when it can do those things with just a couple of lines, there’s just a charm that comes with that. But how do you recognize that? I don’t know. Does it work? Yes. Move on.

Debbie Millman:
Well, not to belabor this … Because I am. I’m torturing with these questions because I’m so curious about them. You are able to convey charm in a letter form, and you’re able to convey charm in a shadow.

Oliver Jeffers:
I didn’t realize that I was able to do that, but my writing is my writing. I moved from a studio in West Belfast to a very tiny studio in New York, and there was not enough room to lay out the way that I had previously worked and so I was forced to contain, and I would put things away and put things in drawers so there was open space, and I would label those drawers, and I like the way my handwriting looked, and so I would just take a little more time and do it. And through the sketchbooks, I always loved that combination of words and pictures as a way to even make notes for myself. And the way that a word in a painting can change the meaning of the painting, not only the meaning, but also the visual aesthetic of it, because that becomes a focal anchor, a design anchor.

Say it’s all sort of abstract and sweeping or large, and it’s devoid of a focal point. You put a word in there, that word becomes that visual focal point, let alone the meaning. And so over time, I’ve enjoyed the way that my handwriting looks and would label things. People seem to be drawn to it, and then never being able to find the right type font that really quite worked for all my books and trying to learn how I could actually put my own writing into my books. Over time, it just became part of my visual language. And when I’m doing a very large book signing line, people always say, “Oh, your wrist must be hurting.” They say this often enough. I was like, “It’s my shoulder.” It’s because you draw from your shoulder, not from your wrist. And I suppose that then doesn’t really change the signal between your body and your brain if you’re working at scale or if you’re working small.

Debbie Millman:
Fascinating. I didn’t know that it comes from the shoulder.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I don’t know if it does for everybody, but for me it does.

Debbie Millman:
Since you were last on the show, you’ve worked on some extraordinary projects with a variety of clients, including now having a list of books that goes about 20 deep. In The Guardian many years ago, you stated that you define your work into three categories. The books you make, the paintings you do, and other. And I’m wondering if you still organize it that way.

Oliver Jeffers:
No. The books I make, the paintings I do, and other. I mean, maybe. There was a big separation for a long time. The books were over here, and the books were about storytelling, publishing. Almost joyous distraction in a way, entertainment. And then the art was about question asking and a totally different style that was open-ended and much more … I suppose I was trying to be highbrow, but there didn’t need to be any kind of a conclusion to those. And over the last 10 years, they’ve started to become closer together. Now, one of the reasons that I really leaned into figurative painting is because when I graduated from art college, got my book published and started becoming known as the picture book person, I would be sending my work off to galleries and they’d be interested until they realized like, oh, you’re the same person who does these illustrated kids books, and they would lose interest.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Oliver Jeffers:
Because I think back then illustrated kids books were not seen as sexy or fashionable, and there was this sort of ego and pompousness about the art world, which has changed massively in these last 20 years. But the illustration was sort of looked down upon, and especially picture books were looked down upon. As I say, it has changed. And the art world itself is less defined by you can only do one thing. So I deliberately kept them apart in one sense because I didn’t want to confuse people, but in another sense, the publishing contract did come very easily. And so I possibly maybe took that for granted a little bit.

And then because I couldn’t break through into this fine art thing, I valued it a lot more because despite that lesson of wanting external validation, clearly I was still seemingly, I need to be in this world.
So a lot of the time now, the concepts that I’ll come up with will manifest in multiple ways, including a book and including a project and they overlap massively. I have a difficult time defining the boundaries between them anymore. Other than that sometimes with a book, the final piece of art is the physical object that you hold in your hand. It doesn’t necessarily matter what the piece of paper looks like that the art is made on or the ingredients that are needed to get there. That’s really one of the only differences that there is no one single thing.

Debbie Millman:
A couple of years ago when that categorization was more in effect, one of the first projects that you became globally known for was the work that you did for U2, and with U2. The band U2. And is it true that you met Bono, the front man of U2, because his wife was reading your books to their kids?

Oliver Jeffers:
I’ve never heard that.

Debbie Millman:
Oh. I read that in some of my research. I thought that was so cool.

Oliver Jeffers:
That’s possible. I met him actually in a bar. A friend of mine worked with them, and I was trying to get them to move to another bar, and we were there and were like, “No, no. We got to wait for my boss to come.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And then the next thing, Bono comes in and sits down. He was like, “That’s Bono.” And so we’re talking and we just get into conversing about art. And he asked me what I did, and I says, “Well, I write and illustrate picture books.” And when I’ve said that before to people, they kind of go, “Oh, cool.” Don’t really know what else to say. But he said, “Wow, what a responsibility.” And I was like, “Whoa. How so?” And he goes, “Well, you’re a human being’s first counterpoint of their cultural world.”

And I just thought that was a very astute way of looking at it. We did get talking. I sent him an art book that I’d made at that point, and then he had asked me to start doing some small collaborations. Firstly, to be part of a workshop that he was doing at Ted’s. Because I was also at Ted that year doing the handwriting for it, which led to me making a film about the charity One.org, which then led to just working on a lyric video and a music video. I worked with my friend Mac Primo on those. And then just bit by bit, they just kept getting bigger and bigger because I think they liked what I did, and they valued my opinion and right up to the point where it meant working with Es Devlin on the Songs of Innocence and Experience doing these drawings that was recreating the youth that they had growing up in Dublin.

Debbie Millman:
And also the relationship that Bono had with his mother, Iris.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
What was it like to work with a band of the stature of U2 that I’m sure have very specific ideas about what they like and what they don’t like, and how did your own taste and your own desires to create something in line with your aesthetic choices, how did they merge?

Oliver Jeffers:
Beautifully. And one of the reasons that I kept working with them is that they treated me as a collaborator rather than a gun for hire. They were coming to me because they liked what I did, they liked the way that I thought, and they handled that with respect. So it was never a case of, oh, no, make that more U2 or make that more rock and roll, or whatever it was. There were conversations about, is this the best way to do this? Can we emphasize this point a bit more? But generally, it was very respectful and yeah, as I say, treated as an equal and as a peer and a collaborator rather than we’re paying you, do what we tell you.

Debbie Millman:
Did you ever have creative differences?

Oliver Jeffers:
No, not really, actually. Because they were concentrating on the music, and I think that’s one of the reasons that they work so well, is that they hire people whose work they respect and they trust in that.

Debbie Millman:
You are very much an artist in and of your own right. You write and illustrate your own books, you create your own art. Every once in a while, you do illustrate books that aren’t authored by you, and are longer than picture books.

One in particular that I wanted to talk to you about was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne. If you can talk a little bit about the subject of the book and your approach in doing this work, because it is really, in looking at the larger high altitude view of your work, it’s very different in its tone.

Oliver Jeffers:
It is. Until that point in my picture book career, there had been a likeness to everything. There was some poignancy, yes there, but there was a lightness to it. And the fine art that I was doing, the painting that I was doing, that was an exercise to explore some of the deeper and docker issues and themes that I was thinking about.

I know John Boyne. We met on the book fair circuit, can’t actually remember where, but we became friendly, and I had read that book and had a very, very powerful reaction to it.

And he was saying that it was the tenth anniversary edition coming up, and we just got talking and it was like, “Has that ever been illustrated?” And he said, no, he was actually, would I be interested in doing it?
And at that point, the film had just come out, and we both agreed that I should not watch the film, just because, if you watch the film and then you read the book, you can’t help but picture whoever the casting director has casted.

So I didn’t watch the film, and I just went through it, and was just thinking, again, trying to employ some of those visual language vocabulary techniques I’ve used, saying something with the barest amount of information, and keeping the colors very, very minimal. So there’s only charcoal ink, pencil drawings, so basically black and white, with a very few spots of red, and a very few spots of blue, kind of a sky blue.
And I tried to remove as much information, so oftentimes, when it’s Bruno, who’s the kid … Basically, the story is, I think he’s a 10-year-old boy whose father is a Nazi officer, who is asked to then run Auschwitz. And this becomes clear in his misunderstanding of the world, as he’s moved to the house next to the camp, and he sees the people behind the fence.

And then, because nobody explains to him what’s going on, so he makes up his own version, to the best of his understanding. And he sees a small boy, as he’s walking around the fence, and they become friends and they talk about what life is like in either way, and they decide to let’s find out.

So Bruno tries to sneak in, and I’m not going to ruin the ending of the book for anybody who hasn’t read it, but for example, whenever it’s the picture depicting whenever Hitler comes to the house with his famous actress, girlfriend, wife, whose name I-

Debbie Millman:
Eva Braun.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yes. I depicted Hitler just with a square in the middle of his face, which was his mustache. And I depicted Eva Braun with just the red lips of the lipstick. And then, I depicted, I can’t remember the name of the young officer who becomes very violent, just always with this shadow under his cap, and then, these piercing blue eyes, sort of that idea of the Aryan purity, and these explosions of color every once in awhile, just to be able to show the emotion of the story, and as simple but beautiful as a way as possible.

Debbie Millman:
What did working on that book do to your spirit?

Oliver Jeffers:
I had to do a lot of research for it, to understand what Auschwitz looked like. Now I studied World War II in history at A level, so I knew my way around that period of history, and I’ve seen the images, but then, really looking at the images, because you have to draw them.

I think I made a post at the time, just saying, that things like this are important to remember, so that we don’t repeat them. There was a heaviness, that kind of permeated over me, the entire time that I was working in that book. And I think possibly, at that time, I was working on Stuck. And I needed that lightness to balance that darkness.

Debbie Millman:
If you look at this overarching, again, narrative arc of your work, so much of it, even when discussing difficult things, discussing climate change, deciding the future, talking about the future of humanity and illustrating the future of humanity, the work is very light and hopeful.

This was one case in your work, where I felt that it was very dark, and that was startling to me. And I was wondering what that might have done to your psyche, while you were working on it.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. And actually, at that point, I think I was beginning the experimentation with the dip paintings, and I thought that there was going to be a darkness in that, because that whole project is about exploring death.

Debbie Millman:
And memory, what we do and don’t remember.

Oliver Jeffers:
And memory, and how the two are related, and how the idea of knowing that life is finite, how that changes how you project yourself into a completely unknown future. It ultimately became more of a project about memory and storytelling, and the vulnerability of memory, than anything else. So that the people that I would paint these portraits of, they were all linked by the experience of having witnessed death firsthand, and in different ways.

Sometimes, it would have been somebody had lost a parent, or sometimes a partner. One of them was an EMT driver who would discover dead bodies. One of them actually was a government assassin, who had killed in cold blood, and seeing what the similarities were with that proximity to death.

The paintings themselves are beautiful. And there’s this, I think, a deep hope that kind of permeates from it. But doing some of those interviews was heavy.

Debbie Millman:
For somebody that hasn’t seen your drip paintings, how do you describe them?

Oliver Jeffers:
They would be typically portraiture painting, like oil painting, in a frame. But the entire bottom three-quarters is a solid color, because I would have painted these portraits, and then I would submerge them into a lot of paint, to permanently obscure the majority of them.

And I would do it in front of a small audience, and no photographs would ever exist of the entirety of the painting. The future of that legacy would exist only in the minds of the people who were there.
So I would ask them afterwards what they remember seeing, and then I would ask them months, sometimes years later, about what they still remember seeing, and just how much changes

Debbie Millman:
Having witnessed one, and it was the drip painting of John Maeda, because I knew the experience of watching the painting being dipped would require my remembering certain things. I became hyper aware of the buttons on his shirt, the color of the shirt, the expression on his face, and so forth. But all these years later, the only things I remember are those things that I just mentioned.

Oliver Jeffers:
It changes the way you look at something.

Debbie Millman:
But that’s all I remember. I couldn’t tell you if you had specific questions about other things.

Oliver Jeffers:
What way was he facing?

Debbie Millman:
I couldn’t tell you, but I could tell you about the button. I can tell you about the button, and that’s about it. So it’s interesting what we deem memorable in the moment.

I was trying to stuff my head with facts about it, so that I could remember more. And in fact, I think I’ve remembered less.

Oliver Jeffers:
Because you were trying to remember?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, yeah.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. It’s been such an interesting experience doing those. One of the sitters I was painting … People ask me, do I have an emotional experience, when I’m doing them? And the answer is yes, but in a different way than everybody else is.

I’m having an emotional experience, because of the collective, I suppose, mood, the collective emotion in the room. But I’m also worried that I’m not going to kick a can of paint over, remember what I have to say, the technicalities of it.

And when I was painting one of the sitters in the studio, and that’s a strange experience, if you’ve ever had your portrait painted, and especially as somebody who’s painting the portrait, you stare at somebody for an uncomfortably long time, but you’re not looking at them. You’re looking at some small, again, detail.

So I was with this sitter, and I kind of did a little laugh, and he goes, “What was that about?” And I was like, “Oh, well, I suppose I’ve just finished painting your ear. It’s probably the best ear I’ll ever paint.” And then, I thought, “Oh, well …”

Debbie Millman:
John Singer Sargent be damned.

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah, yeah. And then, I thought, “Oh, well it’ll be gone soon.”

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Oliver Jeffers:
And I’ll go through the emotion of it while making the painting.

Debbie Millman:
Would you say that your career as an artist has been fighting against the portraiture, the sort of deep detail and finesse that’s required in portraiture, that you’re so good at, and yet, really have in many ways rejected?

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. Have we talked about this?

Debbie Millman:
No.

Oliver Jeffers:
Every time I start a new painting, or go into a direction of a body of work, I was, “I’m going to be loose this time. I want to be big, and I want to be loose.” And I invariably keep getting back to being tighter at that scale. And I somehow can’t find the freedom and energy that happens intuitively, with the book art, on a large scale painting.

There’s just something there where I keep having to … I don’t know. I’m learning how to trust myself, and it’s still something that I strive towards. So one of the pieces of advice that I give myself is, “Just use a bigger brush.”

Debbie Millman:
Ooh, interesting. So interesting, because in the video you did for you too, I was actually marveling at how well your handwriting worked in a large scale, when you were writing on walls of buildings, and in walls at your studio. And I was wondering how that felt to you.

Oliver Jeffers:
The handwriting has never been an issue at scale. When I write big on a painting, or on a wall, it still looks the same as I do when I write small, but it’s always the image making. I use acrylic sometimes, I use oil sometimes, and with both of them, they have their pros and their cons.

With acrylic at a small scale, there’s an immediacy and a charm to that. But when you apply that large, just something in my head, I can never get the colors quite right, or it dries too fast. And then, with oil paint, it’s almost the opposite problem.

So I think everybody is learning, always, as they grow and they develop, and figuring out both what their body is capable of, what their head is capable of, but also what the materials are capable of.

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting to be so close to watching your trajectory as an artist.

Oliver Jeffers:
Wow.

Debbie Millman:
It’s a real privilege.

Oliver Jeffers:
Oh, thank you.

Debbie Millman:
There were two projects I want to talk to you about, before we get to your current book. In your film, Here We Are, the protagonist is a precocious seven-year-old who, over the course of a day, learns about the wonders of the planet from his parents, and a mysterious exhibit, aptly named, The Museum of Everything.

And you said this. “Here We Are, of all my books, seems the most relevant for the world’s current reality, as it began as a sort of comedic routine in pointing out the obvious. But slowly, it dawned on me, the importance of re-remembering the basic principles of what it is to be alive on this earth, and appreciate it right now.” So I’m wondering, what motivated that re-remembering?

Oliver Jeffers:
The book Here We Are is the first book I’ve ever made that’s not a story, it’s a set of observations. It’s quite literally coming home from the hospital, with a two-day-old baby, and figuring out, what do we do now, figuring out how to introduce him to the world. As somebody who’s an over talker and oversharer, I just began narrating everything I saw around me, thinking it was really funny.

It was like, “Welcome home, son. This is your front door to the apartment that you live in, the apartment is one house in a bigger building. Buildings are these things that we make.” And really, just entertaining myself by pointing out all the things that he could see. And around that time, the world was angrier and scared than usual.

Now, maybe I was seeing it from the different perspective of being a parent for the first time, so suddenly aware of the world that he’s walking into, and that I’m responsible, really and truly for the first time, for somebody other than myself.

But in 2015, when he was born, that was when the Brexit vote was happening in the UK, and that was very divisive. And it was the first year that Trump was beginning to run for election here. Everything seemed polarized, and there was a lot of anger and blame and division, and the consensus was that everything is falling, sliding backwards somehow.

As I was explaining the world to him, I wanted to change the way in which I was explaining it. I didn’t feel that it was going to be, even though he couldn’t understand a word I was saying, I was like, “I want to tell you the good things before we get to this. There’s night and there’s day. This is the only place in the universe where people live. There are people, and people come in all shape, sizes and colors, and we may all look different, act different and sound different, but don’t be fooled, we’re all people.”

And just the simple truths, that I’m sort of trying to remind him of the beauty of what it is to be alive, here and now.

As I was writing him this letter, it occurred to me that maybe other people would benefit from re-remembering these things that I was re-remembering. So it became the book, Here We Are, which is this, it’s almost a guidebook for new arrivals on Earth.

Debbie Millman:
Or for re-remembering what is important.

Oliver Jeffers:
Or for re-remembering. The editor at the time joked, he said, “This is a book for new people, new parents, and misplaced adults.”

Debbie Millman:
How did you translate that to a film?

Oliver Jeffers:
Actually, with difficulty. Because, so Apple TV wanted to do an adaptation of it, as a half hour short. Because there’s no story in the book, they were saying, “that this is going to be an educational film, if we just stick with this list of observations.” So we were looking for a way in, we were looking for a narrative.
Philip Hunt, who was the director at Studio AKA, heard me give the anecdote of giving my son the tour of the apartment, and then, the, “Wow, he really knows nothing.” And then, that changing to, “He really knows nothing. We’re going to have to teach him everything.” And that became a bit of the idea of the story.

But the theme and the emotional heart of the story came from this idea of the book trying to point to a true north for people who felt lost. So in the endpapers of the book, there is that, “This is how you find your way home. This is north.”

They decided, “That’s what we can make the arc of the film about. Let’s take this, not as a baby, but age him seven years, and have it be this one day, where it’s about this idea of truly understanding the magnitude of everything, feeling lost by it, but using that as an opportunity to bring it back to a simple core truth.”

Debbie Millman:
And a way forward.

Oliver Jeffers:
And a way forward, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Which, I think, is the common denominator between both the book and the film. The film is narrated by Meryl Streep, and includes the voices of Chris O’Dowd, Ruth Negga, Jacob Tremblay. What was it like to see and hear your ideas come to life in this way?

Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah, bizarre. I was secretly hoping I’d be cast. No, I’m joking. Chris O’Dowd was my idea, and whenever he said yes, I was like that, “It’s perfect.” He’s just got that right amount of charm and humor.

Of course, Meryl Streep as Mother Earth, it was pretty perfect. That was a beautiful moment. It was, of course, supposed to get a big premiere in California, but that happened right in the middle of-

Debbie Millman:
COVID.

Oliver Jeffers:
COVID, so that got pulled.

Debbie Millman:
But you did win an Emmy, so you’re on your way to an EGOT. The last project before we talk about your current book is the poster you worked on with Darren Aronofsky for his film, The Whale.
I’d love to talk to you about that, and get an understanding about how that came to be. The poster that you made was quite different than the film that was used in mass production, far more beautiful, far more subtle. Just was wondering about your approach to doing that project.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, that came from a conversation with Darren. Darren kindly agreed to come over to Belfast speak at this festival I was putting around this giant sculpture project of Earth’s place in the solar system, and talking about using the microcosm, as a way to look at the microcosm.

He spoke brilliantly, and we were hanging out, and I was showing him around Belfast, and he was saying about this new project, and we talked about the idea of doing a piece of art for it, and we talked about the film, but I hadn’t seen it. And I was like, “I think I have an idea, right off the bat.”

I sketched it out, and it was like, “I love this.” The premise of the film is a girl who’s reconnecting with her father, who is close in the last week of his life, and he’s obese, and I can’t remember, like 600 pounds, when they can’t really leave his apartment, but there’s this sort of sad story about them trying to reconnect. And it’s called The Whale.

Now, of course, the whale is not a reference to him. But it’s more of a reference to Moby Dick, which is a story that he keeps reading over and over and over again.

And I had just this immediate flash of a concept, which is paint the surface of the sea, and then, below the sea, you see this sofa with this whale sitting in it, that’s got human legs, on a breathing machine, and then, this girl in a scuba outfit who is there, but distant. It’s like, she’s come from one world into his world, but there’s still this distance between them.

Debbie Millman:
But she’s also trying to communicate with him, to try to find a way in. How was the work utilized in the making of the film, and in the promotion.

Oliver Jeffers:
It was used as promotion afterwards. It was a limited edition print that went out. Actually, when I got to see the film for the first time at the premier, so not before, and that really, then, the penny sort of dropped about what the film was about. It was like, “Wow, this is kind of even more apt, than not.”

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I saw a very early screening. And I can tell you, that when I first saw your poster, I was astounded, how you could see into the film, without even having seen the film?

Oliver Jeffers:
But maybe that was, rather than having seen the film, I talked to Darren. So we didn’t talk about the film, per se, but we talked about the idea and the themes and the emotions of the film. Almost without that excess information, it allowed me to see what I wasn’t supposed to do.

Debbie Millman:
You just published your brand new book, Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go, Our Human Story So Far. I have one big question for you about this.

Oliver, you’ve sold over 15 million children’s books. What made you decide to write one targeted to people of all ages?

Oliver Jeffers:
I never set off to do anything, thinking, “Here’s who this is for,” and I’m doing this, because I think, as I say, “people will like it, and this is going to hit the current trend or market or anything.”

It’s the second book that I’ve made that’s not a story, it’s a list of observations. Though, in thinking now about it, those observations started 45 years ago. They really had started to take root over the last 15 years, when I moved from Northern Ireland to New York, and then, since moving back from New York to Northern Ireland, where I’m part-time based now, that’s when I started actively trying to take these patterns that I could see that were rippling out in society in many ways, and look at them from a long enough lens view, to make sense of them somehow.

So a lot of the work that I do is about perspective. It’s about taking a step back, and looking at something from far away, or back through time, rather than just the microcosm of this moment in this time.

So the Our Place in Space sculpture project that I was referencing a second ago, it was about human conflict where it, in Northern Ireland, we have been at that conflict culturally, less violently over the last few years. But the Belfast that I grew up in was a very violent place, and it was very divided between an us-them mentality between Catholics and Protestants.

And then, moving to New York, and trying to explain to well-educated people that, “No, actually, I’m not from Ireland, it’s Northern Ireland, which is a different country,” and people really not knowing or understanding, and truth that I learned, was not really caring, either.

It just made me look back at home in a different way, and it just seemed like a tragic, poignant waste of time and energy, all of this, what was all consuming, in terms of identity. When I was making Here We Are, a big part of that book was if you’re giving a human being a tour of our planet, you start off with location.

So I started looking at Earth’s place in space, and I was reading about how astronauts speak about looking at Earth from a distance, and came across the overview effect. I could see that the way I was describing Northern Ireland, from the distance of New York, was not unlike the way that astronauts were describing looking at the earth from the Moon, where there’s some of those famous quotes like, “It makes you want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, and drag him a quarter of a million miles away, and say, ‘Look at that.'”

This idea of the separation, of these manmade borders, these lines, these stories that we’ve constructed, that really keep each other apart, it just seems like not the best use of our time. When I then moved back to Northern Ireland from here, I was quite really shocked, watching the 2020 election campaign, and how even more brutal it was becoming, and could suddenly see, because I was in Belfast at that point, that it felt like the USA was where Northern Ireland was in the 1970s, where one group’s identity was defined by the existence of somebody else, by the existence of a perceived enemy.

That really got me thinking about, “Well, why do people think like that? In Northern Ireland, why do we do what we do? What is it people actually truly want?” And asking those questions, “What is it that people truly want,” why do we go against our own best interest, time and time again? And at that point, it was impossible to have a conversation about US politics that was not just explosively conflictual. And.
I’ve been all around the USA on book tours, and I’ve met all sorts of people, and I’ve sort of joked, that I was like, “I’ve never really met anybody who wants to be an asshole.” There’s just people who double down on a misunderstanding that happened about how they have been perceived. And it was like, “Can I ask a question, in a sincere enough way, that people will answer it in a non-defensive way?”

So I put up the social media post, saying, “Calling all Republicans, can you please,” because I know many Republicans that who, have basically I believe the same set of values that I do, “Why is this becoming so polarized? Please explain to me the world that you want, without mentioning anything you don’t want.”
Because, in these conversations, people just tend to go towards what they don’t want, in a negative sense. We all begin with this sense of defensiveness and negativity. So it’s preemptive, that when somebody speaks to you from the other perspective, that it’s an attack. How could you mitigate that, and have a genuine conversation?

So, when trying to really truly understand, I asked people on the other side of the political spectrum to me, to describe the word that they do want, rather than the word they don’t. And the discourse that happened afterwards proved, I think, my gut intuition that we’re all just so busy trying to be understood, that we forget to try and understand.

And it led to the creation of the poem at the end of Begin Again. And then, in taking that into consideration about, a lot of the issues that draw most people’s time and attention are actually massive distractions away from what we should be worrying about, which is making sure that life can continue to survive on this planet. So, streaming all of these different thoughts and experiences that I’ve had, and observations that I’ve made about the stories that people tell themselves, led to Begin Again.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve talked about how one of the goals in creating Begin Again was to create a single narrative about who we are, in an effort to collaborate and address the many crises we are facing. Do you think it’s possible to have a single narrative about who we are now?

Oliver Jeffers:
To answer that question, think about the way people say that New York City is, it’s a great melting pot. That’s not true. Because that would imply homogenization, that everybody’s the same. New York is a giant salad. It’s made up of all different ingredients, but it works together, somehow.

That’s more what I mean about this. It’s almost the same set of goals, morals, and values of what we’re being driven towards. Now, the way in which I think a lot of this has happened, is that things have just accelerated so massively, so quickly, that we can’t really keep up with things anymore. This is the first time that we are aware of all other groups, all other cultures really, truly.

And we are also aware of everything that is happening everywhere at once instantaneously. It’s a bombardment, and an overwhelming sense of information and knowledge, and we need to grasp onto something that just allows us to know where we are.

And because we’re coming out of this period of, I suppose, consumerism, where it’s all just about, “Stuff will make you happy.” We’re learning now, and we see now, that stuff doesn’t make you happy. It’s actually other people that make you happy.

And that can, I think, be one of the stories that we can all rally around, is then, the things that people do want, what came out of that social media post, which sort of ended up in the poem, was that it’s all human beings want safety. They want community, they want dignity, and they want purpose. And everything else is just leveraged towards that.

Those should be accomplishable, that should be accomplishable. I think we can all agree that we want life on Earth to continue, and to exist, and that is the single story that we should get behind, instead of where we are now.

And this is the one thing that I learned about in Northern Ireland, trying to apply why people do go against their own best interests is, we have somehow got to a point where being right is the most important thing. We prioritize being right over wrong more than anything else.

But if we replace the words “right” and “wrong” in any conflict or debate with “better” and “worse,” it suddenly becomes very clear what needs to happen. And it’s not, then, about ego or self, or the past, or justifying the past. It’s about, “Well, what do we do now? How do we make this better?”

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I like most about Begin Again is the notion that, in order for us to really truly survive and thrive, is to become part of the same powerful plot. What do you envision that powerful plot being?

Oliver Jeffers:
I think I envision that powerful plot being, so we started off as villages, and then we grew to towns, and then to cities, and then nations. And maybe the next natural progression is land.

I have multiple passports, which I probably shouldn’t advertise. People ask me where I’m from, and it was like, the easiest answer was, “I’m a citizen of planet Earth, man.”

And that is, again, sort of easy and idealistic to say. But that one, same powerful plot, I think, is the awareness that we feel better, when we know we matter and we fit in. So it’s a return to the sense of community.

A little anecdote I’ve been telling about the real snap of that, the inception of the moment of Begin Again is, when I was back in Northern Ireland, right before lockdown hit there, but you could see it was coming. I got talking to this old lady waiting to cross the road, with a couple of big bags of shopping, and I asked her, “Oh, you’re getting ready for the lockdown?” And she said, “Yes.”

I said, “Do you think it’s going to last for a long time?” She said, “You know, I think it is. Because for awhile, I thought this was going to remind me of the war,” she said. She was around during World War II, and Belfast was heavily bombed in World War II, because we made all the planes and the ships for the British Army.

She goes, “I thought this was going to remind me of back in the war, but it’s not. Because back then, we all tried to see how we could help. But look around, everybody’s just trying to see what they can get away with.”

How do we return back to that sense of, “How can I help?” Or as Nicole Stott, the astronaut says, “How can we go from being passengers on this spaceship earth to being its only crew?”

Debbie Millman:
What do you see as the difference between being a passenger and part of the crew?

Oliver Jeffers:
“What’s in it for me?” Versus, “How can I help? I have a job to do here,” versus, “I’m here to tick. This is all from my convenience.”

Debbie Millman:
So what can everyone do to make everything better for everyone else?

Oliver Jeffers:
I think we have to remember the importance of community.

Debbie Millman:
You conclude the book with a beautiful piece of poetry, and I’m wondering if you can share that with us today.

Oliver Jeffers:
I will happily share that, yes.

Debbie Millman:
And give us maybe a little bit of backstory, as to how you arrived at this part of the book.

Oliver Jeffers:
Well, it was in the deep question asking of a lot of people, everywhere I went, what they actually wanted, how they felt now, versus how they wanted to fail. This real sense of understanding is that we are all collectively chasing the wrong things.

We’re using the wrong measuring stick to value success. And in remembering that we as animals are actually much more simple creatures than we give ourselves credit for. So it’s called The Heart of It.

When you dig deep enough, by asking the why behind the why enough times, you come to a truth at the heart of it. That all people, no matter who they are, where they are from, or what they believe, just want the same things. A den, a pack, position, and direction.

Debbie Millman:
Oliver Jeffers, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Oliver Jeffers:
Thank you, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
Oliver Jeffers’ latest book is Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go, Our Human Story So Far. You can find out about all the other things he’s been up to on his website, oliverjeffers.com.
This is the eighteenth 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.

Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the Ted Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Master’s 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.

Debbie Millman:
Astrophysics has proved we had the Big Bang and there are black holes and undulating space time and all manner of nearly unimaginable phenomena. But what do these things look like? We are such a visual species that for most of us without degrees in advanced math, these things don’t make a lot of sense unless we can somehow see them. Enter Kip Thorne and Lia Halloran. Kip Thorne is a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist as well as a poet. Lia Halloran is a multi award-winning artist and photographer who is deeply interested in the natural world and science. Together, they have created a book of poetry and paintings called The Warped Side of the Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves. They join me today to talk about their lives and their very cosmic collaboration. Kip Thorne and Lia Halloran, welcome to Design Matters.

Kip Thorne:
Great pleasure to be with you.

Lia Halloran:
Thanks so much for having us.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Kip, is it true that the prize for a scientific bet you won with Stephen Hawking was a subscription to Penthouse Magazine?

Kip Thorne:
Yes, that’s true. That was a long time ago. That was the era of the 1970s. It was a different era from today.

Debbie Millman:
What was the bet?

Kip Thorne:
The bet was whether a particular object that had been seen with optical telescopes and radio telescopes called Cygnus X-1, also with X-ray telescopes, whether it had a black hole at its center. And I bet that it did, Stephen bet that it did not. He regarded that as a insurance policy because he had so much riding on it turning out to be a black hole that he figured that he would at least get… For him, it was a subscription to a different magazine, Private Eye, his British Magazine. For me, it was Penthouse. Well, in the end I won, but it took about 20 years until he signed off.

Debbie Millman:
Ah, okay. Well, good to know. Kip, you were born in Logan, Utah, a town of 16,000 people nestled in a valley in the Rocky Mountains. Your dad was a professor and your mom had a PhD in economics. She was a deeply committed community activist and a feminist and the author of the book Leave the Dishes in the Sink: Adventures of an Activist in Conservative Utah. Was your mom an active member of the community all through your childhood or did it begin later in life?

Kip Thorne:
Oh, she was very active in the community throughout my childhood and throughout her life. When she died, there were gigantic headlines in the local newspaper, Old Radical Dyes. By the standards of conservative Logan, Utah, she was a radical. I think by the standards of southern California, she would’ve been very mainstream.

Debbie Millman:
What would you say is the most important thing she taught you?

Kip Thorne:
I think she taught me to investigate things that I was interested in. She took me when I was age eight to a talk given by a professor at the local university to talk about the solar system. And I fell in love with the idea of the solar system with its then nine planets going around the sun with these enormous distances between the planets by comparison of their sizes. And she helped me get started on doing various astronomy projects thereafter and got me to the point quite quickly that I was on my own and I was inventing projects of my own to do. And she was just wonderful with her children And inspiring in this way.

Debbie Millman:
I understand before you fell in love with astronomy, you had a deep desire to become a snowplow driver.

Kip Thorne:
Oh yes, absolutely. The snow in this mountain valley that I grew up in, Cash Valley, in 1948 particularly, it was very deep. And the snow plows in front of our house would push the snow up to a height that could be two or even three times higher than my father was tall. And that was clearly the most powerful job in the whole world, and so yes, that’s what I wanted to be before I fell in love with astronomy.

Debbie Millman:
Once you fell in love with astronomy, I understand that you began to devour everything that you could find about astronomy in the local library and in bookstores. You’ve said that when you found a paperback copy of One, Two, Three, Infinity by the physicist, George Gamow, you were dazzled. And your description of the book was so compelling, Kip, that I just bought it as well. And it’s really a wonderful book. I don’t want to say it’s easy to read because it’s not easy to read, but for somebody like me that’s more of a fan of physics and astronomy as opposed to anywheres close to even remotely able to do anything in physics or astronomy, I found it to be really, really enjoyable. What did you find particularly remarkable about it?

Kip Thorne:
The thing that struck me the most and that just totally captivated me was Gamow’s description of the laws of physics as controlling the universe, controlling how the universe was born, perhaps, surely controlling how it has evolved, controlling the kinds of things that have come to exist in the universe. And that was the point at which I decided I wanted to be a theoretical physicist who worked on the laws of physics rather than astronomer, but one who then focused on how the laws of physics controlled the astronomical universe. And that’s what happened.

Debbie Millman:
As a teenager in the 1950s, you played saxophone and clarinet in a dance band, you participated in exhibition dancing, edited the high school yearbook, you were on the high school debate squad. And it-

Kip Thorne:
Well, you know so much about me, it’s shocking.

Debbie Millman:
You had quite a lot of range in high school. At that point, did you know what you wanted to do professionally?

Kip Thorne:
Well, I knew I wanted to become a physicist and work in astrophysics. I knew that very clearly from age 13 on that-

Debbie Millman:
Even then. Oh, okay.

Kip Thorne:
But I knew how to enjoy life as well. And that was another aspect of me from the beginning is I wanted to enjoy life and I wanted to understand the universe. I wanted to contribute what I could to human understanding of the universe and have fun doing it.

Debbie Millman:
I understand that one of the reasons you chose Caltech for college was that you read that if on an exam you got the wrong answer but your arguments were good, you could get a decent mark.

Kip Thorne:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
What did that tell you about Caltech? What did that give you the sense that the school was like?

Kip Thorne:
Well, it gave me a sense that it was a place that did not have… wrote rules about how things were done, a place that was very reasonable and flexible that focused on what was important. In this case, when you’re a student trying to learn science and how to do science, more important than learning facts was learning how to figure facts out, how to figure things out. And that was the epitome of the statement that I read in Time Magazine in 1954, I think it was. It was a euphoric article about Caltech, a cover story about Caltech in Time Magazine. And I decided at that point I’m going to go to Caltech, I’m going to be a student at Caltech. And I wanted to have a career at Caltech. Well, here I am.

Debbie Millman:
It was at Caltech that you first developed your interest in black holes. What first intrigued you about this phenomena? Why black holes?

Kip Thorne:
Well, I was intrigued by black holes, but I didn’t understand them at all while I was at Caltech. To really understand them, I had to learn in depth Einstein’s general relativity and the laws of warped space time. At Caltech, I just was intrigued by the idea that there would be this object into which things could fall and out of which nothing could come. And I struggled to understand how that could be and how that fit in with the rest of physics. But I didn’t really succeed in understanding that until I went to Princeton as a graduate student and in my early months at Princeton started to study general relativity under John Wheeler and Bob Dickey, were two professors there, one of them a great theorist, the other a great experiment are both working in Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Debbie Millman:
Is it Princeton that you began to develop a vision for the future of gravitational wave astronomy? Can you share what a gravitational wave actually is for our listeners?

Kip Thorne:
A gravitational wave is a… I’m going to describe it in several different ways in order to capture it. First, I can describe it as a ripple in the fabric of space and time that travels at the same speed as light. A ripple, like a ripple on the surface of the ocean. But that doesn’t really tell you what you would feel if a gravitational wave went through you. It doesn’t really explain in a very clear way what’s going on. What the gravitational wave actually does is it stretches space in one direction perpendicular to the direction it’s traveling. If it’s traveling from me to you, then in the perpendicular direction between us, it stretches space in one direction and squeezes space in the perpendicular direction. And then a moment later, it stretches space in the perpendicular direction, squeezes space horizontally. And it’s an oscillating, stretching and squeezing of space as time goes on. That’s not the full story of the gravitational wave. It is also twisting space clockwise and twisting space counterclockwise. It’s a rather rich form of space warping as time passes.

Debbie Millman:
In 1972, Rainier Weiss, the physics professor at MIT, proposed an L-shaped laser interferometer gravitational wave detector with free swinging mirrors whose oscillating separations would be measured via laser interferometry. At the time, you didn’t think it was very promising. Why not?

Kip Thorne:
Because I had a pretty good idea how strong the strongest gravitational waves are that pass through the earth, and they’re very, very weak by the time they reach the earth. Why said is, “You’re going to bounce the light off of mirrors. And you have interferometry, which enables you to measure to high precision the motion the two mirrors that it’s bouncing back and forth between.” And the gravitational waves are enormously larger than the atoms in the mirror, it just didn’t seem to me at all plausible that you could pull this off. I could see that it was conceivable in principle, but in practice to do this down to 10 million or 100 million times smaller than an atom where the mirrors are made out of those atoms, mirrors are bumpy, and the light is bouncing off these bumpy mirrors, and the mirrors are moving by 10 million a hundred million times smaller from those atoms, that was crazy.

I was in the process of writing with my former PhD advisor, John Wheeler, at the time, and Charlie Misner, another former student of his, writing a textbook about general relativity. And I was writing a section on ideas for detecting gravitational waves, and so I just mentioned Ray Weiss’ idea. And I simply said, “It’s not very promising.” I held back. I didn’t say it was crazy, I didn’t say he had gone off a deep end, but I was very blunt at that level. It’s not very promising.

Debbie Millman:
After you studied Dr. Weiss’ report in more depth, you came to consider it a blueprint for the future. And it took many decades of work, but on September 14th, 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, began the first search for gravitational waves. LIGO-

Kip Thorne:
Let me just say indeed, after two or three years of studying his paper and talking with him and with several other colleagues, I became convinced that it had a reasonable shot at success, and so I wound up devoting a large fraction of my career to helping him succeed after having declared that this was not very promising. And as you remarked, by 2015, we did have success.

Debbie Millman:
You spent a lot of your life, as you just said, working on this. What did you think the odds were of success?

Kip Thorne:
I didn’t quote odds to anybody. I was vague in the following sense. It was quite clear when we first proposed to build LIGO, our gravity wave detector system of two detectors of this sort, it was clear that we would have to build very expensive facilities and then build a first generation of detectors, and we would very probably not see anything. We, by then, would’ve spent several hundred million dollars of taxpayers’ money, and then we would having learn enough from these instruments that we had built to be able to design and build the advanced gravity wave detectors or advanced LIGO.

What was the odds of success? This depended on two things. It depended on how kind nature was. And I had a fairly good idea of how kind nature was, but we weren’t by any means sure. It depended on how good the experimental team was. And by that time, I knew we had the best possible team that could be put together from the best physicists in the world. My expectation was certainly considerably better than 50/50 odds, up 80%, 90% odds that if we continued to be funded into the second generation, the advanced detectors and pushing the advanced detectors all the way up to their design sensitivity, I would said 90%… I didn’t quote a number, but I’d say 90%, 95% odds that we would succeed at that level. But that level was very far from where we began; very far. And the whole issue was whether we could really get to that level. But I had confidence in this superb team that had been put together. And once we had that team in place, I was feeling pretty optimistic.

Debbie Millman:
LIGO captured a strong signal from the collision of two black holes 29 and 36 times more massive than our sun and located 1.3 billion light years from planet Earth. The waves carried away as much energy as would be produced by annihilating three of our suns. After intense scrutiny of the results, the LIGO scientists announced this discovery to the world on February 11th, 2016. What are gravitational waves actually made of?

Kip Thorne:
They’re made from a warping of space and time. They’re not made for matter, they’re not made from electricity or magnetism, they’re made from a pure warping of space and time, the stretching of space, the squeezing of space, clockwise twisting of space, counterclockwise twisting of space. And it is really quite remarkable. This is the thing that so excited me as a young man when I came to understand the nature of Einstein’s relativity theory, that you could have what I would call a warped side of the universe, objects and phenomena that are made from a deformation, a warping of space and of time.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that gravitational wave astronomy could someday allow direct observation of the earliest history of the universe. And I’m wondering how would we be able to observe that?

Kip Thorne:
I expect that it’s likely that within the next decade we will indirectly see the gravitational waves that came from the birth of the universe. Indirectly in the following sense: That those waves with very, very long wavelengths, very slow oscillations, wavelengths 100th or 1/10th the size of the observable universe; unbelievably long wavelengths. Those waves stretched and squeezed the very hot matter in the early universe at the moment that it was emitting, it was producing electromagnetic waves that we now detect called the cosmic microwave background. The plasma is being stretched and squeezed by the gravitational waves, and as the electromagnetic waves scatter off that plasma, they get an imprint from the gravitational waves that were stretching and squeezing it. And that imprint is what we call a polarization imprint. And that polarization imprint has been seen by cosmologists. However, there are other ways that that polarization imprint can be made in the universe. And the challenge is to separate out the imprint that was produced by the primordial gravitational waves from imprint produced in other manners. And that’s what the holy grail of this area of cosmology is today, but it’s a holy grail that I think is they’re going to pull it off in the coming decade.

A more direct observation of these primordial gravitational waves will likely be achieved in the middle of this century by gravitational wave detectors that are very similar to LIGO, but they’re out in interplanetary space, something called the Big Bang Observer, the future gravitational wave space mission. And those will see gravitational waves that oscillate with periods from about a second to a minute, whereas the ones that put the imprint on this cosmic microwave background, it’s periods of 100 million years. And so I think that by the middle of this century, we’re likely to be observing the primordial gravitational waves directly or indirectly in very two different frequency bands, as we say, or oscillation period bands, period bands of 100 million years versus period bands of tens of seconds. That will be so exciting because the gravitational waves that we’re observing will be carrying direct information about the birth of the universe. And the birth of the universe is controlled by laws of quantum gravity that we don’t understand. And the challenge then of unraveling the effects of the laws of quantum gravity and the details of birth of the universe from these gravitational waves will be an extremely exciting challenge. And I think it could be the biggest thing going on in science in the middle of this century.

Debbie Millman:
Do you think that we’ll be able to learn what the conditions were that led to the Big Bang?

Kip Thorne:
I hope so. I don’t know. There’s a question of how much information will actually be there. I think through the combination of theory, by then we may have a much better understanding of the laws of quantum gravity. And if we do, then the focus will be on using the combined laws of quantum gravity and observations to try to get a handle on the conditions that led to the Big Bang.

Debbie Millman:
Lia, speaking of origins and conditions, I understand that when you were six years old you told your mom you wanted to have your hair cut like Han Solo.

Lia Halloran:
This is true.

Debbie Millman:
Did she allow it? Did she allow it?

Lia Halloran:
Oh, absolutely. I think I was just initially irritated that my name Lia was so close to Princess Leia that I was like, “If there was any character in this movie, I would absolutely be Han Solo.” And yes, my parents took me. I think the hairstylist was more confused that this mother was like, “Yeah, give her what she wants.” And I got a flat top.

Debbie Millman:
How did it look?

Lia Halloran:
it matched my parachute pants that I was wearing and rocking while I was break dancing around the neighborhood, so I looked like a perfect ’80s California surfer skater kid.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you were born in Chicago but grew up in the Bay Area. Your dad was a physicist, and you grew up in your father’s lab at UC, San Francisco. And I believe it was he who gave you your first telescope. Is that right?

Lia Halloran:
I don’t know, actually, where I got my first telescope. My dad gave me my first skateboard when I was, I think, four years old.

Debbie Millman:
Four.

Lia Halloran:
Yeah. Yes. But I think the first telescope that was actually mine I think I got when I was in college as an undergrad.

Debbie Millman:
Oh. Oh, perhaps you were looking at his telescope in his labs.

Lia Halloran:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
What were you looking at back then?

Lia Halloran:
My father studied the realm of the small. He actually studied bones. And so one of the coolest things that he did when I was young is he just encouraged a general sense of creativity and exploration. He would say to me when I was young, “Oh, Lia, I’m really overwhelmed in my lab. Would you come and help me out? Do you think you would be okay getting out of kindergarten?” And I thought this was a really important job that he needed help with. And he would set me up washing test tubes and just explain everything to me. He was doing all sorts of experiments in the ’80s that were looking at how bones were affected when we went into space. It was very cool. I got to see the space shuttle land at Edwards Air Force Base, and I got to go to a shuttle launch, the Columbia shuttle launch in Florida. But my father was just captivated with the world, whether it was studying bones. He would stop a diesel truck driver broken down on the side of the road, “Oh, what’s happening with your engine? What’s going on?” And he just instilled this absolute passion for curiosity in me.

Debbie Millman:
He also, as you mentioned, gave you your first skateboard. But you’ve stated that you were not invited into the culture of skateboarding in the Bay Area and that you didn’t actually meet a female skateboarder who could really skate until you were in your 20s. Why weren’t you invited in when you first started?

Lia Halloran:
I think skateboarding culture, it’s almost hard for us to imagine what it was like in the ’80s and ’90s. Skateboarding was a subculture. We didn’t have Tony Hawk Pro Skater, there was no X Games. It was a subculture. And if you imagine that, women were really the sub subculture. And there were skater girlfriends hanging out at the skate park, but no one who was actually skateboarding.

I think when I was 12, 13 years old and I was really skateboarding ramps all the time, I was also really starting to become aware that I was queer. And I felt this very much like an outsider even within this subculture. The way that I would describe it is almost like a circus monkey. I’d show up at a skate park, and for me to be invited in there… These are not skate parks that are sponsored by the city, these are guys getting concrete and mixing it on the weekend and transforming spaces that you’d get kicked out of, chased by police. It was really a do it yourself vibe that I absolutely loved. And I find that is very much akin and in parallel to being an artist.

But it was very much like I had to prove myself to be able… They’d say, “Do a kick flip. Oh, jump over this thing.” And then if I did it, then they’d be like, “Okay, you’re cool. You can hang and stay in here.” But yeah, the first time I met a female skateboarder, I was probably in my mid to early 20s.

Debbie Millman:
You ended up having a half pipe in your backyard. Did you build it yourself?

Lia Halloran:
Yeah, my dad and I built several ramps. I will say my dad is not just a scientist, he’s an incredible surfer. He’s just has a passion and love of the ocean. I grew up just south of San Francisco in a small surfing community, and my dad just always had me on a board. Just like the haircut, I said, “Oh, I want to build some ramps.” My dad was like, “How big? How many? What shape?” And we built all sorts of weird stuff in my backyard. But I think since I was probably about nine to when I went to college, I had some kind of skateboard ramp in my backyard that I spent most of my time on.

Debbie Millman:
You were featured in Thrasher Magazine when you were 15 as part of a new wave of young skateboarders. I happened to find a copy of it online, by the way. I can send you the picture picture of you.

Lia Halloran:
That’s incredible research.

Debbie Millman:
They misspelled your name. They spelled it L-E-A, not L-I-A, but I could pick you out of the people. But since your friends had never heard of Thrasher, you still felt like the odd person out. Looking back on that now, you’ve said that you gained a power from that. What kind of power?

Lia Halloran:
Well, when they first contacted me, they said they were going to do an all female issue of Thrasher, which I was so excited about. And I was photographed. At the time, the top spots in San Francisco was Embarcadero. Was photographed in the Thrasher venture ramps on the big half pipes.

I was actually photographed when I was 14 years old, and it almost was an entire year before it came out, and I just never heard anything. And then I got the information that, well, there just weren’t enough women that were… or girls that were good enough to be in Thrasher, so I ended up in this article called 50 Unknowns Soon to Go Pro. And I thought, well, that can’t be right because I’m a girl. No one is going to turn me into a pro skateboarder. I laughed at it even at 15 years old realizing how futile even that title was. But it did give me this sense… It was on one hand like, oh wow, I’m so good. I’m being told that there’s not enough women to make a whole article, but it was also just, in the same way, heartbreaking that there was no community there, so it was a little bit alienating.

But skateboarding for me is very similar to maybe the way that people talk about more akin to surfing because I didn’t feel invited into that community. What I did fall in love with was the creativity of my body moving on the ramps and ditches and just moving through that urban space. And much of me being a young skateboarder, I was skateboarding by myself, whereas when you think of skateboarding, you almost immediately think of that second word, skateboarding culture. It’s like this group. And it took me until I was in my mid-20s to find and form that group in a all-girls skate crew that we called ourselves Rib Death. Very serious.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s really, really cool. There’s some fun videos I found online. Do you still skateboard?

Lia Halloran:
I skateboard with my daughter nearly a couple times a week. I skate her to school. And I have two kids, a two and a five-year-old. And they’re really into the scooters, but I haven’t gotten them completely addicted to the skateboard yet. But little Atlas at two years old, I think he’s my best promise. He’ll stand on it and pull it out. I think I have a second wind in me of being a skateboarder by translating that love to my kids. But yeah, Jass and I skate to school a couple times a week.

Debbie Millman:
When you were 15 years old, you asked your parents if you could have your birthday party at an exploratorium. Why did you want to have it there?

Lia Halloran:
These are great questions, Debbie. When I was 15, I had gone on a field trip I think the year before to this hands-on physics museum in San Francisco. And there’s 9,000 exhibits at the Exploratorium. It was at the Palace of Fine Arts; just a beautiful place. And they have something there called the tactile dome where it was completely, completely dark. It’s not a maze, you can’t get lost, but you are led through these tunnels. You can’t see your hand in front of your face, and you try to move through this space. And when I was there on a field trip, they were saying, “Oh, you could rent out the tactile dome.” And so I think the year later I told my parents, “That’s what I want to do is go to the tactile dome.”

Debbie Millman:
You ended up getting your first job there as well initially conducting cow eye dissections and laser demonstrations, and then in the machine shop where you learned how to build and use a sand blaster and a lathe. At that time, did you think you wanted to be a scientist?

Lia Halloran:
I knew, I would say, even from my early Han Solo six-year-old days that I wanted to be an artist. But I was really passionate about learning how to build things, and I think for me, the idea of science was always intrinsically tied to what being an artist and making could be. Even though I was my first job working in a science museum, everything that I did there, I just thought that that was somehow supporting me being an artist in some way. It was like a vehicle to study the thing that I was going to make work about.

Working in the machine shop, I apprenticed under a really amazing builder, Tom Tompkins. And I felt like that was truly the foundation for me to go to art school. I learned how to build everything, the lay, the end mill, like you said, the sand blaster. Every weekend Tom would throw some weird thing at me and say, “I need 100 of these knobs, and they have to be to 1/100th of an inch.” And just gave me such a dedication and passion for precision, for refining your craft, for really understanding how things work. And if you didn’t understand it, we would absolutely just take the thing apart. Building a museum exhibit, you’re building something to try to share something with someone that has never existed before. Very similar to art making.

Debbie Millman:
You got your BA from UCLA and went on to get an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University. McLean Thomas and Kehinde Wiley were two of your classmates. Paul McCarthy was one of your favorite professors at UCLA. And you said that one of the favorite things he told you was that after he makes something, it could take upwards of six months to really understand what he did. How did that influence you?

Lia Halloran:
That was a really profound thing to hear when you’re in school from someone that you just admire so much. In school, the structure of a semester, you’re supposed to come up with an idea and follow it and execute it and defend it in a critique. And to have someone that was so ingrained in making and would let their studio practice lead them through that making to what the content was, that was just so freeing to me. It just gave me a big, open space to be extremely exploratory.

That’s one of my favorite things that anyone said to me as an undergrad. I pass that on to my students. And I think about it all the time. When I’m lost in my studio, I don’t know what I’m doing, I actually find great comfort in the unknown at this point because of that, to think you have plenty of time to figure out what it is. And through the act of physically being creative, your body and your intuitive marks will tell you something about the thing that you’re doing more so than thinking about it can.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk a bit about some of your early projects before we talk about your collaboration with Kip. In 2009, you began working on a performance performance-based photographic series called Dark Skate using long exposure photography to document their trajectories of your movements on a skateboard at night. The series consists of site-specific two dimensional images that are part photograph, part performance and part self-portrait drawings. Dark Skate has been described as an exploration of relationships generated between the body and space, expressing the universal and intimate qualities of each. What inspired this piece?

Lia Halloran:
Well, I think, as an artist, I do things without thinking, just that I’m drawn to and I want to explore, and then they turn out to then be ingrained in my art practice. I don’t think that I ever set out to make a project that was about skateboarding, but because skateboarding is such a huge part of my history, I was really interested in answering the question how could I make work that embodied the way that I could express myself physically through space? And to me, one of the spaces that I’m the most free and exploratory is through skateboarding. And I loved that I would be actually setting a project that documented my physical limitations of what I could do.

In this series, I attach a light to my body and I’m skateboarding bowls in the pitch dark. Well, a lot of people think, oh, that’s outrageous, or it’s such an extreme idea, but it’s actually not, it’s muscle memory. Like we talked about in my childhood, I’ve spent so much of my life on a skateboard on a ramp that it actually is really very much like a self-portrait. And in so much of my work, it’s really important to have an intimate connection to whatever I’m making my subject matter and to put myself in it. Even though you don’t see a photograph of me, I also think that people in a lot of ways are surprised that there is a female skateboarder, a queer body that is a skateboarder. I fly planes. People are surprised that there would be a female skateboarder. All those things, it’s very subtle, but it’s really important as an artist to represent those spaces. And so Dark Skate is really so much… I think of them as double portraits. It’s the portrait of the city, the urban space, the explorer, myself, the self-portrait of me within those spaces.

Debbie Millman:
They’re absolutely haunting and quite beautiful. You were in a show with Guggenheim called “Haunted Contemporary Photography Video Performance,” and the curators placed your work in the section of performance. Did that surprise you?

Lia Halloran:
I loved that. I felt that I always tried to tell everyone in these pieces that I’m not really the photographer. The photography is the necessary intersection to document those movements. I just thought it was absolutely perfect because when I’m moving in that space, I am being very inventive. And you capture this glimmer in a moment. The photograph flattens it out. But it’s so akin to making a mark, a line, a gesture. You can find reference in drawing, and also just the body moving through space.
One of the most influential things in conceptually thinking about this space is every time I would go surfing with my dad, which was every Saturday when I was growing up in Pacifica, I would be eagerly trying to get into the ocean, and he’d say, “Hang on, hang on, let’s take a look.” And he’d always want to watch the ocean. I was so impatient. And he’d say, “Where are you going? What wave are you going on? Are you going left or are you going right? Where are you paddling out?” And from that age, I always imagined… I think I started projecting this line coming out of my chest that I would look and find my way on the wave. Then before getting to the ocean, I’d say, “Okay, we’re going to paddle through that channel and we’re going to sit on the crest of that wave and we’re going to take the wave to the right.” And that, to me, was also so much of what Dark Skate was, was inserting my own personal, intimate way of reinterpreting the urban space around me.

Debbie Millman:
Lia, you said that not only is your work about science or drawing from science, but the process itself always has an experimental quality. And I understand you’d never made a cyanotype before you began this series, your body is a space that sees, and it took you six months to master the process. Was that process enjoyable? Is that experimental phase one that you find fulfilling even if you don’t have an outcome that you can foresee?

Lia Halloran:
I think it’s actually the most exciting because it’s like it can be anything. You’re determining what the thing can be through the experiment. Making a cyanotype to take six months, it sounds like a lot, but me and my studio team really trying to figure out how to make these things on a really large scale.

Debbie Millman:
Kip, what about you? Do you find the process of going through the unknown something that is enjoyable, or does it produce anxiety and tension because you don’t know what the outcome is, and in your case, spending decades on something where you don’t know if you are going to get a result? How do you manage that? How do you calibrate that experience into your psyche?

Kip Thorne:
As Ray Weiss, my MIT soulmate, says, “It was such great fun that we didn’t ever get discouraged.” The whole process is exciting. It’s more enjoyable in many ways than the discovery itself.

Lia Halloran:
That’s how it feels. Making art, being in the studio, creating, discovering something, it has the potential for anythingness, especially when I don’t know what the medium, where it will take me. When it’s done, then it goes off, it goes to a gallery, it has another life, and then you’re just… I feel like then I transform back into a viewer and I stop becoming the maker. But I ended up getting into everything that I do because I love the making, I love the sitting in that unknown and the opportunity to find something new that could surprise or shock me in my own studio. How wonderful could that be to then show someone what that could become?

Debbie Millman:
You two met at a cocktail party in Pasadena in 2007. Lia, is it true that you overheard someone say Kip’s name, and you went up to him and effusively and unapologetically shared how much of an impact his writing had had on your artwork?

Lia Halloran:
Absolutely. And so much so that the woman he was talking to, under her breath, but loud enough for me to hear, uttered, “Physics groupie,” to me.

Debbie Millman:
Kip, did that scare you at all?

Kip Thorne:
No.

Debbie Millman:
How do you manage the physics groupies?

Kip Thorne:
It just goes with the territory, unfortunately. What has been difficult for me was I win the Nobel Prize, I become an icon, which is what they want, the Nobel Committee wants, icons for science. I’m uncomfortable being an icon. I don’t want to be an icon, but I am, and I’ve just gotten used to it. And so I’ve more or less try to ignore it and try to just be Kip.

Debbie Millman:
Kip, as Lia told you what she did, you realized that a filmmaker, who was interested in making a movie that engaged some of your science, needed someone who could help make drawings and paintings of black holes and wormholes to help convey the ideas. And the film ended up being the 2014 film, Interstellar. And while the original director was Steven Spielberg, you ended up working with the director, Christopher Nolan. But it was Spielberg you had to convince to not use a spaceship that could travel faster than the speed of light. Is that correct?

Kip Thorne:
No, that one was Christopher Nolan.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, it was Christopher Nolan?

Kip Thorne:
Yes, yes.

Debbie Millman:
Oh. I’m disappointed in Christopher Nolan. I thought that he was smarter than that.

Kip Thorne:
In reality, his whole attitude was one of pushing the envelope. And he had discovered in his conversation with me very early that I could make pronouncements and I could turn out to be wrong. My PhD advisor, John Wheeler, used to say, “The greatest physicists are the ones who make the most mistakes the most rapidly on their way to the truth.” And so, yes, I could frequently be wrong. And Chris would say to me, “I would like such and so.” For example, he said, “I would like one hour on Miller’s planet in the movie, The Water Planet, is seven years back on Earth.” And I said to him immediately, “That’s not possible.” And he said to me, “You go do a real calculation.” By then, he knew the foundation is to do a real calculation with the real laws of physics and not just guess. And so I went off and did a real calculation, and sure enough, he was right, I was wrong; this was possible. It was very extreme, but it was possible. And so he had this experience of me making pronouncements, and then when he pushes me to the wall, I go check for absolutely sure and I’m shocked to find I was wrong. When he said that he wanted to go back to earth faster to the speed of light, I told him, “Absolutely, that’s not possible.” At that time, I was right.

Debbie Millman:
You prevailed?

Kip Thorne:
I was absolutely right. I prevailed. But the interchange with Christopher Nolan was an enormous pleasure. We worked together productively with a give and take. It was very similar to my interactions with Lia. I’ve had two wonderful collaborators in Chris and in Lia.

Debbie Millman:
Interstellar is one of, if not my favorite movie of all time. Well, maybe that and Arrival and Contact. And you also consulted on contact with Carl Sagan. Lia, I understand that you created over 250 paintings based on Kip’s scientific writings. Did that mean you had to fully understand them?

Lia Halloran:
Huh. That’s a good question. Is there a test in the end here, Kip?

Kip Thorne:
No, no, no. I’m just really curious.

Lia Halloran:
Well, I think that for the book, there’s probably 150 paintings that appear in the book, and we’ve counted up now to about 668 is last week’s count. The reason that they keep going is we’re going through all the old archive because over 13 years, I’ve made so many different iterations. And I think that through drawing and through painting, I would get closer to understanding what Kip was talking about.

Some of the things like black holes and wormholes, I already had peripheral information and knowledge and had taken many classes on these things and just a totally separate interest before meeting Kip, which is why I was so excited to meet him. But through our conversations, Kip would just explain it a little bit different, just a different entry point, and I’d make a painting. And in a weird way, the way that even Paul McCarthy was talking about, I would learn something by even me making the painting. Then Kip would look at it and nudge it in a different direction, say, “Well, why doesn’t it go a little bit more like this? Or the tendexies should be spinning a little bit more like this.” And so I think through our conversations and through the visualizations, those things would bring me to understanding the topics within our book. Even more so than reading

Kip Thorne:
Kip, you’ve said that you could see the spirit of science captured in Lia’s drawings in a way that people who are not physicists could get some real sense of what they were. Do you think that ideas expressed visually are easier to comprehend than verbally?

Different people’s minds work differently. For me, visualization of ideas is very powerful. My mind operates visually. When I’m doing research, mathematics is the language of science, mathematics is the ultimate arbiter that tells me what the laws of physics are predicting, but the visualization is the thing that enables me to make leaps of insight, and with those leaps of insight, decide what mathematical calculations to do in order to verify whether or not my leaps of insight are correct. When I’m thinking about physics, I’m almost always thinking in terms of visualizations and not in terms of the mathematics. It’s only when I’m trying to get things nailed down for sure that I turn to the mathematics. And so going from my thinking of physics to communicating with Lia or more generally with the non-scientist public, the visualizations are the natural tool. They just carry right over from my research right into the conversation.

Debbie Millman:
You’re about to publish a new book together, a book that has been nearly two decades in the making. It is titled The Warped Side of the Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves. Now, is it true that this book began with an article you were asked to write and illustrate for Playboy Magazine?

Kip Thorne:
Oh, yes, absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Tell us more about that.

Kip Thorne:
Isn’t that a natural way for a book to begin?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, between that and Penthouse, we’re getting this all covered.

Lia Halloran:
Listen, we have Thrasher in there too. You see a theme.

Debbie Millman:
That’s true, that’s true, there is a theme. I love it, I love it.

Kip Thorne:
This was the era when Playboy was trying to distinguish itself from other men’s magazines by having what they regarded as high quality interviews, high quality literature. And so the editor that I had had on a previous book I had written called Black Holes and Time Warps had become literary editor at Playboy Magazine. And she contacted me and asked if I would write an article about warped space time for Playboy. And I said, “Yes, but I would like to bring on Lia to do paintings as part of the article.” She and the art director at Playboy looked at some of Lia’s paintings on the web and came back great, very enthusiastic, and so we got a contract with Playboy Magazine to do this. We moved forward and we submitted then an article that… I’ve forgotten, it was maybe 3,000 or 4,000 words long and had four or five of Lia’s paintings in it. And fairly quickly, we got a response. Lia, you want to describe the response?

Lia Halloran:
Well, I was personally rejected by Hugh Hefner, which I wear as a badge of honor.

Debbie Millman:
Now, he rejected the paintings. Why?

Lia Halloran:
Well, they weren’t up to Playboy’s standards. He said, I don’t think that I had properly objectified these women, is essentially what it came down to.

Debbie Millman:
That is definitely a badge of honor.

Lia Halloran:
Yeah. And I thought I was being subversive because for the models, I had used different queer and trans women. And I was like, “This is the first time they’re going to be in Playboy Magazine and no one will know then.” Yeah, Hugh Hefner said that my paintings did not live up to the Playboy standards.

Debbie Millman:
And you also featured your wife as one of the models, right?

Lia Halloran:
Yes. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Very, very beautiful woman. His mistake.

Lia Halloran:
Well, the good news is for Kip is that all those original paintings that were supposed to be in Playboy existed. And when we transformed them into a book, Kip got all the originals. He has one hanging behind him right now.

Kip Thorne:
Yes, here in my office, a beautiful painting of Lia’s wife. Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Well, since this is a podcast, we can’t see it, but maybe we can post it when the show goes live. And people can’t see the book so I want to actually describe it a little bit. It was designed by the legendary artist and designer, Rebecca Mendez. It has 240 luscious coffee table sized pages, a stunning jacket. It includes more than 100 magnificent four color paintings by Lia throughout. It has multiple gatefolds. And the text is an epic prose poem written by Kip. What made you both decide to make this book like this book?

Lia Halloran:
The way this book came to be is such a good force for collaboration because I don’t think that we ever set out to make what you just described. What we did set out to was to have these conversations and to continue with what we started in making for Playboy. And we called it our little book. For years, we thought, oh, it’ll be 30, 40 pages. Because what happened was every time Kip and I would get together, we’d have these wonderful conversations, then I would make more paintings. And Kip would look at the paintings and he’d extend the writing. And then I’d look at the writing, and then I’d make more paintings. And it would go back and forth and back and forth. But I would say we never intended to make what it looks like now. It’s almost like the book made itself or the collaboration and our friendship and our love for each other of just making the book that we would want to read based on black holes and wormholes and time travel, it told us what it needed to be.

Kip Thorne:
And I never intended that it would be poetry or verse. It was prose originally. But I had always, in all of my writing, even very technical writing, worked hard to polish the prose so that it was really understandable, so it flowed beautifully, and so it was a pleasure to read. That’s what I had done with this Playboy prose.

And early on, after we decided we’d make it into a little book, Lia had a friend lay it out as a book. And that friend happened to break up on two facing pages happened to break my prose into stanzas. It was a particular piece that naturally got broken into the stanzas. But I looked at that; I had an epiphany. I realized that because I had worked so hard to polish the prose so that it flowed beautifully, it could be turned into verse.

And as I experimented with turning it into verse, I then came to realize that this combination of tightly integrated verse and paintings could convey the essence of the science that I was talking about. The warped space and time, black holes, wormholes, the Big Bang could convey gravitational ways, could convey the essence of that much more powerfully than the standard writing I had always done for the non-scientists of prose together with illustrations.

This is very different. The verse is simultaneously more constraining and more liberating. More liberating in the sense of opening myself up to focusing on the essence of what is going on, the beauty and the essence of it, instead of focusing on getting all the fine details right. And I think this was an epiphany for me, but it’s really an epiphany probably for Lia and me together as we jointly came to understand the power of this combination.

Lia Halloran:
Yeah, I think it was also a moment for me to realize that we could make something that would possibly embody and really offer a wide invitation to these things that people are very curious and passionate about but feel maybe intimidated by didactic writing and mathematics that could we have an entry point? Could we make something that wasn’t just the science or the art, but it was like this third thing where the text and the paintings, really, they supported each other, like you need one to have the other?

Debbie Millman:
Did you get the manuscript first, Lia, and then make the paintings? Or were you collaborating back and forth, volleying?

Lia Halloran:
Yeah, that’s how it was made. It was made in a very untraditional way. Kip didn’t have something that I then, quote, “illustrated.” I really think of them as paintings, not illustrations. A lot of times, I would make a painting, and I’d show to Kip, and Kip would look at it, and then he would write based on looking at the painting. And then he’d send me things, and then I would pick out what to me… He would never say, “Make a painting about this,” he would send me different passages, and then I would say, “Okay, if I want to understand what was the essence and the ethos of what we’re trying to communicate here…” And maybe it’s one painting, and sometimes I’d say, “Okay, this short passage, we need five paintings here.” Because that’s, to me, what could create what we came to describe, which was we want a book that transfers someone into it a total experience, an experience of the universe.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how we got here, what we’re made of, et cetera. And I was a little bit intimidated by the book because I’m limited only by what I don’t know when it comes to thinking about these things. And that’s a lot. I actually decided I was going to read the glossary first. I went through the book and I saw there was a glossary, and I’m like, “Let me read the glossary,” so I could really get a sense of these terms and then read it feeling like I had a little bit more of a foundation.

And I actually found that you don’t need to do that, you don’t need to do that. It’s so beautifully understandably rich that it’s nice to have the glossary because I think it’s a way to go back and say, “Oh, I know what a gravitational wave is now. It’s this.” Or, “I know what the bulk is. It’s this.” It’s almost like a piece of music that you’re going through, and the prose and the art are so intertwined. It’s really quite a marvelous journey to go through the book. Lia, you say that your collaboration presents one aspect of art and science, and I’m wondering if you can describe that aspect.

Lia Halloran:
Well, the collaboration for the book, it just gave me an opportunity to make something that I would never make in and of myself in my studio. I exist in this strange art world where a studio artist… I make things often alone in my studio sometimes on large scale works. I have an amazing studio team. And then those things, where do they go? They go to galleries or museums. And oftentimes, I don’t see them again or there’s a show, it gets put up, we celebrate it, and then they go away.

This collaboration, on a large scale, I’m really interested in accessibility and art. I’m a professor and chair of the Art Department at Chapman University. I think of teaching as a complete extension of my studio practice. It’s not just something that I do, but often when I’m thinking of an idea and I’m in that period that we’ve talked about before with Paul McCarthy of figuring out what it is, often I’ll write a course that I then share with my students. I think of collaboration with my students, with Kip. I’ve had other collaborations in the past that have just been so fruitful in getting me to understand the thing that I’m curious about.

And the way that I envision it, and because I am so visual, I often have these mind exercises, is if I’m thinking about a black hole, I would imagine that I’m putting that thing in the middle of the room. And then I circle it from all different aspects. Maybe one of those might be making a drawing about it. Another thing is reading one type of writing about it. Another way would be looking at how did someone else depict it? Just really engaging in enmeshing myself in a community of other thinkers.
I think of collaboration as being absolutely integral in my studio practice, not only for the concepts and the development of a subject matter, but actually for the technical exploration. You had asked me have I ever made a cenotype before, but I made another piece in the last couple years called Double Horizon where I took several cameras and I attached them to the external parts of a Cessna plane while I was learning how to fly. I just thought to myself, how could I represent time and time-based piece that also engaged what a landscape could be? And then I thought, well, of course it has to be time-based, but I had no idea what that was, so I was basically flying around recording flights for two years. But that took an exceptional amount of collaboration because I’m not a videographer, I’m not an editor, I’m not a sound person. And honestly, these collaborations, it has just been so rewarding in my life because it gets me to meet and work with so many incredible people.

As we talk about the book coming up for its release, Kip and I talk on the phone and Zoom and see each other on a weekly basis for how many years. And I’m like, “We’ve got to get another project going because it’s been just so amazing to…” The reason we wanted to make this was just so we could work together.

Debbie Millman:
Well, Double Horizon is stunning. When I was looking at the photographs, it reminded me a little bit of the planet that Murph lives on at the end of Interstellar [inaudible 01:02:25] of time is bending on top of itself. Kip, I want to ask if you’ll read a short excerpt from the book so people can get a sense of the prose. But before that, I just wanted to ask you one question. Early in the book, you state this: “For decades, I, a beast materially composed, have been consumed by quests to fully comprehend this warped side of our universe. How? Through tricks of mathematics and computer simulations probing Albert Einstein’s relativity equation.” My question is, how do you come up with the tricks of mathematics to better understand parts of the universe we didn’t even know existed?

Kip Thorne:
Well, mathematics is the language of the universe. Mathematics is the language of the physical laws that control the universe. We have two ways to really explore with confidence the universe. If we have confidence in our physical laws, then it’s a matter of working with those mathematical laws. And mathematical tricks or a major part of working with those laws to figure out what the predictions are for what may be going on out there. And then going out and doing observations such as our observations with LIGO, with gravitational waves. Those are the essential final tools for firm understanding the manipulation of the mathematical laws and the observations. We’ve been talking about the visualization in paintings, or mental visualization. Those are the essence of the intuition that enable us to make great leaps of understanding. The mathematics is really very central to the deep understanding.

Debbie Millman:
Will you be willing to read us a little excerpt from the book?

Kip Thorne:
Sure. Sure.

Debbie Millman:
Tell us what you’re going to read us.

Kip Thorne:
I’m going to read the beginning of the prologue that basically explains what the book is all about. That introduces the warped side of the universe, which is what appears in the title of the book, and the challenge, the excitement of our first contact as human beings with the warped side of the universe.

Debbie Millman:
Wonderful.

Kip Thorne:
Our universe is varied and vast. Galaxies, planets, stars and moons, quasars, pulsars, and magnets all made from atoms and molecules just like you and me and all that we hear and touch and see. Our universe is also endowed with a marvelous shadowy side that is warped, phenomena forged for warped space time. Witness the ravenous fat black hole that Lia here depicts ingesting her wife, Felicia. I’m going to stop reading and just make a comment. The verse by itself is pretty dry. It is pretty sparse.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, Kip, no, no.

Kip Thorne:
Without the painting, it’s pretty sparse, and so you have to understand that to really experience this, you need the painting side by side with… The painting here of Lia’s wife, Felicia, being ingested by a black hole is so powerful as it ties so tightly into the verse.

Debbie Millman:
I disagree. I think that, yes, the experience of the book as one unit is wonderful, but the prose is really beautiful.

Kip Thorne:
Okay, well I’ll move on. Although this warp site is entwined in the weft of our matter-filled universe, its stars, its planets and nebulae, its galaxies and its comets, we humans never saw it until just recently. Why did we never see warp space? Time cannot produce light or other signals that yesterday’s technology was able to perceive. Now how has that changed?

A very long time ago, a billion years in the past, well, here on earth multi-cell life arose and spread around the globe, but in a galaxy far, far away, two spinning black holes danced around one another, rippling the fabric of space and time. The ripples, we call them gravity waves, suck energy from the holes orbits, so the hole spiraled inward, eclipsing each other toward a climactic collision. The holes at half of light speed catastrophically collided and merged in a brief cataclysmic storm of writhing and twisting space time that brought the waves to crescendo. The climaxing gravity waves from this catastrophic collision surged out of their birthing galaxy and into interstellar space, spreading across our universe for nearly a billion years. They stretched and they squeezed all that they met, stars and planets and nebulae, in patterns that encoded a portrait of their birth, colliding holes and space time storm.

Then 50,000 years ago when humans shared earth with Neanderthals, the spreading and weakening gravity waves sailed into our spiral alarmed Milky Way, our galaxy, our home. On September 14th, 2015, near the Antarctic peninsular tip, the waves flying upward plunged into the earth through air, then rough oceans, then rock. Whispering up through earth’s bowels unscathed and emerging just north of New Orleans, the gravity waves came face to face with a complex and huge L-shaped invention designed and built to perceive them. LIGO, the Laser and Interferometer Gravity-Wave Observatory. Flowing through LIGO, the gravity waves stretched and then squeezed microscopically two very long beams of bouncing light that extracted the portraits the waves had encoded, colliding holes and space time storm. This tiny shutter in LIGO was momentous for the whole human race, our very first moment of contact with the warped side of our universe.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. I have three last questions for you both today. First one is for Lia. Lia, do you have any plans to have an exhibition to show off the full-sized paintings that are featured in the book?

Lia Halloran:
Yes. I have a solo show opening on November 4th with my gallery here in La, Luis de Jesus. And we will be showing a collection of the original art from the book. And then I’ve made a larger piece that celebrates each of the chapters as an expansion of the book itself. We’ve made a print so that… We wanted to make something that was like an extension of a special edition of the book, so a print will also be available for the first two weeks that the book comes out to celebrate its release. And you can find all that on… the information for the exhibition in Los Angeles on my website at Luis de Jesus Los Angeles. And the print information is on those sites as well.

Debbie Millman:
Wonderful. Kip, my next question is for you. You know that I went to high school with David Spergel, the MacArthur fellow former professor of astronomy at Princeton University and currently the president of the Simons Foundation. And I told him that I was interviewing you today and I asked him if he had any burning questions for you, and this is what he responded with. Question from David Spergel. “Among the many fascinating things that Kip has thought about, one of my favorite topics and one that will likely be of interest to your listeners is closed timeline curves, the possibility that we could travel back in time. Kip has thought deeply about how closed timeline curves change the structure of reality. Self-consistency requires that you don’t kill your grandmother before you were born, but like in Back to the Future, you could help your father meet your mother.” David’s question is this: “I have wondered whether closed timeline curves are stable to quantum fluctuations. Could the photon travel back in time and then circle around endlessly, back and forth in time getting brighter and brighter?”

Kip Thorne:
I think that David was feeding that to me. It did get me to respond the following way. He knows a lot about my thinking on this. This process, that if you had a time machine and you first turn it on, then a photon could be the first thing to travel through. It could go through the time machine and come back arriving back at the very same place as it started at the same moment as it started, and now you have two photons there at the same point in space and time; you have the original one and you have the older one that’s made the trip. And then those two can go around and come back to where they started; now you have four. And so what began as one photon can wind up as being an enormous number of photons. In fact, that could build up so explosively, it might destroy the time machine at the moment that it gets turned on.

And this was a question raised for me by two colleagues at the University of Chicago when I was thinking about time machines and closed time like curves. And it triggered me to ask the question in a little more sophisticated way. I can save the time machine by just simply blocking the photon so it can’t go through, and so then I’ll still have a time machine. But there’s something I can’t block, and that is fluctuations of what we call virtual photons; quantum fluctuations of light. These quantum fluctuations of light are unstoppable and they’re unremovable. And so I sat down with a postdoc some years ago and did the same analysis and discovered that these quantum fluctuations going through this incipient time machine when it was just first being turned on do create a gigantic explosion.

Stephen Hawking and this student of his did a similar calculation about the same time, and we then got into a big argument between ourselves. It appeared to me that the explosion would be strong enough to destroy the time machine, it appeared to him that it might not be. And as we went back and forth, we came to realize that the answer as to whether it’s strong enough, that all time machines will always be destroyed when you first turn them on. Whether that’s the case or not, it was held tightly in the grip of these poorly understood laws of quantum gravity. There we are. We don’t understand the laws and quantum gravity well enough to be sure whether time machines always self-destruct when you turn them on.

There’s a whole chapter about this in our book. And Lia even invented… She invented a very simple version of this that you have to read in the last part of that chapter, a variant that is much easier to understand than what I just said. A wonderful part of the collaboration was the elaboration that Lia did.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Didn’t Stephen Hawking have a party for future physicists to come back in time and had food and drink and no one showed up?

Kip Thorne:
Yep. And no one showed up. That’s right, that’s right.

Debbie Millman:
Well, since we’re speaking speculatively, I have one last question for both of you. What do you think the chances are of there being extraterrestrial life in the universe?

Lia Halloran:
As an artist who is so influenced by reading about science and hearing about it from all aspects, I think that because I’m not a scientist, I get very excited hearing from different ways that we’re creatively thinking about what people are doing at JPL and what they’re sampling and what they’re doing. And I think that it seems very unlikely that there is not life out there. And there’s probably much more well said by Carl Sagan that, “What a lonely place it would be if there wasn’t.” But-

Debbie Millman:
Big waste of space.

Lia Halloran:
Yeah. And I think in the same way that Kip is looking at what the next generation of LIGO can be, I feel like what an exciting time to bear witness that I think within our lifetimes we’re going to be able to see what those life forms are. I’m really excited to see what the mission to Europa being built by JPL is going to show. Yes, it’s going to be tiny, little unexciting microcosms of life and not a multi-celled body, but I vote yes enthusiastically.

Debbie Millman:
Kip, what about you?

Kip Thorne:
Well, let me describe a gathering that I had when we were just working on the movie, Interstellar, when Steven Spielberg was the director in the early creative phase. It was at Caltech. We brought together I think 18 scientists from around the United States who were experts in various aspects of the science that was going to be in the movie. And Steven himself, he posed toward the end of our discussion… It was an all day discussion. He posed the question, “How many of you think that it is very likely that there are civilizations out there, advanced civilizations out in the universe besides our own?” And every hand went up, all 18 scientists said they thought it was very likely. And I was surprised at that. I wasn’t surprised that it was a majority, but I was a little surprised that it was everybody; people who were experts on astrobiology, experts in quantum physics, experts in rocketry. But everybody, including me, thought it was quite likely.

Debbie Millman:
Kip Thorne, Lia Halloran, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, for helping us comprehend the magic and the science of the warp side of the universe. And thank you, thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Kip Thorne:
Thank you.

Lia Halloran:
Thank you so much for having us.

Debbie Millman:
Kip Thorne and Lia Halloran’s new book is titled The Warped Side of the Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves. You can read more about Lia Halloran at liahalleran.com and more about Kip at nobelprize.org. 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.

Debbie Millman:

Black women are front and center in the work of Mickalene Thomas. They’re lying on couches, sitting on chairs, sometimes nude, other times clothed and brilliant patterns or glittering with rhinestones. And they’re almost always looking right at us eye-to-eye demanding to know if we are worth a glance or acknowledgement. Mickalene Thomas is one of the most important artists working today. Her paintings, photographs, films, and installations can be found in the permanent collections of museums all over the world. She joins me today to talk about her powerful art and her extraordinary career. Mickalene Thomas, welcome to Design Matters.

Mickalene Thomas:

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Mickalene, in your monograph Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Roxane Gay states in the introduction that you have big dick energy. Would you agree?

Mickalene Thomas:

Yes. It’s interesting because when I first read that, I got really shy just of the notion of having big dick energy and what that means. I often think so, but to hear it from someone else is to validate me, but it also made me realize it was okay to have my shoulders back and my head held high. You know what I mean? It was like she saw me, but not only did she see me in a physical sense, she saw my energy and recognize that enough to put it in writing. Especially coming from someone that I see that has big dick energy. So for her to welcome me to the club, wow, I felt like I was part of the club suddenly. So it’s just like whether the big dick energy is seen by many, I don’t really care, I’m just glad that it was seen by Roxane Gay.

Debbie Millman:

It’s interesting, many, many years ago, decades ago, Eric Bogosian wrote a short story about a man who had a big dick and this innate quality that he had about his life and that it didn’t matter whatever he did, because he had this big dick and he carried around this big dick energy. I don’t even know that it’s something that you have to live up to, I think that part of what it is something so innate that it creates this inner swagger that is inevitable.

Mickalene Thomas:

Yeah. Oftentimes my friends would joke around that I had a swagger, but I think it’s also just self-awareness and just reminding myself that, “You are a badass.” Because sometimes there are days when I forget about who I am and my greatness and what I’m just doing for myself, my daughter, or just when I get up in the morning. To be quite honest, I had a really tough time on Saturday. This last week was really difficult.

Debbie Millman:

Why?

Mickalene Thomas:

Well, my mother’s birthday is October 27th. She died 10 years ago, so celebrating the 10th anniversary of her transition just really hit hard. I’m thinking about her and some of the accomplishments that are happening and just wish that she could and a physical sense, a hug and say how proud she was of me. You know what I mean? So it was just a real tough day and that carried on because then my grandmother’s birthday is November 5th, and so there was just a combination of great women in my life who aren’t here to see how I’m evolving.

Debbie Millman:

Well, your mom, I mean, aside from being your muse for many decades when you were little in an effort to get you to see and do things that you weren’t otherwise exposed to, she enrolled you and your brother in afterschool programs at the Newark Museum, the Henry Street Settlement to New York City. What kinds of things were you both making so early on in your lives?

Mickalene Thomas:

Oh my gosh. You know what kids make in afterschool programs, papier-mâché, animals and face mask and houses and characters of whatever you could think of, crazy little trinkets of flowers and things, anything with papier-mâché. I remember a lot of papier-mâché. That was fun. A lot of self-portraits, a lot portraits of other kids in a class, a lot of ceramics. I had a great experience with art at a younger age but didn’t really understand or was exposed to working artists. It wasn’t something that was a way out. Art wasn’t looked as a career as a way out from the life in which you lived, and particular urban communities. We didn’t grow up dirt-poor, but my mother was a single parent. We had financial struggles and then we had more when she became an addict, and I lived with my grandmother. But my mother always provided the best for my brother and I and exposed us to as much as she could.

She was a practicing Buddhist up until she died. And I think that was that faith for her and the community really provided stability in her life and also provided a sense of spirituality for me at a young age and a community of diversity of different groups of people. I grew up with a group of really incredible Asian women that came to the US in the late ’40s and ’50s and lived in New Jersey and they were incredible and they became like parental figures in my life, and so I grew up with a lot of community of creative people, and the Buddhist group, at the time was called Nichiren Shoshu of America. And so they had a kids group, which was a fife and drum group, and so, I was able to learn how to play the fife and be around community of other little Black and brown and white kids at a very young age and coming to New York to Union Square 14th Street to the Cultural Center.

So that was a huge part of my foundation and stability and just learning about different types of people and different cultures and ethnicity and people and different financial status. So even though we didn’t have that, I was exposed to it at a very young age. And so, even with the hardships that I was dealing with, I knew that there were other things in life because of the exposure.

Debbie Millman:

Tell me about your nickname. You had a very specific nickname growing up.

Mickalene Thomas:

So Quanikah. Yes. So when I would go down to South Jersey where most of my family lived and still lives and Camden, New Jersey because we were one of the only family members who had moved out of Camden, New Jersey. And my mother, after she escaped from my father and divorced him, she and her girlfriend moved to East Orange, but all of her family were still in Camden or Camden area. So we would go and visit family members quite often, holidays, summer breaks, weekends, family reunions, birthdays, all of that stuff. My cousin Robin and her siblings were really interested in, some of them were becoming Muslim and the whole idea of not associating yourself with a slave name. And so, they gave me the name of Quanikah. And so, a lot of my family members still call me that when I go to South Jersey. They call me Quani or Nikah or Anikah or something of that sort.

I liked it then. But there was a period in my life that I didn’t because it was very heavy and I didn’t really understand the notions that they were taken on like theories of Marcus Garveyism and just really empowering themselves, no longer straightening their hair and just wearing their hair natural. It was really sort of this Black power movement. And so I really started identifying with that, not until I went to graduate school. When I started photographing my mother and looking at other images and I think I saw something on the back was where I signed, “Love, Quanikah,” and I was like, “Oh yes.” And it triggered in this memory of my childhood, how we were really interested in black is beautiful and just all things celebrating the great life of Black excellence and the Black experience. And whether it was through Jet magazine or Ebony, it was really exciting moment for us as kids.

And so, it was a name that I kept and used within my body of work as this other sense of who I am and defining a part of my life that comes through as a conduit do in the work or extension of who I am when I do my portraiture. It’s often time how I see myself, but then I don’t. So it becomes this mirror image and the redefining of this notion of who I was in the community, of my cousins and their siblings and my family and how we would have these associations of empowerment. And sometimes didn’t always understand the full scope of what they meant, but we were just a part of the movement and excited to just adapt to it in any way that we could, even so much to change your name.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about your formative years before we start talking about your work. I know that when you were 17 years old, you dropped out of high school and followed your then girlfriend to Portland, Oregon. And you had met while working at a restaurant, I think you bus tables and she was the hostess. What made you decide to up and go like that to another part of the country?

Mickalene Thomas:

We worked at this hotel in New Jersey and there was a restaurant called The Jockey’s Club, and I was the bus person, she was the hostess and we became friends. She was older than me and we fell in love. And at that time, I was living with my grandmother and I was going through a lot. That was a phase when I wasn’t as close to my mother. I had some boyfriends and I always had feelings towards women. I remember like crushing out on my classmates or my teacher or something like that, and I had a huge effectuation with Whitney Houston.

Debbie Millman:

Who didn’t.

Mickalene Thomas:

My locker was plastered with her images. I even tried to look like her at some point. And I started modeling a little because I thought, oh, I can be some attachment and closeness to my mother because she modeled and tried to really have her be a part of who I am, because I felt like I was growing apart from her and didn’t understand what she was going through in her own personal struggles. And I was just really looking for a way out. Not that where I was living with my grandmother was bad, I just knew I was different, I just knew that I wanted more, and I just knew, at a very young age, I used to always say to my family, when I grow up, I’m going to move to Europe.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I read that.

Mickalene Thomas:

And they would just go, “She keeps talking about moving to Europe.” Anyhow they dismiss you, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, she’s talking about some Europe, she don’t know nobody in Europe. She never even been, she doesn’t even know anyone who went.” But I had this fascination with television and movies and watching Mahogany and Diner Ross and all of these, just the fantasy.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. Remember that yellow dress she draws on the train.

Mickalene Thomas:

Yeah. It’s like just going somewhere. It was just the fact that people were going other places and I recognized that very young that what I was growing up around, that there were other worlds within worlds around me that was doing things. I didn’t know what they were, I knew I had a great sense of community. It was a really great way for me to go, “Oh, I can leave here.” And also I was a very different kid, I was a very quirky kid. I stayed under my grandmother a lot. I loved listening to her stories. I stayed home a lot. My cousins and my aunts would always try to get me out. I was really into punk music. The kids I hung out were listening to the Dead Milkmen and The Cure and all of that. I wore Doc Martin’s. I shaved the side of my head similar to I have now looking like Grace Jones.

I was fascinated with Grace Jones. I loved Depeche Mode, it was just all of this. So while I was listening to that, my cousins and I were listening to Kris Kross and hip hop and Sugar Hill and stuff like that. And I listened to that, but there wasn’t like what I was really interested in. And I think because I was queer, but I didn’t know I was queer. You know what I mean? I was really trying to express myself through this other music and other identities because I had this infatuation with women, but I didn’t know how to do it because I didn’t have any role models. I didn’t see it. So I isolated myself from my family and just wanted out.

So when I met this woman, she’s Filipina, and when she said she was moving back to Portland to care for her mother, I was in love and I was like, “Well, I’m going with you.” And I remember going back to my grandmother and telling her that I wanted to leave, that I really needed to leave, I needed to leave or I just remember saying that. And it wasn’t like anything happen in my life, but I remember being suffocated and said, “If I don’t leave, I’m going to die.” That’s how I felt. And when I moved to Portland, one of the first experiences I had was at the Oregon Country Fair.

Debbie Millman:

What happened there?

Mickalene Thomas:

Oh my gosh. It was like what didn’t happen? The description of it was kind of like Oregon’s Woodstock or something, but it was like the freedom of seeing just all these people just being themselves, queer people and straight people. And then I’d started hanging out with a lot of artists when I was living there. I didn’t stay in a relationship long with the woman I moved with, we end up moving with her family, we weren’t out. Eventually they realized that we were a couple and they asked us to leave, so we did. I did get my high school diploma from Marshall High School in Portland and then immediately applied to college.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I read that after high school you were actually thinking about pursuing a career in law and that you actually worked part-time at the law firm, Davis Wright in Tremaine for several years.

Mickalene Thomas:

Yes, I did. I did. I started out as a file clerk, worked my way up to a document clerk and then became a paralegal’s assistant. I worked there for a long time and I just worked my way up. Just worked. That was my job. So when I went to Portland PSU, I was in theater arts and pre-law was my sort of major/minor.

Debbie Millman:

And you really wanted to be a lawyer

Mickalene Thomas:

I did. I mean, I was thinking of security. I was thinking of stability. It was something that was always in my purview, I guess, as a kid in my mind as thinking about success. And oftentimes in Black communities we’re conforming and looking to this respectability politics of what we think is we should be doing. And creativity and being an artist was not on that top of the list. If I said I wanted to be in sports… Because also in junior high school, I did track and cross country. And so I did have the opportunity with partial scholarships to go to HBC schools. I didn’t because it was, I didn’t want to be in sports.

Debbie Millman:

I think you also worked at a Starbucks. You started hanging out with a circle of friends that included the artist Patrick Abbey, and I believe it was he who recommended that you attend an art therapy workshop.

Mickalene Thomas:

Yeah. Portland was incredible during that time. It’s like the early ’90s, there was a lot to unpack with me leaving. But once I got there, as a young adult living and working on my own, the independence and sense of self, the community, a lot of people say Portland isn’t diverse, but I found a real incredible diverse group of people. One of the jobs that I had before working at Starbucks that I actually worked as a receptionist in North Portland with this midwifery organization that had doulas and midwives and training for them, and it was a Black woman who ran it. It was incredible. So that was my exposure to the Black community in Portland, Oregon. And so I was in all these different worlds. I was in a Black community, in a Black women world, I was in the gay world, I was in the artist world.

And so, when I got a job at Starbucks, it was at the Square, it’s very different now. There was Thomas Lauderdale who is with the Pink Martinis would never come the Starbucks, he would go right across the street from Starbucks, was Nordstrom’s. And my friend Chris Stark worked at the outdoor cafe at Nordstrom’s. I would sit out on my break and roll my cigarettes and I would watch. I had a great my view. I would watch from the Square in Starbucks, Chris Stark, who was this cutie with this sort of curly poppy hair as he would serve people and just full of life talk to this guy, this kid with blonde hair, and who would scoot around. I’ve never seen anyone on a scooter. I mean, now scooters are pretty popular. He was doing it well before scooters were popular. He was always ahead of his time.

He would scoot around and he would never come into Starbucks. And I was like, why doesn’t he come to Starbucks? And so, one day I just walked over to them and started talking with them. And then I discovered that Thomas was this incredible genius and talent of a piano player, classical pianist, trained since he was like four. And he had just returned home after graduating from Harvard. And so, I just started hanging out with them. He would have parties and group of artists and that’s how I met Patrick Abbey, who was an artist.

Debbie Millman:

And they all encouraged you to be an artist, they saw something in you and felt that you should. I mean, I think it was Patrick Abbey who saw some of the work you were doing in your art therapy workshops and encouraged you to have a show.

Mickalene Thomas:

Yeah, I did this art therapy workshop with Chris Stark and all this stuff came, but it was shortly after I saw the Carrie Mae Weems show.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, that was actually going to be my next question. I wasn’t sure if it was right before or right after.

Mickalene Thomas:

Yeah, it was after. And I had already seen the show. I had purchased all these postcards and took them with me. I think I took the postcards, I took some oil pastels and I took William H. Johnson book that I got from Powell’s bookstore. It was a really great experience, even though Chris and I were like the youngest people at this artist retreat. There was one point we looked around and we’re like, “Why are we here? Should we be?” And I just remember, I was just laughing, but sharing and present, but laughing but also feeling out of sorts and thinking like, “Okay, this is way over us, but we’re going to do it.” But what it did for me was allowed me to tap into a space that I didn’t realize I had, which was this creative space, this creative voice. And so, after I left that, I immediately went to the art supply store, purchased more oil pastels and paper, and just all this stuff poured out.

Patrick and I, we all lived in Northwest Portland and my friend Dan McCall, who’s incredible young man, and he was a fashion designer, he exposed me early on to designers like [inaudible 00:23:56] and Yves Saint-Laurent and Issey Miyake, and he was always wearing Japanese designers and just would go to Paris and come back and tell these stories about fashion and what he was doing. So even though we were in our early 20s, we were doing things, they were doing things. And Portland at that time, they would have what was called the Art Walk where all the galleries would open up and it was just like you would just go from gallery to gallery looking at and going to the art shows. So, that was my first real exposure to an art market. I didn’t know what art market was. I didn’t call it that back then, I just knew.

I was hanging out with all these artists and musicians and writers who were doing and making things and having great shows. And I was really shy about what I was working on, I was partying a lot. And Patrick was like, “You should have me come see it.” And I did. And at this point, I had stopped working at the law firm because I just couldn’t. The lifestyle was living I was like hanging out with my friends, I was going to work late. I didn’t get fired, but I just knew I had to quit. And so, I got a job at this cafe called The Green Room Cafe. I was always cooking anyway, but it was a cafe that was ran by all women and we always cooked sort of this amazing black bean soup. It was a vegetarian cafe, black bean soup.

And just like everything was cooked fair. And so, I was cooking and serving and waiting and they always threw art and wall. And so Patrick, he’s like, “You should put your art up at the Green Room Cafe.” And I was like, “I’m not going to put it up there.” And I did. And that’s when I got a good response from it. And my friend saw that I was doing something, but it was Patrick who encouraged me, and then he also was talking about different schools. And then my friend, Chris Stark, who was a photographer, had decided that he wanted to go to school for photography. So he was looking into San Francisco Art Institute and encouraged me to go to the portfolio day with him. So I dragged my drawings on paper oil pastel drawings down with me and show them to some of the schools that were at the portfolio day, San Francisco Art Institute, I went there because that’s where he went, and I got a really positive response.

But once I went to San Francisco Art Institute to visit, it was in a campus and I freaked out and I wasn’t ready to go, so I deferred. That’s when Patrick said there’s the school in Brooklyn called Pratt. And I never heard of Pratt. Pratt wasn’t present at the portfolio day. He’s like, “I was just in New York and couple of friends lived around there and it seemed like a really good school.” He said, “I don’t know, it’s kind of in a sketchy neighborhood, but it might be good.” And he had just finished his summer program.

At the time, didn’t know the importance of Scout Hagan, but we threw him a big party because we were very excited that he went to Scout Hagan, wasn’t later that I really knew what Scout Hagan was. But very excited that he got into Scout Hagan. And so, after Scout Hagan, he had came to New York and so he was in somewhat of a art scene here for a little bit, but he would come back to Portland and report and he was really good about sharing what was happening here. And at that time, I knew, I was about 24 going on 25, that I was ready to leave Portland.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. You returned back to Brooklyn and did go to Pratt?

Mickalene Thomas:

Yeah. I was here for Stonewall 25 with Thomas Lauderdale and Chris Stark. We came and I brought some of my work and I went up to Pratt and applied with the work. But it was wild, it was an amazing experience to be in New York for Stonewall 25. It was beautiful just to walk down the street and be for me queer and to be out and be with my friends and something that was historical, was like, “I want to be here.” I was probably more politically active thin than I am in my adult life here. I am, but in a different way. Not as vocal about my sort of social political viewpoints.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, but it’s embedded in your work.

Mickalene Thomas:

It’s embedded in my work. And I remember even then during AIDS, I had a lot of friends who died of AIDS. So going to Stonewall was great.

Debbie Millman:

After school, after Pratt, you thought you were going to teach, but the faculty at Pratt encouraged you to attend a summer residency for undergrads at Yale. And there, you met a whole slew of faculty that really influenced what you were thinking about what you wanted to do next. Can you talk about that transition from Pratt and thinking about teaching to Yale and really embodying your future becoming an artist?

Mickalene Thomas:

Yeah. Peggy Cyphers was teaching at Pratt at the time and she was my teacher. She’s an incredible artist. And being at Pratt, I was an older student, so I was really working with a lot of young artists who most of them had just come out of high school and I had lived this life. I was like, I lived on my own and paid rent and knew how doing all this stuff when I was 17, and most of them were just going into school at 18, 19. So I was just like, okay. I was in the studio every day and Peggy Cyphers saw that I was a hard worker and she told me about Yale School of Art summer program and that she encouraged that I apply. And so, I did and I got in, and I was the first one to get in that program from Pratt in many years, because I think it was probably like a 10 to 12 year period before anyone had gotten into that program.

It was a summer program for undergraduates similar to Scout Hagan. You were there for six weeks for an intensive studio practice and mentorship program. It was phenomenal. I had Laura Letinsky as a photo instructor. You had all of these incredible artists, Valerie Hammond as printmaking instructor, and then you had all incredible visiting artists coming to visit you to talk about your work. And we did workshops and constantly critique, it prepared me for a graduate school for sure. I even still then after doing the residency, I was still trying to figure out, because while I was at Pratt, I did painting and then interior design, but then that dual degree stopped after my second or third year. So I had to pick another minor, my minor is art education. So I graduated with a minor in art ed and art history with painting as my major. Because I still thought even then I need to make sure I have a job, I need to look at being financially stable and didn’t think of art as something that I would ever live off of financially.

Debbie Millman:

Isn’t it incredible now to think how possible it’s become?

Mickalene Thomas:

It is, but I still think of like I need to get a job. Because first of all, I enjoy teaching even though it takes up a lot of time. I like knowing that I have a different stability other than just this being the only thing that I make money from. It just seems strange. Also, I like to encourage and mentor and be around students. And I feel like as an artist, it helps you grow and gives you a great outlook on life, and it keeps you involved with conversations of what’s happening, world changes, people change, ideas change. And so you have to maintain a youthful spirit. And I think one way of doing that for me is immersing myself around education and working with artists. So right now, I’m looking and thinking about other institutions to work at, not just as a visiting artist, but as faculty.

Debbie Millman:

You entered Yale as an abstract painter inspired by Australian Aboriginal art and late 19th century French pointillism, but started to create representational paintings using found objects, textiles, glitter, rhinestones. Did your photography classes inspire this transition?

Mickalene Thomas:

Yes. My photography class with David Hilliard. When I entered Yale, I was convinced I was going to be an abstract conceptual painter. I was not interested in the figure at all. So never say never. So, I go to Yale and take this photo class and that’s when the transition happened. I photographed my mother. She was the first one that I photographed.

Debbie Millman:

I believe one of your photography professors suggested that you do you that. What gave him the impetus to figure out that that would be something meaningful for you?

Mickalene Thomas:

Well, I think what the impetus was David Hilliard, from his own conceptual photography and narrative in which he works, he photographs himself and his father, and it’s a way of healing and conversation and discourses that he, as a gay man, realize as a lens of healing and conversation with photography was a way to have conversation with his father about who he was as a queer man. He encouraged us to photograph at the time the one person we were having challenges with or difficulty with.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, wow.

Mickalene Thomas:

I was having some challenges with my mother, and so, she was the first one that I asked to photograph.

Debbie Millman:

I read that the first time you felt truly comfortable photographing nudity in your work was when you started to photograph her. How did she give you that permission?

Mickalene Thomas:

I don’t know, provided a sense of agency and validation, I guess, because I never wanted to be the type of artist or photographer that felt or put women in a position that I wouldn’t put myself. And I never wanted to come off as exploitative with my work. And so, I stayed away from photographing except at the time myself and my partner, Maya. Any woman in the nude, I was just really not interested in it. But when my mother was so comfortable with herself and her own body and wanting to display herself in that way, that sense of agency and awareness really solidified for me beauty and sexuality and erotica, Black erotica in a way of being a conversation for celebration of Black women.

And I love that it came through her and I love that it came through her as her being her own person, but also my mother and me being my own person and her daughter and on this journey and experiencing that together for what I gave her through my creativity, which I didn’t realize until I did a documentary Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman of what my work and what the platform I was creating for her did for her sense of self. I didn’t recognize that until much later.

Debbie Millman:

Well, she became your muse, but she also became the model of the art world, which she was nearly the first African American supermodel. Iman got that role, but she was really a contender.

Mickalene Thomas:

Yeah, she was a contender. She really was. And that is what ate at her. She became self-destructive because of that feeling of knowing that I don’t know what it what it could be like. And I think because she was like that, I became who I was, like I’ve never looked at other people and covet that or wanted that. I’ve always like, “Okay, this is what I want.” Because I’ve seen what it could do to someone. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen how that destroys someone. When you look outside of yourself at other people of what they have or what they’re doing, and you feel a sense of loss or a place that that was an opportunity for you.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, unfulfilled potential. After you graduated Yale, you got residency at the Studio Museum and worked very closely with Thelma Golden and began to have conversations with curators and writers and museum people, yet your gallery debut took place at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago. And I’m wondering, did you have this sense of pacing yourself or of taking your time up the mountain in the way that you debuted your artwork?

Mickalene Thomas:

I think so. I mean, I imagine myself like Faith Ringgold and Alison Saar and Pat Steir and Louise Bourgeois, I want to be in my 80s and my 90s still making art. I’m in this for the long run. So I’m fortunate that what I’ve done and what I’m doing has provided me some success. But I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t have success. So for me, it was no rush up the mountain. I still see myself as an emerging artist because there’s still things I want to be doing.

Debbie Millman:

Well, especially if you want to be working in your 80s, there’s a long road in front of you.

Mickalene Thomas:

There’s a long road and journey. And so, there are women in the arts that I look to as mentors, whether I know them personally, some I do, Carrie Mae Weems, mentioned Faith Ringgold, Pat Steir, like these are women who are still working.

Debbie Millman:

And making the best work of their life. It’s not like they’ve peaked and are still just riding the wave, they’re making the best work of their life.

Mickalene Thomas:

Exactly. Lorraine O’Grady, like all of these women that I look at, Nona Hendryx, these are women that, for me, personify who I want to be in the world.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve created work that very intentionally redirects the body politics in old master paintings. Certainly, your first show back in 2012 at the Brooklyn Museum, the title of the show was a riff on Gustave Courbet’s scandalous 1866 painting The Origin of the World, which was a closeup study of a model’s crotch. And you used your own body as the model for your interpretation, which became the origin of the universe, and I love that expansion. But your painting Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires as a reprise of Courbet’s 1866 sleep, but you replace the white heterosexual sleepers with two powerful Black women who are lovers. You use the images from Picasso’s Guernica, your take on Édouard Manet’s 1863 painting the Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, The Luncheon on the Grass, which is to formally dressed men sitting in a park with a nude woman, just as we all do. You’ve remade as Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: les trois femmes noires, the three black women. What do you make of the conversation around this historical relationship now that seems to be positioned as Matisse, Manet and Mickalene?

Mickalene Thomas:

I mean, I think it’s radical and powerful, you know what I mean? That’s what excites me. For a young girl when they’re Googling something like Matisse, my name comes up. There’s this discovery. For me, to assert myself within that Western canon is to really try to dismantle and deconstruct the notions that persist, so that way when young girls and boys who look and think like me, and they’re doing these search, that it’s not all of these white faces that come up through history, it’s very important. And that’s a strategic thing that I thought about. It’s like how do you align yourself within this conversation? And then, if more people do it enough, then they become minuscule and our images become the algorithm of that changes.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I want to talk about the use of gaze in your work. The subjects in your paintings and your work are almost always looking directly at the viewer. They’re gazes, unapologetic, proud. I would describe it as kind of fierce. How would you describe it?

Mickalene Thomas:

I guess I would say my work conveys that Black women’s existence in this world is revolutionary, radical, innovative, and unapologetic, and her gaze is powerful. Whether I’m incorporating new techniques and bringing Western canon ideas and these dimensions, I like to think that that concept is a thread that runs through, that that’s what I’m thinking about like, “Okay, is this radical? Am I be an innovative? Because that’s how I see Black women. At first, the gaze for me really is more about love, love for myself, love for Black women, love for women and love as a queer woman who loves women. And it’s not always about that, it’s about all of that, it’s about all of who I am. You know what I mean? My relationships with my friends, my mother, my lovers, all of that, it’s about love.

And how do you convey that? How do you share that? How do you celebrate that, and how am I doing that? And also love about images that I grew up with, when you think of celebrity and mentorship and printed matter images and how these images shape me as a Black woman, how Jet magazine has shaped me, how looking at the beauty of the week and the beauty of the month, how that gave me a sense of self as a young kid and seeing those images and printed matter matters. I’m interested in my work not necessarily being about trauma.

Debbie Millman:

Although I think traumatized people feel a lot of comfort in your work.

Mickalene Thomas:

Exactly. And that’s what I want. Believe me, I had a lot of trauma in my life and there’s a lot of stuff that it’s not that I don’t share or talk about, it’s just like I don’t allow it to anchor me in that way. I don’t allow it to guide me. For so long, the reason why I did the documentary of my mother, because the only way I knew how to show who I was or to share that part of me was not to talk about it in antidotes with friends or podcasts or when I’m doing lectures, it was through my art. I wasn’t going to share it with people in a way where it’s just like, “Okay. You know, girlfriend.” “Oh yeah, I’ve been through that. Oh yeah.” That’s not who I am. That’s not how I express myself. That’s not how I learn to express myself. So for me, I’m not one of those people that have allowed my obstacles and circumstances and the limitations in which I grew up, I don’t let them lead me.

Debbie Millman:

But you include them. I think that’s sort of the interesting concept about how you use the muse in your work, you include your viewer with their own gaze to participate somehow in that dynamic. And I was really curious, you’ve had three significant muses in your work, your ex-girlfriend, Maya, she was your first serious muse, and then your mom more recently, Raquel Chevremont. And you said that a lot of the women that you use in your work have contributed or have attributes rather that personify a particular prowess that you relate to and you want to put forth into the world. How would you…

Mickalene Thomas:

Yeah. Because all of those women, I see a little myself in, whether it’s the strength, the femininity, the sexuality, just the sense of confidence and the sense of self. I don’t always feel like that’s portrayed in my daily life, although Roxane saw my big dick energy, become full circle with that. But there’s a beauty and the women that I look to that I go, “I see myself in that. I see me and you in some way.” And I’m trying to using that space of what I’m seeing in them, in myself, of that energy in between to convey creatively in the work.

I think I believe that all artists that do portraits and self-portraits really convey sense of themselves. You look at all of the paintings they do, some of the famous paintings of women, they look like men to me like Modigliani and even some [ANGs], a lot of them, they just look like men because they’re painting a sense of themselves. Look at John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage and Kehinde Wiley, all of these artists are portraying a sense of who they are themselves and extension. Frida Kahlo talks a lot about that.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Yeah. I love when somebody asked you if you were ever going to paint men and you replied, “Well, how do you know that I haven’t?” I love that.

Mickalene Thomas:

I have. It’s not something that I put forth. And I was really looking to notions of beauty through the lens of transgender women before it became a more topic of awareness and conversation. In 2009, my first show, She Comes Undone, was about transgendered women, how they saw themselves and other women, who they are as women. And one of the reasons for that specific show that I didn’t even use the terms of transgendered or transitioning or trans, all of any of those terms because I looked at them as women. And for me, I don’t even care if people know that that’s who they are, because to me they are women.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely.

Mickalene Thomas:

That’s how they identify. So that’s why even in the press release, I made them take all of that out. I did not want them seen and any other way than what they see themselves. To me, that’s the power. That was a conscientious decision. And also to put my mother at the center, why? Because most of men and women who are transition, they’re connecting and they see themselves within their own parental family, whether it’s a male or female. And so, how I looked at my mother and so using my mother as this anchor of the show for them.

Debbie Millman:

How did this notion of the muse shift to using archival photos of women sourced from vintage jet pinup calendars? And so much of your previous work includes women as muses or women you admired, whether it be your mother, your ex-lovers, celebrities like Diahann Carroll, Eartha Kitt. Suddenly it seemed like you were centering women that for most people would feel more anonymous.

Mickalene Thomas:

Yes. And I think it had more to do after great success of my Aspen show, my AGL show: Mentor, Muses and Celebrities. A lot of that work was archival images. I started really thinking about how I was working when I was in graduate school. I worked mostly, even though I was creating my own photographs, a lot of the images that I was working from was archival images. I really wanted to revisit that. It was very important for me. And I think mostly because of the lockdown, there was a lot of things that were coming to the surface for all of us in various ways because of restriction and limitations. But to me, when you have restriction and limitations, it opens room to new possibilities. I can’t do this, but what can I do? So because I didn’t have full access to all of my tools and my studio, I had to revisit and look at things that I was thinking about looking through old sketchbooks and ideas, and I was already making that work without knowing I was making the work.

I had a stack of my Jet magazines that I was collecting from Material Life in New Orleans, Carla Williams store, collecting calendars. I was doing that, but it was just kind of stacking up. But it took the pandemic and a lot down for me to go, “Okay, what are you doing with this stuff?” And I had started it when I was in graduate school with me as a beauty of a week. I had to photograph myself as a beauty of a week.

I went just full circle, I just came back to it, those ideas. And I was like, “Let me revisit this idea.” So because of my limitations, I just started going through all my archive, going through other archive, thinking about what these images meant, thinking of how they really defined me as a young Black queer person. Because being a queer person and seeing these Black women, that did some weird, crazy mind fuck because I’m like, “I’m queer, but I don’t think those women are queer.” You know what I mean? And maybe there was a sense of desire, and the reason why I liked that beauty of the week was more than because I saw myself, but there was this sense of sexual desire too to it. You know what I mean?

And so really revisiting all of that and that was the impetus for it, just really, it was time and space. And I was really excited about that new way of looking and thinking of the gaze through these anonymous women and given them a sense of power because the women of the Beauty of the Week, how they were identified through their attributes, through their desires, through their dreams and things that they wanted in life. And their name, The Beauty of the Month was just identified as a month. You knew nothing about them.

Debbie Millman:

Back in 2011, you participated in an artist residency at Monet’s home in Giverny, France. And most recently you returned to France to mount your first major museum show in France at the Musée de l’Orangerie. And for this exhibit, you created three new large gal collages, a monumental painting, an immersive site specific installation. And that installation features your 2016 video sculpture Me as Muse, which includes you. And I’m wondering what made you decide to include that specific piece.

Mickalene Thomas:

I guess it was just thinking about the threshold of the private and public space and that as a gesture. Me as Muse, it’s a very me in a vulnerable state, but I wanted to also re-contextualize that because I had shown it at the New Museum. I’ve shown it at the AGO and I’ve shown it in Aspen. And each time, they were very site specific to those particular spaces. I’m interested right now in this body of work of the body in the landscape. And so it gave me this opportunity to transform this particular video to present a different context, being inspired by some of the rebellion of my predecessors like these white men thinking of, “Okay, what is my rebellion in this?”

With these 12 monitors stacked in this kind of faux landscape, as you kind of walk up on this elevated sort of garden that was quite intimate with birds chirping from Monet with this narrative voice of Eartha Kitt talking about the abuse and discrimination that she endured as a youth but also as an adult and describing that about her own black body using that as a statement, a proclamation, and providing these juxtapositions for the viewer of life as being complex. The nuance of that, some people may just take away that chirping sound like this sort of peaceful, tranquil, utopias sound of birds, reminds them, triggering sort of Monet. But then you hear the voice of Eartha Kitt talking about being tied to a tree and being abused and being used as a work mule.

Thinking about what that means to me as an artist, sometimes I feel like a work mule. Sometimes I think in the state of Black artists today of being used and all of these situations, what does that mean, and in my body? Because earlier I talked about trauma, not wanting to depict that, Eartha Kitt talks about trauma, but it’s her confidence in the banter of her voice when she’s speaking of things that are so horrific, but it’s so clear with confidence that she could be just saying anything. And then me thinking about the notion of in terms of I see my work creating celebration and Black joy and all of this, thinking of the notion of luxuriating. What does it really mean to recline? What does it really mean to be able to be in such state of relaxation? The desire to do that as a Black woman, the desire to be in a state of rest and then be portrayed in a beautiful way, that is a state of privilege.

Debbie Millman:

Well, it’s also, I think, there’s a foundation of safety required for that too.

Mickalene Thomas:

Safety and a space that is given to you and not often accepted or expected of you. And I’m really interested in that dichotomy of seeing ourselves an elevated positions that we are often told that we shouldn’t see ourselves or that we shouldn’t desire that as well. You know what I mean? Because we see ourselves in so many other positions that we rarely see ourselves. And when you think of artists, just to mention Derrick Adams, because he’s so close to me of just the notion of Black people swimming. Or you think of Tyler Mitchell’s the notion of Black boys just lounging. Or you think of Nina Chanel Abney’s work, just the notion of Black people fishing. These states aren’t often what we known and see ourselves in images, and that’s so powerful about when you think of what Jet magazine was doing because it had all of that, and at all of those narratives in it, it had that and then it had on the cover Emmett Till. That giving you the life of Black America.

And so for me, it’s really important to show these kind of elevated states and juxtaposition to the art historical canon of these classical images that we are towed in through history and school, that these are the ones we should be learning about. And I’m always like, “Well, where am I at?” We’re lounging, and no, we’re not being lazy. We’re enjoying ourselves as well, and we see each other with desire and beauty and eroticism. Why aren’t those images portrayed? Often time, even today, just the grotesqueness for people wanting to see Black bodies abused all the time publicly, that’s damaging. If that’s all you see of yourself, that you expect that you’re supposed to be abused. And so for me, I’m really interested, and I have images that are about resistance, my resistance series, and I get that out about the civil rights movement and portraying those images and trying to make sense of what’s happening to us today. But it’s really important for me to really have my work be about celebration.

Debbie Millman:

The work in your current show has been described as representative of the breath of the visual language that you’ve developed over the last 20 years, while also revisiting the time you spent as the artist and residence at Claude Monet’s home in 2011. So looking back on the last decade from then until now, what is the biggest difference you see in the evolution of your work?

Mickalene Thomas:

That I don’t need permission to make what I want to make. That it’s okay, just like those artists, Monet, Manet, Courbet. If I want to do a landscape, I got them landscape. If I want to paint flowers, I’m going to paint flowers in the same space I’m going to paint about Black women, in the same space I’m going to paint about resistance or the same place if I just want to do self-portraits, that I can paint whatever the fuck I want to paint. My only thing for me that I want is that it creates some impact. And what I love about showing at the l’Orangerie is that they allowed the platform for me to put Me as Muse in that space. It’s the first time they’ve done something like that.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Mickalene Thomas:

I’m honored and I feel very fortunate to be able to do this. And that’s why I don’t take what I do for granted, and that’s why I love what I do, even though it has its challenges and sometimes it’s setbacks and stuff. But you know what? I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I’m very fortunate because if I think about who I am, this girl from Camden, New Jersey, when I have family who are still there, some of them who have never been out of Camden, New Jersey. Have you been to Camden, New Jersey lately?

Debbie Millman:

No.

Mickalene Thomas:

It’s heavy, but it’s also changing. It’s also beautiful. It’s also complex. It’s also incredible people. There’s geniuses, there’s talent, there’s so much going on there. But what’s perceived is always the trauma. But when you go there, there’s all of that. But being from that, I’m very really fortunate and I have a really incredible group of friends who are from there as well, who are also amazing. I really thank my mother and I’m very thankful for her, for bringing Buddhism in my life, for taking me to the Newark Museum, for taking me to the Henry Solomon School, for doing all of these things to expose me to a diversity group of people and loving me for being a queer woman. I was afraid to come out to her. And when I did, she was never, ever, I was very fortunate to have the kind of parent that I did who embraced me. And the one thing that she said when she hugged me, she cried and said she was sorry because had she knew the signs of raising a queer child, she would’ve done better.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I can’t imagine that she could possibly be any prouder of what you’ve made and created in the world being exactly who you are.

Mickalene Thomas, thank you so much for making so much work that matters and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. You can find out more about Mickalene Thomas at mickalenethomas.com. Her current show is at the Musée de l’Orangerie in France. 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.

Debbie Millman:

Carey Lowell has spent a lot of her life in front of a camera. First as a model in the 1980s for designers, including Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. Then as an actor. She played Bond girl, Pam Bouvier, in the 1989 James Bond movie, License to Kill, and then ADA Jamie Ross in several seasons of the television show, Law and Order. After a break from acting, she reprised that role in the recent reboot of the famed long-running franchise. Carey Lowell has also spent a lot of her life in pottery studios. The pandemic helped turn a passionate hobby into a career shift, and now she has her own line of ceramics. Carey Lowell, welcome to Design Matters.

Carey Lowell:

Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Carey, is it true that your nickname is Karaoke?

Carey Lowell:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Tell us all about that, please.

Carey Lowell:

Well, I have this crazy… I listen to a lot of music and therefore, know all the words to all the songs. I got the nickname Karaoke because whenever a song would come on, I knew the words and could repeat them pretty accurately. So it’s just a silly nickname I got.

Debbie Millman:

I was envisioning you in sports bars, standing up and singing Total Eclipse of the Sun and so forth.

Carey Lowell:

It’s funny, I don’t do a lot of karaoke, actually. That nickname was given to me by a writer friend, Jonathan Cot.

Debbie Millman:

Okay, well done. Well done.

Carey Lowell:

Name tag. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

You were born in Huntington, Long Island, but moved all over the world with your family until you settled in Colorado when you were about 12. Why were you moving so much and where were some of the places you lived?

Carey Lowell:

My father was a petroleum geologist and they were living in Tripoli, Libya when my mom was pregnant with me. I have an older sister, Jennifer, who was actually born in Tripoli, but my mother’s parents lived in Huntington, Long Island. And so when my mom was due to deliver, they actually happened to be on leave in Huntington, and so I was born there and then I think I went back to Tripoli when I was about maybe less than a month old and lived there for a couple of years. And then we moved to Holland and I have another sister who was born there while my father was working in the North Sea. And then we moved to Virginia and then Texas, where I have another sister who was born. And then we moved to Colorado when I was 12, and that’s where my father still lives, and two of my sisters actually.

Debbie Millman:

Your father was an award-winning geologist, and I understand he co-authored an article that defined copper models that became the standard reference for exploration geologists worldwide. Were you involved in any of the work that he did?

Carey Lowell:

No. Only in that he used to take us on tours in Colorado, on these hikes, and we thought, we would much rather be anywhere else, but on this hike while he pointed out the geological structures to us. As an adult, I wish I’d paid more attention to it because now whenever I’m out in nature looking at formations, I’m thinking, “Okay, what happened here?” I always see it through my father’s eyes.

But I think you might be confusing my father, James Lowell with another James Lowell, who was a copper geologist magnet. My dad did publish a textbook that was used for most geology college courses about structural geology because his whole area was plate tectonics and continental drift.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I got really involved in a lot of these papers. Well, we’ll have to investigate to see which James Lowell. Yeah. That’s interesting.

You took your first pottery class in high school, but even before that, I know that one of your earliest childhood memories of being creative involved finger paint when you were three or four years old. I was wondering if you could share that memory with our listeners today because it’s so visceral.

Carey Lowell:

Well, my parents bought us an easel, my older sister, Jennifer and I. We’re only two years apart. So the easel had two sides, and we would stand on either side of it and put up our waxy paper and just go to town. I just remember these pots of red, blue, and yellow, and it was really an opportunity to stick your hand in and mush it around. I just remember loving that feeling of the squeegee, gooey, wet creation of it all. I loved that. I think that clay has a similar tactile feel to it, but just that thing of just taking nothing, your hand and a substance and creating something out of it.

Debbie Millman:

It’s magic. It really is magic. And there’s something, so I don’t know what the word would be it, the word that I’m thinking of is sensual, but it feels even more than that to feel the warm paint or warm clay in your hands and have that ability to craft something from nothing.

Carey Lowell:

Yeah, that’s definitely sensual, a gift for sure.

Debbie Millman:

Would you say that this is when your love of tactile things really began?

Carey Lowell:

I have always had this, I don’t know if it’s unusual or normal, but I’ve always had a thing about of how things feel. My mother used to put my hair on pigtails and she would always tie them with a satin ribbon, and I would always take the satin ribbon out and fold it into little ribs and push it across my cheek or across my lips. It was just like a total sensual thing. I could even find the satin on the label of the seatbelt. If we were in the car and I didn’t have a ribbon, I would find it and do that. It’s like a self comforting thing. I don’t know, but I’ve always been very in tune to tactile things.

Debbie Millman:

You took your first pottery class in high school where they actually had pottery wheels, which I found so interesting. I’ve never heard of a high school having pottery wheels. What kind of pottery were you doing back then?

Carey Lowell:

At that point I was just trying to get the clay centered on the wheel. It was the learning curve. I went to a public school in Denver, Colorado called Bear Creek High School, and back then, the arts were supported in public schools. So our arts class was a pottery class and there was probably 10 wheels in it. We had a wonderful teacher and we’d all just go in there and do our best. But my pottery back then was a wonky bowl if I could ever get it centered.

Debbie Millman:

Do you happen to have any of those old pottery creations still in your possession?

Carey Lowell:

I don’t. I do actually have one that I hand-built that actually I look back on and think, “That wasn’t so awful.” But I do have some from when I got back into pottery, because I took a little bit of a break for motherhood and acting. I wasn’t doing it so much when I was doing the James Bond stuff, but then when my daughter was born, I got back into it.

Debbie Millman:

I love that you just said the James Bond stuff. We’ll get to that shortly. At that point in your life, what did you think you wanted to do professionally? Was it going to be something in the arts?

Carey Lowell:

I never considered that I could make a career in the arts. I came from a very academic family. My dad, as I said, is a geologist, and my mom was a music major at Wellesley. Even though that is in the arts, it’s funny, I always thought that I needed to do something professionally and I was always told that I’d make a good lawyer despite my mother who told me that I was very argumentative. So that was my best quality to get that career.

But looking back in hindsight, I so wish that I had pursued the arts then, in the very beginning. When I took an acting class in college, it was the first acting class I’d ever taken, and it was just an extracurricular activity. Nothing that I ever thought I would make a career at.

Debbie Millman:

You attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, and I understand that while you continued to pursue pottery, initially, I think your major was literature.

Carey Lowell:

It was. It was literature. I read a lot of Russian literature. I read a lot of French literature, not in French, in English.

Debbie Millman:

That’s so interesting. I minored in Russian literature, but in English translation. People are always really impressed thinking that somehow I managed to learn Russian and then have a minor in Russian literature, but I’m like, “No, it was all in translation,” but I still think it counts.

Carey Lowell:

Yeah, it does count. I was so into Lermontov.

Debbie Millman:

Yes, yes.

Carey Lowell:

Like A Hero of Our Time.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. Me too.

Carey Lowell:

I loved that book. I loved that book. And then I transferred to NYU from Boulder, ’cause I just did a single year at Boulder. I had been modeling that summer before I went to college, and then I went back to move to New York to continue modeling.

Debbie Millman:

How did you first get discovered in modeling? How did that first all come to happen to you? ‘Cause I understand it was really kind of a fluke.

Carey Lowell:

It was kind of a fluke. I had a high school classmate whose sister was with an agency in Denver, and she said, “You should really go in and meet this woman, Vicky Lite.” It was The Lite Company, was the name of the agency. “You should go meet Vicky.” And I was like, “Ah, I don’t know.” That really made me feel anxious. But I did go in and she said, “Well, you need some photos if you’re going to do this. Here’s a name of somebody, you should go and get her to take your picture.” Well, it turned out to be this woman, and maybe you’ve heard of her before, a photographer named Pamela Hansen.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Carey Lowell:

She was living in Boulder at the time. I went up there and made an appointment with her. Pamela did all my makeup and shot me in these great photos and then gave them to the agency and they put them out there. Somebody from Fords was on a talent scout. They came to the agency, they saw my photo. I got a call. I was at my house, my parents’ house, which is in the foothills of Denver, not in town. And they said, “Somebody from Fords is here. They they’d like to meet you.” And I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have a car. I’ve got no way to get there. I’m not going to be able to do that.” And they said, “Well, you’re really missing out. This is the chance of a lifetime.” I was practically in tears, but I didn’t have any way to get into town and my parents weren’t there and I didn’t have a car.

And then about a month later, I got a contract in the mail from Ford saying, “We’d like you to come to New York this summer when you’re out of high school.” I was about to graduate. So after much negotiating with my parents and Eileen Ford on the phone with them, assuring them that I would be staying in her home and promising them that I would return to the University of Colorado for my freshman year, I was allowed to go to New York that summer and that was my first modeling.

Debbie Millman:

And you really had quite an extraordinary modeling career. You were photographed by some of the great fashion photographers of our time. Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber. You worked with Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren. What was it like? This was really at a time when the art of modeling was front and center. The supermodel era began, models were seen as muses, and I know that you were very much a part of that. What was it like for you to go from high school to the world stage of modeling?

Carey Lowell:

It was he a heady time. I have to say that when I first arrived in New York, I went to Eileen Ford’s house for the weekend. She got a call that weekend saying that a model that she had booked for a job on Monday had been injured and wasn’t going to be able to make it. And did she have anybody that could be a backup? So she had three other models there with her at the house. She brought us to this person’s house on Sunday night and said, “Are any of these girls going to work?” I was chosen. I was told to be at the airport at 7:00 AM the next morning. I literally just arrived that Friday night from Colorado and I was back on a plane to Four Corners in the West. It’s Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. I was basically back where I had been a month earlier with my senior class doing a senior seminar river rafting trip. That was just a weird circular moment of, you think you’re going somewhere and you’re right back where you started. But in a completely different context.

In terms of the supermodels, they came just after me. I think of like Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford as the supermodels. And before that, in my era, it was more like Christie Brinkley, Janice Dickinson. But I did get to travel the world. I got to meet amazing people, but I always felt a little bit self-conscious about it all. It’s not my natural state to be front and center posing. So I always felt a little awkward about it. That was something that I’ve always been working through.

Debbie Millman:

You never got any headlines about what models and rock stars and so forth are often written about. It seemed like you always have been able to keep a really steady presence in your own life as well as in your professional life. Did you have to experience a lot of pressure to be a certain weight or look a certain way? How did you manage through that?

Carey Lowell:

Well, I do remember showing up for a shoot once and I had been traveling somewhere. I’d definitely put on 10 pounds and my hair was sort of orange because I’d been in the sun and it just oxidized like crazy. The client took one look at me and looked at the photographer and said, “This is not going to work.” I was fired right there on the spot.

Debbie Millman:

Oh my God.

Carey Lowell:

That had never happened to me before. What can you do? I didn’t go into a downward spiral or anything. I really have to credit my parents with giving me a really grounded childhood and my three sisters, we’re all very close and still are. I just feel like that’s served me in good stead in the crazy world of modeling.

Debbie Millman:

By 1987, you began to transition into acting. What made you decide to take that step?

Carey Lowell:

It was just an audition that I got for Club Paradise and my line was, “Do you have anything to smoke?” I said, “I’ve done that before. I can do that again.” The next thing I knew, I was off in Port Antonio, Jamaica and the shoot went on for it seemed five months. It was a really long shoot. Harold Ramis was the director and Robin Williams was the star. And Twiggy and Peter O’Toole and Jimmy Cliff, Andrea Martin. It was all the Second City people. It was just a crazy big cast. And I was just a beach bunny really in it. I was basically a model who had some lines, but it gave me a taste for that collaborative experience, and when you’re in a crew and when you’re in a group and how wonderful that feels to be part of something bigger.

Debbie Millman:

Were there skills and knowledge you learned while modeling that helped you make that transition into acting?

Carey Lowell:

Well, being open to being scrutinized or to be looked at or watched, learning how to lose yourself in it. You don’t always have to be present almost. In acting you have to be more present, obviously because you’re exchanging lines, but in that role especially, there was just a remove because I was wearing a bathing suit that I never in my normal life would’ve ever put on, really low cut and high cut on the hips. Anyway.

Debbie Millman:

Oh Carey, that sounds like the definition of hell to me.

Carey Lowell:

Well, you’re walking around, everybody’s got clothes on, and you’re the only one in the tiny little thing. It can be intimidating.

Debbie Millman:

What advice might you offer to models and actors starting out about their careers? What do you wish somebody had told you at that time about that work?

Carey Lowell:

Just don’t take it personally. You’re going to be rejected so many times for so many reasons that have nothing to do with you. It’s nothing that you need to take on personally because you could really get depressed with all that rejection. My daughter, Hannah, is an actress and she’s constantly going up on auditions and she has to hear, “I’m sorry, they’re going with somebody else,” or “I’m sorry, you’re not tall enough,” or “I’m sorry, they wanted brunette,” whatever. It’s a challenge. And so you really have to have a strong sense of yourself that you don’t lose it in all the rejection.

Debbie Millman:

I know you studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. What were some of the most interesting things you learned while you were there? It’s such an interesting school.

Carey Lowell:

It is, and I have to correct the record there because what I did was study with a man named William Alderson who was a teacher at the Neighborhood Playhouse Theater, but I personally did not attend the Neighborhood Playhouse Theater. That was Sandy Meisner. But the techniques were the same. It’s the repetition technique. I really loved it. I loved my class, I loved my teacher. It was really intense, but it taught me a lot about how to just respond and not think. It was a really positive experience.

Debbie Millman:

One of your biggest roles was as a Bond girl, you starred alongside Timothy Dalton’s, James Bond in Licensed to Kill. How did you get the role and what was it like for you to be catapulted onto the world stage like that? Talk about scrutiny? The Bond girls have their cinematic universe at this point.

Carey Lowell:

They do. In fact, I was just talking with a friend yesterday. I was like, “How many Bond girls have there been?” There’s been, I believe 27. No, there’s 27 Bond films and 75 Bond women, something like that. Because there’s usually two in each film, a villain and a protagonist.

But I was living in Los Angeles, I got it as a go see like any other audition that I would get. I was told it was a biker chick in a biker bar. I showed up in my leather biker jacket and my jeans and read the lines, and the casting director, Janet Hirshenson, said, “This is a Bond film. This is for a Bond girl. You look nothing the part. You need to sex it up. Come on, you can come back on Monday, but wear something different and I’ll let you have another shot at it,” which was very kind of her. She didn’t have to do that. But I went out that weekend to the mall and I found the trashiest pink lame zip up, like a halter dress. Like if I had pulled the zipper down, it would’ve come off and it was short.

I just went in there and I did the same thing in this pink halter dress, and I got the part. It was funny because I had short hair at the time, which I’ve had a lot of my life. They weren’t a hundred percent sure what to do with me and which is why they put a wig on me for the initial scenes of the movie, and then I’m supposed to have a transformation and have it cut off. But they weren’t really comfortable starting out with my short hair. I remember that being an issue. But the Broccoli family were so lovely, and Cubby was alive then, and his daughter, Barbara Broccoli, who was the producer, was fantastic. It felt like being part of a family. That everybody had worked so much together on all the past films at that point, that the art department and the special effects department and the armorer, they’d been in it for life. And my director, John Glenn, had started out as a second unit director and had made his way up the ranks. And so that’s how they did it back then.

After that film, they really changed it up and they hired a new director, I think. I want to say, was it Ramey, Sam Ramey who directed one after? I don’t remember who the next director was, but I just remember that mine felt very of the old-fashioned type of Bond films. And then the one that came after that felt much more sort of had advanced to the modern era.

Debbie Millman:

Well, your character is so unusual. In re-watching the movie, first of all, I had no idea that was a wig that you were wearing initially, but I was really surprised because I had never seen you in photos or in anything else with the long hair. And then you do have this transformation midway through the film and essentially become the first Bond girl badass. You didn’t take any BS, but you had this wonderful dichotomy of looking incredible in the casino dress with the garter belt with the gun, but then also with this slicked back, short hair that you’d never seen before in a Bond film. And at the time, I remember it being somewhat controversial.

Carey Lowell:

She wasn’t an ornament on James’s arm anymore. She was somebody who was going to go toe to toe with him. And as a CIA agent, I just remember they gave me shooting lessons, so I had to fire a gun and I would just naturally flinch every time it would go off. And they were like, “You are our CIA agent. You do not flinch. You hold your eyes steady.” And so that was something that I had to overcome in that, but it was a little different. I was definitely not your common Bond girl, and I did like that they had moved it forward in that regard.

Debbie Millman:

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Carey Lowell:

But they still had a scene where, like the one on the boat where we’re just leaving that bar where we’ve had a bar fight and James and I are, it’s when we first kissed. That was shot in a studio on a boat that some guys were rocking like this. They were splashing water on us, and there was a wind machine, and the background was just these little twinkling lights that they put in the back of the studio. So what looks like we’re floating out on the sea, was all done inside. And that’s what I mean by the old-fashioned, because these days they do it on location.

Debbie Millman:

Right. Well, it’s interesting because you also are more of the aggressor in that scene. You kissed Bond. He’s usually the one that makes the first move. I loved that you were so confident in your own sense of who you were to do that.

Carey Lowell:

Well, that’s the tagline, isn’t it? He says, “Why don’t you wait until you’re asked?”

Debbie Millman:

Right.

Carey Lowell:

I’m like, “Why don’t you ask me?”

Debbie Millman:

I love it.

Carey Lowell:

Yeah, yeah. She’s more aggressive. Yeah. That’s funny.

Debbie Millman:

You then started in films like Sleepless in Seattle and Fierce Creatures, but by the 1990s you said that you never realized all the weeks you spend going on auditions and being rejected. I think you said at one point you had been on 150 auditions and not landed a role. It seemed so incredulous to me to go from being a Bond girl to then not being able to get other roles. How did you keep your spirits up? When I’m rejected from one thing I could take to my bed for a week.

Carey Lowell:

Well, in the 1990s, my daughter was born in 1990, so that kept me busy for one. I definitely had something to distract me. And honestly, I’ve always been a meditator. I learned to meditate when I was 18, and that just really grounded me, put things in perspective. I don’t want to sugarcoat it and make it sound like I didn’t have terrible days of like, “Oh, this sucks and I hate this job and I’m not any good. I’m an imposter.” But I somehow worked my way through it. It wasn’t, believe me, I thought about quitting many times, and in fact, went to enroll back in school at NYU, Tisch, The School of the Arts and was accepted into their program. Right before I was supposed to start classes, I had the audition for Law and Order, and the rest is history, as they say.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. What made you decide to go back to school? Were you thinking about becoming a filmmaker or were you going to study more acting?

Carey Lowell:

I was thinking about being a documentary filmmaker. There were some stories that I wanted to explore, and I thought that that would be a really good way to do it. It’s probably very idealistic because making documentary films is not an easy road. You have to get all the financing and you have to have a really good story and really tenacity to do it. But it just was an area of interest. And Tisch, I was living in New York. That’s one of the best film schools in the country, so it just seemed like a natural thing to do, but I wasn’t going to study acting more. I just washed my hands of that. I needed to move on.

Debbie Millman:

Two days before you were supposed to begin classes, you found out you landed the part of ADA Jamie Ross in the original Law and Order, and your first appearance was in the 1996 episode, Causa Mortis. You remained a series regular for many years and then joined the cast of the spinoff, Law and Order Trial by Jury. What was it like suddenly working on episodic television in New York?

Carey Lowell:

I loved being in New York. We shot at Chelsea Piers, that’s where our sound stages were, and it was a 10 minute ride from my house. So in that way it was ideal. I loved my cast. I love and adore and still do Sam Waterston and Jerry Orbach, who’s no longer with us, sadly, benjamin Brat and Patha Markerson. We just had this amazing group of people and I was so pleased to be a part of it. And the writing was fantastic. We had really good writers. It was just a chance to sink your teeth into a character. Even though Law and Order doesn’t really care about the characters, you never see any backstory or home life or anything like that, really. It’s all procedural. But I still got a chance to inhabit Jamie’s skin, and it was really good practice. I have to say that. I really enjoyed it and it took a lot of the stress out of acting. It felt second nature.

And I’d only done an episodic show before that for a League of their Own, that Penny Marshall created. And I had the Genie Davis character, again with some long black wig on, that was in front of a live audience with three cameras. That was all about hitting your marks and hitting your line at the right moment. So I’d had a little bit of training for it, but Law and Order was just a joy. My only problem with it, and the reason I left the show after two years, I actually asked to be let out of my three-year contract after two years was because my daughter was five at the time, and I would leave in the morning before she woke up and come home at night after she’d gone to sleep, and there would be days that I wouldn’t see her.

Debbie Millman:

And the days are 18 hours long. It started 4:00 AM. It’s insane.

Carey Lowell:

Yeah. Crazy long days. I could never go to a parent-teacher conference. I never knew if I was going to be available. They let you know the week before what your schedule is, but it had its wonderful parts about it, which I will always think of fondly.

Debbie Millman:

Dick Wolfe, the creator of the Law and Order franchise, described you as a steel fist in a velvet glove. And I was wondering if he was referring to your character, ADA Jamie Ross or you, Carey Lowell?

Carey Lowell:

I think they’re not that far apart. I remember him telling my agent, “She’s got the right mix of sex appeal and moral authority.” I am kind of a bossy boots. I do like things my way and I’m not afraid to ask for it. Now, that’s something that I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older. I wasn’t like that all the time, but as I’ve matured, I’ve realized you can ask for what you want or you could say what you need. And I think that’s what Jamie Ross did. She was very forthright about her feelings and how she felt and what she wanted. So I appreciated that about my character.

Debbie Millman:

The original Law and Order was recently resurrected and you’ve made a guest appearance on the reboot. How has the character of Jamie Ross evolved and what was that like for you to go back?

Carey Lowell:

Oh, well, it was painful in that, Jamie’s gotten older, and so Jamie doesn’t look so good on camera as much as she used to. I just remember saying to the lighting guy, “Please don’t give me a raking sidelight. Can you put some diffusion up there?” So I wasn’t happy about the way I looked, but also I hadn’t acted in a long time prior to that. It felt like 10 years. And I said yes, because I knew Sam was doing it. We shot some scenes, Sam and I, but they had never made it into the final show.

So I was really disappointed that it didn’t live up to my expectations of what it was going to be. What I learned is it’s hard to go home again. The crew, the cast wasn’t my cast and I didn’t know anybody, and we didn’t have that easy flow that you get when you’ve been working with the same people for a long time. So I realized that that’s an important part of it all, and that wasn’t there. And I think that was as the first episode, the people that are the ongoing characters are still finding their groove. They hadn’t found their groove yet either. So it was a good lesson for me in that I realized that I’m in the right place today doing ceramics and not acting.

Debbie Millman:

Interesting. Oh yeah. I want to talk to you about the ceramics. I just have a few more questions about your acting career. Iterations of the Law and Order franchise have been on television now for over 30 years. What do you think makes this show resonate so powerfully with people?

Carey Lowell:

I think that Dick Wolf hit on a formula that is really self-contained in that you don’t have to have watched the prior episode or the subsequent episode without getting the full story. In that one hour slot, you know that you’re going to get the full picture from beginning to end in that one hour. And that’s powerful because you don’t feel like, “Ah, I didn’t see that one before. I’m not going to be able to watch the next one.” You get what you get in that hour. And you know the characters because you’ve seen them. Jerry would always have his little one liners, his little quippy one liner, and Sam would always have some moral outrage about how the case was being handled. And we’d always have Stephen Hill, God bless that man, he was a wonderful man, sum it all up in one little line.

It was dependable in that you knew the formula and it was unexpected because you never really knew if we were going to win the case. There were a lot of times where we didn’t win in court, or the argument didn’t hold or the perpetrator got away. And I think it closely hued to how the law operates and how difficult it can be to prosecute somebody and come away with a guilty verdict. And also, one of the main reasons, and I think it’s been a huge success, is that it’s ripped from the headlines. You could look at the New York Post and that will be the title of the next show.

Debbie Millman:

It’s so interesting because the Law and Order main show, there was that anticipation of will they be convicted or won’t they? And there was often that big surprise at the end that left you breathless. Whereas a lot of the other spinoffs, there is a more satisfactory conclusion where the bad guys get caught.

Carey Lowell:

They get their comeuppance. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. And that’s I think what makes Law and Order SVU so eternally successful is that you know, as gruesome as the crime might be, they’re going to jail. They’re getting caught, and Rush is going to beat the shit out of them and they’re going to go to jail.

Carey Lowell:

Right.

Debbie Millman:

There was a question that I asked you in the interview that we did for Print Magazine earlier this year about your biggest regret. At the time you told me that your biggest regret was marrying at 23 because it cut yourself off from many possibilities or moments when you could have been a better parent to your children or a better child to your parents. I’m wondering if you wanted to expand on that a little bit. You talked about leaving Law and Order for your daughter. Do you feel that you’ve had to compromise in life in any way, in your career and in your family?

Carey Lowell:

The part about getting married too early and then being a better daughter or a better parent were two separate thoughts. I did marry at 23 despite my parents’ protestations. I thought I knew best, and they were of course, right and I never should have done that. I did get to travel a lot and I got to see a lot of the world with my first husband, but in retrospect, I really feel like I didn’t need to get married.

Debbie Millman:

Same. Mine was at 26, same.

Carey Lowell:

But you live and you learn and nobody can tell you how it’s going to go. You need to live it to understand it. So in terms of having to make sacrifices, I think it’s really hard to have two actors in a family relationship. I then went on to marry two actors and I found that I was the one more, because I wasn’t working as much. Griffin was definitely working more than I was. So I was the one that was home with our daughter more often. And then when I would get a part, I remember having Hannah with me. I remember going to Paris to shoot a film and Hannah came with me, just because you’re the mom and they want to be with you.

So I really feel like I turned a lot… And then when I was with Richard, I definitely turned a lot of things down because we had our son and I wanted to be there with him. And Richard would go off and work a lot and I would be home keeping the home fires burning, as they say. So yes, I think when they say you can have it all, okay, maybe, but not at the same time.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I absolutely agree. People ask me all the time, “How do you do what you do?” And I’m like, “For most of my career life, I wasn’t married and didn’t have children. I had a completely elastic life.” Even being married now changes how much you can do and when you can do it. And I know as much as I sometimes fantasize what it would’ve been like to have children, I would not have been able to have the career that I’ve had. And I don’t know anybody that has it all. I truly don’t.

Carey Lowell:

No, I think it’s a myth.

Debbie Millman:

Let me put it another way. I don’t know any woman that has it all.

Carey Lowell:

That has it all and has great joy in it. It’s a real juggling act if you have it all. It’s not a relaxing having it all.

Debbie Millman:

There’s a lot of guilt involved in the balancing of it all.

Carey Lowell:

Definitely.

Debbie Millman:

Your interest in pottery making and ceramics has been a through line in your life since elementary school and albeit more in the background until the last couple of years. It’s since taken a major role in your life and you have your own line of ceramics, you make porcelain objects, you make vases, bowls, plates and more. What brought you back to this particular form of artistry at this point in your life?

Carey Lowell:

It happened because I was looking for an art class for my daughter, and I used to live down in the village on Sullivan Street, and there was a place called the Children’s Aid Society, and they had some ceramics classes and I enrolled my daughter in it. One day when I went to pick her up, I saw that they were having adult classes and I thought, I would like to do that again. So I signed myself up and I started taking wheel classes again, and then I just segued over to the Greenwich House Pottery, which is just a couple blocks away, which is a big townhouse that’s devoted to ceramics basically. And I just really got into it and never looked back.

Then, again, I was going on a lot of auditions and not getting anything, and I just thought, “You know what? What gives me joy? What’s really making me happy here now these days?” And it was just doing ceramics, not going up on an audition where I had to think about how I looked, I was old, too old or anything like that. It’s just been the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s just makes me really, really happy to do it.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. You’ve talked about how the process of pottery gives you a sense of autonomy. You get to decide what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it, whereas when you’re acting, you’re always waiting for somebody to hire you and give you the lines to read and then tell you how they want to shoot it.

Can you talk about the evolution of your style? It seems almost from all the work that I’ve looked at of yours to have been born fully formed. Like you just have this really unique, very original style that just seems to have been born alive the way it is.

Carey Lowell:

Well, thank you. That is such a compliment because I’m daily struggling with, “I don’t know if this is going to work out,” or “I don’t know how this looks.” And maybe that’s the role of an artist is just constantly self-questioning. It’s funny, during COVID, I started signing up for a lot of online pottery classes just because I wouldn’t have to travel for them. You could see all kinds of different artists sharing their work, and you didn’t have to be there in person, which was such a gift. And there’s this one group called Gasworks in Brooklyn, and they do this thing called Women in Clay.

It’s only women artists and all of the artists were talking about their work and doing instructional videos, but many of them were Native American or they were South American, or they were Latin American. And they all were talking about their indigenous art and how you really should make pottery that’s based on your heritage because it speaks to you. And I was thinking, “Oh God, what’s my heritage? It’s what? English, French.” So then I started looking back into old English and French pottery, and this is after I’d already been working for a while. This is only in the last two years. And I realized that the style that I have does echo that kind of porcelain, more fine, refined, there’s petals, there’s details that… And I think I was unconsciously doing it. At least that’s my excuse. I don’t know.

But I just sit down with a ball of clay and let it take me where it goes. Sometimes I have an intention going into it and think I’m going to be able to create this thing and then it will go off on a side road and it will be something completely different. But I think the best thing to do is just let it go that way and not try to impose too much about my vision because I think you lose something on the journey.

Debbie Millman:

You seem to take a lot of inspiration from nature, very naturalist aesthetic, organic shapes. Many of your pieces are adorned with very intricate detailing, often in the form of piercing or pinched edging, delicate petal assemblages, which are just stunning. You said that you find this odd because you’ve always seen yourself more as a tomboy, and so I’m wondering what do you make of this dichotomy with the style of your ceramics, which are so delicate and feminine and sexy?

Carey Lowell:

Thank you. Thank you. I’ve never heard them called sexy before, but I appreciate that.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, the bowls with the petals inside, stacks of petals.

Carey Lowell:

Oh, the gazing bowls. Thank you. Those are the gazing bowls. Well, I think it’s the expression of that. It’s that I don’t express that side of myself in my daily life. I don’t dress that way. I rarely wear makeup or heels. I am a tomboy in my dressing. I don’t know if that’s my Colorado upbringing or what, but I feel like my ceramics is the expression of my feminine side. It’s the expression of the woman who makes the cooking pot or makes the household objects or adorns herself in flowers or I don’t know. I’m also a very avid gardener, so they all cross over with each other. I remember in the questionnaire you had about in the print thing, are you religious?Is there an afterlife? And what does it look like? And I think I wrote, nope.

I have to preface that with, as the daughter of a geologist, I never had a religious upbringing. I was always, the earth was created in a hundred million years. That’s the way it is, and that’s what it is. And so I never really questioned that. But nature is my church and I’m constantly trying to recreate it in my ceramics. If there was a worship that I have, it’s worshiping nature in the creation of my ceramics, and that’s why I’m always repeating flowers or floral motifs. Flowers to me are just the most amazing gift that we have. Flowers and birds.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. We wouldn’t exist without them. I think we forget that a lot.

Carey Lowell:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You work mainly in porcelain, and you’ve also used gold luster in the style of Japanese art called Kintsugi. Can you talk about what that is?

Carey Lowell:

Kintsugi is a Japanese technique that’s made to repair broken pottery. They use this sort of resin to join the pieces and then brush gold dust over the top of it. So when you have a broken piece, it becomes even more special because you’ve repaired it and adorned it even with the gold. I often will have a crack or a breakage or something, a mistake in my ceramics. And so instead of chucking it or tossing it, I will put some gold luster on it to accentuate it and just show the flaws. I think we all have them. We might as well embrace them instead of trying to hide them.

Debbie Millman:

You said this about pride and ceramics and I found it really fascinating and I want to share it with you again so that we can talk about it. You state, “Ceramics has removed any pride that I might have in my abilities. Ceramics teaches you to let go of pride because there are just so many variables that can go wrong. There are so many steps along the way in the making and the firing and the glazing that you can ruin a piece. So you never really know what you’re going to get until you’ve unloaded the kiln at the final firing. If you do actually come up with something you like or that exceeds your expectations, that is a moment of pride.” And Carey, I’m wondering, how do you manage all of the not knowing in the process of making something?

Carey Lowell:

It’s trial and error. It’s time and time again, having things that don’t work out and learning from your mistakes. It really just takes a lot of practice and a lot of experiments. What if I put this here? What if I try that and, oh, nope, that didn’t work, or that temperature was too hot, or this glaze runs or that clay body slumps. There are just so many variables that go into making something and that’s part of the joy of it. You just never know what’s going to be a happy accident.

I learned early to take notes so that I can try and recreate if something does go well. You’re never finished with ceramics. That’s one of the things I love about it is that there’s always another possibility. There’s always a different way to do it. There’s always another test tile. There’s always another glaze, there’s always another clay body. It’s endless.

Debbie Millman:

Can you talk a little bit about your color palette? It’s very neutral, very white. What made you decide to take that direction with your work?

Carey Lowell:

The simple answer is that I could get some really good white glaze that was working in my studio and I thought, “Well, this is working. Let me stick with that.” But I also like the purity of it. In my own home, I have a lot of white ceramics and I also like that porcelain is a clay body that I work with often because I like its translucence and it’s elasticity. And if I were to put a color on it, it feels like it would almost mask it in a way that I don’t want to do. I realize that now ceramics has taken a different tack in that everybody’s using a lot of color and globs and texture and…

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Things are very blobby now. I did notice that.

Carey Lowell:

They’re blobby and they’re also flaky. Everybody’s using that sodium silicate that looks like a riverbed, a dry riverbed. I’m actually trying to move into a little bit more color because I was getting bored with the white. And so I’m working with paper clay now, which is a clay body that has a lot of paper fiber in it. It’s great because it can go really big scale. That’s another thing I’m trying to do is scale up, but the white just always feels quiet to me. There’s something about it that just feels serene. And often because my pieces do have so much going on with the petals and the stuff and the pinching and the piercing, the white just calms it all down.

Debbie Millman:

How have you gotten your ceramics to look so thin and delicate? I’m thinking particularly of the eggshells.

Carey Lowell:

Those, I made a mold. I learned how to do plaster mold making of a big gourd, like a big squash. And then I slip cast it, but I slip cast it with a really, really thin layer and I don’t fill it up all the way and I pour it upside down and then the edges go the way they go.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, they’re so unusual. It’s taking something that you’d either throw into a compost or throw away and making a piece of art out of an eggshell of what looks really, truly looks as delicate as an eggshell. It’s magnificent. But you also are a part of a group of artists who use discarded gun parts to make incredible hand glazed candle holders and other ceramic wears. Can you talk a little bit about how that line of work came to be?

Carey Lowell:

I was approached by a woman named Jessica Mindich, who had this group called Caliber Collection, where she had initially started trying to raise money to do gun buybacks in communities that had a lot of gun violence. And so she would go into the sheriff’s office and everybody would get $50 to bring in their gun. So that’s what a gun buyback is, and the gun would be destroyed. She dealt a lot with different detectives and they would give her gun parts. She asked for parts of the guns that had been destroyed as well as the casings that had been found at scenes of crime, crime scenes. Hello. She asked me and a few other artists if we would create something out of the gun parts. So I took the barrels, the gun cartridge, where there all the bullets go in and I cast them and made them into candlestick holders, but you wouldn’t know it was a gun part unless-

Debbie Millman:

No, yeah.

Carey Lowell:

Unless you knew it was a gun. But then we would sell them and a portion of the profit would go back into Caliber Collection for the gun buybacks.

Debbie Millman:

So ingenious. There’s a quote on your website that I love and you state, “There’s a distinct calling to lose yourself that is apparent in both acting and throwing ceramics. Each are transcendent in their own way, in the sense that something is always operating through you.” I’ve been talking to a lot of artists about this notion of this sense of a muse moving through you instead of by you. I talked to Rick Rubin about that recently, who writes quite a lot about it in his book. Can you talk about the difference of the creative spirit moving through you instead of created by you?

Carey Lowell:

Well, I think it goes back to what I was saying before is about, I’ll start with an intention, and then if I’m in the flow, and I do call it a flow because you’re not thinking about it, you’re hands are doing it and you could be listening to Design Matters, which I often do in my studio, but your brain could be somewhere completely else, but your hands are going through the process and making something.

I think when I can get in that zone, the things that I end up with at the end, I’m not saying they’re always great, but they usually lead me in a direction that I can then develop more. And I think it’s about paying attention to that divergence from your initial goal or initial intention that allows you to sort of create in a more free flow sort of way. I love the space, when you’re done, you go, “Wait, what? I just did that?”

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. And also, how much time has passed that you have no notion of having passed. It feels like five minutes and it’s three hours. Sometimes when I’m doing my research, I look up and I can’t even believe that several hours have passed since I started because I was just so intrigued by what I was doing. But I do find in the making of things, there’s a real distinct difference between something moving through you, which tends to feel much easier and the work feels more relaxed and something being created by you more cerebrally, which always tends to me to feel more tortured, at least in my case. And I’m wondering if you have that too.

Carey Lowell:

Well, it is more tortured. I find that I will create a piece and somebody will ask for it again, and that’s when I’m making it and I’m just reproducing. It’s a very distinct difference for me because I’m like, “Okay, I got to make this, I got to make that,” and I know the program, I know the steps, which is a reason I don’t really like to do a production pottery. I don’t want to make the same iteration over and over again. But I do relish the times that I get to just have a ball of clay in front of me and say, “Well, where’s this going to take me?”

In fact, I don’t throw anymore. I still have my wheel, but I just don’t tend to use it so much because it feels mechanical to me, and I don’t really want that element in the making. I’d rather do it with my hands and see the mark of my hands. It feels freer and it feels more authentic.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. It reminds me of something that Joni Mitchell said on one of our live albums. I think it was Miles of Aisles where somebody yelled out for her to play something, one of her hits, and she was like, “Nobody ever asked Van Gogh to repaint Starry Night.”

Carey Lowell:

Love Joni.

Debbie Millman:

It’s typical Joni. It’s so perfect.

Carey Lowell:

Yeah, it’s great.

Debbie Millman:

Carey, the last thing I want to talk to you about today is longevity. I know you had a milestone birthday recently, a couple of years ago. I also had one last year. Yeah, same grim-

Carey Lowell:

Happy birthday.

Debbie Millman:

What have you learned about aging, because you have been really open about your age and your experience, what have you learned about aging both from your experience in modeling and in front of the camera and from your experiences now making art?

Carey Lowell:

Well, I am just really grateful that I have my art at my age, because I can do that at any age without judgment and only will gain from my experience and my longevity in it, if my body will keep up. My hands are a little bit arthritic. But in terms of acting and modeling, I don’t want to have to try to stay young. I don’t want to have to try to be beautiful every time I step out.r it’s too much pressure and it makes me anxious and I’m really happy to have been able to step away from it. Ceramics has allowed me to step away from it because my creative energies have been able to be focused elsewhere and not on my appearance. I just feel really fortunate that I have clay to engage me.

Debbie Millman:

It’s interesting in the way that you’ve, whether consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or just by accident, created this arc of your career with so many different chapters, doing so many different things that in many ways have all informed the subsequent chapters.

Carey Lowell:

Yeah, without any pre-planning. They just sort of fell from one into another. I guess that’s the way to do it is just take it as it comes and try to be open to the possibilities and say yes. Just trying to say yes to it all. I’ve just had a very fortunate run. That’s all I can say. I’ve been healthy and I have beautiful children, and I like where I am right now in my life. I wouldn’t trade any of it, but I’m really happy to be where I am.

Debbie Millman:

Carey Lowell, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you so very, very much for joining me today on Design Matters.

Carey Lowell:

Thank you, Debbie. It was my pleasure.

Debbie Millman:

You can see what Carey Lowell has been working on in her studio at careylowellceramics.com and the 1818collective.com. 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.

Debbie Millman:

So this month’s theme for Creative Mornings is abundance. And Milton Glaser once said, “If you perceive the universe as one of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be.” And Milton goes on to say that he always thought that there was enough to go around. “There are good enough ideas in the universe and enough nourishment.” Dario, you’ve stated that if there’s an abundance of something, that you share it, have you always had this mentality around the notion of abundance?

Dario Calmese:

I’m not sure. I think, sometimes… I have this feeling that whatever you have just offer it to someone else, I think it’s a way of showing gratitude, actually. It keeps the river flowing. I think it’s coming from a scarcity mindset of hoarding and holding onto that actually limits you and limits life and limits the things that you’re after. But in sharing, in giving, it just keeps the energy flowing. And I think even, we were talking about the Institute of Black Imagination, and it all started with me inheriting 2000 books from a famous artist, Geoffrey Holder. And somewhere on the inside I was like, “Oh my God, I would love to just be lost in these books and hold onto these books, and pull from them and reference them.” And I don’t even define it, but something inside me knew that I just couldn’t, right? I had to share it. I had to share this knowledge. I needed other people to have access to this information. And so that actually is what undergirded the Institute of Black Imagination. So yeah, I think there’s something inside that says, give.

Debbie Millman:

You have an abundance of identities. And we talked about identities a little bit before our interview. You’re an artist, a photographer, a sculptor, a writer, a podcast host, a teacher, a show and casting director, and the CEO of The Institute of Black Imagination, all of which I’d like to talk to you about today. You’ve said that you think we all have multiple identities, but because we often align ourselves to specific identities and professions, it keeps us from other modalities of being. And I was really intrigued by that notion because it’s sort of the opposite of abundance. When we are holding on to an identity, it forces us to remain sort of intact as opposed to growing and evolving. And I’m wondering how you were able to break that trap and sort of have these expanded versions of yourself.

Dario Calmese:

Well, one, I have to first of all, thank my parents. My parents really allowed for me to simply be curious and explore all the things that I found interesting. If it was microscopes or telescopes or chemistry sets or piano lessons or karate, I was able to explore all of these things. And I think on some level it came down to just pure curiosity. If I’m being totally honest, I’m just really fascinated by, what is possible? And you try some things and they don’t work out and you try other things and they resonate and you want to go with it. And so that’s something that I’ve done. I’ve literally just followed things that I was interested in most of my life, and luckily supported by my parents and supported by friends and communities that have allowed me to do that.

Debbie Millman:

You grew up in North City, Missouri, which is in the suburbs of St. Louis, and you’ve talked about how you were raised in a predominantly white neighborhood. Your father is a pastor, but also a substance abuse therapist. And your mother is a nurse, but also a seamstress. Now, is it true she sewed all your clothes?

Dario Calmese:

She didn’t sew all of my clothes, but she sewed a significant portion of them, particularly my church clothes. I don’t know how many people here grew up in a Black Baptist church?

Debbie Millman:

Raise your hands.

Dario Calmese:

Okay. So you all know what the pastors anniversary is, and it’s something that we have every year. We would get dressed up and whatever, and my mother would literally allow me to imagine and design whatever I wanted. So I remember one year, MC Hammer was huge in the ’90s, and she made me this incredible MC Hammer suit with the big baggy pants and the bolero jacket.

Debbie Millman:

I had one of those too, by the way.

Dario Calmese:

Oh okay, see. I actually just met him last week in San Francisco.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Dario Calmese:

Random. He offered me a Mentos and said he wanted my boots.

Debbie Millman:

As one does. I understand that your mom is quite the style maven and instructed you on all the do’s and don’ts of dressing. She taught you things like your belt should always match your shoes, was wondering if that was still the case?

Dario Calmese:

No belt.

Debbie Millman:

Do you still heed her sartorial instructions?

Dario Calmese:

Actually, she now heeds mine. She sends me photos from dressing rooms. She’s like, “Oh, what shoes should I wear with this? Bracelets, earrings.” Yeah. It’s interesting, my mother and I have always had this style dialogue for my entire life. And even when she was sewing, that was our connection. She would, I got it honest, I’m also a procrastinator. I’m trying to be better.

Debbie Millman:

How, with all of those multi hyphenate titles, can you possibly think you’re a procrastinator?

Dario Calmese:

I don’t know, I’m always just like… Well, I’m actually much, much, much better. But my mother would be up until five o’clock in the morning sewing my sister’s cotillion dresses and I would just be sitting there watching her. Our basement, you can open the door and the stairs go down, and it’s open, and so I would just sit on the stairs and just watch my mother sew until five o’clock in the morning. It was just this thing we had.

Debbie Millman:

My mother was also a seamstress, she made all of my clothes growing up. We had no money, so that was the only way that I could get any kind of new clothes. I learned how to sew as well. I just want to let you know, bragging a little bit here everyone, I won the home economics award in high school because of my sewing ability. My red corduroy overalls were among the most popular of my constructions, just letting you all know, that had an appliqued butterfly embroidered on the front panel. She also taught me how to draw, because she used to draw images of all the clothes that she made because she was a professional seamstress, she made clothes for other people. She would draw those outfits.

You’ve stated that the women in your family were some of your early influences and inspired a bonafide interest in the worlds of art and fashion. But you also come from a family of musicians and have said that you discovered your voice as a tool of expression at a very young age. And I’m wondering if you could talk about what that means and how you were able to do that?

Dario Calmese:

It really started in elementary school, growing up in a creative family. And yes, my grandmother, my paternal grandmother, I really consider the font of all creativity, she was also a singer, played piano, a writer, a ceramicist. And all of her children, including my father, have tons of these gifts and they talk about them and things like that. But in elementary school, it really came from me being bored in church while my father was preaching, and I would just read the hymnals and I was memorizing hymns while my father preached because I was not paying attention. And then…

Debbie Millman:

We won’t tell anyone.

Dario Calmese:

And then in fourth grade, or even third grade, I was in elementary school and we were in music class and it was Black History Month so we were going to sing a spiritual for Black History Month, and it was Wade in the Water. And when it came time to, the verse came or whatever, I just started singing it because I knew it. And my teacher was like, “Oh my God, your voice.” And I was like, “What?” And she was like, “You need to sing the solo for the program.” Or whatever. And that was when I first began that this was something maybe that other people didn’t have or whatever, because everyone in my family sings, it was never anything that felt quite special. And over time finding that, and maybe this is something that we all have, is not understanding the power of our voice or not understanding that we have a unique perspective on the world that people want to hear.

And so I discovered that in many various ways. And if you think about all of the identities, it’s really me saying the same thing in different languages. Each medium allows for a certain type of communication, and I think that is where that really comes from. And really finding later that writing was an incredible way to also, not only find one’s voice, but to also really kind of weave together seemingly disparate ideas and then share them with somebody else so they can follow along with your thought process.

Debbie Millman:

By the time you were 10 years old, you were already studying the piano, you also studied classical voice, acting and dance, beginning in your teens. You began performing professionally by the time you were 15, what kinds of productions were you a part of?

Dario Calmese:

So my first professional show was A Chorus Line.

Debbie Millman:

What part did you play?

Dario Calmese:

I was in the ensemble.

Debbie Millman:

Oh.

Dario Calmese:

Because I was 15, but it was at a professional theater. So in St. Louis we have a theater called The Muni, and it’s America’s largest and oldest outdoor theater, and it seats around 14,000. And yeah, I went to audition and I made a friend there at the audition who taught me how to do a double pirouette, I had never even heard of that before.

Debbie Millman:

Can you still do it?

Dario Calmese:

I can still do it.

Debbie Millman:

Ooh, the gauntlet is down.

Dario Calmese:

I can do a triple. No, I’m kidding. I mean, I can. And then other things like Missouri Honors Choir, all of those things that one does as an ambitious little kid, it’s early.

Debbie Millman:

At that point, what did you want to do professionally? Did you want to be a performer?

Dario Calmese:

I don’t think I really knew. I enjoyed it, but I actually always thought, and this is so strange, but I always thought that academics and art were silos and that I had to make a choice, and so I was always kind of straddling this line. But as far as what I wanted to be, I actually thought I was going to be a psychiatrist. Yeah, I was going to be a counselor.

Debbie Millman:

You went to school for psychology. You got your college degree in psychology and mass media at Rockhurst University in Kansas City. What provoked you or motivated you to think about being a psychiatrist?

Dario Calmese:

You know it’s so funny, my father’s a therapist, and as much as I did not think that I was my father, I’m totally my father.

Debbie Millman:

I hear you.

Dario Calmese:

And I think you’re surrounded by these things when you grow up, what your parents do, and they really influence you. And both of my parents really were in professions of service, and I really loved psychology because I just loved the human mind. But I also loved like pissing people off. And this is something I used to do to my elementary school teachers all the time, and I’m sure they were just over it, but if I didn’t see you snap, I didn’t trust you. And so I would push people to the point where whatever facade they had up, as teacher or something, once I saw that I was like, “Okay, they’re a human being.” And so I think psychology, the mind, these are things that were always very interesting to me.

Debbie Millman:

So you were an early provocateur?

Dario Calmese:

Si. Yes.

Debbie Millman:

I read that when you got to college, you started questioning everything you’d ever been told about yourself. This included your own sexuality, what it meant to believe in God, and even music and art. What type of epiphanies did you have about who you were?

Dario Calmese:

So I went to the small Jesuit school called Rockhurst University, there were a couple of things. One, I remember we were in maybe art history class or something like this, and we were learning about the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and I’m sitting there hearing about this amazing, amazing what we would call a cathedral with the largest man-made dome, and I’m like, “Why am I just learning about this?” I was like, “I was a good student and I’m curious, and why am I just learning about this, in college?” And I’m like, “And this is a very specific school right?” I’m like, “If I was maybe at a different school or maybe even a state school, we may not even be studying this.” So it opened up that there was this entire other… I started to see the limits of my education, which I thought was vast, and started to see the very Western European lens through which I was educated, right?

And then you start thinking about, oh wait, I was getting up at six o’clock in the morning for AP European history and we didn’t talk about the Eastern world. We didn’t talk about these things. And I think I was really upset, “How could this have been kept from me? What are you talking about?”

But I would say the biggest epiphany, so again, my father’s a pastor, I grew up in the church, I was taught that the Bible was the unmitigated word of God, it was from his mouth to the page. And we had to take theology and the teacher asked us to bring the American standard Bible to class. Now if anyone here grew up in the church, you know that there’s multiple versions and multiple translations of the Bible, and then if you have the wrong translation, you just kind of like, make it work. And so I was just like, “I’m not buying a new Bible. I’m just going to bring this good old King James to class. It’s going to be fine.”

And then the teacher says, “Turn to second Maccabees.” And I was like, “I’m sorry, what?” I mean, I literally looked over to another student and I was like, “Wait, what? There are these other books of the Bible? And nobody told me?” The Apocrypha, first and second Maccabees, The Book of Wisdom, The Book of Light. And then we’re learning about Martin Luther and them taking… Anyway, I won’t get into the construction of the Bible.

Debbie Millman:

Please do.

Dario Calmese:

I mean, we don’t have a lot of time except two… But for me, it all came crumbling down. It all came crumbling down. Because that was the one thing that culturally was the through line of my entire life, of my community, of my identity. And all of a sudden the ineffable had a chink in it. And any information that we learn, we’re walking through life with certain paradigms in place, kind of like a room, and when something new is introduced, either you rearrange everything to make space for it or you reject it so that everything stays the same. The easy things to do is just to reject the new and let everything stay the same, but that was an undeniable thing. And so to let that in, everything had to change and everything came into question. And then I saw the hand of man in what I thought was the hand of God.

And not only that, I remember talking to my father excitedly about these books that I had discovered. Discovered. And I was like, “Dad, oh my God, I was reading The Book of Wisdom. It’s amazing. You’ll be able to find some really great sermons out of these scriptures. This is amazing.” And he was like, “Oh no, those are the forbidden books.”

Debbie Millman:

How did you manage through that type of conversation?

Dario Calmese:

Well, I also started to see that religion in those who were leaders in upholding it, also weren’t interested in the truth. They were interested in maintaining, right? And I was just like, “But if you are who you say you are and you’re about this life, if you got new information about something that you’re passionate about or you love, wouldn’t you want to know it, wouldn’t you want to share it? Wouldn’t you want to enlighten other people?” And there was just like a wall of rejection to it. And I was just like, “Oh, okay, got it. So even this isn’t as real as I thought it was.” So when the core of your kind of existence or faith is shattered like that at 19, everything, everything is up for question at that point.

Debbie Millman:

How did that impact the type of work you were making?

Dario Calmese:

It’s so interesting. I never really made that connection, but I think that impacts everything that I’m making. I don’t take anything at surface level, I’m always interrogating systems, I’m always looking for what’s not being said and questioning everything. I think everything is worthy of being questioned. So yeah, I mean everything.

Debbie Millman:

After you graduated, you decided to move to New York City and allowed yourself one year to pursue professional performance. What kind of performer were you envisioning yourself at that point?

Dario Calmese:

So I was doing musical theater mostly, and I did some soap work. If you dig deep enough, you can find me on All My Children. But yeah, I literally decided to… The decision was to move to New York for one year, try out the acting thing. If I’m terrible, I’m going to go back to grad school for either cognitive neuroscience or psych assessment, which is designing psychological tests. Or if I’m good, maybe I’ll stick with it. And so yeah, I just kept going and was able to travel the world, but it was mostly musical theater, singing and dancing. And in that space, as much as I loved it, I found that there was more that I wanted to do and more that I wanted to say. And so as much as I loved it, once I got into it, I was feeling the limitations of it. And so a pivot came into photography.

Debbie Millman:

In that traveling that you did, you took a three week trip to Europe where you purchased your first DSLR camera, which you’ve stated, bridged the gap between your technical side and your artistic side. And when you returned to New York, you continued to work as a performer, but then began collaborating with your colleagues and friends to take head shots and create stylized portraits. At that point, you decided to go back to school to get a master’s degree from SVA in photography. But despite your degree and accomplishments and a level of professional success, you don’t consider yourself to be a photographer?

Dario Calmese:

Yes and no.

Debbie Millman:

Okay.

Dario Calmese:

And I think that this goes back to kind of like identity, and to let you all in on a conversation that Debbie and I were having pre-interview. We were having a conversation about identity, and that identity isn’t necessarily who you are, but identities are things that you hold, you are the vessel that holds these different identities. And identity is something that comes from the outside, people are telling you how you are seen versus you defining it for yourself. What we call identity is really one’s interest in an identity. And to be seen as a photographer, it’s like a yes and, more than I am not a photographer.

So with photography, I just find that it’s just not the whole story. So I’m a photographer, but I’m also not a photographer. For me, it is not what I live and breathe and move in 24/7, although I’m always looking at images. I love taking images, it is a mode of expression for me. But photography is… We all are flowing rivers, and what does it mean to be defined by how one feels when they step into it in that one moment, three seconds later it’s going to change. And I think that’s really it, I felt really hedged in by that.

Debbie Millman:

Since graduating, you’ve had a number of different jobs and opportunities. You worked as a staff photographer for Essence Magazine and the Council of Fashion Designers of America. In 2013, you became the casting director for Kerby Jean-Raymond’s Pyer Moss fashion shows, and then went on to become the director. And you titled the 2016 show, Double Bind, which was acclaimed for its messages going beyond fashion, not surprisingly, to address depression and Black Lives Matter. And you said this about the topic matter. “The Black experience in America is the ultimate double bind. It’s a place where natural born citizens, promised life, liberty, and property, live an immigrant experience in the only land they’ve known as home. A place where Black culture is praised, commodified, and appropriated while Black peoples are marginalized and serve as scapegoats for the ills of American society, and we can’t escape and we can’t talk about it.” Five years later, six years later, do you feel the same way?

Dario Calmese:

See, that’s why writing is good. You can really get at the thing. I was like, “Yes, that is it. That’s it.”

Debbie Millman:

I thought so too.

Dario Calmese:

I was like, “That is it.” It just so clearly articulates it. Are we still there? Yes. Yes, it is, because there hasn’t been a reckoning for, not only this country, but I think particularly for white Americans. When we talk about oppression, when we talk about even racism, so much of it is about a denial and a lack of a confrontation. I mean, I think this goes back to the psychology of it. In order to change, you have to confront a truth in order to move past it. And America, and it goes beyond America, has yet to really reckon with and reconcile that past. And it’s ultimately the journey that we’re all on, we’re all on that journey of becoming. And I will say that I speak this not from a place of listlessness or even tragedy, but from a place of hope. Martin Luther King says that “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” And I wholeheartedly believe that.

However, and we were talking a little bit about Afropessimism earlier, and I won’t get too much into it, but essentially the notions of Afropessimism says that the Black experience or Black suffering is one that cannot be repaired because Blackness is the boundary line between who is human and who is not. And so Black individuals actually serve as the boundary line between who is human and who is not. And so as long as that boundary line is needed, I’m unsure of how well or how far we’ll really be able to go. But I do see and understand and witness quiet moments of care and humanity every single day. And I think on an individual and a citizen level, there’s just more heart there. There’s more heart there. And we also have to sep… Now I’m going on a tangent, but let me circle back. I just want to say we do also need to separate the citizen from the state, right? Because state actions and institutionalized parts of racism make it sometimes really difficult for individuals to act in the way that they want to.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely.

Dario Calmese:

So, we’re also dealing with systems, and this kind of goes into design.

Debbie Millman:

Was this part of your decision to create the Institute of Black Imagination?

Dario Calmese:

Yes. So the Institute of Black Imagination, like I mentioned, came about with me inheriting these 2000 books from Geoffrey Holder, but also really see, I mean, if we want to get to the why is… Still in New York.

So you mentioned that I grew up in the suburbs in this predominantly white neighborhood, but we started out in East St. Louis, which is where my parents are from, which is on the other side of the river. And you can Google East St. Louis, it’s a really great case study in geographical racism. But I grew up with my cousins four blocks away from me, and I moved when I was five. And as I grew up, I really began to see, firsthand, what environment does to life outcomes. And I started to see our lives diverge. I got to exist in this place of abundance and resources, and their lives took a very statistical route. And for me, this is really what undergirds the Institute of Black Imagination, because it was very clear to me that it was designed, it was designed.

Where we grew up was not designed for us to thrive in. It was not designed for us to dream in. It wasn’t designed for us to imagine in. And I also saw what was possible when one just had access to resources, to information, to tools. I’m a witness of it. I am a product of it. And so when creating the Institute of Black Imagination, it’s like “What does it mean to create a space to give access and resources to individuals to allow them to dream, allow them to imagine as well.”

Debbie Millman:

In 2020 via the institute, you developed a podcast to incorporate Black and Brown voices around broader concepts of design. And in a recent episode with anti-disciplinary designer, Adam Sally, you stated, “Design is a tool we use to bring our thoughts into space time.” One of the most beautiful lines of yours that I’ve read. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about what you mean by that.

Dario Calmese:

Sure. It’s my favorite topic. I mean, I’ll circle back and then I’ll go forward. In 2016, I was in Athens, Greece, and I heard this phrase during this conference that all design is predictive, meaning that the designer is predicting or dictating how an end user is going to interact with any given design. Rarely is there a modular or an adaptive function on the user end. It was like a throwaway line, but it completely changed my life. I literally walked out and looked at the world and realized that this was all designed, and it was-

Debbie Millman:

In looking back at your childhood and the sort of divergence between you and your cousins, it’s…

Dario Calmese:

But literally, and it sounds so basic, and we know it, but everything you’re looking at right now was once an idea in somebody’s head, the shoes, my pants, this stage, the sidewalk you walked on, the subway you took, the streets, this building, the lights, your glasses, the microphone, my gloves, the table, the cup was all immaterial. I mean, there’s a lot of creative people here, right? And so you know what it means to bring an idea and translate it into space and time. And so for me, I was like, “Oh, that is what design is. It’s the series of mechanisms or processes to bring thought into materiality.” And then I asked the question, I was like, “Oh, well, if this is all designed, then who designed it?” And that’s also a pretty easy answer. And then we realize that we’re actually living in embodied ideals. We are surrounded by thought, literally solid thought. We are moving in thought at all times.

And so then what does it mean to then open up that lane for other individuals to dream and imagine? And what I also love about that concept is that it makes the world feel really light, because it’s just thought, it’s just an idea. This building is just an idea that’s no more valid than the idea that you have in your head right now. The monarchy is just an idea, you can literally just think of something else tomorrow.

Debbie Millman:

Right?

Dario Calmese:

Seriously. And so the world-

Debbie Millman:

It’s incredibly powerful.

Dario Calmese:

The world doesn’t feel so heavy. You’re like, “Oh, you could just change your mind.” That’s what happened in COVID, everyone just had to change. And it was crazy how swift, you’re like, “Oh, we could just make another choice.” And for me, that I think is extremely powerful. But yeah, it’s just a translation of thought into space and time.

Debbie Millman:

Dario, in 2020 you also made history, as Tina mentioned in her introduction, as the first Black photographer to shoot a cover for Vanity Fair in its 106 year history, which is just so heinous in so many ways. Nevertheless, you made the history with your portrait of Oscar winning actress Viola Davis. You didn’t know you were the first Black photographer to shoot a cover for the magazine until you asked. Did that surprise you? It surprised me. I couldn’t believe that in 106 years, there was not one. Not one.

Dario Calmese:

Was I surprised? No. Did I even find it heinous? No. It’s like, if you know American history, is this a surprise?

Debbie Millman:

Talk about predictive.

Dario Calmese:

For me? It’s just like… And I wasn’t even upset. It’s interesting that I meet so much outrage when people hear that, and I’m like…

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Why are we surprised? Is really the question.

Dario Calmese:

You know what I mean?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I do.

Dario Calmese:

And I also really took it as, this is a team of people, because it also wasn’t reactive right? So I had been shooting for Vanity Fair for a year prior to, so if there are any photographers in the room, it was almost a very traditional kind of photography progression. Working for a magazine, you start shooting front of book portraits, you start doing other things, and you kind of work your way up to hopefully a cover. So outside of the historical and racialized context, it was pretty kind of straightforward in that regard. And also that they weren’t choosing me in reaction to, it was like, “No, we’ve been working together for a year.”

I think that it’s a truth for us that none of us created the world that we find ourselves in, we all inherited this. We inherited these systems, these ways of being, these thoughts, these social constructs. There’s not one individual in this room that is directly responsible for anything, including the team at Vanity Fair. They can’t speak to their history. They were not even alive when the magazine came. And one of my favorite questions of the two pages on my website, because I can’t, but on the contact page it has one of my new favorite questions is, what will you do now, knowing what you now know?

Debbie Millman:

What will you do now, knowing what you now know?

Dario Calmese:

And ultimately, that’s all we can be responsible for.

Debbie Millman:

Your portrait of Viola Davis was monumental not only because of its beauty, but also because of what it represented. It wasn’t just a photograph. And you credit the pose for the image to Black women artists such as Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems, who often photograph subjects from behind. But it also referenced another significant photograph, which we’ve been hearing quite a lot about recently. But this was actually before any of that sort of came to the cultural zeitgeist. Can you talk a little bit about the reference?

Dario Calmese:

Yeah. So for those not familiar, I referenced a portrait of Peter Gordon, it’s called Whipped Peter, and it’s a pretty famous image of a runaway slave with scars on his back. And in doing research for anything that I’m doing, I keep just a catalog of images, thousands and thousands and thousands, thousands of images. And when I get an assignment, I just go through them and I don’t even think about it. I just start pulling things that make sense, that resonate for some reason. And that was one of them. And I actually found the image to be, at least his pose, to be one of strength and quite beautiful. And it was actually quite a fashion pose because he is really trying to show the scars on his back, outside of the just horrific nature of the image.

But I was also challenged, and I actually don’t think I’ve ever spoken about this, but Samira Nasr, who’s now the editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar, was still the fashion director at the time of Vanity Fair, she was making her transition at the time. And I was showing my reference images and my mood boards, and she said, she’s like, “I just want to challenge you to also think about women and how women want to be represented, a modern woman in this world.” And so we all walk through life with certain privileges, and I get to walk through life as a cis male presenting individual, I am not a woman, nor have I lived that life. And so that for me was one, of checking my own privilege, but then two, realizing like, “Oh, actually I need to go to see how Black women represent themselves, how they want to be seen.”

And so that’s when I really went back in and started looking at the work of Lorna Simpson. I mean, familiar with, but researching again the work of Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weens, and I started to see this… Alma Thomas as well. I started to see this repetition of the face away from the camera, and I thought that was really interesting. I was like, “What?” And it was crazy because when the cover came out, so many people were also comparing it to the Simone Biles cover that Annie Leibovitz did for Vogue a couple of weeks prior to, and they were lambasting it. And I did not think that that was going to be the reaction I was thinking, I was like, “Here’s another image of a Black woman with her back to the camera.” That’s actually how I interpreted it.

Debbie Millman:

They weren’t lambasting Dario’s image, just to be clear.

Dario Calmese:

Oh yeah, Annie Leibovitz’s. And so that’s actually what I was thinking about.

Debbie Millman:

Well, you’ve said that your shoot with Viola was a love letter to Black women, but I actually think it’s broader than that, I think it’s a love letter to humanity. But part of the issue that arose with the comparison of the Simone Biles photo to your photo of Viola Davis was the issue that some white photographers have shooting non-white skin, and the notion that white people don’t know how to adjust lighting for non-white subjects. And you’ve addressed this with a recent project that you were commissioned to do with Adobe. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dario Calmese:

Yes. So Adobe reached out and asked me to design presets for Lightroom, specifically geared for people of color. And they had deep skin tones, medium skin tones, and lighter skin tones. I was given medium, and it was an amazing process. It was an amazing collaboration, particularly in that medium skin tone range. You’re actually not just dealing with people of African descent, you’re also dealing with individuals from Southeast Asia, that’s a range that goes across. And it was really, really beautiful to really explore and work with a team that was extremely excited, super excited, super helpful, extremely generous, to really get down to the nuances of what it means. And I think the critique of white photographers is just a lack of sensitivity. It’s just a lack of sensitivity to nuance.

And I think even with Annie Leibovitz, who I actually admire her photography, and I think she’s an incredible photographer. She just has that filter she puts on everything to make everything look like you’re in the 1800s, like a Emily Bronte like situation. And it makes white folks look aristocratic and wind swept and just makes Black people look ashy. And so it’s just make that adjust… The sensitivity to adjust, right? And I think what undergirds that is also love and care. Like saying, “I see you and I want you to look your best,” despite my voice, despite the way I want you to be seen.

Debbie Millman:

And it also gives us the ability to have an abundance of viewpoints.

Dario Calmese:

Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:

Dario, the last thing I want to talk with you about is your fellowship.

Dario Calmese:

The last?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, Unfortunately.

Dario Calmese:

Okay.

Debbie Millman:

I wish we had another hour or more. You’re wearing this hat that says Loeb on it, and you have a Loeb/ArtLab Fellowship with Harvard University. How did this come to be, and what kind of work are you doing in the fellowship?

Dario Calmese:

So I am, yes, at Harvard doing a Loeb Fellowship right now. And to quickly explain about the Loeb Fellowship, it’s a fellowship, they choose around 9 to 10 people from around the world working in and around the built and natural environment. And my work in defining design, I think so universally and broadly, it allows for different entry points to talk about design. And so the fellowship allows you to take any class you want to at Harvard and m MIT for a year.

Debbie Millman:

And you’re taking like eight classes?

Dario Calmese:

I went down to six.

Debbie Millman:

Oh.

Dario Calmese:

I’m exploring design through all of these different lenses. So taking classes in urban design, 3D printing and robotic with ceramics, additive manufacturing, taking Latin. Because for me, then language also becomes design, because language is also a tool that you’re using in order to translate your thoughts and speak to your own reality. And like any design tool, it allows for and disallows for certain things. And so for me, wanting to get to at least one route, there’s multiple, but getting to the core understanding and the meaning of words, for me was really important. And then also taking classes at the Kennedy School, philosophy of technology adaptive leadership, which is really looking at, philosophy of technology looking at society and the state from a systematic level through the lens of Marx and Heidegger and Hegel.

But then also leading from the inside out, which is about, we spoke earlier about identities, what are those lines of code that we’ve been taught about ourselves? What it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man, what it means to be Black, what it means to be American. And seeing that we are all individually operating algorithms that are made up of these codes. And so for me, that’s also design, right? What it means to be a woman is a design construct that was designed before you got here, but was not designed with you in mind. And so what are the limbs? What are the legs, the feet that you’re cutting off in order to fit within this preexisting design construct? And I find that so many of our frustrations, I think in life, in the world, internally, are about that friction between who we are, the core of our essence versus this meeting of this preexisting design construct. And I think that even goes back to why being defined as just a photographer is like, “I have hands and legs, and you just want the trunk.”

Debbie Millman:

And makes it easier for other people to create the construct of who you are.

Dario Calmese:

And I’m not interested in reducing myself for other people’s level of understanding.

Debbie Millman:

Bravo, bravo.

Dario Calmese:

There’s a really great word, procrustean. Do you know this word?

Debbie Millman:

No, I don’t.

Dario Calmese:

procrustean. It’s actually that act of needing to literally sever your limbs in order to fit into something. The morphology of it is, there’s a Greek myth of this guy Procrustes, and it’s called a procrustean bed, and it had a certain length and height, and he would tie you down to the bed, and if you didn’t fit, he would just cut off the parts of your body until you fit onto the bed. And so…

Debbie Millman:

Sounds like an episode of Criminal Minds.

Dario Calmese:

So it’s procrustean, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

How do you see what you’re learning, influencing what you’re making?

Dario Calmese:

Oh, I can’t wait actually. So for me, this process has been really one of ingestion and seeing how it will inform. So I haven’t really focused on the doing so much, but more on the taking in of input. But what I’m excited about, really is just to have more vocabulary, just to have more vocabulary in order to speak to the things that I see in the world and be better at translating them to other individuals. And so that’s really what I’m up there doing is, I say, “I’m just up there putting more arrows in my quiver.”

Debbie Millman:

Dario Calmese, you are remarkable. I want to thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on this very, very special episode for Creative Mornings at the School of Visual Arts Theater in New York City. Ladies and gentlemen, the remarkable, the brilliant, Dario Calmese.

Dario Calmese:

My absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

When Michael Stipe was the lead singer and lyricist for the band R.E.M, it was clear he had talents and interests beyond music. He was deeply involved in crafting the album covers and other aspects of the band’s visual identity. In 1998, he published his first photo book, and in recent years, he’s published several more books of photography. His latest is an untitled book of Portraits and Still Lives. The making of which was complicated in interesting ways by COVID. He joins me now to talk about his practice of photography and about his career as a musician and an artist. Michael Stipe, welcome to Design Matters.

Michael Stipe:

Thank you, Debbie. How’s it going? It’s so nice to see you.

Debbie Millman:

So nice to see you too. Michael, I understand that the best kiss of your life was with Allen Ginsberg.

Michael Stipe:

Well, that was, that was a question there for The Guardian or The Independent [crosstalk 00:00:59].

Debbie Millman:

It was for UK paper, for sure.

Michael Stipe:

One of the UK papers. They think that Americans have no sense of humor or sense of irony. I work extra hard to create ridiculous responses to their questions.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, so it wasn’t really true?

Michael Stipe:

Well, it was a very memorable kiss. Allen’s kiss, yes. We were working together. We worked several years with Tibet House out of New York City. There was a yearly benefit, an annual it to support Tibet House. I got involved through Patti Smith and through Philip Glass. And Allen was always there up until his death. Allen was standing side of stage when I was introduced as the magnificently talented and irresistible Michael Stipe. I got up and I did my thing, couple songs, walked off stage into the arms of Allen Ginsburg who grabbed me by shoulders, planted a kiss squarely on my mouth and said, “Irresistible.”

Michael Stipe:

I mean, the guy was this massive hero of mine from the age of 17. And here he is kissing me on the mouth and calling me irresistible. It was quite memorable and funny.

Debbie Millman:

That actually sounds really yummy. If you want me to be honest, I think that sounds really yummy. Michael, you were born in Georgia and that is also where your grandparents are from, but your family traveled a great deal while you were growing up, your dad was in the army. Where were some of the other places that you lived?

Michael Stipe:

It seems like I have this very particular memory that’s super specific to the time that we spent in Germany, outside of Frankfurt in a place called Hanau. Hanau was where, during World War II, they told everyone in Frankfurt to turn off their lights and they told everyone in Hanau to turn on their lights. So, Hanau was bombed to shut and then it became an army base after the war. That’s where my father was stationed in 1966 and ’67, I believe. I spent the Summer of Love there, I remember.

Michael Stipe:

But I have these very distinct, almost hour by hour memories of that time. I’m speaking to you actually from Athens, Georgia, which is where my family live and where my former band was based. I kept a home here that I bought when I was 25-years-old. I come back for holidays to visit family, but I wound up spending actually a huge part of the pandemic here. Why am I talking about that? You mentioned my grandparents.

Michael Stipe:

Well, interestingly, they’re not all from Georgia. My grandmother was born on a reservation in North Carolina called black mountain. She was actually born on black mountain. My grandfather is from South Carolina. My maternal grandmother is from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. And my pappy, who is my maternal grandfather, was actually born in Alabama, I think. But they all settled, for one reason or another, into Georgia. And that’s where, when my parents met each other, that’s where they were, here in Georgia.

Debbie Millman:

You mentioned some of your memories. I read about a unique memory that you have of your childhood. One, when you were four years old and upon looking at a light bulb, you decided you wanted to become the filament. The only way you thought you could do that was to bite into the light bulb, which you did. And your father and uncle found you trying to eat the bulb and ultimately tried to pull the pieces out of your mouth and then tried to put the light back together with glue to make sure you hadn’t swallowed it. I thought that was a really unique memory and sort of the beginnings of a baby artist right there.

Michael Stipe:

Wow, that’s beautiful. Thank you. I can actually move back a couple of years. I think I was for when that happened. I distinctly remember them being horrified at my attempt to become the filament. What’s interesting me, as an adult, what’s interesting is that I really meant it. I wanted to be the thing that lights up. I didn’t understand that, of course, I’m made of very different materials than the filament of a flashlight light bulb and that, that wasn’t going to happen, at least on this particular plane of existence, but I did try.

Michael Stipe:

A few years before that, and again, my mother and I were talking about this the other day, because she said, “Honey, you were so, so, so sick.” I contracted pneumonia and strep throat and then it turned to scarlet fever. That was the second memory that I had, my first memory being my sister’s birth when I was two years old. Then two months later, right before my third birthday, I had this terrible fever.

Michael Stipe:

William Burroughs told Patti Smith that they were both members of the Scarlet fever club. It boils your brain. It makes your synapses connect in a different way, according to William. Maybe we’re exaggerating a bit, I hope so, but if someone can exaggerate my second memory in life, I would hope that it would be William Burroughs. I had scarlet fever and so, maybe the idea that I could, at four years old, turn myself into the fulfillment was not so outrageous.

Debbie Millman:

Was it at that moment that you felt it was important that you actually light up a room?

Michael Stipe:

I was called Mike Stipe, the shining light, when my name was Mike. That was my nickname in kindergarten and in first grade. Now, that was also in Germany. Again, I remember virtually every day of it. I was a slow learner in many regards, so I was learning how to read and write. Then I was left handed. My mother made the decision that with … You are, too.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Michael Stipe:

My mother made the decision that they would not try to change me to … The idea that all people should be right-handed. So, she allowed me to be lefthanded, but I wasn’t learning at the same rate as other kids. I was in third grade before I learned how to read a clock. It was this abstract concept, the round thing with the arms, I couldn’t connect that to the passage of time.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. It wasn’t totally years later that there were digital clocks that … I’m always so sad when people rely on digital clocks, because I think there is something kind of wonderful about the idea of reading time as if that’s something that could be ever static.

Michael Stipe:

One of my first sculpture pieces, going back to, I guess it was 2006 or 2007, is an exact replica in cardboard of my first digital alarm clock, which also played music. So, it was this combination of kind of the future along with being able to listen to the radio. Two things that for me are profoundly important. My dream scape pretty much exists in this post apocalyptic future that’s got a lot of water, no Kevin Costner, but a lot of water, but it’s not terrifying. Everything’s held together by Scotch tape and staples, but it’s not a terrifying place. It’s actually quite welcoming.

Michael Stipe:

But how did I get into that now, Debbie? I have to say, I’m drinking my first cup of tea in a month. I haven’t had caffeine in over a month. I’m going very slow with the caffeine here. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but you might have to remind me why we’re going in different directions.

Debbie Millman:

Not a problem. I don’t mind doing that at all. Do you keep track of your dreams? Do you write them down when you wake up and analyze them?

Michael Stipe:

I’d like to say yes, but I don’t. No, I don’t. The ones that I need to remember, I remember. And then some of them, like last night’s stream, I’d really rather just let go of. The only thing I write on paper is my schedule and pop lyrics, everything else. Pop lyrics, even kind of wind up more on the computer these days than on paper. I don’t like my handwriting. I find it distracting and imperfect and I can write something brilliant. But if it’s a bad handwriting day, I’ll just throw it away or I’ll disregard the idea equally.

Michael Stipe:

I learned this with lyric writing, pop lyric writing. I can write something really bad. And if it’s a good handwriting day, I’ll think that it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, and it isn’t, you know.

Debbie Millman:

How do you come to whether or not you’re having a good or bad handwriting day? What are the criteria to create a good handwriting day?

Michael Stipe:

I look at it and it’s either appealing to me or it’s mortifying. It’s more often than not, mortifying.

Debbie Millman:

So, you have no control over the output.

Michael Stipe:

No. I don’t think that has to do with being lefthanded. I don’t know if you have a similar problem, but I do smear things a lot. So, there’s a lot of smearing that happens. I used to write kind of sideways upside down, but that was really painful. I think a lot of lefthanded people have that same. I also walk into doors a lot. Do you?

Debbie Millman:

Yes. It’s very funny. Terry Teachout, the theater critic for The Wall Street Journal and also a playwright and dramaturge, once told me that he falls a lot. He’s also lefthanded, and he said that he’s been told that lefthanded people see the world backwards and that’s why we often have spatial issues. I have a lot of spatial issues. So, yeah, I trip and fall and bang into things all the time.

Michael Stipe:

Yeah, me too. Me too. I’m really bad that way.

Debbie Millman:

Are you able to write mirror backwards? A lot of left handed people can do that without even realizing they can do it.

Michael Stipe:

Until I was in the seventh grade. And then I had a teacher who pulled me aside and she had gotten tired of … She would grade my papers by holding them up to a light bulb and grade the back of them. I wrote exact mirror image until …

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, me too.

Michael Stipe:

What is seventh grade? I was 12-years-old. Yeah. But she said, and this is probably almost a direct quote, she said, “Your brain is like two fish that are going to flip flop if you continue doing this.” I could visualize that and it terrified me, so I stopped doing it.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, well, I bet you could still do it. I don’t think it’s something you can unlearn. I actually think the opposite. I think that there’s something kind of wonderful about flipping back and forth, left brain, right brain. And it’s never flip flopped in a way that felt like a fish.

Michael Stipe:

It’s really good in meetings because I can read, when people have papers on their desk, I can read everything upside down. Is it upside down and backwards? It looks backwards. But yeah, I’m able to read-

Debbie Millman:

Just mirror backwards. Yeah, like da Vinci.

Michael Stipe:

Exactly. Well, I did think, and this is really an exclusive Debbie. I wouldn’t say this to many people, but for a moment, as a young, I’m going to place myself at 11, I thought that I was the reincarnation of Leonard da Vinci.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I love that.

Michael Stipe:

Because he had really bad hair and he wrote mirror backwards. I was like, okay, I’ve got bad hair and I write mirror backwards.

Debbie Millman:

It works for me. You first started reading about the club CBGBs when you were 13 in the magazine, I believe it’s called Rock Scene. That is also when you made your first recording. I understand your sister had one of those old school, audio tape recorders. And one day, when everyone had left, you locked yourself in the den in the basement, turned the machine on record and screamed for 10 minutes.

Michael Stipe:

All this is true, but it was a Cream Magazine. I can picture her bedroom and sitting on the corner of her bed with this … It’s like a secretary’s early cassette recorder, and what I would not give to have that tape today. I would really-

Debbie Millman:

That was my next question.

Michael Stipe:

I’d put a disco back beat on it and it would be in my mind anyway. The greatest hit single of all time. Yeah, that was my first recording, but I was 15 in detention, and this was in a different place. This was now, we were now in Collinsville, Illinois outside of East St. Louis. I was in detention in high school and I found, under my desk, a Cream Magazine with an article written by Lisa Robinson about the CBGB scene and how, compared to the popular music of the time, it was like watching an old movie on a black and white TV with static and noise, versus the kind of technicolor, cinematic music that was popular on the radio at the time.

Michael Stipe:

And she was drawing this obvious parallel to the more energetic and chaotic scene that was happening around groups like the Ramones, Blondie Television, Patti Smith Group, etc, at CBGB. And comparing it to what was on the radio, which at the time, was really uninteresting and boring.

Debbie Millman:

You were originally a fan of The Archies, I believe.

Michael Stipe:

I love The Archies. I have an older sister, but she wasn’t into music. My parents were not really into music that much, and so what I had was pop radio in Texas mostly. The formulative radio listening years for me were in Texas up until the age of 13. That’s when we moved outside of St. Louis and I was teased mercilessly for my accent, which was, had been at the time, was a Georgia, south Georgia accent, run through … And now, keep in mind, grandmother from North Carolina, grandfather from South Carolina, grandmother from Mississippi, grandfather from Alabama, they all grew up in Washington D.C., or Washington, as my grandmother would call it, and then south Georgia.

Michael Stipe:

Run that through Texas and run it through Germany. Plopped out at the age of 13 in a little kind of white flight drug-addled town outside of east St. Louis and I was teased mercilessly for my accent. Because I had really long eyelashes. I was a little faggy, but I was more just really a nerd. They called me the Maybelline cowboy and it was extremely painful. I wasn’t really deeply bullied until those years, but that’s when the bullying really began.

Michael Stipe:

I changed my accent very quickly. I took some play school scissors and I chopped my eyelashes off. I tried to fit in. It didn’t work. So, I got a very early lesson in trying to fit in, recognizing that, that’s not working and deciding to kind of be yourself. That led us on what I think is a pretty spectacular path.

Debbie Millman:

Talk about how you accidentally got a subscription to the village voice.

Michael Stipe:

Well, younger listeners would not remember this, but for a dime, you could get subscriptions to 12 magazines for a year if you just subscribe to some Random House kind of thing. I don’t know what it was. It was in the back of all magazines in newspapers, I mean the comic books rather. My sister, she got like red book for my mom. I don’t know, life magazine and all the magazines of the early ’70s, late ’60s. And The Village Voice seemed interesting to her, so we got a year subscription to The Village Voice.

Michael Stipe:

That introduced me to this whole other universe, of course, of New York culture. That played a really heavy and important role in my embracing punk rock at the age of 15 and recognizing that, that was my tribe and that’s where I was comfortable. Of course, there was no one around me who acknowledged or even knew about what was happening with punk rock and with the punk rock scene. I was really, really on my own. I mean, I made mimeographs at school that said, Tom Verlaine, Tom Verlaine was the founder of the band, Television.

Michael Stipe:

Tom Verlaine is God. I went to school early one day and I put up these posters, these mimeograph posters all over school. I almost shut the school down because the English teacher said, “Clearly someone is referring to the French poet Paul Verlaine. So they got that wrong, but how dare they blasphemy our Lord and savior by referring to a French poet as God.” There was this whole like investigation to find out who blasphemied the school. It was me, and it was Tom Verlaine from the band, Television, but nobody had any idea. Anyway, that was me at the age of 15. I was a little bit of a scamp, I guess.

Debbie Millman:

Did anybody ever find out it was you?

Michael Stipe:

They never did. There are other secrets from that era that probably are not repeatable on your podcast.

Debbie Millman:

I’m thinking back to my first introduction to The Village Voice, which kind of happened around the time I first, it was around 1980, ’82, when I first graduated college. I was already familiar with your work in R.E.M, but I came to Manhattan after going to school in Albany, New York. My dad had lived in the village while I was growing up, but I didn’t spend a lot of time there. Found this newspaper and thought it was sort of like a primer to the world.

Debbie Millman:

At the time, I was really, really afraid of coming out. I was afraid of the judgment. When I was doing a lot of my research on your background and your history, I was reading about how you grappled with your thoughts about coming out back in the early 80s. I read it out loud to Roxanne because I thought, she’s 14 years younger than me, and that’s a big difference in the world of coming out.

Debbie Millman:

I’m like, see, this is what Michael was feeling at that time. That’s exactly what I felt, like suddenly you’re going to be judged. It might affect everybody around you. You were really scared about what it would mean to your band-mates and how the world would treat the band. It was such a different time. I mean, we’re so lucky now that the world has changed to the degree it has, although it certainly has so much more to go. But reading what you were going through really helped her understand why it took me so long to come out. So, thank you.

Michael Stipe:

You’re welcome. I mean, my band-mates and everyone around me knew my sexuality all along. We lived together. They couldn’t ignore or disregard who was coming up into my room and leaving the next morning. Yeah, it was … I turned 20 years old in 1980. I think that LGBTQIA+, if I can use today’s terms and apply that to the late ’70s, that liberation, that moment should have happened in the late ’70s following civil rights and following the women’s liberation movement. That was a movement that was, in our country, certainly not just diminished, but squashed completely by the advent of aids, and of course the Reagan administration, and Reagan and Bush senior taking over the whole of the 1980s and into the early ’90s.

Michael Stipe:

It took a revolution and shifted it by a good 20 years, which is, I think why, when it finally did happen, it happened so quickly, that a lot of people’s heads are still spinning, trying to figure out where they are or who they are within it. Not only within the straight community, but also within, as we call it, the element LMNOPs, all of us. Trying to figure out who they are and where they fit in. This is something I really love about the 21st century. From the moment I did start speaking about my sexuality publicly, and for me, it was more a matter of privacy than anything else, but I just felt like I’d given so much of myself as a public figure and as a pop star to the public.

Michael Stipe:

I wanted to keep something to myself. Of course, I chose the wrong thing to keep. I now recognize how powerful it is to have people, like ourselves, in the public eye, and that, that’s profoundly important to people who are struggling with their own situations. But anyway …

Debbie Millman:

But I also think, you had already been bullied, and I think, once you’re bullied, once you feel damaged by who you are, it’s very hard to keep putting it out there because of the pain that you’ve already experienced and the you’re afraid you’re going to still feel.

Michael Stipe:

Well, the people I surrounded myself with as a 20 year old were people that understood who I was and they had no problem with that. In fact, I think it was encouraged that I be exactly who I am, because the result of that is, is that we were not your typical pop band at all. We were never really a rock band, although we use some of those sounds, but my being a part of it just radically shifted the focus of the band completely.

Michael Stipe:

I think those guys acknowledge and recognize, when I say those guys, Peter, Mike, and Bill, of course, former band-mates, but then also the people around us. It was clear that we were very, very different. Part of that I think really had to do with my sexuality and my identity and how that placed me in a very different sphere than most of what normal pop culture would offer you.

Debbie Millman:

One of the things that I do now, in addition to the podcast, is teach. I teach undergrads seniors at the School of Visual Arts. One of the things that I talk to them about is their hopes and dreams and what they want to be and what they want to do in their lives. I find really tragically that they’re already at 18, 19, 20, 21, beginning to think about what they can’t do, as opposed to what they can. They start limiting the possibilities of their life before they even try to make anything possible.

Debbie Millman:

I was really, really struck by something that I read that you said. You said that your greatest achievement has been deciding what you wanted to do at 15 and against all odds doing it. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what gave you the sense back then that it could be done.

Michael Stipe:

Delighted. Interesting that you talk about kids today using a process of negation to try to figure out who they are and how kind of sad and upsetting that is. My band or my former band, R.E.M, we used a process of negation quite regularly to figure out what we did not want to be. Not only as public figures, but as songwriters, the way that we dressed ourselves, the way we presented ourselves, the way we talked to the press, we knew all the embarrassing and fucked up tropes. So, we used a process of negation to figure out how to not be those horrible idiot cliches.

Michael Stipe:

I think we did a pretty good job of it over the course of 32 years. But going back to when I was 15, yeah, I mean, it was unbelievably naive of me to think that when I read these articles about the punk rock scene as a 15 year old, I read them, and what these people were saying over and over again were that we’re not special, we’re not particularly talented. We’re normal people. Anybody can do this. Anybody can be pick up a guitar. Anybody can grab a microphone and start to sing.

Michael Stipe:

I took it quite literal when they said anyone can do this. I was like, okay, that’s me, that’s what I’m going to do. It was an insane teenage dream that became an even more insane adult reality being the singer of a band. I became the singer because I didn’t know how to play an instrument. I didn’t know I had a voice when I was 18 years old or 15 years old or 19 when I started R.E.M. I certainly didn’t know I had this voice. I like my voice a lot. I think I’ve become a very good singer with a very distinct voice, but I didn’t know that at that age. I just knew that, that’s what I wanted to do.

Michael Stipe:

But then learning that you have to, not only have the audacity to present yourself publicly, but also that you have to have something behind that, there’s got to be at least a modicum of talent. I didn’t know you had to write songs. I didn’t know what a bass guitar was until we started our second album. I couldn’t identify the bass guitar sounds from the guitar sounds. I didn’t know that the one with four strings made all the low notes and the one with six strings made all the high notes. I mean, that’s how naive I was about music.

Michael Stipe:

And you could hear it in the early stuff. I mean, it’s quite … They’re beautiful. I’m not disregarding those recordings at all. They are, for some people, quite magical. But I hear, and I acknowledge a band and within myself, an artist learning how to, not crawl publicly, learning how to be a toddler publicly, learning how to poop his diapers a few times. Then if we can carry this a little further, I finally take the training wheels off the bike and I’m actually a songwriter and a lyricist.

Michael Stipe:

I wrote a song last night, Debbie, I’m so excited. I took this crazy moment at a house party in London, maybe 15 years ago with a bunch of friends dancing. And this thing that came out of my mouth, to a great friend of mine on the dance floor, and I always remember this phrase, well, it presented itself at two o’clock this morning with a song written on a Moog synthesizer in 2018, pre pandemic, that has been sitting around in the studio.

Michael Stipe:

Last night they came together and created this what … I’m going to go in tonight and see if there’s anything to it. But I woke up real excited that this insane phrase from 15 years ago, London house party has found its way into a song written on a Moog in 2018, and in 2021, boom, here it is. We’ll see. Hopefully, it’ll wind up on what is I’m certain to be solo record that’s going to be coming out probably within the next year. Hopefully. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You stated that it took you the better part of your 20s to recognize that insecurities are actually a superpower and something that you could utilize to allow your better work to come forward. You also realized that you didn’t have to be snippy and cynical. And you’ve said that quote, “Cold ass bitch was a coat I put on to protect myself and I realized I can take that coat off now.” Which I love. How did you come to that realization? How did you get to that point where you could throw off that coat?

Michael Stipe:

Yeah. Wow. I mean, I can’t believe that quote came out of my mouth, but it did. Anyone who knows the band from earlier days, I would come onto stage wearing four or five layers of clothing and usually a hat and maybe some glasses. As I got heated up during the performance, I would take them off. By the end of the evening, by the end of the performance, I was down to a t-shirt or down to my jeans, no shirt at all. I always felt the need to protect myself and to layer myself from the world at large.

Michael Stipe:

I was born a very shy person. I’m not anymore because I had to learn how to not be. The part of that, Debbie, that I find interesting is that I was really moving on instinct. Instinct was telling me that the things that are embedded into me and a part of who I am, the very part of my DNA that allows that insecurity, allows that vulnerability, part of it being queer, part of it being bullied, if you will, as a child, part of it being from a family that had this nomadic paratactic crazy, pick up and move every couple of years lifestyle, and having to really be fiercely independent or independent within a very tight family unit of two sisters and a mother and father.

Michael Stipe:

All of this created, I guess, an instinct that allowed me to, without acknowledging it and without having the language to describe it to myself, allowed me to use that insecurity and that vulnerability to create the persona that became who I am, and that gets into a whole other philosophical or deeply psychological, I guess, arena that we don’t need to go into. We become who we want to become and then we create who we want to become, and then we become them.

Michael Stipe:

But I didn’t have the language to recognize that until much, much later. When I did, I had established myself enough that it didn’t knock me backwards or throw me off my game. It simply allowed me to look at the earlier work and not disregard it so easily, and to acknowledge, wow, I did do stuff that was incredibly ballsy and incredibly courageous. I just didn’t see it as such, and I still don’t think of myself, I still have, what is it? Imposter syndrome. I always think that the next song or the next photo book is going to be the one where everyone and realizes that I’m a big fake. That, in its own regard, can be a great power, super power.

Michael Stipe:

I’m a little bit quoting Greta Thunberg who referred to, when she became a public figure through her activism, and then was being mocked by the world’s media, how embarrassing are we as Americans, but being mock for her voice, acknowledged publicly that her being on the spectrum, her being autistic was what she regarded as a superpower. I was like, whoa, hang on a second. Here’s a teenage girl telling me that this thing that we’ve thought of my whole life as something that’s a disability, she regards as a superpower. I have the superpowers within my vulnerability and my insecurities, and I’ve actually employed those throughout my entire adult life and with the work that I’ve presented as a public figure, as a pop star, as a singer songwriter, as an artist, as a photographer, etc.

Michael Stipe:

Wow. Thank you Greta Thunberg for allowing me to see myself a little more clearly. I’m sometimes embarrassed that it feels like I start every sentence with the word, I. I feel a little navel-gazey, but part of being a pop store allows you to not only acknowledge that the ego that it takes to get up on a stage and think that what you have to say, or sing, or present is valuable to someone beyond yourself. Also comes hand in hand with the humility of stepping back and recognizing that, if you start to believe your own myth, you’re screwed and the work that you do is vastly unimportant.

Michael Stipe:

You are really, really human, and that humanity, I think this sounds insane to me coming out of my mouth, but that humility combined with that ego is what I think, that friction can create beautiful work, whether it’s in a writer, performance artists and dancers, or in something as rigid as opera or ballet, or in something as freeform as my idea, theoretically, of what punk rock means.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. It’s interesting, in spending time researching a lot of the things that you were a part of and talked about and wrote about through the eighties till now. I was very aware of your awareness of the sort of tides as they go back and forth between acceptance and reverence and people then getting upset about the very things that they used to be excited about and how you have to temper how you consider what you mean to them by what you mean, sort of internally, and hold onto that in some way.

Michael Stipe:

Wow. Can you expand that?

Debbie Millman:

If that makes sense.

Michael Stipe:

No, can you expand that a little bit more? I’m really intrigued.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I remember you were talking about one of the albums that you released not being as popular as some of the bigger, more sort of stadium albums. I have stacks and stacks of your work.

Michael Stipe:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

The very, very early work appealed to a certain type of people. The later more stadium work I’m talking about, losing my religion and sort of the world of that super duper heavy, popular music that people … All the out of time, time. Then when you have something that might be smaller or less appreciated by the masses, it’s still work that has meaning. And if you start to, and I talk to Roxanne about this all the time, if you start to measure your value and worth by the amount of books that are sold, or the amount of albums that are sold, or the amount of downloads, or the amount of streams, you put your whole life in control of something that isn’t you.

Michael Stipe:

You’re also competing, and I can’t possibly compete with my past and I have no desire to, nor with whoever the pop stars of 2021 or 2022. I have no desire to even try to compete with that. I read an article, I think it was in The Guardian about Damon Albarn from the band Blur. He’s someone who I deeply admire. The point that they were making is, the writer was saying, here’s someone who had success and then did something quite unusual, which is didn’t try to continue having this success upon success, upon success on a mass scale, but spent the next 20 years doing exactly what he wanted to do, experimenting with different types of music and musicians and different ways of presenting music and performance together through stage, and theater, and what-have-you.

Michael Stipe:

He’s someone who I deeply admire, one. But it also, I was like, oh, wow. I wish I had done that the way he did that. It’s a day later, I’m thinking about what I have done. I’ve done okay. I think I’ve presented some pretty interesting things in the past decade, certainly since the band disbanded. It’s not at all I’m looking at the span of my life and I’m looking at time remaining, and I want to do a whole lot more.

Michael Stipe:

I actually thought about this yesterday as well at my age, I’m 61 now, and I look great. But at 61, most people are thinking about retiring. As an artist, I can’t retire. Even the thought of that is ridiculous. I look at my heroes, whether it’s Leonard Cohen, certainly Patti Smith, Edmund White, people that continue working until the end of their lives. Not because they want to, not because they’re having to pay the bills, not because they have some fragile ego that has to be supported by this desire to be appreciated from outside. No, it’s because you have to do it. It’s really not a choice.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I feel the same way. I just turned 60 and feel, while I do feel time in a way that I really haven’t before, I mean, it’s been escalating since I turned 50, but I also am more urgent in thinking, if not now, when? It reminds me of when I … I interviewed David Lee Roth two years ago when we were talking about 1984, and I asked him how it felt to be, at that moment in time, the most popular dude on the planet, the biggest album, the biggest tour, the biggest music video, everything that there was.

Michael Stipe:

Biggest hero.

Debbie Millman:

And his surprise … Yeah. I’ve talked about this at length. I asked him what it felt like, and he paused and he was extremely thoughtful, and he said, “You have to be really careful when you get to the top of the tallest mountain, because it’s always cold, you’re usually alone, and there’s only one direction.” I’ve suddenly felt really comforted by the idea that you can sort of slowly walk up the mountain, and maybe, if you’re lucky, not peak until the day before you die.

Michael Stipe:

Wow. I wouldn’t have expected that from David Lee. Roth. That’s incredible.

Debbie Millman:

I know, I love that. He said that. It really was extraordinary. All that being said, I do want to talk to you about a couple of your early pieces, only because they mean so much to me and sort of the formation of who I am. I’m going to be really selfish and I just want to ask you about a couple of songs because, had I thought at the time that 30 years later I’d be talking to you about these songs, I would’ve just said, Debbie, you never have to worry about anything again, because everything’s going to just be fine.

Debbie Millman:

I want to talk to you about Harborcoat. Harborcoat is one of my all time favorite songs. If somebody said, “Debbie, write down top 10 songs of your life,” it would be Harborcoat. Not only is it one of my favorite songs of all time, but there’s a line in it that I use sort of to describe a moment in time. At first, when the album first came out, I’m talking about the album, Murmur.

Michael Stipe:

It’s on Murmur. Yeah [crosstalk 00:36:32].

Debbie Millman:

I’m sorry, Reckoning. I’m going to say that again.

Michael Stipe:

Oh Reckoning, came out in 1984, right?

Debbie Millman:

Right. Reckoning came out … Yeah.

Michael Stipe:

[crosstalk 00:36:40].

Debbie Millman:

Yep. I have it, both the album and the CD. That’s how much I love this. I also have all the sort of digital versions of it because it’s just easier to listen to music that way, but I would never ever give these up. So, these are all the first pressings. You didn’t include the lyrics at the time. You had to really, really listen. People would argue, what does this mean? What does that mean? What is he saying here? What is he saying there? I want to talk to you about that in a second, but I want to ask you about this line. I spent my whole life waiting to ask you this, “There’s a splinter in your eye and it reads react.”

Michael Stipe:

If you’re asking me where that came from, I have no idea. I think it’s that instinct that we were talking about. I was a fan of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. I was very familiar with the cut up technique that they had employed through their own work. Mostly through the bands that were coming up with R.E.M through the Athens Georgia scene, specifically Pylon and The B-52’s, the idea of taking these random thoughts and ideas and throwing them together in a kind of Brion Gysin, William Burroughs mashup was kind of common.

Michael Stipe:

What does that mean? I mean, was 24. I was already kind of a pop star. The band had already gotten named the record of the year over Michael Jackson’s Thriller with our first album, which sold 40,000 copies at the time. Was that The Village Voice or?

Debbie Millman:

New York Times. New York Times rated it the number one album of the year.

Michael Stipe:

Over Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I mean, we were living, at the time, when we were York, which was a lot of the time on 44th Street at the Iroquois Hotel. It’s where James Dean lived when he was studying acting in New York. We were in his room, we were told. [Samo 00:38:31] used to go into the … He would tag the elevator, it was the [inaudible 00:38:38] elevator in New York City.

Debbie Millman:

Oh my God.

Michael Stipe:

But Samo was of course, [crosstalk 00:38:41]. I mean, it was just this moment, there was all this stuff was happening around us, but I would pick phrases out of the air and just throw them into the songs and not think twice about it. Where that came from, I have no idea, Debbie, but it sure does sound good. It means something to me most certainly. That’s the line in the song actually. You’re at the peak of the mountain right now. You pick the very best line in that song to focus on. Maybe we’ll get tattoos together at some point, but I think having a tattoo of my own lyric on my body would be a little creepy. I’d get a tramp stamp across the back so I’d never have to …

Debbie Millman:

Well, and now I use it. I use it as a way to explain what it means to cut off your nose to spite your face.

Michael Stipe:

Exactly.

Debbie Millman:

Which is so much more poetic.

Michael Stipe:

Exactly.

Debbie Millman:

My last question about that particular song, and then I’ll leave you alone about it, just as I said, it’s my life playlist. What is a Harborcoat?

Michael Stipe:

Well, to me, actually that line for me is about like, everything seems to be going right, but there’s something niggling, there’s something that’s irritating. There’s something that’s not quite on. And what is that? What you need to investigate, you need to step back, you need to look again and figure out, what doesn’t feel exactly? That’s when you have to change things slightly, maybe to just shift them incrementally.

Michael Stipe:

But Harborcoat, no idea. I mean, again, I was walking on stage in probably four or five layers of clothing. After the first song, the coat would come off, usually an overcoat. Actually, the hat would come off, and then a shirt, and then a jacket, and then a shirt, and then another shirt, and then I’d be down to a t-shirt at the time. Later, when I realized that sex sells, I would strip down to my bare body and sometimes shave my chest, because it looked better from a distance, depending on how big the venues were. But I was a skinny little thing back then. Yeah, I mean I was wearing the coat. I was literally embodying my own lyric. I was protecting myself.

Debbie Millman:

The other thing about the early albums, they are pop albums, and one could also call them rock albums, but you have a lot of love songs, Perfect Circle, Talk About the Passion. There are so many love songs that are almost like Trojan horses in these pop albums.

Michael Stipe:

In a way because I intentionally did not write love songs. I don’t think I used the word love in a song until our seventh or eighth album maybe. I mean, it was way, way, way, way-

Debbie Millman:

Oh, but Perfect Circle is one of the great love songs of all time really.

Michael Stipe:

Thank you. It’s such a sad song to me.

Debbie Millman:

I know, but that’s what I love about it. Why were you so opposed to having the lyrics on the sleeves?

Michael Stipe:

I sang using my voice as an instrument. Again, that’s something I picked up from Vanessa Briscoe from Pylon, I think talked about her voice as an instrument. I, again, very quite literally and naively, I said, “Oh, okay. My voice is an instrument too. That’s how I’ll use it. The early stuff, Murmur particularly, it’s like Sigur Ros, or This Mort Coil Elizabeth Fraser. People that …

Debbie Millman:

Cocteau Twins.

Michael Stipe:

Cocteau Twins are creating languages or are just singing nonsense without narrative. The narrative is within the emotion and the feeling of the voice. I was doing that without even knowing what I was doing. I was just throwing words out that … They didn’t have to make sense. It didn’t need that. It had my spirit and my soul and my energy and my charisma, whatever was there at the age of 22, all wrapped up in it, and that was enough. But it was around the time of Reckoning, the second album, and certainly by the third album, that I realized I couldn’t do this forever.

Michael Stipe:

The stuff that worked live for me wasn’t particularly working on record. I needed to sharpen my storytelling and I needed to start writing about something. At that same time, we were starting to travel the world and we were becoming politicized by again, the Reagan era, US intervention in Central America, cruise missiles in Europe. We were representative of America wherever we went. People were like, “What the fuck are you doing? What are you allowing your government to do in your name?” And we were like, “Excuse me, what?” We became quite activist and politicized simply by traveling the world and seeing who we were and what we represented from a distance and through other people’s eyes.

Michael Stipe:

The first lyric I wrote down was World Leader Pretend. That was on green, which was our fifth, sixth album. Sixth album, I think, and it was nine years after the band started. I didn’t feel secure in my abilities as a lyricist. They didn’t read well to me. You know what happened? I read the lyrics of a band that I really admired as a young man before I heard the song and the lyrics were not very good. It completely changed how I listened to the song. It felt like it stole the magic of music and the magic of a human emotional voice away from me as a listener and as a fan. I think I was … I’m putting this together as we speak, Debbie. I’m not kidding. I don’t think about this stuff. I haven’t heard Harborcoat since I was 27-years-old, but …

Debbie Millman:

Sorry. Sorry.

Michael Stipe:

That’s okay. No, I’m going to go listen to it after we’re done talking. I’m interested to hear … There’s also a song called Nine to Nine on one of those records.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Michael Stipe:

I want to hear that too. I have no idea what it’s about, but anyway, World Leader Pretend was the first song. I lifted that basically from Leonard Cohen. It’s using a military terminology to describe very, very profound, deep and upsetting emotions. The guy in the song is really eating himself alive and questioning his positions, questioning what he’s doing to himself. But I thought that, that was a really, for me, a watermark moment. So, I allowed that lyric to be in the packaging of the album. That was 1989.

Michael Stipe:

It wasn’t until losing my religion, which was 1991 that I allowed lip syncing in a video because it seemed fake to me. It wasn’t until after, I think Bill Barry left the group in 1996 that I started including all the lyrics just because I was like, okay, I’ve done that. I’m a really good lyricist now. When I’m good, I’m great. When I’m bad, I’m not mediocre, but I’m just bad. So, that’s okay. That’s something to be proud of. And I included all the lyrics, for better or worse.

Debbie Millman:

I want to talk to you about your current work. I’m going to ask you one last question about the older work, and that really has to do with a competition that I read that you had with Kurt Cobain to see who could write a song with the most yeah, yeah, yeahs.

Michael Stipe:

Kurt and I didn’t have a literal competition with each other. I said to self I’m going to write a song with more yeahs in it than any Nirvana song ever written. And it was only after the song was written that I said, “Hey, Kurt, guess what I’ve done?” We had a laugh about it, I think. But that song was written in Seattle on a Walkman, walking around the block of the studio that we were working at. Peter Buck had moved there, bought a house, started a family, and Kurt and Courtney bought the house next door. They literally shared a fence. It was an incredible moment for us as a band to find these people that were a little bit younger, but really our contemporaries and moving into their ascendants with a similar attempt at grace and style that we had carried the whole time that we were doing what we were doing as a band, as R.E.M.

Debbie Millman:

Well, in 2011, after countless awards, becoming one of the world’s most successful and respected bands of all time, selling over 85 million albums, you-

Michael Stipe:

More.

Debbie Millman:

More.

Michael Stipe:

More. It’s always more. They always-

Debbie Millman:

Always more.

Michael Stipe:

[crosstalk 00:46:37] the Americans-

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. 185 trillion.

Michael Stipe:

I always think over a hundred million. That’s that’s what I say.

Debbie Millman:

Over a hundred million. Yeah. Because when you see these things on wherever, it’s always like that moment in time. It’s like, again, that time thing. It’s like that moment.

Michael Stipe:

I’m actually teasing. It’s fun.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I love-

Michael Stipe:

We sold a lot of records.

Debbie Millman:

A lot of records.

Michael Stipe:

In 2011, we disbanded. We …

Debbie Millman:

Without any acrimony, without anger, you still make and record music, but you do so many other things now. You have a number of really beautiful books that I want to talk to you about. In 2018, along with Jonathan Berger, you published Michael Stipe: Volume 1, which is a collection of 35 photographs, combining intimate moments with images of people like Kurt Cobain and Patti Smith, as well as photos that you’ve also collected of people like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Roy Chon, and lots of others. You’ve said that photography is your primary way of keeping a diary. Is it true you have over 50,000 photos in your collections?

Michael Stipe:

There’s a lot more. And if I turn the camera, we’re speaking on Zoom for your podcasters, we see each other, but I can turn just slightly. Do you see that mountain right there?

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Michael Stipe:

That’s about 50,000 negatives, and that’s just in this studio. I have three studios. This one, that’s stuff that we’ve actually gone through and digitized. So, those are secure in more than one medium now, but 50,000 doesn’t begin to touch it. I use photography as a way of remembering where I was and who I was with and as a way of sparking my memory. Patti Smith writes everything down. I just don’t write things down. I’m not very good at that. I never have been. I’m really good with taking a picture, and that will spark all kinds of memories, down to, what was the meal? What were we eating? Who was at the end of the table, who I maybe didn’t talk to, but they were still present, they were still there in this incredible moment?

Michael Stipe:

I’ve had this extraordinary life surrounded by and meeting incredible, incredible people. I’ve traveled the world. I’ve seen so many things I’ve been in so many places that people dream of. Even talking about it, I’m in shock that, that’s my life. That’s something that I am able to participate in. It’s so thrilling and so exciting. Those pictures are a way for me to remember that and a way to reflect back and have a diary, keep a journal. That’s my journal.

Debbie Millman:

I believe one of your first cameras was one your father had gotten you from Vietnam.

Michael Stipe:

He bought it in Korea and it was a Nikon FM2. It was stolen when I was 21 years old, along with a lot of weed and a jar full of pennies, but his insurance covered it and he got another FM2, which I have to this day. Yeah, I used it when I was 14 years old. That was when he first loaned it to me and I started taking pictures as a 14 year old. It wasn’t until I was 15 that I discovered music. So, photography is really my first love in terms of mediums. In that first book that you mentioned, Volume I, Jonathan Berger went through about, I think it was 35,000, 50,000 of the images that I had on my computer and he picked the 35 or 34 images that he thought represented me as a visual artist.

Michael Stipe:

In a way of presenting me, not as a pop star with a hobby, but as someone who’s been actually doing this all along to a larger audience. I’m very grateful to him for the experience of putting that book together and actually having to take a step back and look at myself and my life through someone else’s eyes. It was really exciting to see the choices that he made.

Debbie Millman:

One of the things that I think is so interesting about your books is that they work on a whole slew of different levels. There are books of photography, so obviously they include photographs which could work on their own on a wall somewhere. But then they’re also talking to each other. They’re communicating throughout. There is, in all of your books, a very specific linear narrative that changes from looking at one individual piece on a wall to communicating in multiple ways just by the virtue of the way that they’re ordered and the way they show up and the size of the photo in the book. How involved are you in the actual layout and the design of these books?

Michael Stipe:

With music and with R.E.M, we always thought that the first song on a record is a really important way of introducing someone into a world of here’s a universe that you may not have explored before and here’s our version of a different type of reality. That first song is really important, the first notes. I employed that recently on the Velvet Underground cover version that I did of Sunday Morning for Todd Haynes’s documentary about the Velvet Underground. I did it with Hal Willner, my dear friend who died recently of COVID.

Michael Stipe:

It was the last thing that Hal and I did together. But I wanted, knowing that it was going to be the first song on the album, I wanted to introduce the album in a way that would acknowledge that there’s no way that anyone can ever copy or mimic the brilliance of the Velvet Underground’s first album, but we can present variations on what those songs mean to different types of artists and musicians. So, I opened it with this long keening held clarinet note that for me, I stole from Gershwin, from George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Michael Stipe:

But I presented that to the musician and said, “This is what I want. I want it to hold for way too long and then we’ll bring the song in underneath it and allow that to be the introduction to the album.” With the books, I’m doing the same thing. If you look at the beginning of each book, there is something that … In the second book, you’re literally, the first image is a window that’s blackened and it’s inviting you into this unknown place. That book is quite, I think, accomplished, the first book as well, the Jonathan Berger book. The third book with Tilda Swinton on the cover is my pandemic book.

Michael Stipe:

It is a little bit like me in third grade, not being able to read the clock quite right. It’s a little stunted. It started as something that was quite tight in terms of the idea that I had for what the book was going to be. It became something very different under the madness that became my COVID year of 2020. I went a little bit cuckoo, like I think a bunch of us did, and that is well represented in the book. You need a little bit of a legend to get through it. Now, the book does come with a QR code with me audio describing.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, it’s a little podcast.

Michael Stipe:

[crosstalk 00:53:33].

Debbie Millman:

If you scan the QR codes, you … No, it’s in a good way. For our listeners, if you scan the QR codes on various pages, they lead you to audio recordings of Michael talking about why he included the photographs and thinking about the narrative arc, the placement, which is super important. It’s a real sort of multi-layered experience that I think is really interesting for the format.

Michael Stipe:

It helps unravel the puzzle and it shows my intention. My intention as an … No, I hate the word artist, but as an artist, my intention is always, always to not have anyone feel left out. I want every single person that encounters anything that I do to feel smart when they walk away from it, to feel like they get it. They understand it on some level, whether it’s visual, whether it’s emotional, hopefully whether it’s a deeper understanding of themselves or a deeper understanding of something that’s outside of what they might expect from a former pop star.

Michael Stipe:

I want everyone to feel smarter when they come away from this. Even if they just go, “Wow, that’s a really pretty picture of Tilda Swinton. Isn’t she a magnificent creature?” Well, yes, she is. She also represents a ton of stuff that this book explores, and that’s why she’s on the cover. But anyway, I want everyone to step away feeling smarter. One of my great heroes is Dolly Parton, and I think she’s really good at describing her intention behind her work, the same way everyone should feel lifted by and a part of what the piece is.

Debbie Millman:

The thing that I like so much about the books though, is that they, while they are really inclusive, I don’t think that they would exclude anybody, they have different ways in. In terms of your brand new book, that to me feels more like a play, a play with different parts. You’re going through it. There are very distinct emotions that you experience, whether you’re looking at, whether you’re looking at photographs, I think there’s something kind of almost installationy about it. Whereas, our interference times feels much more conceptual. It’s much more abstract. It feels like you’re diving into an experience. A lot of the photographs feel like they’re surrounding you, whereas in Still Life, portrait Still Life, you feel like you’re going into something, if that makes any sense.

Michael Stipe:

You completely nailed it. My mouth is hanging open. I can’t believe that you just said what you said about the new book, because all the work that I’m doing right now is actually from … If you can picture two things, Uncle Vanya and the film Birdman. A lot of it is coming from a proscenium stage using language of the theater, and conceptually using all these ideas of being either an actor or someone on the side who’s watching, who’s a significant and important part of the production, but not in the public eye.

Michael Stipe:

I’m using all these, and God knows there’s tropes., there’s layer upon layer, upon layer of stuff around that. But that’s what I’m using, not only in this book, but it in all the work that I’m doing right now in the studio. And you just nailed it on the head with no provocation at all. I’m super-

Debbie Millman:

So good.

Michael Stipe:

That’s super exciting to me, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. Well, I’m really loving the work and I think especially, portrait Still Life feels like it needs to be it explored materially, if that makes sense, sort of in a location.

Michael Stipe:

Thank you. It will be in Milan, fall of ’22, at the ICA Milano, the Institute of Contemporary Art. They’re doing my first giant exhibition of my work and it’s going to flow on these three books. The vases that are in the book, which are real vases that were photographed, made by the ceramicist, Caroline Wallner, and the books, which are real books. But in that language that we were just speaking of, of the theater, they’re photographed to look like a digital image of a book rather than a real book itself.

Michael Stipe:

So, what you’re looking at is a real image that looks like a fake image. And if you look closely, you just get a little shadow here and there and you realize that the background of the books, the edges of the books are not exactly the same from one picture to the other. They are real and so they’re going to be a part of it. Some of them represent people who are no longer with us on this plane, the ghost images, the ghost books. And some of them represent people that are with us, but it’s all people who, for one reason or another, last year, in trying to put together a book of portraits of people who I found to be immensely courageous and vulnerable at the same time, and using that vulnerability to allow a humanity into their work or into the way that they presented themselves as public figures, or as people in my lives.

Michael Stipe:

Or as people that are not public figures, but were pushed into the public sphere through one incident or another, black lives matter having a huge amount to do with it. All those people found their way into my consciousness in pandemic 2020, and therefore into this book. It’s a little bit of my shout out song. My best friend called it that, the James Brown shout out song to everyone in 2020 who caught my eye and touched my heart.

Debbie Millman:

Well, it’s a beautiful book. I think you also rekindled an interest that you had in fonts and designed some of the fonts yourself for the book.

Michael Stipe:

Speaking of design. I mean, there are two things that … The one thing on earth that horrifies me more than anything is injustice. When I see injustice, I become … I see red. I just become furious. The second thing after injustice that bugs me, makes me crazy is bad design.

Debbie Millman:

Oh yeah. Yeah, let’s just talk quickly I just want to ask you about the fonts, because you did design the fonts, right?

Michael Stipe:

Well, I pulled them from the 1970s. That’s the era that I was a teenager and all these things, like all these important things like discovering my own sexuality, deciding to embrace that within myself, discovering punk rock and the idea of being a pop star and being a public figure, embracing that. All of the fonts that were happening in the ’70s, that’s my sweet spot. Had I not found music or photography, I think I would’ve been a very failed graphic artist or graphic designer. I explored that in this book under lockdown.

Michael Stipe:

I pulled fonts that reminded me of the 1970s and spoke to me as such. Then I used them in books that again look like, either computer generated images of books or they look like really trashy collages, which was of course intentional, but I cut and pasted my version of these heroic and vulnerable people into books and then re-photograph them for my book.

Debbie Millman:

Michael, it has been an absolute honor talking with you today. Thank you so much for joining me on Design Matters.

Michael Stipe:

Thank you. That was awesome.

Debbie Millman:

Michael Stipe’s latest book is an untitled book of Portraits and Still Lives. You can find out more about him and see a lot more of his work on michaelstipe.com. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting 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 to talking with you again soon.

Saleem Reshamwala:

Hi, I’m Saleem Reshamwala, host of a podcast called Far Flung, from TED. In each episode, I’ll take you to a new place across the globe to get lost in a new vibe and tap into surprising ideas, from tiny suspension bridges in the mountains of Nepal, to journalists who’ve taken the city buses to deliver the news in Caracas. Let’s tap into what the world is thinking on Far Flung. Stay tuned after this episode to hear the trailer.

Richard Tuttle:

Every artist wants more than anything else to be recognized. But once it’s recognized, you go so quickly into the fathead syndrome.

Speaker 3:

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, artist Richard Tuttle talks about what he’s up to as he enters his ninth decade.

Richard Tuttle:

Life is its own reward. But how do you live successfully your entire life?

Youngme Moon:

Hi. I’m Youngme Moon.

Mihir Desai:

I’m Mihir desai.

Felix Oberholzer-Gee:

And I’m Felix Oberholzer-Gee.

Youngme Moon:

And together, we host After Hours, a podcast from the TED Audio Collective.

Mihir Desai:

We’re friends and colleagues at Harvard. And on the show, we discuss news at the crossroads of business, society, and culture.

Felix Oberholzer-Gee:

Join us each week as we catch up after work and see what’s trending, share our thoughts, and disagree with each other. Sometimes a lot.

Youngme Moon:

Is Apple losing its mojo?

Mihir Desai:

What’s behind the industry behind the chip shortages we’re all struggling with?

Felix Oberholzer-Gee:

Who’s winning the streaming wars, and should you fear inflation?

Youngme Moon:

So check out After Hours, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Debbie Millman:

Richard Tuttle is one of the master artists of our time. His work has revolutionized the landscape of contemporary art, and includes painting, drawing, sculpture, bookmaking, printmaking, installation, and poetry. Over the course of his 60-plus-year career, he has constantly challenged the constraints of material, medium, and method. He draws beauty out of humble materials and creates art that simultaneously exists in the present moment, reflects the fragility of the world, and allows for individual experiences of perception.

His work has been exhibited in hundreds of galleries and museums all over the world, and is included in important collections everywhere. He is represented by Pace Gallery, and an exhibit of his objects is currently on display at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. He’s been called a conceptual artist and a post-minimalist artist, but the labels aren’t nearly as interesting as the art itself. Often minimal, innately witty, rigorously intelligent, and always deeply moving. Richard Tuttle, welcome to Design Matters. This is an absolute honor to be talking with you today.

Richard Tuttle:

Thank you, Debbie. Thank you. Thank you. You lift my spirits.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. You lift mine. Richard, is it true that you believe that there are only two kinds of artists in the world, those that can use the color green and those who can’t?

Richard Tuttle:

Oh, that’s fun. I guess we should start with a base where you could speak about a New York artist. There has been a strong drift, anti-nature, which speaks about life in New York. When it rains, we go out. We show up. When it snows, we don’t play around with nature. We’re all out to defeat nature.

Artists who make art along those lines would never be able to use green, because green, it suggests. I once asked my great friend and mentor, Agnes Martin, why she didn’t use green, ever use green in her painting. And her response was, “Because it would remind people of nature.”

Debbie Millman:

Interesting. I have a whole slew of questions for you about Agnes, but I want to get to your fringing a little bit first and then talk about your friendship with her and her influence. You were born in Rahway, New Jersey. You were raised in Rosselle.

Richard Tuttle:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Your dad was an electrical engineer and your mom had hoped to go to art school, but she didn’t. Why wasn’t she able to go?

Richard Tuttle:

Depression. Great depression.

Debbie Millman:

Your mom seems to have lived a life full of art, nevertheless. I read about how you had a long kitchen with a rather long kitchen table. And on one end she might be cooking, but on the other end, there was always some sort of project she was working on with paper mache or puppets, or any number of things. Would you say that she’s the first person that introduced you to art?

Richard Tuttle:

I think it’s one of these cases of getting it together or connecting some dots. Because when I was very young, I was the type of person who probably is just born with a philosophical turn of mind. I asked, as many of that type do, where they must say, well, what is this all about? Why am I here? What’s good, what’s bad? What’s the whole thing?

Probably that those questions gained intensity with the fact that there was a war going on. I think we can’t underestimate how important our earliest experiences are in this world. I didn’t know what art was or what it meant to be an artist. There was no real art in our home.

Debbie Millman:

Your mom had been an only child and had suffered quite a lot of boredom as she grew up. And you’ve talked about how she vowed that her kids would never be bored in the same way, which is why she had all these projects in the house. But you’ve talked about how you overheard someone when you were a young man in school, saying that they were bored and went home to ask her what the word meant, as you had never heard it before. She must have been a really fun person to be around.

Richard Tuttle:

Yes. Also, complex. One of my issues at the moment is how we sustain these unsustainable opposites. I think that’s in my work. It’s always been about the intense interest in a stoppage, in the fact that we know nothing stops. We don’t stop and the world doesn’t stop. You turn your back and the plant has grown another leaf. There are just so many questions that come when you deal with stop, where motion is an expression. It’s a form in movies and videos and so on where we can express this constant motion we have. It can be very necessary, but it still doesn’t to me, interest me as much as the mystery of the stop. Does water ever stop?

Debbie Millman:

Part of the interest that I have in your work is my fascination with things that start. The origins of creativity, the origins of consciousness, of ingenuity, of obstacles, those are the things that I tend to be really endlessly fascinated with. Which is why my podcast is so much about how somebody begins the journey of their life and how that ends up influencing how they become who they become.

Richard Tuttle:

Yeah. In my pantheon of touchpoints, the color orange represents a beginning. And whenever I do a work of orange, it informs me that this is a beginning, like a new chapter or a new work, or a new direction. If you begin, there has to be an origin. I don’t like to be held to one side or the other in that question, and so It’s a bittersweet thing. But again, art can handle that type of thing, and I don’t know much else can.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve been an artist for your entire life. There are really very few people that could say that that’s all they’ve ever done is make art. And you’ve made art in so many different genres, so many different categories. Do you remember that first experience of being creative? Do you have any sense of when you realized that your role on this earth was to make art?

Richard Tuttle:

Yes. Because of COVID rehab, I’ve taken up singing. It’s been about two years and I had an excellent, excellent teacher who brought me to the point where I could do a recital.

Debbie Millman:

Wow, I should have asked you to sing. I didn’t know any of this.

Richard Tuttle:

I know. You can have it. I’ll do anything. Yeah. As you very well pointed out, this focus has been on visual arts, the visual side of things. But in doing this recital, I actually went on stage identifying myself as an artist of song. I, in my younger days, would’ve not given so much credit to songwriting and singing of songs, performances and so on, because I just didn’t think it was up to the level of the visual arts.

But when I gave this recital, in the middle of my song, my right arm began shaking. I didn’t know if people in the audience could see it or not, but as an artist, performer, I knew that sort of instinct where you can just turn that into emotion for sake of the audience. It’s all for the sake of the audience.

It proved to me that these questions of what is an artist, who is an artist, how are these things known, that doesn’t matter how many shows you make or how much success, or how many museum collections you’re in. It doesn’t ever come to the answer of what it is. It’s something about the head and the body relation that as a singer, I completely learned myself as an artist in my body and the way the song can be remembered, in front of an audience, for example.

That’s not in your head. I can’t possibly do that in my head. But if it’s coming from my body, I can, and I love it. And it’s like a release. It’s a kind of freedom that I never got out of my head.

Debbie Millman:

In the way that you are now, approaching learning how to sing, it seems like a very different approach than the way you learned how to make art.

Richard Tuttle:

Uh-huh.

Debbie Millman:

Can you talk a little bit about how you began to understand what you wanted to do when you were making art? You didn’t go to school for art. You did have an art education at Trinity, but it wasn’t an art school.

Richard Tuttle:

No.

Debbie Millman:

And you created your own art education while you were at Trinity. After you graduated Trinity, I understand you were still hoping to go to art school, and also didn’t want to get drafted. So you applied to the University of Chicago. You got in and your dad helped you get a job as a bellhop at the Drake, one of the biggest hotels in Chicago at the time.

You were all ready to go, as you put it, to put on your little bellhop cap and work for tips. But you ended up also getting in at The Cooper Union and going there. I understand that the euphoria of going there lasted about a week, and then you decided that you were going to leave. Talk about that time and what that was like for you.

Richard Tuttle:

This was the Camelot period and things were moving very fast. Suddenly, the world became youthful and it needed expression. When I was at Trinity, I did a yearbook. And in those days, we pasted up each page and we used a high enamel gloss paper for that, because it photographed well and so on. When I got to New York, I still had some of that paper. I’ve kept it. And then I began making these three-inch paper cubes, which I felt were my first real beginning of my work. They were of interest because they took the cube and penetrated it in different ways. So each work was a unique and different penetration of the cube and any others. They were very lightweight. You could hold them in your hand.

But this notion of when you begin your art or how that happens, for example, Velázquez was already painting great work when he was 16. I think those juices, those forces in us can begin in teenage years. Those cubes, when I say that was the beginning of my work, going back to the idea, I’m a New York artist, that was the beginning of the New York work that is still and quite mysteriously so, part of my ongoing work. When you emerge and, it’s a kind of almost primitive ritualistic thing, you emerge, that point stays part of you for as long as you continue. My emergence point happened to be, I think a part of it, of an archaic expression.

Through the cycles of time and so on, the archaic will come back in different guises, but it was very important in my work that I saw or felt that the historic cycle ended with minimal art. And that was this part of my side to start a new cycle. One of the reasons I like going on with creative work is because as a genre, we know so little about it. What it is, how it works. What happens? How does an individual relate to it? Is it part of them or part of some parallel existence? I don’t know. I don’t know any of it, but those things can only be known through having a body of work as data. I don’t know. Part of my service is to create that quality of data.

Debbie Millman:

From what I understand, I think you met Agnes Martin by just calling her on the telephone, and you became lifelong friends.

Richard Tuttle:

Yeah. I think I do perhaps have a privileged understanding of her work, which most people don’t. So if I’m invited to an interview or to a symposium or something, and I will go there and try to say what I feel remains to be said about, or hasn’t been said before about Agnes’s work. Because to me, it keeps developing too.

I’m always learning more about it. I’m currently involved in doing a show of Alexander Calder for Los Angeles. It’s the same where I feel his work has not been shown with the understanding I think it should be shown with. With contemporary art, you have to be ahead of the times. That’s the rule.

By the time you’re dead, there are lots of your ideas that you can’t manage and process to the public benefit. Somebody else has to do it. Because you might think then it would be like an artist historian or so, but artist historians have a completely different road than an artist would.

Debbie Millman:

Why do you think that Calder’s work isn’t as appreciated as it should be now?

Richard Tuttle:

He was a kind of artist who was motivated by a need to speak. He had something he really wanted to say, and of course, it was about him himself. The work came out in ways where it could be charming and dazzling, or easy to access in terms of its motion and so on. But in terms of what he was saying about himself and the world, and art and all these topics, he hasn’t been successful in that sense.

I think he himself is a fascinating creative talent, because he did go to the end of the branch. He really did go to the end, like van Gogh or Pollock, or some of these people, who you don’t get back, who can’t find their way back. But he did, could find his way back. But the sacrifice was that somehow the world doesn’t know what he was saying or.

Also, the importance of his influence, the kind of spaces that he achieved in sculpture went into the abstract expressionist and painted spaces. If you realize that each one is better for understanding that, and how art passes the boundary of … For example, my work, if it’s sometimes painting, sculpture, drawing, it’s really about the passages, what happens between drawing. When drawing becomes painting, or painting becomes drawing, or painting becomes sculpture. That’s what’s exciting.

Debbie Millman:

What do you think happens in those experiences, in those moments?

Richard Tuttle:

Our spirits can rest. I think, in our lives, the civilization that we’ve built, which is great, but we haven’t figured out how our spirits can have rest. What’s the longevity of our civilization if we don’t provide the spirits who are intrinsically, they are that civilization and they can’t rest? I see that on the street. I see that on people’s faces and so on. To me, part of contemporary art is choosing the subject matter, what it is you’re going to do.

And that in contemporary art, it almost matters more ever than in history, because there are so many possibilities. I feel naturally aligned in terms of my choice of subject matter, with Calder’s choice of subject matter. And there’s how many generations between this one, but really looking forward to the show. Just offering an entrance to these analogous expressions fulfilled through need of just two artists. Any two artists, it doesn’t matter who.

Debbie Millman:

Agnes Martin helped you get a job at Betty Parson’s gallery, which ultimately gave you your first show, but you also met a lot of the New York artists at that time. You met Ad Reinhardt. You met Mark Rothko. Talk about the influence that Ad Reinhardt had on you. I know that you’ve said that if Agnes Martin was the mother of your work, Ad Reinhardt was the father.

Richard Tuttle:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My position, as I see it, is probably concocted. Because when I started my work, I felt the great achievement in American art and recent art was the abstract expressionist. And that part of my work, as I saw that, was to show my respect for that art. Because other forms of isms had come along by that point, and I was not so interested in them as I was in the ism abstract expressionism. The way I handled that was I felt that I couldn’t … What is it?

It’s almost like maybe the image comes from a marathon race or something like that, or a horse race, where you can’t really get your stride until you move in front of the pack. Something like that. What I had to do was make something, achieve something that was equal to what they achieved as that group. I think at that point, let’s say the critics and the art historians were not as close to the jugular as an artist had to be, because talking about them as a group had to be supported for many reasons.

But what I saw was that all of them were involved in using time in their art, the same way you would use a piece of steel in a sculpture, the same way you would use the color red in a painting. That, physically. Whether it was Pollock, he recorded time with all these strips. Or Mark Rothko. You look at a Rothko, each time you focus on one of the colors, it’s a time and the overall painting is this particular relation in time. He was the last one to fulfill that work.

The black painting, which was the initial experience where you see black, that’s A. And then the time it takes you for the painting to show that it’s actually color is red, blue, green is the art of the painting. And that the B, you experience it as space in a sort of emotional way. But in a measured, physical way, you experience this as time. The achievement in terms of art? Yes. Is that a special definition of art? Probably so.

But there have been very few times in the history of the world where people have cared enough to create a conception of art in the first place, and then project a goal out of that. And then achieve that goal on top of it. My God, this is amazing. I felt I had to equal all of that in my own work. I think in the cloth orthogonals, which they have no top, no bottom, no front, no back, they can be on the floor, they can be on the wall, each one is a specific statement. It’s something I created to answer my needs to express myself.

Debbie Millman:

Well, what I’m so struck by, especially in your early work, was how much criticism you got.

Richard Tuttle:

Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Betty Parsons often said that she’d never dream of giving an artist who was younger than 35 a show, but she gave you one at 24. You were then included in a survey show in the Whitney in 1975, that provoked such dramatic reactions from observers and critics that it ultimately cost the curator, Marsha Tucker, her job for including you.

One of the critics, Hilton Kramer, of The New York Times, he eviscerated your work in a scathing column in The New York Times. And he stated, “Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s dictum, ‘less is more’, in Mr. Tuttle’s work, less is unmistakably less. One is tempted to say where art is concerned, less has been never as less than this.” First of all, all great work provokes some type of uncertainty and vulnerability and fear. But what was so controversial about the work that resulted in Kramer’s disdain, utter disdain?

Richard Tuttle:

Yeah. Well, I’ve actually wondered that a lot myself, because I can see that my work is for everyone. But clearly it isn’t.

Debbie Millman:

Well, it wasn’t at that point.

Richard Tuttle:

Whatever the romance of the life of the artist, it’s real.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Richard Tuttle:

It’s a life and death thing.

Debbie Millman:

Now, all these years later, all these decades later, The Wall Street Journal has stated you are the most influential and the most misunderstood contemporary artist in the time since that faithful Whitney show, the curator, Marsha Tucker went on to create the new museum in New York City.

Since then, the LA Times art critic, Christopher Knight, said this about the same art that Kramer crucified. “The work collectively ranks as Richard Tuttle’s most distinctive contribution to art history.” How do you make sense of reviews? How do you make sense of criticism? How do you keep yourself both separated from it, but also cognizant of it?

Richard Tuttle:

Well, this is part of why it’s such an extraordinary field. Because every artist wants more than anything else to be recognized. But once it’s recognized, you go so quickly into the fathead syndrome. That kills the work, because if you don’t do the work, the Fathead cannot do the kind of work that is worthy of recognition there.

And yet, it’s also yes, to be aggressive, to matter, to have a profile that means something to the world, on the one hand. On the other hand, none of that matters at all. The work is the only thing that matters. People have criticized me, I think, correctly for being too intense, to turn it up to a point, an intensity level that can’t be followed.

Debbie Millman:

Why?

Richard Tuttle:

Well, for me, one of the definitions of art that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is that it’s that thing which you can care so much about. Whatever you can care to your maximum possibility, that’s what art is. What can we do, or what is given life and the magnificent, the wonders of life? What can you say? What can you do? What can you think? Also, emotions. You can only process them. They could happen to you 50 years ago, but you can process them. What do you do in the meantime?

I’ve said this, that life is its own reward. But how do you live successfully your entire life? I find Asian wisdom shows that life is developmental, that you first have to learn life, whatever it is for you know, and then you have to stand out and you have to think for yourself. You have to, in a way, cancel what we learned. And then when that’s done, then you have to make a world for yourself. That’s the stage I’m in at the moment.

So many people will pass away because retirement is boring, but retirement, it can be also for some people, the best time of life. To have a life that equals life in a way, you have to succeed in each phase of life. And that requires reversing gears and sending the course in the opposite direction and so on.

All that to me is analogous to art strategies. That to live the kind of life, what I find equals life is to make the kind of art is the same as making the kind of art that I think equals art. Thank you, Mr. Kramer, for pointing that out.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve talked about how you feel like our culture today is very anti-hand, that people think it’s better to work with the head. Everybody’s aspiring to go to college so they don’t have to work with their hands. Yet, hands are a real source of intelligence, and you divorce yourself from a part of your intelligence without them.

Richard Tuttle:

I find many people need a mirror to the world. We’re living in this thing, and things change. There’s a current that blows through humanity one day to the next. And then the color green looks good this day, and the color purple looks good this day. We’re part of this fluidity and I think that’s part of my enjoyment of life is to sense these flows, these changes that take place. The index finger has, you could say, replaced the hand.

Debbie Millman:

Hmm. I love that. I love that.

Richard Tuttle:

It’s funny, but when I look at my index finger, anybody, you look at your index finger, you see how much it’s used. But it is the finger we point with. Your interest in the beginning, for example, beginning is rich because it’s that place from which we point. The potential in art is to bring things from the darkest side and from our doubts and from utter chaos. I’ve actually identified the most frightening thing for human beings is the absolute absence of light. And that, because even some people say our bodies produce cells, there are cells in our bodies that produce light, the same thing as light.

And so absolute no light means those cells cannot produce light either. That is true horror for us. In order to find rest for the spirit, those fears, those enormous fears have to be placated. Again, I think that for me, the role of the great artist is to placate those fears and give us, our spirits rest, and life. Hats off to anyone willing to contribute. Thank you, Debbie, for what you’re doing, because it gets out there. I can’t get it out there like you can.

Debbie Millman:

Well, thank you. Before I let you go, I do want to ask you about your current show. You just closed a show, a beautiful show of sculptures at Pace. Absolutely stunning. You have a show up now at Bard Graduate Center and it’s titled What Is The object? And the show features never-before-exhibited work, a personal collection of what might seem to be ordinary objects.

Furniture that you’ve designed to best display the objects. Some of these objects include duck decoys, a fragment of a Dutch ceramic, various bowls, various cloths and textiles, coins. What you refer to as the most beautiful camera, a Prussian cast iron urn, a set of plastic copies of flatware from MOS, from the 1980s, which man, I’d love to get my hands on, which you annotate as great design.

A policeman summer motorcycle hat, said to be from Chicago, in which you find the bulge of the head extraordinary to look at when fitted to a hat like this. As well as glassware, plastic ware, folk art, cookie cutters and more. It’s a beautiful show. What was the motivation of doing a show about specific things you collect?

Richard Tuttle:

Wow. That is an excellent question. I really would love to help people viscerally feel what it is to be alive in our culture, to be here and in this place. Because I think it’s beautiful in the first place. But also because of the singing, my singing, I’ve gotten into Stephen Foster, who people say is the father of American pop music. I’ve been reading a biography of him.

When he was a boy, almost every song that was written … Because in America, it was the first great cultural export of America was this new pop music, and certainly before painting or sculpture. Almost every song of that period had the word old, O-L-D in it.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, wow.

Richard Tuttle:

Yeah. If you go through a newspaper today with the ads and all that, the word that comes up most on the list is the word new.

Debbie Millman:

Huh. I would’ve thought love.

Richard Tuttle:

Well, I would’ve hoped love. Don’t you find that juxtaposition is so … The relation of old and new. The Bard show, curiously enough, I think one of the motivations behind that was that when I make the furniture, and it’s freshly painted and it’s sparkling white and all that, and it’s all in a pastels colors. And then my object collection tends to be brown. It’s dark brown. It’s like Baroque colors.

In our culture, American culture experience, we have the old, the thing that fascinates us by the old, because we’re not old. We’re really not old. And we love the new as well. In the show, which sits there, well, now it’s maybe two-and-a-half months, another month ago, but people go in there and they’ll respond to the furniture, which is like the way they would respond to the new. And other people go in there and respond to the objects, which brings the old.

Debbie Millman:

I thought you’d enjoy, I’m sure you know this, but in the review of your recent show at Bard, in The New York Times, the writer, Will Heinrich said this about interacting with the objects in your show. He says, “I’d become so used to meeting art through my eyes alone that I’d forgotten what an impoverished way that is to experience the world.”

Richard Tuttle:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

I thought that would make you happy.

Richard Tuttle:

Right.

Debbie Millman:

It made me happy.

Richard Tuttle:

No. The Bard show, it does try to get into one of the other senses; outside the visual, into the tactile. There’s no stopping there, because you can listen to it and you can smell the objects. I would have no problem if somebody tried to taste them either.

Debbie Millman:

Richard Tuttle, thank you so much for making such profound work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Richard Tuttle:

Very welcome. Yeah. I’ve enjoyed this, a lot.

Debbie Millman:

Richard Tuttle’s work can be seen at the Pace Galleries in cities, including New York and London, and currently at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. The book about his collection is called Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object? 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 3:

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 Wiland.

Saleem Reshamwala:

Woo. What is happening in my mouth? My tongue is fizzing. It feels like pop rocks and lemonade. And now it’s salty. And now it feels like I’m eating meat. Now I’m tasting cheese. I have no idea what’s going on in my mouth.

I’m Saleem Reshamwala, and coming in June are 10 new episodes of Far Flung. Over the past few years, not many of us have been able to really travel and explore. One of the things that starts to happen is you can lose touch with that weird but wonderful feeling of being changed by new people and cultures. On Far Flung, we recapture some of that vibe.

This season, we collaborate with local producers in 10 more locations around the world, to understand ideas that flow from those places. You’ll journey to very tiny suspension bridges 400 feet up in the air, uniting people living in the mountains of Nepal.

Speaker 8:

It’s one thing to see it in papers, read about it, see videos, but it’s completely different thing to be there. It just goes on and on, and on, and on. And it becomes smaller and smaller, and almost disappears in the horizon, the other side.

Saleem Reshamwala:

You’ll hear tapes of Somali music that were hidden away, buried underground for years, in an attempt to make sure that they are never forgotten. (Singing) Meet journalists who’ve taken the city buses to deliver the news behind a cardboard cutout of a television set.

Speaker 9:

[foreign language 00:40:45].

Saleem Reshamwala:

And learn about how Iceland is struggling to strike a balance between keeping its language alive while still staying actively engaged with our constantly changing global culture.

Speaker 10:

Sometimes it just comes out like a blur, because I’m thinking in one language and speaking in another. It gets confusing sometimes.

Saleem Reshamwala:

Come with us and see what the world is dreaming up as we all try to get that feeling of traveling and getting hit by a new idea at the same time. That’s all part of a new season of Far Flung with me, Saleem Reshamwala. Coming June 9th on Apple Podcasts, and June 16th everywhere.

Debbie Millman:

Most political art doesn’t change much. Occasionally though, art becomes the cutting edge of political activism. Karen Finley has spent her career on and even over that edge. Her boundary-shattering performance art, her searing readings and recordings, her incisive visual art, and her many books have been getting people talking about equality, sexuality, sexism and violence for many decades. She joins me today to talk about her long and provocative career. Karen Finley, welcome to Design Matters.

Karen Finley:

It’s lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Debbie Millman:

Karen, my first question to you is something I just learned about you, is it true you started a group called Artists Anonymous.

Karen Finley:

Yes, I have. Yes, and we still meet. Yes.

Debbie Millman:

And I understand, pre-COVID, you’d meet at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City to talk about artistic issues and concerns, and you also have a 13-step program. Can you talk about some of the steps?

Karen Finley:

Well, the program for us started at Museum of Art and design, but it meets at libraries or at other places and has met in other parts of the country pre-COVID. We have been doing some meetings online. But I do have 13 steps, and the first step is admitted that we were addicted to art, that I’m addicted to art, and that our life became unmanageable because of art. And is sort of a humorous but also a very serious fellowship for people that are stigmatized by the art world, women, people of color, queer people that really feel that they’re not part of the mainstream art opportunities.

Debbie Millman:

You were born in Chicago, the oldest of six children. You were raised in Evanston, Illinois, and you’ve described your upbringing like growing up in a John Irving novel. In what way?

Karen Finley:

Well, I think that it was a family that was very involved in the arts and politics, and everyone was very involved in different interests, and that that was supported. And it wasn’t a town of where Northwestern is. So, education was a focus, research, any types of interest. But there’s also, I don’t know if it would be John Irving, but there was also trauma in my family. My father committed suicide and there were different issues that went on as in many families. And I also grew up during the era of the ’60s and ’70s.

Debbie Millman:

Your dad was a jazz drummer who also sold vacuum cleaners, and your mom ran a sewing business out of your house. So did mine, by the way. She advertised in the Pennysaver on Long Island. Your mom was also a member of the Jungian Institute, and you’ve said that to her, dreams were more important than even having food on the table. Do you mean sleep dreams or dreams of the future?

Karen Finley:

I think I mean about in terms of the nourishment. My mother was very interested in divination. She had learned all the divination arts from her mother, so that within that world, you’re not always having to be thinking about the practicals. But my mother was also a very practical woman too. And she also worked in an insurance company as well, and she was a vice president of that company. So, yes, she did start doing sewing. And my grandmother also was a tailor, and I still have that sewing machine. I keep that sewing machine nearby me. And my father, yes, he was involved in jazz early on, he also then, I think, left that business because I think of drugs, and he then went into sales. But he carried that, music was part of my life growing up.

Karen Finley:

And it was a very privileged household that my father would say, “Oh, I would like to show you this poem by Rabindranath Tagore,” or we’re having conversations about Carl Jung and synchronicity. So, I had that type of an intellectual household.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve talked about how your mother’s creative talents were considered to be just as important as your father’s. And you began drawing when you were about two years old, and started performing by 12. You joined the Chicago Art Institute’s Young Artists Program when you were 12. And I read that when you first visited the art institute and were perusing the collection, you thought that the artists Joan Miro and Jean Dubuffet were women.

Karen Finley:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

How did you find out otherwise?

Karen Finley:

Probably when I started taking French, and then all of a sudden, autonomy, “Oh.” But, yeah. And you know what? I mean, I just assumed that they were women. And I think it’s good I did because I think probably in the museum, there was Georgia O’Keeffe and Mary Cassatt. And that would probably been it at that time.

Debbie Millman:

The first public performance that you gave, I believe was actually in the cafeteria of the Art Institute of Chicago. Can you talk about what that was?

Karen Finley:

This was in high school. I did a performance with music, my father was playing drums and I was dancing and moving to that music. There were some high school friends of mine that were playing some instruments that didn’t make sound, and that was considered very conceptual. But I also did costumes, where I would be sewing stockings together, pantyhose together. But my first performance that I did that was, I would say really like a public performance in the style that I started to do that would have some type of a semblance of what I’m doing now is that I performed it at the Gay Community Center in San Francisco, and when I was at school there, and I performed in a group show.

Debbie Millman:

Was that when you were smashing bananas against the window?

Karen Finley:

I did things. There were many at that time I did that. I went into a JCPenney window that was, I think the store had been closed and one of the other students had organized a show. So, like, let’s say, every week, there’d be a different performer. And so, I went and rode up on a motorcycle. My roommate’s boyfriend had a motorcycle, so, drove me right up, I don’t even know if it was right to the window, and I went into this window display and I started smashing my body against the window, and convulsing and eating many bananas. And the police were called and I was put into a squad car. I laugh because I was a little bit scared. I just continued performing while I went into the place.

Karen Finley:

But when you think about that in terms of events with the police, there still was a certain sense of innocence there. And I think that the organizer was able to explain that this was art. I mean, it was San Francisco, but the art…

Debbie Millman:

I read that somebody reported that you were on drugs and convulsing in the way though.

Karen Finley:

They thought I was insane. I mean, I think that they wanted to take me to a psychiatric ward or something.

Debbie Millman:

You mentioned attending the San Francisco Art Institute, while you were there, you became immersed in the Bay Area’s punk music scene, you also worked in strip joints to help pay for school. And I’m wondering if that experience gave you insight in the range of ways people respond to bodies.

Karen Finley:

Yes, I do. It’s a mixed feeling. My father had committed suicide and I needed money to go to school. In fact, I even paid for my father’s funeral. So, I was working there and it was, I would say, a positive experience. But I wouldn’t have been doing it if I came from a family with money. I did it for economic reasons. So, yes, I met wonderful people there and it was much more kind of an, I would call it burlesque. It was, the women and the artists there really took their art forms seriously. I was a cocktail waitress, and there were many tourists that would come in. And the feeling that I felt in the club was different than on the street because the female body was revered and respected there. That is what really, really moved me, and to be thinking about that respect and these different levels in terms of desire, gaze, and the economy.

Debbie Millman:

Karen, you’ve brought your dad up a few times, and if it’s okay, I’d love to talk to you a little bit more about what his death did to you. I understand that before he committed suicide, you were having recurring dreams about him dying.

Karen Finley:

Yes, it wasn’t right beforehand, but I had some. I consider myself to be, if you want to say, clairvoyant. I consider that I’m intuitive or even if I want to say the word, a psych, I have a psychic ability. But, yes, I did have dreams. And earlier, and I actually told him about it and the events that happened at the dream. And also, I was at my family’s psychic at the time that my father committed suicide, and she did not know why I was there, but she told me exactly what was going to happen when I got home. She closed the business and she poured me a drink, and she then told me the events that were to happen, not that he had committed suicide, but just all of the events that were to happen, and it did happen.

Karen Finley:

The certain people and everything, I think, for this conversation, I’m not going to go into each detail here, but, yes, I am very much part of the belief of different dimensions of the psychic and the ethereal. And that’s been a very strong part of my life.

Debbie Millman:

You wrote about it really beautifully in a different kind of intimacy, which I have really ravished. And you’ve said that it was only after your dad dying that you understood how depressed he was, and it was the last time you would allow yourself to be so out of sync with someone suffering. And I read that after he died, you couldn’t paint because you couldn’t be alone by yourself, and you had to cut that feeling out. Is that why you started performing instead?

Karen Finley:

I think that there isn’t ever one particular reason and the different selves of how we answer things, change and grow. Now in looking back at how I answered that is that depression is so… we don’t talk about depression. And in that time, I didn’t have a training or to know or to speak about or to understand. And I think that I was saying that I wanted to be more sensitive, and that I didn’t really understand all that was going on. But in adding to that is the emotional space of loss or trauma, and there’s been other things in my life, is that because I had that pain or that loss that one carries with themselves, is that from there, you’re able to empathize with other people.

Karen Finley:

And so, that’s what I think is part of more of my momentum in making art after that experience. Do you see? So, it was no longer just on the aesthetic, it wasn’t just on the idea of representing nature, it really was supposed to be representing an inner nature within the work, or things that couldn’t necessarily be represented. And in that, in the combination of with my femaleness, and that the female is so accused of being hysterical, I use those emotions because I understood those emotions, I had confidence in those emotions, and I could share that. And that is where I think I brought my work to.

Debbie Millman:

You said that the wellspring of that pain is what you express on stage. How were you able to channel it, or how are you able to channel that wellspring of pain?

Karen Finley:

I think that my work also is about the joy that comes out of that pain, because I think much of my work is that my performance is a celebration of living, and that I think that celebration and performing and having people come together and being there in the room and assembling together, and the physicality, which I think we’re all missing so much in terms of this quarantine in COVID is also what my work is about. My work is about the resilience of speaking up and out, of expressing the vulnerability and the strength and the courage, and the resistance which occurs in the actual act of creativity. And the rearrangement poetically is an attempt by the re-imagining of events or the interpreting the witnessing provides, or what I’m interested in providing is a portal to an imagined space, and that then is this potential for an inspired future, or an inspired presence. So, that’s what I try to do within my work.

Karen Finley:

The other point that I would like to make is, when I wrote that book, I was just beginning in this process, which took me many years to do, but another part of my life is the censorship that occurred in unpolitical situations and the NEA, and when all the worlds that went on without that. And I had to come to a certain decision, which is the joy in making art, the joy, the joy. The joy actually right now here in this opportunity to be here with you, Debbie, how joyous this is, of that we both came into New York at the same time, all that we’ve really been trying to organize here, doing this during quarantine, we have a new administration. We’re speaking, I know that we both are professors, the work and what we’ve done. I consider this to be a joyous moment, and there’s a joyous potential.

Karen Finley:

And so, that is something also that I intentionally carry with me as a space of resistance, to be joyous despite whatever administration or dictator or authoritarian regime is there.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I want to talk a bit about the issues that you’ve had with censorship, and I’m going to get to that really soon. But I want to talk for a moment about the work you did before you came to New York. You work with Brian Ruth, a member of the legendary performance art team called The Kipper Kids, and you and Brian went to Germany to perform together and actually got chased off the stage because of the performance. And I’m wondering if you can share for my listeners what you did that got you chased off the stage.

Karen Finley:

Well, Brian’s name was Brian Routh, and-

Debbie Millman:

Brian, I’m sorry.

Karen Finley:

… later was like mouth.

Debbie Millman:

Brian Routh.

Karen Finley:

We actually even did a performance, Mr. And Mrs. Mouth. But The Kipper Kids was an extraordinary performance dual that performed usually without a specific language. And I got clowning and avant-garde clowning approach. And what we did in Germany at a Theater of the World Festival, basically what we’re doing is performing as Hitler and Eva Braun, and we also started performing as dogs. We had still been seeing anti-sematic graffiti in the city, and we were really making this staunch work about anti-Nazi imagery by taking on and making this parody. And so, at one point, Brian went back and he actually, I guess where they laughed up or were hit because they didn’t have bathrooms over there, and went to where I had pooped and he went up to it and he just, he laughed, and I know this is going to be so extreme here and for it, but that’s what he did at this time.

Karen Finley:

And I guess, beforehand, we were sniffing each other’s bums, and that is actually, they could have really cared less about poop, what they got really, really upset was us eating our food like dogs, we put the dog food in it. And they said, “The Germans are not dogs,” and people came down from the audience and started attacking me in particular with brooms. And this isn’t like hundreds of people coming down, but it’s definitely more than 10 people, to the point where Brian had to move the person off of me whereas I’m being attacked and we had to run out of the circus tent. And Fassbender was there that night, and the next day then he filmed the performance, the second night of the performance, but there wasn’t the same amount of outrage the second night. But you can see that film sometimes shows it. At certain point, it showed at the Museum of Modern Art and places like that.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve said that performance art is a response to capitalism, that it’s a space about going against the audition process, going against the space of acceptance and rejection. And you are your own director, you’re creating a performance and a ritual. Were you ever scared as you were creating these new rituals? Were you scared that day on the stage being hit by brooms?

Karen Finley:

No, I wasn’t scared because I could see the venom in the people’s eyes, and I could see the hate in the people’s eyes. The anti-Semitism had not gone away, and which actually then we can see what’s happening, I think it could be continuing thinking about white supremacy. It was about white supremacy, and that white supremacy we see still continuing here with Trump and the administration. So, what I saw there then opened my eyes and gave me the knowledge for doing the work, then I continue here.

Debbie Millman:

How do you feel that performance art is a response to capitalism?

Karen Finley:

Because of the object, so that in the art market, when you’re making the art and you look at museums and who’s on the board, and I think there’s been much happening about that in terms of within the Whitney museums all the time on boards, the Sacklers. We can give many examples. And that relationship between the art market and the money put into these objects as a place of holding the money, holding the economy. When you don’t have the object, but yet it’s an art and it’s an experience, and you can’t then be bought or collected in that same way, it’s subverting a system, it’s subverting the art market. That system is definitely developed in terms of capitalism because of the prices, so that the prices determine the value and the worthiness of what that artwork is.

Karen Finley:

So, in performance, you’re subverting that object, you’re fragmenting it. It’s like a rebellion. That was something that was important to me of coming from the background that I do, from a working class. And that’s the reason why I have such a strong belief in terms of public funding for the arts, so that the arts aren’t just funded by those who have money, and that there can be art making and art appreciation that isn’t solely dependent on inherited wealth or a certain profit or a marketability. That market is there, but it’s not the only market.

Debbie Millman:

You moved to New York City in 1983 and began working in clubs like Danceteria, performing at venues, including P.S. 122, which is now Performance Space New York, Franklin Furnace, how did you get your first gigs?

Karen Finley:

Well, for free. It’s all about who you know and friends and doing things, right? So, I think in New York, there are non… that’s why I came to New York, because there isn’t economy of the arts, so, I am part of that economy, which is the nonprofit economy, because we have a strong state support system for supporting the arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts. The New York City supports the arts, and that’s why I live in this state. I’m very proud to live here and the way how the arts are supported. So, some of them were nonprofit spaces, but then many New Yorkers, young people were coming into New York and it was just post the collapse of New York City with the bankruptcy. So, you could find buildings for nothing. There’s been so much written about that.

Karen Finley:

And so, people would get storefronts or get places, and you would just do a show. If you had four people come, you’re happy. 14 people would come to it, that was a success. So, that’s the way how it happened. We were excited to do things, this is before Facebook. You would make a little poster, you would invite a few friends and you would do it in your living room, you’d do it on a street, and it was a lot of fun. And it’s still a lot of fun to put on a show, it’s still a lot of fun to be around people, making art together, and to be part of a community.

Debbie Millman:

You wrote and performed I’m an Ass Man in 1984. The title piece was performed in a man voice about to rape a woman on the subway. Another piece is titled Mr. Hirsch, and you performed it in the voice of a small girl who was forced to perform oral sex on her friend’s father. One of your most famous pieces from that time is titled Yams Up My Granny’s Ass, which you performed in the voice of a drug addict who celebrates Thanksgiving by abusing his grandmother. And you did this while dumping candy yams over your naked backside. One of the things that I’ve always wanted to ask you, Karen, is, you seem to be really comfortable in your own skin, whether it be stripping or doing burlesque through college, or performing with your body in some type of nudity. Have you ever felt insecure about being so physically vulnerable in this way?

Karen Finley:

I think that I would feel vulnerable about it now, because at that time, you have to be looking at my body, my whiteness, my femme presentation of my gender, the way that I presented myself, my body was the prized possession in terms of male desire, right? And so, in that way, that’s what I was doing. That’s what I was presenting within that space. So, I hear what you’re saying, and so, that is a very, very interesting question. I’m going to think about that further. It’s also interesting to be thinking about the woman’s body then at my age, in that representation. But I think that my work really wasn’t necessarily about completely nudity, and I have to think about it, it was about at that time of me claiming.

Karen Finley:

And I think at my age, and events that had happened to me, and just being… This is before Me Too movement, it was my form of Me Too. It was my way to articulate so many times and so many times for my, when I say sisters, not being able to have that space. And so, I wanted to take that on.

Debbie Millman:

In 1986, Cynthia Carr wrote a cover story about you for the Village Voice, and it was titled Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts: The Taboo Art of Karen Finley, wherein she stated this about you, “Finley performs on the club circuit, wafting on to the stage in her polyester good-girl getup at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning to wail like some degenerate apparition about incest, priests’ assholes, the cum on the bedpost, bulimics upchucking in their stilettos. The fuck-and-shit vocabulary draw shrieks, backtalk, occasional hysteria from the rowdy drunk crowds. Her monologues are obscenity in its purest form, never just a litany of four-letter expletives, but an attempt to express emotions for which there are perhaps no words. An attempt to approach the unspeakable.”

Debbie Millman:

The article changed your life, changed the trajectory of your work and your awareness. Before we talk about Pete Hamill’s response also in the Village Voice, how did you feel about what Cynthia wrote?

Karen Finley:

I was very moved. I felt understood. I felt very, very privileged for the fact that at this time in history, that there would be a woman writer who would be able to speak about my work. And I knew that this was something that was very new, and that she had women editors. I felt like I had a responsibility with the work I was doing, and so, it was an honor and also to be able to speak to her. And I became friends with Cynthia.

Debbie Millman:

She has a remarkable book of essays that includes the piece that she wrote about you in the Village Voice. It’s very difficult to find online, but it is available in her book.

Karen Finley:

And she also then did the biography on David Wojnarowicz. We were friends with him together, and so, she’s had a very illustrious career.

Debbie Millman:

I think that one of the most remarkable things that she wrote about your work, which really led me to believe that she totally got what you were trying to do, was she wrote that your work moves beyond rage to the trigger for that rage. Would you say that that’s accurate?

Karen Finley:

I think that’s very powerful and transformative. I mean, that’s what I’m trying to get into some spaces like that. Yes. And I think it had something to do with the time when I was doing it as well. I don’t know if that would have that same resonance now, but in that particular time, it resonated.

Debbie Millman:

Pete Hamill, who was also one of the writers and one of the most famous at the time at the Voice, accused Carr of writing a brilliant parody of, one, Bohemian pretentiousness, two, the emptiness of performance art, three, a strain of feminism, and four, the Village Voice itself, rather than a serious, informative, and appreciative piece of journalism. And he asked the readers who were as offended as he was to mail a single yam to the voice editor, Robert Friedman, who would know what to do with it. So, he wrote about you in a way that made it clear he had never seen any of your performances, you never in fact ever put an entire yam up your butt. And that’s followed you around for your entire career. What did you make of his article at the time?

Karen Finley:

It was all overwhelming, if you can imagine, at the Village Voice, and at such a young age, being on the cover and everything. But I think that it continued for several more issues. So, it started a fight and it made it very clear of something that I knew, wasn’t anything surprising, but that he had to offer. Pete Hamill, in fact, Pete Hamill, bless his soul, he just passed away recently, but that they’re supposed to be so liberal, and like, “Oh, we’re supposed to look him.” No, they weren’t that liberal, and they’re misogynist. And I also felt that it was very homophobic too.

Karen Finley:

And the way to get back at me was then to have this certain kind of sexual act of putting the yam, which my performance wasn’t even about that, it was this tinned ass, but he then escalated this performance to fit a certain kind of a sexual act that then would be in a way of ridicule, or to demean, or to shame, or to undermine, or to neutralize anything that I was doing. But more so, it was an attack to Cynthia Carr, and then to her editor. So, it was very misogynistic, it was very hateful. But she continued on and that it was the beginning. When you have friends like that, who needs enemies? And so, that’s what it was, they’re supposed to be so liberal, and they’re supposed to be so incredible. And Pete Hamill actually, I went out with Jackie, and all these things going on. As Joe Biden says, “Shut up.”

Karen Finley:

I just look at him to be kind of… I mean, I know he had these books and everything, and all these things they did, and Norman Mailer and all of them, but I was anti that entire canon of journalists and artists because actually it was a projection. They’re the ones that are so pretentious.

Debbie Millman:

Why were people projecting their fears and anxieties onto you in that way?

Karen Finley:

Well, I was in analysis for 20 years, trying to figure that out. Projection, no, it was a projection onto me, and because, I think that, as Cynthia said, since I refused to, at that age, just to be the ingenue, that I refused to stay within a certain code of feminine persuasion or female representation. And I think that I evoked fear of the fear of the female, because there was a great deal of fear in the female and that there was some triggering that happened in that in terms of my own empowerment.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I think that I asked you about if you felt scared or vulnerable, and it just occurred to me as you were saying this, was that I think that you were making many in the audience feels scared or vulnerable. The people that were bothered by your work, I think it gave them that sense of being out of control. The people that were excited about your work, I think felt empowered by it.

Karen Finley:

I think that those are very interesting questions or observations, Debbie, of what you’re saying about with fear, or even going back to earlier questions about this idea of, “Were you ever afraid?” Well, of course, I’m afraid all the time. A woman is afraid in every elevator, every alley, every time she opens up a door, goes into her car, goes in our own house, her room, her job, you’re afraid but you live with that fear. So, when you asked that question, “Were you afraid? Do you have fear?” It’s like, how much fear? That you continue. But the situation is that with that fear that I carry with me daily, the artwork or the creativity becomes like your magic cape that you have with you while you’re going through this cruel world.

Debbie Millman:

In December of 1986, your solo performance, The Constant State of Desire, premiered at The Kitchen in New York City, and you won a Bessie Award for that work. And you follow that with performing We Keep Our Victims Ready, which was influenced by news reports of Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old girl at the time who was raped and found smeared with excrement in a garbage bag. And in your performance, which I saw at Lincoln Center, you covered your naked body in chocolate, and then covered yourself with tinsel. Why tinsel?

Karen Finley:

Because after the woman is treated like shit, and then I had other things, then I think I had candy hearts on me, then, “You’re loved.” And then I had also like alfalfa sprouts, then it looked like sperm, you’re kind of like jerked off over. And then still you get up and you need to get dressed for dinner. And so, that silver is really about that. You get dressed for dinner. I’m sorry that if my performances would ever make people feeling… I live with the discomfort. I wouldn’t ever want to be having people feeling fearful in my work, but it is a space of testimony, that ritual then became kind of like an embodiment of a psychic practice where there aren’t words for.

Debbie Millman:

The piece drew the attention of quite a few people. Senator Jesse Helms, he claimed the work was offensive. And in 1990, you became known as one of the NEA Four, four performance artists whose national endowment of the arts grants were declined after the criticism by Helms. You took this to court, you won your first court case for reinstatement of the original grant in 1993, but this ended up going all the way to the Supreme Court, and you lost the appeal in the Supreme Court. As a result, the government was legally allowed to withhold funding if standards of decency were violated in art. And this attempt by Washington to censor the arts has forever changed the structure of public funding in the United States. Karen, is this still the current law in the United States?

Karen Finley:

Yes, it is, and it becomes a precedent to consider what the government can declare as being indecent in order not to fund it. So, that could be in healthcare, that could be in terms of books, abortion, healthcare, that’s why it’s so important, the case. So, it became a precedent. Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Karen Finley:

And I don’t think that NEA has ever become restored since then.

Debbie Millman:

What’s truly tragic, and again, similar to the way that Pete Hamill analyzed your work without obviously having even seen it, the piece is not sexual at all. As I said, I saw the piece in Lincoln Center, it’s a show of tremendous compassion, tremendous pathos. You’ve described it as the mortification of the body by a psychically battered character whose self-image is so damaged that she thinks of herself as nothing more than excrement. I think it’s one of the most important pieces of the time, and it is truly a disservice to humanity that this went all the way to the Supreme Court and then ultimately was lost. How do you make sense of that in your own life and in your own head?

Karen Finley:

There’s different levels to making sense of it, and there is no not making sense of it. It’s law. And I think everyone gets so excited about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but she voted against the NEA. There’s only one person who voted for the case.

Debbie Millman:

Was that David Souter?

Karen Finley:

Yes. Is there a lot of different levels to it? I mean, the first level I’m going to look on a larger level is that I did… at that time, I had that idealism and I felt that it was my responsibility to go forward with the lawsuit and with the other three artists, because the other three artists were gay and lesbian artists, and that I think that that is what was behind this, is that to demonize and criminalize art by feminists, but by queer artists. That’s what I think that this was about, and it was within that, and that’s what the culture wars were primarily about too. And sometimes you win by losing because since that loss, there was a rejuvenation in that there has been progress that has been made in terms of gender rights.

Karen Finley:

And so, although we lost, I feel that there were gains that the conversation started in society. So, I’m very, very happy about that, I’m pleased about that, that it’s happened, or is happening to some extent. But in terms of within my life, I feel that this is very important to say first is, I feel that I was very privileged to be censored. And what do I mean by that? Because I was in a position in society at that time as a white woman with a certain presentation of, within my body, that I would be considered that what I am saying would be that damaging or has that potential. And with that, there are many, many voices that people do not even get censored or they don’t even get heard.

Karen Finley:

My way of looking at it now is in a different way. I feel that I really kind of participated with my whiteness in the fact that the selection of may is the idea of putting it on the pedestal, there’s this preservation to the idea of preserving the white kind of strip, this female kind of version of whatever it is. So, I was used and I was used within that kind of situation. And I also feel that I was part of a movement of many boomers who went into areas, neighborhoods such as the East Village, and gentrified these neighborhoods, and then basically built on neighborhoods mostly of color. And then I speak casually about the art market, but I did profit from it.

Karen Finley:

I mean, there has to be some accountability to it, is that I have profited, I am in an art market. It might not be an art market in the millions, but there is, whether it’s a celebrity or profile, or that the work that I was doing would have a value that to a point where President Bush would have to have power breakfast to discuss my work, or that Jesse Helms would have to be discussing my work. So, that’s where I’ve changed in looking back in this experience.

Debbie Millman:

At the time though, it affected your career. I know that the Whitney Museum of Art canceled one of your shows, people were scared about what it meant to work with you, but you never, ever dulled down your work. You never changed your approach. Was it ever something that you considered? Were you ever rethinking how you might work? Was there anything that you felt like doing but felt it might be too much of a taboo?

Karen Finley:

I was sad, I was bitter, I didn’t know where I was going to work. I was very lucky, I was working in California, and I realized that I didn’t think that my future, my personality to go into the Hollywood way. I just thought that I would go into education, I wanted to continue making work, and then I had to go, as I said earlier, back into the joy of making art. I realized that I had accomplished one step, and just to continue making the art, and in some ways, taking out those opportunities that were based on a validation on institutional acceptance really is what my work was never about. So, I mean, it took me a little bit of time, but I’m not Frank Stella, I’m just not one of these artists where I’m churning it out and it’s the same thing going on.

Karen Finley:

And so, I continued making art in many different ways, and I started making art maybe even in some quieter ways, but I have never really gotten back into any grants. I have some support, I’ve received a lot of support, and lots of support is I’ve had so many friends, I’ve had families, teachers, that’s why I love being a teacher. So, it was a spiritual shift for me, and it’s actually brought me great joy, and I feel that my artwork actually has gone to other levels or capacity. I’ve been able to expand on my practice.

Debbie Millman:

You began teaching at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and are now a professor there teaching art and politics. Does teaching impact your art practice?

Karen Finley:

I love it. I love teaching. I know that you are a professor, you’re working. I love my students. And I do use the word love, it’s something that… I love the faculty, I love being in an environment, and that’s also another environment that I think that there has been with the Trump administration of this anti-intellectualism. So, I feel that being an intellectual and participating in knowledge development, and research, and the arts, and innovation, and experimentation, and writing, and reading, and literacy, is my spiritual mission and part of my life as important as it is to brushing my teeth. So, I think that if any A’s didn’t happen, I don’t think I would have gone into teaching.

Debbie Millman:

How come?

Karen Finley:

Because I would have continued with this monetarily. I was living off of my work, I would have become more, I would say narcissistic, but just all about me, me, me, and I’ve learned a lot and I’ve developed. And so, I feel very grateful for this opportunity.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve been working on performance art, sculpture, you’ve been continuously mounting exhibitions all over the world over the past two decades, and I’d love to talk to you about several newer works. One in particular that I really loved, in 2013, the New Museum in New York City presented your show, Sext Me if You Can, which was a personal performance that took place in the public lobby of the museum, and the exhibit blurred the lines between art and commerce, and popular culture, and private behavior, taboos and sexuality, and allowed participants in the show, or participants at the museum to purchase a drawing that you created of a photographic image that they sexted to you from a private room in the museum. What was that like for you?

Karen Finley:

Oh, it was a lot of fun. It was wonderful.

Debbie Millman:

I guess you saw a lot of different kinds of photography.

Karen Finley:

It’s a wonderful project, I still was doing it this past year in Los Angeles, and I have done this project all over the world. I’ve done it in Serbia, I’ve done it in Croatia, I’ve done it in Australia. It is a project that I started because of the shaming towards sexting, and in particular with high school students, or there was that horrible shaming of a high school, no, actually, he was is a college student, and he had a webcam up and he was having sex, then he went and he committed suicide. The work is really grounded in removing the shaming towards sexual acts, or sexuality, or being found out in the secrecy. And so, that’s what the work is about.

Karen Finley:

So, in this exhibition or in this process, people suck exhibit, but sometimes they’re not, it’s about intimacy. It’s about seeing and witnessing. It’s for me looking at them without any judge, with acceptance. And then I representing those images or words into an artwork as a sacred space in this oval. And so, that’s what the piece is about. It was fun because people, when they’re doing it, they’re happy. And so, I really enjoy looking at the human body, and I enjoy life drawing. That’s what I was trained as an artist to do.

Debbie Millman:

Full disclosure, not all the texts were photographic sexts. Karen, I actually participated in the endeavor as one of the patrons.

Karen Finley:

Oh, whoa, that’s so nice. Oh, I’m so glad. I wish you could show me which one it was.

Debbie Millman:

I’m going to.

Karen Finley:

Oh, God, I love that. Oh, whoa.

Debbie Millman:

Listeners, I’m sorry that you’re not able to see it. I will post a picture of this with the podcast. So, yeah, I went into the room, I didn’t want to do a sext because that’s not why I was there, I was there really to have an engagement with you as a fan. And so, I texted you a photograph of my face with my eyes closed, which I think at the time for me, in 2013, was really still a time when I was just managing a lot of my own shame about my childhood and my background, and you drew me quite accurately without having any other correspondence other than these texts, you drew me with three mouths, and I felt like you understood just magically that I sometimes felt like I had a lot to say, and wanted to say a lot of things, but was too afraid to, which I’ve since really dealt with in my life quite a lot. At the time, I wasn’t able to, and it was just really an incredible experience. So, I just wanted to share that with you.

Karen Finley:

Oh, that is one of the most beautiful things to hear because, oh, how beautiful, how gentle. The experiences were to be gentle experience because they were counters because sexting or in sexuality or in intimacy, that is also a part about it too, right? In that moment I’m seeing. And the intimacy, oh, that is so beautiful. And it’s interesting because yesterday, I was doing some artwork and I was actually looking at some of those colors and thinking about it, and meditating on those colors that are in your painting. So, can I look at that again?

Debbie Millman:

Sure.

Karen Finley:

I was looking at the steel gray, and then also within to see, because there’s like a grayness in that, and I was spending time with that last night and thinking about that, and the power within the grayness.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, this is one of my prized possessions.

Karen Finley:

Oh, I’m so glad. That’s so nice.

Debbie Millman:

I also want to talk to you about your latest book, which is called Grabbing Pussy. It’s an experimental book, it contains letters, prose, poetry, even word games. And I understand you started it before the 2016 election as you were investigating neo-liberalism, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, and society’s response to whiteness, which dovetails into what you were saying about your own experience back in the ’90s with your whiteness. You’ve said that Grabbing Pussy is about action and about physical assault, and I’m wondering if you can elaborate and talk a little bit about in what way it is about action and physical assault.

Karen Finley:

Well, the book began when I was exploring the spaces of gratitude or women’s response to apologies, gratitude, and that submissiveness and that expectation. So, that’s what I was interested in, and looking at the imaginary being because of unicorns or mythologies of whiteness in imaginary beings. And I was starting in looking at the genital election and what was happening with Hillary, Bill, that just all of these traumas and events, and then with Trump, and the assault with language, and even everything about the mail, the deleted mail, the deleted email. I don’t feel that she ever really handled that, seeing that scene of, with the debates, and Trump just behind her and her body, and still that’s so traumatic.

Karen Finley:

So, it’s taking the words, the language of this era that we’re still in and examining it analytically and also experimentally, and the vulgarity of these times.

Debbie Millman:

Karen, I’m wondering if you would be willing to read a piece from Grabbing Pussy, a piece of your choice.

Karen Finley:

I’m just going to read a couple of just short pieces here. Okay?

Debbie Millman:

Okay.

Karen Finley:

So, the first one here is Toilet Training. “What a disaster, a disaster, a disassturd, toilet training resistance, potty mouth, potty training, too early, too late, stool holder. Can’t help it. The pee and poop belong to you, not us. Power struggle. You have the poop now. Mommy said, ‘I knew you could do better.’ Had to run bare bottom, remove the impacted hard, release constipation, dismantle the power struggle, stool softer, rectal signals. You can’t watch TV until you have a Twitter. Tweet hand, tweet and squeeze hard for mommy. Push that tweet, hold that tweet for mommy, can’t control his feeder. No potty prodigy. Dumb shit, dumb tweet.

Karen Finley:

“I had a poop accident, conflict, poop conflict, parental diarrhea, coffee enema. Gosh, can’t control the sphincter, can’t control the ass. Child has no control over his own bowels. This is some crazy ass shit, Trump. That’s how this rump rolls, what a dump. This White House is such a dump. Pussy speak out, men pay attention, when we say no, we mean no. We do not push your body on any of us. Rape violation, assaults, hotel sex crimes, hitting kept secret harassment, assault disguised as job interview. 30 years of abuse? Try 3,000 years, over 90 accusations, just one Harvey. Every woman doesn’t expect this to happen in her lifetime, but it happens to every single woman repeatedly, guaranteed, intergenerationally, spoken between women, mothers to daughters, to granddaughters, amongst friends.

Karen Finley:

“We are taught how to use your body at times to feign interest till you get to safety, a pause in his release. How to disembody, disassociate as you are raped, taught to forget, yet remember and hold the pain, and fear, the shame. Hating your body, yet the desire is abjection. Held as object, trained and groomed, “Grab them by the pussy,” a president’s war cry, whether Bill, or some other friendly neoliberal, or some other conservative cock. It’s like eating a chicken sandwich takeout, power of pussy. Harvey handlers and enablers to keep your jobs and forcing silence for another slobbering box of popcorn for some other film, probably made and directed by a man, where a man gets girl turning down the shades to get to the script, appearing naked.

Karen Finley:

“Coaxing young women to overpower intimate grabbed encounters, massage explicit messages with oil and motion, it never stops with a back rub. Keep me safe, manipulation, fearing retaliation, embarrassment, pain, rape, sob, being Jean, sobbing, distraught, locked in a van, in a room, job, a desk, an office, a car. Get the pillow to his room, bathroom, disturbed, angry, take me out of here, let me go, no, no, no, no, no, passing out here. You are here, help me, I. Together we stand band together in solidarity, women unite. ‘Oh, hello, young beauty, here is your predator.’ When powerful male producer known as the Hollywood system, a systemic industry thin and full of Botox and cleavage to force his hairy self.

Karen Finley:

“You are perfect for the upcoming role, a ragdoll for Harvey. No one stopped him, no one from the company, no one from the board, never stopped. Too much money to be made, not too bad, put up with it. Sign a non-disclosure clause while it’s getting money to a liberal cause. Mr. Weinstein, known for outbursts, tirades, explosions, private and public pounding, but it was the particular female that he enjoyed the most, and gave her this most personal self, hurting the most vulnerable young woman, a female who wanted, who had ambition, who desired to work, had talent. He was brutal and shaming and punishing this woman of her desire to be an actress, to work in the field.

Karen Finley:

“Written off is just another form of toxicity, coercive bargaining to keep quiet, maybe a chance at a script for the hopeful actress meeting with the God, his devil, might generate a deal, an opportunity, a chance to be part of what you had trained for. But first, you had to do Harvey, penetrated, suck, let eaten. It was never your choice. The pain is so bad to keep your soul from slipping as you clutch to whatever dream you can salvage in this nightmare, as he enters, as you cry out, Harvey ejaculates, feeling her fear, that then transforms his power to prove he is a man, he’s in charge, takes her power.

Karen Finley:

“He has the plan, ‘I will force myself, eat you and you eat me, for it’s a doggy dog world. I’m so ugly, so ugly, but you’ll eat this ugly, where I’m at down your throat. You won’t have anything like me. There’s no way out. There’s only a way in. I despise women, I hate women for I want them, and I’m so ugly that I can only force myself on them for fear of rejection. They only want one thing, they are actress whores, and all this to make a moving image, where we all sit in a darkened theater, together in the dark, left alone, survivors, left in the dark. Oh, that’s entertainment.’

Karen Finley:

“It’s not just the ravishing actress on stage or screen, for it’s in all walks of life and career. A woman poses a risk to herself, her body is dangerous, a potential target of attack. She presents by her presence at all times everywhere and anywhere. The male has the dominion to punish and beat and violate a passionate, uncontrollable rage. Her body pushes him to the edge. He is built that way. He can’t help himself, that’s how men are. ‘We know your life, your body has value, women. You speak truth. You aren’t lying. You aren’t bringing this on. You didn’t dress this way, you weren’t expecting this.’ Wherever you work and live, whatever you do, whoever you are, women unite. We won’t stand to be raped, groped, abused, mocked, and violated.

Karen Finley:

“Women, girls, females, identified trans people deserve to be treated with dignity. Your body is yours. Respect our body. This body is mine, it is not here for you. The time has come for female empowerment. We won’t be ridiculed, and our bodies occupied for your benefit. No more codes of silence. No more codes of silence. No more silence. Pussy, speak out.”

Debbie Millman:

Karen, thank you so much for bringing so much truth to the world, and thank you so much for joining me today on Design Matters.

Karen Finley:

It was really a beautiful conversation for me, and thank you for this opportunity. And I wish you health and safety during this time with COVID and have a good rest of this year till we get to the next administration.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, January 21st.

Karen Finley:

Okay.

Debbie Millman:

To see Karen Finley’s work, you can follow her on Instagram @the_yam_mam, or on Twitter @kfinleyartist. This is the 16th 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 could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

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.

Debbie Millman:

Catherine Opie is one of the most preeminent artists of her generation and has made some of the most indelible images of our time. Her intimate photographic portraits of queer communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco put her on the map in the early 1990s. She also works in landscapes, both natural and urban. Her black-and-white photos of empty freeways and strip malls hold up a haunting mirror of contemporary America. And once you see some of her self-portraits, I guarantee they will stay with you forever.

Her work has been featured in hundreds of major museums, gallery exhibitions and public collections all around the world. For the first time, the body of her work has been published in a stunning new monograph published by Phaidon. It includes over 300 images as well as essays written by the likes of The New Yorker’s Hilton Als. She joins me today to talk about the evolution of her extraordinary career. Catherine Opie, welcome to Design Matters.

Catherine Opie:

Thank you so much, Debbie, and design does matter. So I’m happy to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, good. Thank you. Thank you. Catherine, I understand that you still have a Garfield stuffed animal and a third-place bowling trophy from the 1970s on display in your studio.

Catherine Opie:

Well, I actually think it’s 11th place, which even makes it more humorous in my mind.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. OK. Why do you still have these objects, and why on display?

Catherine Opie:

Well, you can see me. I have a shelf behind me … if people were on Zoom, they would be able to see a shelf behind me that had numerous books and little things. And recently my mom was cleaning out her house and we’re about ready to move her to another place that is for a living at 85 in a really beautiful way. And she brought me this trunk of objects, and when I opened it, it was just, I had these shelves and I thought, Oh, well, I’ll just have this weird Garfield stuffed animal and one can’t throw out their 11th place plaque of bowling from Sandusky, Ohio.

Debbie Millman:

No, I agree. I have to confess, I have a little trophy from sixth grade coming in third place in the three-legged race. And that is also important.

Catherine Opie:

So you did a little bit better than me.

Debbie Millman:

Well, yeah. Just the only evidence of my athletic prowess I will ever have in my life. So yeah. Catherine, you were born in Sandusky, Ohio. Your mother was a gym teacher until she had children. Your dad ran his family’s art supply company. Is it true he also had one of the country’s preeminent collections of Republican political memorabilia?

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. Both—and Democratic, actually.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, both. OK.

Catherine Opie:

It was a large overview of political paraphernalia, including all the Lincoln karyotypes. So it was quite an extensive, fairly important collection actually.

Debbie Millman:

What has happened to the collection?

Catherine Opie:

He sold it upon us leaving Ohio. And I think that that person donated it all to the Smithsonian. My father’s obituary had said that he donated it to the Smithsonian, but my father was a frugal businessman and I think he sold it to somebody who then donated it.

Debbie Millman:

And I understand he gave you an embroidered commemorative ribbon made after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Is that true?

Catherine Opie:

Yes, that is true. I have that upstairs here in the studio in this special little box that is actually a family business box, Opie craft. And it’s kind of his treasure chest that he sent to me before he passed away so that I would have these different little moments including … he always carried an Ohio buckeye in his pocket for lock. So it’s just this little treasure chest of things that included the Lincoln ribbon because Lincoln happened to be assassinated, unfortunately, on what is my birthday, April 14.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, wow. Now was your father a Republican?

Catherine Opie:

My father was a Republican up until Obama ran. And when Obama ran, my father’s switched to being a Democratic voter for the reasons that the Republican Party was no longer the Republican Party that he believed in. And he did not like the conservatism and he believed that women had a right to choose. And he believed, having a lesbian daughter, that I had rights and so forth. And so the Republican Party that he grew up with was no longer an affiliation that he wanted to have.

Debbie Millman:

He must’ve been extraordinarily proud to know that your work was hanging in the Obama White House.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. No, he was. I mean, he was very proud of me. One of my biggest nervous moments was both him and my stepmother coming to the 1995 Whitney Biennial opening because it was the first time I was ever in a major museum show. And obviously my queerness was very much on display there, but he just rode along with it in a very good way, and surprisingly so.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I want to talk about the exhibit in a little bit, but I want to start first with your first experiences with photography. I understand at 8 years old, while in the fourth grade, you wrote a book report on the photography of Lewis Hine. Why Lewis Hine, and how did you first find out about him?

Catherine Opie:

Well, it was actually not on Lewis Hine, it was on the photograph of the girl from the Carolina Mills. And it was in my social studies book and I was reading about child labor, and I was supposed to be writing a report about child labor and the history of that in the U.S., but I spoke about the photograph and what the photograph told me. And it made me realize that also, probably growing up with all this political memorabilia around me, that history is made within an image culture. And so I had that awareness apparently and asked for a camera on my ninth birthday so I could be a documentary photographer.

Debbie Millman:

So you always knew what you wanted to do and to be?

Catherine Opie:

In a way, I guess. I mean, I guess so. It seems now that it’s hard to believe that that was really what I was going to decide to be, but at that moment it was important to me, and the camera was bought for me for my birthday. And I used it throughout my life to document my life. And that is including … even when we moved to California, I used my babysitting money to build a darkroom in our house, where I ruined the family tiles of the bathroom with chemistry. Design does matter. Your mother gets mad at you if you get fixer and developer all over bathroom tiles.

Debbie Millman:

Well, it was a spare bathroom.

Catherine Opie:

It was my bathroom attached to my room. So it was a perfect way to make a darkroom. I spent a lot of hours in there.

Debbie Millman:

I understand that you went about making friends when you moved to San Diego or outside of San Diego by taking photos. And I believe this is also when you had your first crush, is that correct?

Catherine Opie:

I did. I had my first crush on a very beautiful … a woman who was a profoundly amazing actor by the name of Surrey Monet Flack. And she lives in England at this point, but she was my first major crush where I was still trying to figure out certain things, but just couldn’t not be around Surrey. And I grew roses and I would bring her a rose every day. And so it was pretty crush-worthy, actually. Although Surrey didn’t realize that I had a crush on her. I met up with her later in England and said, “I was completely in love with you in high school.” And she was like, “You were? I thought you were just my best friend.” I was like, “Oh, well.”

Debbie Millman:

You knew from a young age that you were gay, but have said that the lack of role models around you made coming out a difficult process. And you and I are the same exact age, both born in 1961. And so I didn’t come out till much, much later in life. And so I fully understand that difficulty. What was the most difficult aspect for you?

Catherine Opie:

I think then, until I moved to San Francisco, again, I didn’t have it surrounding me. I was called names in high school. I was called a dyke. I was harassed in that way. Being homosexual scared me. I thought that I wouldn’t be accepted in society. I carried that fear and internal homophobia within me. And it didn’t happen legitimately until I moved to San Francisco and I was sitting on a curb with my best friend, Dean, at that moment in time, Dean Moser, who I had met at a residence club that I was working for my room and board while I went to San Francisco Art Institute.

And Dean thought I had a crush on him. And so Dean said, “Cathy, there’s something I have to tell you. I’m gay.” And I was like, “Oh, well, I am too.” And that was the first time that it was actually spoken. And then there was no hesitation after speaking it.

Debbie Millman:

What’s so interesting to me in terms of looking at your body of work is despite the difficulty that you might’ve experienced and the inner homophobia, you did seem right from the very beginning in your body of work to … embrace isn’t even the right word, but celebrate your sexuality and your gayness.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah, no. I think that I did, but it wasn’t right away actually. It took some time. I mean, there was the side person, Cathy Opie, who then everybody who is a friend calls me Cathy. Cathy Opie published in On Our Backs magazine, not Catherine Opie. So I took on these different kinds of personas I suppose to, again, create different compartments of my life. And then I guess that’s in some ways having multiple closets in one’s house. And I think that really beyond being Cathy Opie and On Our Backs and celebrating that through queer culture … it wasn’t until becoming a part of ACT UP and Queer Nation that I decided to make my work publicly about my queerness.

But I would have to say that a good portion of my work was trying to be a very serious street photographer in San Francisco. And then my queerness within my work at CalArts was actually the dissemination and observation of master plan communities in Southern California, which I kind of grew up in from moving from Sandusky to Rancho Bernardo, Poway, California, and watched that turn into master-plan community. So I think the queerness was always also involved in the relationship to “how do we fit in this world?” And if there’s this kind of separation in relationship to idea of community, then how do I portray my community? And I think it was a quandary for quite some time.

Debbie Millman:

The quandary, also, I think, began even before you committed to photography as a profession. At one point after you graduated high school you considered becoming a kindergarten teacher and even went to Virginia Intermont College to study early childhood education. I mean, in thinking about the pathways of a life, you were on that pathway.

Catherine Opie:

No, yeah, I was. I profoundly loved children. I really, really love children. And I suppose that’s even the other aspect of queerness is, how was I going to become a mom? Because that was always what I wanted to be; even as a child, I would tell my mom that I was going to have 12 children, for some reason.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah, that would have been too many. So kindergarten, I was a camp counselor for a long time and I really liked kids. So I just imagined that I would be a pretty fun kindergarten teacher.

Debbie Millman:

A year into your studies to become a teacher you called your mom and said, “I’m an artist and I need to go to art school.” How did she respond? I mean, both your parents really encouraged you to be this kindergarten teacher. How did they respond to you wanting to be an artist?

Catherine Opie:

Well, my mom was the one who was supporting my ability to go to college. My father was … he was financially capable, but chose to not financially support my endeavor of receiving a college degree. He kind of believed that when you turned 18, you were on your own kind of guy.

Debbie Millman:

How generous of him.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. Right? So my mom, that was hard for her. She actually took a loan off of her car that she owned outright for me to go ahead and move to San Francisco. And I picked San Francisco Art Institute. And I wasn’t thinking about San Francisco as being a very gay city. It was just in California and a really good notable art school that had Ansel Adams and Minor white and Dorothy [inaudible], and the legacy of that program in terms of photography is actually why I chose it. And mom supported it. She said, “OK, but I’m only going to be able to pay the tuition, Cathy. This is a really big tuition.” And just so you know, in 1981, it was about $7,000 a year.

And she was able to get me all the way through paying the tuition. And I did get some scholarship money, and then grad school was, again, up to me. So if I was going to go to graduate school, then I had to do it on my own.

Debbie Millman:

You left San Francisco to pursue your MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. You said that that transition sucked.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. It really did.

Debbie Millman:

In what way did it suck?

Catherine Opie:

Well, I was leaving a community that was profoundly also becoming decimated from AIDS. And I all of a sudden moved back into a very hot Southern California environment in the middle of a master-plan community that I had exited when I was basically 19 years old. And to be all of a sudden going from the Bay Area of this incredible city, and it’s the first time I had ever lived in a city, back to the suburbs where it was really hot and I couldn’t wear my leather jacket year-round like I could in San Francisco, and being newly possessed of my queerness, my being a dyke … it wasn’t even queerness. I don’t even think we used the word in 1985, but my being a dyke, and what that meant for me.

Even though I had Catherine Lord and Millie Wilson and amazing people around me at CalArts who celebrated that and definitely added on to my ability to understand theory and feminism, and had Douglas Crimp come through the school, [and an] enormous amount of people at that time period, it still wasn’t San Francisco.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. As a way to cope, you started photographing a planned community that was being built across the road from your apartment, which ultimately became part of your thesis portfolio. And this work included photographs of “matching model homes, plots of land and billboards advertising in the United States where the children are apple-cheeked and tow-headed and the parents are as straight as Ken and Barbie.” What provoked this particular direction of your work?

Catherine Opie:

Well, at first I didn’t have a car because I was moving from San Francisco and my car had been totaled and I just decided to walk with my camera. And so I was also trained as more or less a street photographer in San Francisco. So in Southern California, there’s very little street. And so you just start wandering, and I’m a big proponent of wandering. I talk about wandering quite a bit. And I recognized what was being built was actually what I watched being built in my teen years, and decided that it was something that I could try to talk about.

Debbie Millman:

In the meantime, you began to contribute photographs to lesbian magazines. You mentioned On Our Backs, whose name was a response to the anti-pornography feminist journal Off Our Backs. How did you first discover the magazine?

Catherine Opie:

Well, living in San Francisco, you’re basically embedded in … at that point, Valencia Street in San Francisco was the kind of lesbian area. The Castro was for the boys. Valencia Street was for the women. We had Artemis Cafe, we had Osento Bath House, we had Amelia’s, which was the seven-day-a-week lesbian bar. So you had all of this happening all at once. And I’ll tell you, the women who would go to Amelia’s were also the women who were being photographed by wonderful photographers like Jill Posner and Susie Bright, and all of the sex-positive in terms of starting On Our Backs was right there at that time.

And so I just decided, “Well, I want a picture on On Our Backs. I’m a photographer. I’m a lesbian. Why shouldn’t I try to actually do that as well?”

Debbie Millman:

Those magazines introduced me to my own private realization that I was gay at the time, although it was another 25 years before I publicly came out. But other magazines that I have in my collection that I thought you’d enjoy, I’m sure you know this one. And then Caught Looking, which was—

Catherine Opie:

Oh, Caught Looking.

Debbie Millman:

… just an extraordinary publication. At the time, you also joined a woman’s S&M society called The Outcasts. It’s co-founded by the activist and academic Gayle Rubin. But you’ve said that S&M was never sexual for you, and have described it as the scariest, most violent secret impulses that could be followed and validated and made almost cozy in an atmosphere where you could always say “no.” And you go on to say that you needed to push yourself to get over the enormous amount of fear you had around your body. Where do you think that fear came from? What was that fear about?

Catherine Opie:

Well, it’s personal and it’s not on the record in terms of personal, but there was some childhood trauma on my part. And I think that there was an enormous amount of healing that this community brought to me in relationship to trauma. And you’ve never read this in an interview. So, I’m saying it right now for the first time. And it’s been very hard in a certain way to be quiet about this during the #MeToo movement, but there’s reasons. And the reasons are, is when you make self-portraits that I made, people easily equate that to, “Oh, well, that’s why she made that—she was traumatized as a child.”

And I try to, very hard, again, that kind of compartments that I put things in. In this society, we’re very easy to connote things and to take things and blow them out of proportion in a way that’s not authentic to one’s own experience. So my authenticity to my own experience into my childhood was definitely worked out on an emotional level very much so through the leather community, but at the same time, the publicness of that is not necessarily something that I feel I need to have completely spelled out in the world.

Debbie Millman:

I completely understand. For years, I was in the closet and also would not disclose my own early childhood trauma with sexual abuse. Primarily because I never wanted anybody to say that anything I did was because of that or that I was damaged in some way because of it or that I would be judged because of my own inner homophobia in those decades. But I know that the kink community essentially saved the life of my wife, Roxane Gay. She’s very public about the fact that if it weren’t for the kink community, she wouldn’t be alive today.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. No, and I feel very much the same without having to lay out all the details of my past, but that was an amazing place to be able to work out so much.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you for feeling that you could trust me with this. That sense of community that both you talk about and that Roxane has experienced, that seems to be the most important aspect of being involved in the BDSM scene, and that it was also political. It was as political as much as it was sexual, as much as it was community. And I read that you often talked philosophy in the dungeons.

Catherine Opie:

Well, Gayle Rubin is great to talk to. I mean, I remember at one point asking Gayle for coffee and just wanting to talk about the amazing experiences of the transition of so many butch dykes transitioning to male. And I wanted to have like a real philosophical conversation with her in relationship to AIDS and the kind of work that she did in relationship to the gay male leather–called sex clubs south of Market. And so when you have actual role models and brilliant people that were surrounding me at that time period and very sex-positive people, there was really interesting deep discourse in relationship to what we were doing and what we were holding, and also consensuality. I mean, I wish everybody had that education, in some ways.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. Yes. Some of your early work for On Our Backs included photos of your sex toy and leather collection, and a beautiful image of a woman standing while urinating. And in 1987 you created a self-portrait titled Cathy, which is a black-and-white image of yourself wearing a strap-on, dressed in a negligee, a stride, a bed. And at that time you vowed you’d never be a voyeur within your own community. But I’m wondering, did you ever feel shy about sharing this part of yourself in such a public way?

Catherine Opie:

Not anymore.

Debbie Millman:

Did you at that point, or …?

Catherine Opie:

Yeah, I think that I did. I think that I was still protecting my parents and my family. I think that it takes a long time to figure out how you should be as a person and what is OK to be out in the world in relation to also this weird protective bubble one puts around their biological family. And then at a certain point, I just realized that my family is my chosen family. That even though I have a profound sense of love for my parents, that I was also not going to remain in the closet. And that that was not a healthy position for me.

And so I just decided to go for it, but I didn’t put that image out actually until the 2000s. I mean, that’s the thing, is I went back into the archive. And I also probably thought that some of the black-and-white work from Girlfriends that I did, it was maybe too close to Mapplethorpe. And I needed to create my own identity within the leather community as a woman that was separate from Mapplethorpe, because we both also have similar aesthetics. We really like to highly aestheticize our material in a visual kind of classical way. And so that work in the 2000s was fine to pull out, where in the ’80s, when Robert passed away from AIDS until 1989, it was too close.

Debbie Millman:

Is that why you stayed away from using a square format?

Catherine Opie:

Well, I used a square format a lot in all that private work. I mean, it was all shot [inaudible]. Yeah, no. And the archive has that because it’s a camera that I really enjoyed using. Including in the new Phaidon book, you’ll see an image of me with my grandfather’s Rolleiflex as a self-portrait at one of the beginning pages where it was 1983 or ’84, and I’m in New York City and it’s a self-portrait with my grandfather’s fedora with a big overcoat holding a twin reflex. So that work existed and it was going on and I was making it. But when I decided to make work of my own community, I felt that I needed to create a different way of thinking about documentary.

And so with Being and Having, which was the first studio photographs of mine with women with fake mustaches, my friends with fake mustaches and looking straight into the camera, by using that yellow background consistently with the consistent framing, [it] created a conceptual positioning to portraiture that I felt was a way to shift from on necessarily a comparison to Mapplethorpe.

Debbie Millman:

That work, Being and Having, really shot you to fame. What made you decide to shoot them all on a golden yellow background?

Catherine Opie:

Well, it was in my living room in Silver Lake. I lived on Sanborn Ave. How I made all my early portraits was in my living room. I didn’t have a studio. Yellow is a hard color in relationship to skin tone, but the other thing is, in terms of the diversity of skin tone of my friends in relationship to inclusion, yellow was the best to make it pop. And I would often have all my friends get their mustaches, and we would make the portraits because I was shooting with a four-by-five camera, and we’d make the portraits, and then we’d just hang out afterwards.

So it was also in a small living room, and Silver Lake, I didn’t have the ability to change over all different colors of seamless … nor was I thinking about seamless in that way at that point. It wasn’t until I started making the portraits the year after, which began first as a collaboration with my good friend from CalArts, Richard Hawkins, who’s a fellow artist, where we started making portraits of our mutual friends at that point. And then he realized that it was my body of work. And he just said, “This is yours. Go with it.” But he introduced me … really thinking about Holbein and what nobility is and what that is within our community. And we had amazing extensive conversations about that.

And Richard is a very brilliant person who I felt just helped lead a pathway for me in terms of continuing to photograph the community after I made Being and Having.

Debbie Millman:

I understand that the title of the show Being and Having was a play on psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s idea that men have the phallus, while women as the embodiment of erotic desire and art are the phallus. And when I was reading this, I’m like, “Was this dude serious?”

Catherine Opie:

So this is serious. And I have to tell you that the title came from the woman with her arms crossed over her chest, peeing, in On Our Backs. So she is an amazing philosopher from Toronto, Canada, by the name of Anne Marie Smith. And she was one of the head political philosophers and teachers at Cornell, but she was my lover at the time. I met her in Canada at a bar and she had been making postcards with a friend that were really awesome erotic postcards from this collective in Canada. And, I’m sorry, I don’t remember the collective’s name anymore, but I was in the bar going, “Hey, do you know who made these?” And then the woman I was talking to said, “Yeah. Myself and my next-door neighbor did.”

And then it started a very long friendship and love affair with Anne Marie Smith, including the portrait that’s on the bed, the self-portraits on our bed. When she came to visit me in California while I was in grad school, that was a student’s installation in their studio. And they let us have it as a little private palace so to speak during her visit.

Debbie Millman:

Wow. Wow.

Catherine Opie:

So it all gets wrapped together. That’s the beautiful thing about community, is you meet people and you’re in this kind of … in the ’80s, you’re going through so much as a community, especially in relationship to politics and AIDS and visibility. And just all of these inner weavings are really also a part of my ability to think and begin to figure out how to make work.

Debbie Millman:

20 years after you took the Being and Having photos, several were used to accompany the opening credits of “The L Word,” the original version of “The L Word.” What did you think when you were asked about their using your photos of women in drag for the titles?

Catherine Opie:

It’s funny because there’s another photograph that you probably know because you’ve really researched me and you know my work, but for our listeners, it’s a photograph from the series Domestic of two women in a swimming pool, Miggi and Ilene. Ilene was the producer of “The L Word.”

Debbie Millman:

Ilene Chaiken.

Catherine Opie:

Ilene Chaiken. So for my first show at Regen Projects, her and Miggi hosted my opening dinner party at their house. And so when she approached me, we had already forged a friendship in the art world and I just thought, Yeah, go for it. You’re making a show. Let’s use lesbians with mustaches in the title. And I think that that is also a different kind of radicality of Los Angeles because of the kind of lipstick lesbian positioning of Los Angeles as a city, that I thought it was actually pretty brave that she wanted to do that, and it connoted also another part of the community in LA that might not be actually represented within the series.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I love those opening credits. What do you think of the reboot? Have you been watching it?

Catherine Opie:

I haven’t yet. I have to get on that. I haven’t watched the reboot and it’s just because there is so much to stream. And then during the pandemic, there was a lot to stream, and I’m just not caught up on “The L Word” yet, but I will. It’s in my queue. It’s in my queue.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I’m loving it. I’m absolutely loving it. And just seeing Bette and Tina together, not as a couple, but just seeing them in the same room on the same sofa makes me happy. Catherine, you created three portraits in less than a decade, three self-portraits in less than a decade, that propelled you to even greater awareness and fame in the art world and beyond. And I’d like to talk to you about all three, if that’s OK.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

The first is titled Self Portrait/Cutting. You created this piece in 1993 and it’s a photograph of you from behind, facing away from the camera. You’re shirtless. There’s a drawing carved into the skin of your back featuring two stick figure women smiling and holding hands. And behind them is a house with some birds flying and it looks like it could be a child’s drawing. And you’re standing in front of what looks like a baroque-type wallpaper. What did this photograph represent at the time?

Catherine Opie:

Well, at the time it was something that I actually, it was a photograph out of mourning. My first domestic relationship, and the only one I had ever had before being with my current partner and wife, Julie Burleigh, was with a woman, Pam Gregg. And I was utterly in love, and we built a house and we got two puppies and we were living the domestic dream. I imagined in my mind that it would go on for a long period of time. That the two puppies would potentially turn into children and all of that, which was still hard in 1993 to imagine, very difficult in 1993 to imagine.

And then blood as a substance is the substance that was feared. And one of the things that I did say in that quote that S&M was never sexual wasn’t actually completely true because Pam and I met in a leather context, and ended up being lovers. And I’ve had other lovers within the leather community in that context. So there is a bit of kind of pleasure in terms of sexuality mixed into it in terms of my history of relationships. But Pam broke up with me and I was devastated. And for a year I spent doodling on a pad. And I would doodle these stick figure girls with the house with the sun coming out of the clouds as a sense of optimism that I will find love again.

And then I decided to go ahead and make it a cutting and make it a portrait. And I was in the process of making the other portraits at that time. And it was just a profound sense of loss and longing, not just for me personally in losing my first domestic relationship, but the notion of loss overall, in terms of the AIDS epidemic and watching it decimate all of these couples and community. So even though there’s two stick figure girls with skirts, I wanted to make a very complicated universal piece that went beyond my own personal sadness of the loss of my domestic relationship. And that is what I came up with.

Debbie Millman:

Can you talk about how the artist Judy Bamber carved the illustration into your back? What was that like for her?

Catherine Opie:

I think she was really nervous. I mean, it’s actually on videotape. We have both cuttings documented on videotape. We don’t have Self-Portrait/Nursing, but we have the cutting on my backend pervert documented. Self-Portrait/Cutting happened in Los Angeles in my new living room in what we called Casa de Estrogen, which was predominantly a lesbian apartment building in Koreatown on Catalina Street. And so there was an amazing history there, Jenny Schmutz who lived above me. And it was just an incredible group of dykes and their motorcycles that all lived together in this apartment building.

And then my good friends Mike and Sky, who I had photographed, were there to support Judy. And my other good friend who was the photographer Connie Samaras, took the dark sides out of the camera and operated the four-by-five camera because there wasn’t … it’s a self-portrait, but it couldn’t be done on a tripod with a cable release because it was four-by-five. So Judy practiced on chicken thighs before she practiced on my body.

Debbie Millman:

I hope there are photos documenting that series.

Catherine Opie:

And what’s amazing is Judy is one of the most precise painters ever. I mean, her work is unbelievable. If you don’t know her work, look up her work. And we’re born on the same day in the same year. So we both share April 14, 1961. And she was one of my best friends. And I wanted an apprehension in the cutting. I wanted it to not be done by somebody like Mike or Sky who would have been able to do it perfectly. I wanted the blood to kind of, almost as if the surface of the skin was scratched, but at moments the scalpel would actually make a mark that was more definitive. And it was never meant to be a permanent cutting. I guess it became obviously a pretty iconic portrait.

Debbie Millman:

And then in 1994, you created Self-Portrait/Pervert. This time you’re sitting in front of a black-and-gold brocade. Your hands are folded in your lap. You’re facing the camera. Your head is completely covered in a black leather gimp mask. You’re wearing leather chaps. And the word pervert is carved in bloody, kind of oozing, very ornate letters across your chest, and the body modifier Raelyn Gallina cut the word into your skin. And then two of your friends from a piercing shop lined your arms 46 times from the shoulder down to the wrist with two-inch needles.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah, I think they were 12-gauge needles. But I remember we wanted the gauge to be big enough that it would create the appearance of body armor in a certain way. And that I wanted the cutting and the needles to be completely precise because I was thinking about a whole binds kind of Henry VIII portrait in a certain way. And I was thinking about what the word pervert meant in 1994 in my community, especially when there was a beginning of a divide within our own community. And this is very specific, it’s not just for what pervert means from Jesse Helms, the holding of Mapplethorpe photographs on the Senate floor, but it also came from internal homophobia of our own community of, again, the sex workers, the people who practice S&M were also perverts, and that there are portions of the gay and lesbian community that are “normal.”

And I didn’t like the notion of normal. I’ve never liked the binaries of normal or abnormal. I’m more interested in the complexity of sexuality and desire. And so it was that moment where in the same way my friend Steak tattooed dyke on the back of her neck that I was going to have Raelyn do this cutting. And that was done in San Francisco in a studio while I was making the portrait series. It was attended by an enormous amount of my friends, including the incredible trans historian Susan Stryker. And the needles were done first, and then I sat in the chair and Raelyn did the cutting. And then I put the hood on and we made some without the hood and some with the hood. But I really didn’t want my face because I wanted the notion of visibility to be placed on language.

So what does the word pervert mean? How do we deal with language? Is this enough of a pervert for you? And it’s also really beautiful, and then you actually have to deal with the beauty of it as well? Because it’s not dripping blood. It’s done in such a way that it just looks like almost a red tattoo, but it is blood coming to the surface.

Debbie Millman:

Well, there is a real elegance to the photo with the way it’s constructed. Had you been very involved in body modification at that time as well? How hard was it for you to have 46 12-gauge needles put through your skin?

Catherine Opie:

Not that difficult, actually, because I think that when you prepare yourself it’s totally different. If I’m walking through the house and I stub my toe on furniture, I sit there and I weep. I’m really angry. I can’t believe I’ve hurt myself. But when you’ve already been in the leather community and you are doing this and the dungeons on your own, you know what you’re doing. And so your mindset is different. I mean, if somebody goes to the doctor and gets a shot, the only thing that is hurting is actually the fear of getting the shot.

So our kind of relationship to fear is so complicated as human beings. And I was never afraid because I knew that my friends were professionals. And Raelyn was a professional and that they had done this time and time again. And I had done a lot of play piercing and a lot of cutting in a private setting. And so I was very definitive in knowing what I wanted to do and had the mindset to go through it.

Debbie Millman:

Did you experience any of the euphoria that sometimes occurs during body modification?

Catherine Opie:

Oh, absolutely. No, your endorphins are going off the rockers. And it was funny because if you watch the videotape, there’s one moment where I have the group Dead Can Dance playing in the background because I love that kind of meditative music. And you’re breathing and you’re going through it and then Raelyn decided to stop for a moment and try to pop a pimple on my chest that was driving her crazy. And at that moment I lost my focus and then I started moaning a little bit more once she went back into the cutting. The cutting is much harder than the needles to go through. Needles are fairly quick, but definitely cuttings take enormous amount of concentration. And that’s partly why I didn’t want my face in the picture is because the endorphins are going off. With my glasses off my eyes are slightly crossed. And the first thing that people look at in portraits is people’s faces usually. And it, again, it had to remain on the body and about the body.

Debbie Millman:

The image was first shown to the public in 1995 at the Whitney Biennial. And you’ve said that since then you’ve struggled to look at that photo now. How come?

Catherine Opie:

Well, it’s not necessarily a struggle. I haven’t said a struggle. It’s a photograph that I don’t need to live with. It’s a photograph that I made and that I’m proud of and that represented that moment in time. I had several collectors at different moments say how powerful that piece is to live with, and that it’s in their bedroom and they wake up to it every morning. And I guess I started thinking, could I wake up to that every morning? But one of the things that I love about photography, it defines the sense of time.

And within the defined sense of time of that, going back to that geeky kind of [inaudible] notion of the decisive moment, Pervert is a decisive moment on my part, but that doesn’t necessarily define me as a 60-year-old woman now. So the frozenness of my time in my community. I’m so profoundly honored that my friends and I, myself, chose to use ourselves in relationship to community to make and work on a body of work that created a certain history and a certain idea of visibility. But that doesn’t mean that we’re held in that time in the same way that we’re held in the time in terms of the making of the work.

Debbie Millman:

Before I ask you about the third self-portrait, Self-Portrait/Nursing, I want to ask you about your thoughts on domesticity in your work. And you’ve said that Self-Portrait/Cutting was about the relationship between queerness and domesticity. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about what that notion between queerness and domesticity is or was?

Catherine Opie:

Well, throughout history people fall in love. And throughout history and relationship to homophobia, especially after, say, the roaring ’20s, so to speak. And when the puritanical notion of homosexuality ended up entering the religious indoctrination of not being acceptable, and so forth. And the Bible misinterpreted and so forth. When you fall in love, you often want to live with the person that you fall in love with. And so domesticity was always literally a part of the notion of having a relationship and being in love and opening up one’s home of cohabitation.

And to then be denied that both on legal fronts as well as just rhetorically within our society is incredibly fraught. And so this notion of coming out of the closet always made me laugh because a closet is a domestic space. A closet is where one another’s clothes co-mingle if you don’t have your own walk-in closet, which I don’t. But a closet is where a co-mingling of the everyday happens. And so domesticity has always been a part of love and relationship and trying to build a life and a home with another person.

Debbie Millman:

After Cutting and Pervert, you drove across the U.S. in your RV photographing lesbian families, women who had children, who lived in groups, couples engaging in everyday household activities across the country. And you titled the portfolio Domestic. Were you looking for something specific in that body of work?

Catherine Opie:

Well, that body of work also was … I had been in a relationship then for three to four years with another amazing queer photographer, important lesbian artist on a historical level who should be. She’s in books like Stolen Glances. Her name is Kaucyila Brooke. And we were about ready to buy a house together. We were going to do it. We had been in a three-year relationship where she ironically was living on Sanborn Ave., where I ironically lived with Pam, my first domestic relationship. And I was still in Casa de Estrogen down in Koreatown.

And I just decided to go ahead and celebrate the notion of domesticity while getting an RV and going around the country and making these photographs. But they were also in conversation with [inaudible] and MoMA in terms of pleasure and terror and domestic comfort. They were also a way for me to create a different kind of conversation around family. That it’s not just couples, that it’s also lesbian households. That the body of work reflected a different notion of family within my own lesbian community. And Kaucyila broke up with me while I was on the road making this.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, heartbreak.

Catherine Opie:

More Cathy. I’ll be pulling out a violin and more heartbreak, right?

Debbie Millman:

Oh no, I’ve been dumped. So I feel it. I get it.

Catherine Opie:

So that happened. And then I was left printing all of this work as my next body of work. And once again, my attempt at having domesticity was a failed attempt, just as the cutting on my back. And I basically picked up my life at that point because I didn’t get a full-time job at UCLA that I was up for, for teaching. And I was dating a woman in New York, Daphne Fitzpatrick, another artist that we had met in Australia, and started a mad Australian road trip in romance with each other. And there was a job opening at Yale, and I thought, Well, let me apply to Yale. And I ended up getting the job and moving from LA because of absolute heartbreak with my relationship. And that was that. And another chapter began.

Debbie Millman:

Prior to teaching at Yale, I know that you were awarded a fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, which is where you met your current partner, Julie Burleigh.

Catherine Opie:

Yes. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Who is also an artist. So I think you moved back to LA in an effort to be closer to her, is that correct?

Catherine Opie:

No, no.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, OK. So tell us how that happened.

Catherine Opie:

The story goes on. The love story goes on. The love life of Cathy Opie.

Debbie Millman:

Some of these intimate moments were harder to find.

Catherine Opie:

Oh, exactly. So I had met Julie at Wash U when I was teaching there on the foreign fellow, and she became a friend. But I thought that she was really amazing and she blew my mind. Julie was straight and I was dating Daphne Fitzpatrick in New York. And my whole life was just super discombobulated in a way. And so it was funny because I remember Daphne going, “God, you talk about Julie a lot. You really do.” And I’m like, “Yeah, she’s this really awesome woman. She’s my new friend.” Basically Daphne broke up with me as soon as I moved to New York, which she was very wary … she was like, “I hope you’re not moving to New York for me.” She was very clear that I shouldn’t be moving to New York for her.

And that was fine. I just really liked her. And I liked her. All of us are still all best friends today. They’re my posse in New York. Incredible group of lesbian artists that are now at this point where we have over a 20-year friendship with one another. And so then I kept talking to Julie Burleigh when I lived in New York. And Julie ended up being my date to my show at the MCA in Chicago that Elizabeth Smith curated. And she kind of knew, being my date, that we were going to share the same hotel room. And Julie—we fell in love. And I said, “By the way, I’m in the process of trying to get pregnant.” And she was like, “Oh, OK.”

And she had already raised a daughter. She was a single mom from the age of 18. And this was the first time in her life that she was being independent and living away from Sarah. And so it was kind of an incredible statement to say that I’m trying to get pregnant. And she was like, “OK.” And then we ended up, she moved into LA when Oliver was three months old. So I got headhunted. I was asked if I was happy at Yale by UCLA by Jim Welling. And I said, “Why?” And he goes, “Well, I’m going to open a position. And I would like you to apply for it.” And UCLA was always a dream of mine. And I thought about, OK, I live in Brooklyn, I want to have a baby. I’m going to have to move to New Haven. I can’t be two hours away from a newborn.

So all the stars aligned again for me, so to speak. And I got pregnant in New York and moved back when I was eight months pregnant. Julie and I bought a house over a three-day period of time in West Adams. We had three days to buy a house and we did. And then I moved into that house. And then she moved in when she finished her teaching position and Oliver was about three months old.

Debbie Millman:

And you’ve been together ever since.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. It’ll be 21 years this November.

Debbie Millman:

Incredible. Absolutely incredible. Well, the birth of your son, Oliver, and the part he plays in your third self-portrait … I want to talk to you about the piece Self-Portrait/Nursing. But before I ask you about it, there was one thing that I read that I thought was so interesting when you were trying to have a child: A number of your butch friends were shocked that you were trying to get pregnant and have a baby. And you said this at the time: “Why can’t I be butch and have a baby? Why can’t I acknowledge the fact that I’m a biological woman and I have a vagina that can do shit.”

Catherine Opie:

Pretty much so.

Debbie Millman:

And so I’m wondering if you have any perspective on why it’s so hard for people to accept the fluidness and expandability of gender and orientation.

Catherine Opie:

Society, quite honestly. Roles are presented to us. I mean, you were born the same year that I was born, 1961. We had to learn how to read from Dick and Jane.

Debbie Millman:

Yep, we have.

Catherine Opie:

It’s a construct. It’s a construct that you have to break. And a lot of people have a hard time understanding what it is to actually break a construct, so to speak, of what is dictated to us through this notion of normality in society.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. It’s taken me this long, it’s taken me 50-plus years to even feel like I have the beginnings of some answers. And as I approach 60, I’m still struggling with truth and authenticity. What it means to be fully out in the world in every way.

Catherine Opie:

Well, and it got slammed back at us in a completely different way in relation to the last administration that we all just had to live under. I mean, talk about Draconian measures again, to go from an enlightenment of the White House being lit in rainbow colors from the Obama administration to what we just had to go through and are continuing to feel the ramifications from in relation to hate and homophobia within our society. Progress has been made, but that doesn’t mean that it’s still not frightening times to live in.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, absolutely. I’m doing a lot of work right now with Lambda Legal, and there’s real concern that there might be cases that come to the Supreme Court challenging marriage equality, which seems just inconceivable.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. And I say there’s an enormous amount of us who actually have been able to financially do fairly well in life. And I’m always a proponent of starting a different church for all of us queer folks. And that if they want our tax money, that it goes to that church. And then when they acknowledge us as actual part of citizenship and equality, that they can have their tax money, but I’m all for no taxation without representation at this point. I’m over it.

Debbie Millman:

Sign me up, Catherine. Sign me up. Sign me up.

Catherine Opie:

I just have to figure out a name for my non-church church.

Debbie Millman:

I can help you with that. Self-Portrait/Nursing, it’s the third portrait, correct?

Catherine Opie:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

You are shirtless in this picture as well, but for the first time you are showing your face to the camera. You’re holding your son, Oliver, in your wonderfully tattooed arm. You are looking into his eyes as he’s nursing. You’re both sumptuous and tender. And it’s been described as a butch-dyke Madonna and Child. And I’m wondering was that your intention?

Catherine Opie:

Well, I’m butch. I mean, I have short hair, but the history of the body is very important terms of this portrait in the classical sense. I mean, because design matters. I’m in a [inaudible] chair. It’s actually called the chieftain chair. It is a chair that in the house that I usually sat in to nurse Oliver. So it was important to bring it back to the studio, and then the red, just again, using that fabric with the gold threading. And it is funny because I finally just had my first trip to Rome. I mean, it’s kind of crazy that I had borrowed so much culturally from a certain history of power in the Roman Empire, especially in relationship to imagery.

But when I walked through the gallery [inaudible] from the Cardinal [inaudible] house and all of these other things and saw the wallpaper which I was using fabric backgrounds, it was funny because I knew that obviously through art history that those were tropes that I was using. But until you’re actually in front of something, until you’re actually bearing witness, you don’t realize the influences. And it was Madonna and Child. And I saw an enormous amount of Madonna and Child while I was in Rome. The Catholic church and the representation of Madonna and Child is one of the best marketing campaigns ever.

Debbie Millman:

Tell me more. Tell me more.

Catherine Opie:

And then all of a sudden to have the queer body be able to have a baby, to be able to be butch, to be able to live in their identity, for the scar of Pervert to still be existing on the body, ends up allowing you to begin to articulate, and again, look at that great marketing campaign of Madonna and Child in a very, again, different way. So how do we make something iconic that ends up culturally being able to engage in the construct of culture in itself through history? And those are things that I’ve always been interested in in terms of making work. It’s fascinating to me.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, absolutely. Did you realize at the time that Pervert could still be seen? Was that intentional?

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. It’s a scar. It’s there. It’s slightly raised.

Debbie Millman:

Still?

Catherine Opie:

Yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Awesome. In 2011, several months before she died, you were commissioned by the actress Elizabeth Taylor to photograph her home in Bel Air Los Angeles. How did that project first come about?

Catherine Opie:

Well, she actually didn’t commission me. We shared the same accountant, who’s still my accountant to this day, Derek Lee. And Derek for years kept saying, “Elizabeth Taylor is my client. If you ever want to do anything, I could propose something to her.” And I kind of looked at him and I said, “Well, I don’t really do celebrity.” And then I had done the body of work inauguration of going to DC for three days and making a body of work in a book and a portfolio out of the first-ever elected African American president in the United States.

And I was thinking a lot about what is a portrait? How do we begin to think about a portrait? And I also had photographed quite a bit for Dwell Magazine, which were portraits of people’s incredibly interesting homes. But inauguration is in conversation, and I love having conversations with other artists. It’s in conversation with Eggleston’s Election Eve, where he went around Georgia and photographed just the landscape as Carter was becoming president of the United States. And then also Eggelston photographed Graceland after Elvis passed.

And I was thinking about, “OK, those are two different kinds of portraits. Those are really interesting ideas. And I’ve often used landscape in relationship to portraiture too. It’s something that I’m profoundly interested in.” And so I went back to Derek and I said, “Yeah, I want to make a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor through her home, through her belongings. And would that be something that you could propose and I could get access to?” And so I met with her personal assistant, Tim, who I became very close with through the process, because during the process Elizabeth passed away while I was still photographing the house. And it was a profoundly amazing experience.

I never met her, but I feel like in a weird way, I was granted kind of the last portrait of Elizabeth Taylor. And it didn’t have to be done with her before camera, but it became much more intimate and much more tactile in relation to her home. And the home was immediately dismantled and sold upon her passing.

Debbie Millman:

You photographed 3,000 images of her possessions and her private spaces, her vanity table set with loose sight containers of carefully organized eyeshadow in her sitting room, her blue velvet sofas—which I assume were supposed to be mimicking her eyes—her Christmas decorations, which she specifically asked that you do, shoes and boots and more shoes, her lavish clothes. What was that like for you? How did feel doing that?

Catherine Opie:

It was really quiet and I really appreciate quietness. I would go in, the house was so soft, lush. I lived in West Adams. And I lived on a rowdy, rowdy block that was pretty much run by the gang the Bloods. And it was car racing and squealing tires and music. And it was a lively, lively neighborhood. And all of a sudden, a gate would open and I would go into this driveway and go through this front door of a house that was lushly carpeted. And you used such great descriptive terms, but it became this place that I could slowly watch the light unravel in each room. I had time.

It was close to UCLA. So I would often go after I was done teaching and spend the afternoon. They always offered me lunch. The staff was incredible. Her whole entire office was in her home. I really loved her cat, Fang. Fang and I became really good friends. It was a reprieve from a lot of chaos in my life that I could slowly unravel through a six-month period in making a portrait. And one doesn’t normally make a portrait in six months, they make a portrait within 40 minutes of somebody visiting the studio.

Debbie Millman:

How would you describe Elizabeth Taylor through getting to know the objects in her life?

Catherine Opie:

That she was passionate as a human being, that her objects held memories for her, that they also were about her love of shiny sparkly things, but that also a stuffed animal that somebody would bring over to her would hold as much importance. She was a generous person in my mind. And the generosity that she and her team displayed to me was obvious in everything that was cared for. She was also really independent and savvy and understanding of a woman of her generation. And when she was born that she could hold power. And that also she could hold power with her voice as an activist. And she was an activist at a period of time that we really needed.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Catherine Opie:

And if she was the person who was actually able to get Ronald Reagan to say “AIDS,” to say what was happening … and that was her who did it as well as starting the early fundraising. That within all the softness and the lushness, there was utter power and a position of humanity that I just have an enormous amount of respect for.

Debbie Millman:

In one photo of Elizabeth Taylor’s vanity, there seems to be a line written in lipstick on the mirror.

Catherine Opie:

Oh yeah. Colin Farrell.

Debbie Millman:

And I think it reads, “the quest for Japanese beef.” What is that about? Where is that line from?

Catherine Opie:

Well, Colin Farrell became very close with Elizabeth and would visit Elizabeth a lot. And he went in her bedroom, and in her bathroom mirror after visiting her wrote in her lipstick that he was going to take her out for Japanese beef. And so that remained on the mirror because actually there wasn’t any expectation of, I mean, I was getting ready for them to bring all the luggage out into the foyer because she was going on a big trip to New York. And I was going to have the opportunity to photograph what it looked like when she packed her bags for a big trip, which according to her assistant, Tim, was a lot of luggage because she always wanted to have the choices around her.

And then the next thing I heard was she was hospitalized. And then we rapidly tried to get the blue room together, which is represented as one of the last moments in the book of this blue room that almost looks like angel wallpaper because she was going to move back downstairs. She wasn’t able to go up the stairs any longer. And she would come home from the hospital to this room and it was described to what she wanted the room to look like. And so we were racing around getting that done, and I was still in the house photographing as all of this was happening. And then she passed.

And so the blue room never got to be realized with Elizabeth in it. And so that’s one of the reasons why it’s photographed in that way, as well as the jewelry abstracted, was the day that Christie’s came to take the jewelry, Tim and everybody called me and said, “This is the last day that the jewelry’s going to be in the house. Do you want to come by?” And so in the morning we came by with her son, just gorgeous, and we took a couch pillow out and we laid some of the jewelry on a couch pillow for it to sparkle back to Elizabeth. And I made these abstract photographs that feel almost also like an homage to her passing.

Debbie Millman:

Feel extraordinary.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. It was one of those extraordinary experiences of somebody who was obviously one of the biggest famed Hollywood movie stars, but who also led an extraordinary life helping others.

Debbie Millman:

The last project that I want to talk to you about today is your 2018 film, your first film, The Modernist, a 22-minute movie containing 800 photographs about a frustrated artist who, unable to buy their own home, starts burning down beautiful houses. And I believe that this is also, this film is also in conversation with another film that preceded it that was also created with still photographs. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Catherine Opie:

That would be Chris Marker’s film La Jetée, which was made pretty much after you and I were both born. It was made in 1962. And the biggest fear in 1962 was nuclear obliteration in relation to the Cold War. You have to think about the Cuban Missile Crisis and other things that were happening historically at that moment in time in which Chris Marker made La Jetée, which is about love and longing and memory. And it’s kind of a pseudo sci-fi film made out of stills. But it’s an incredible political poem to that time.

And I wanted to do a conversation in terms of that, maybe at this point in time the notion of nostalgia and Modernism as a utopic dream has also failed us. So using my good friend who I photographed for years, Pig Pen, whose real name is Stosh Fila … Piggy and I have a very, very close relationship. And I asked Pig Pen to star as the protagonist of this film. And it was also the last piece that I made in my West Adams studio behind my house because I had moved finally, I was going to move to a bigger studio.

And so it is about the fact that I will never be able to afford a case study house or any kind of house, which was supposed to be affordable at this point in time in which they were made. It also mirrors the time period of when La Jetée was made. And so it’s a quandary. It’s a quandary to where we are at this point in time, but it also is a trans body. It’s a queer body. And we all know in terms of economics that one of the hardest economical groups is lesbians, actually, in order to be able to own property or prosper in any way, because we still do not have wage equality in this country. So it was trying to put in all these ideas of a lot of other bodies of work that I’ve mapped out all into one piece.

Debbie Millman:

Pig Pen is one of the two most photographed people in your body of work. Can you talk a little bit about why you keep coming back to photograph them?

Catherine Opie:

Pig Pen is just one of the people that I’ve just really, really loved in my life as a friend. I mean, I have gone through so much with Pig Pen. We have gone through losing so much in our community to performing together with [inaudible] to just our bodies are entwined on a very emotional friend way. I would do anything for Pig Pen and Pig Pen would do anything for me. And I think it’s really, really important to also say, because it has been brought up in a number of interviews about Pig Pen being one of the most photographed people as well as one of my best friends, is that I think that a lot of people view this as a potential muse. And I don’t view my friendships as muses or who I photograph over and over as muse.

I might really enjoy looking at them, but by no means are they muses; there are friends that I honor in relation to kind of image making. I have a harder time with this notion of muse.

Debbie Millman:

That’s so interesting. It would never have occurred to me that Pig Pen was your muse. If I had to pick anything or anyone that was a muse to you, I would say it would be culture.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah, exactly. Thank you for saying that.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, yeah. It wouldn’t have even occurred to me. Was it different directing, so to speak, a film versus taking a photograph because it is a film made of photographs? I’m just wondering about that relationship.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah, no. I think that it wasn’t. And it was interesting because I have a longtime assistant, Heather Rasmussen, who’s just amazing and does everything for me. And it was harder for her than it was for me, because she would say, “Do we need to storyboard this? How are you going to do this?” And I said, “It lives my head. What am I going to do? Draw stick figures, because that’s about all I can draw anyway?” And I said, “No, this piece lives in my head.” And I knew that I wanted to create a sense of multiple cameras. I knew that within the stills I wanted it to, I wanted to rack focus and then bring things into focus. I knew that I wanted to use the newspaper as a platform of what comes in our lives and how we deal with it.

Debbie Millman:

Really well done, by the way.

Catherine Opie:

And I knew that this was … I knew that the protagonist was an artist who lived in their studio and that’s all that they could afford. And through this, they were making a piece. And their piece extended with the incredible amount of fires that always happened in California too. So fire in itself is one of the most feared elements in California. We have major wildfires burning right now, but what it is also in terms of notions of loss, in ideas around what we all have lost through not being able afford to buy a house, to live on the fringe of one’s ability in society. What Modernism was supposed to apply. Then you have stores like Design Within Reach, which is, we all know in our joke of our community, it’s designed without reach.

Debbie Millman:

Whole Foods is whole paycheck.

Catherine Opie:

Right. Whole Foods is whole paycheck. So this idea that we could live this utopic notion of what Modernism was going to give us and this was also formed in relationship to devastation, culturally, in terms of World War II. It’s like when you think of who moved here and who was designing houses from Shindler on, it was really even abrupt writing for Hollywood films. That is so interesting to me, also, as a place of a Los Angeles and what is iconic about the idea of better health here in LA is no longer affordable to live in this city. We have over 50,000 people unhoused right now in this city.

Debbie Millman:

It’s really quite astonishing to see what’s happening in the parks and on the sides of highways in Los Angeles. It’s just completely inconceivable that as a culture and a community, we could allow this.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. It’s devastating. And I needed to speak about that, and I didn’t. We all assumed that Hillary would get elected. But I actually didn’t have those assumptions. I actually saw of the percolation of what we went through in the last four years. And I felt an incredible need to talk about the times that we are living in.

Debbie Millman:

You were recently appointed the departmental chair of the UCLA Department of Art.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Congratulations.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

And this comes after your appointment as the university’s inaugural endowed chair in the art department, a position that was underwritten by a $2 million gift from the philanthropists Lynda and Stewart Resnick. And I was really struck by the goals that you’ve outlined as department chair, which include raising scholarship funds to ensure an arts education is actually accessible to all students, which seems like the real centerpiece of what you hope to be able to do. Can you talk a little bit about what changes you’re hoping to make to create more accessible education for students in the arts?

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, one of the greatest things about UCLA is it’s a historically amazing art department. We are a public university. Being a public university, we do not have the same kind of funding opportunities in relation to getting students. And it’s getting harder and harder to get our top choices because we have places like Yale who also then not only do full scholarships, but then they actually do a stipend to live upon as well. I think that those who can afford an education should actually pay for an education, but I am completely opposed to going into debt for education.

So I was very careful about my words in my interview in the LA Times where I laid out my goals, because my goal is that art students are able to leave with a degree debt-free. And in order to do that, I need to raise money for scholarship to create a larger endowment so that we can accomplish that for both undergraduate and graduate students. We need to further endow more positions in the art department, and that is specifically for adjunct. It is also unsustainable for adjuncts to be living in the way that they live now. And I was adjunct for a long time.

Debbie Millman:

Me too.

Catherine Opie:

It is not sustainable not to have medical insurance and it is not sustainable for somebody to potentially live on $20,000 a year here in Los Angeles. That’s not sustainable. So I’m really interested in sustainability in terms of also how much the adjunct community brings to the overall amazing education opportunity for both our graduate and undergraduate students. And we need to celebrate that versus make it a detriment for them.

And so by endowing more positions, we can create an ability to potentially give two- to three-year contracts that include medical insurance. And then we’re allowing a pool of really amazing young artists to be able to have their first opportunities to teach at a university like UCLA, and then hopefully be able to gain employment in other places. So it’s a two-tiered thing in relationship to students leaving in debt, but that also, that we are kinder and more responsible to those who give us so much within the department.

Debbie Millman:

How do you manage your pathological life with your art and life as an artist?

Catherine Opie:

There are those closets again, right? The compartments. I mean, at this point, it all seems like it just flows together. It really does. And I think I’m pretty good at time management. I have a really good assistant who really helps me extraordinarily. And at this point, the experience of making the work and the knowledge and relationship to what I want to make and the experiences that I try to put forth to figure out what I’m making all feel incredibly fluid. They’re not fraught. I think that I would say that in the ’90s and in my 30s I had more anxiety. And at this point I am beyond mid-career artists because I’m 60 and I’ve been making work in the art world for now 30 years.

And I think that I’m really just excited about the continuation of being able to talk about what I see around me during my lifetime and live out my life with the love of my beautiful family and friends. And I’m really hokey and going to cry about that right now because it is, I’ve worked really, really hard. And that is the hard thing about having multiple closets, so to speak, and sometimes there were too many clothes. And I feel that I’ve been able to pivot and move and be aware and continue to feel that I’m tied into the things that are interesting for me. And I have the incredible support of being able to have the longevity that I’ve had in relation to being an artist. And I wish that everybody had those kinds of experiences.

Debbie Millman:

Catherine, I have one last question for you. It’s not particularly profound, but it is one that I’m highly curious about.

Catherine Opie:

I like curiosity.

Debbie Millman:

Is it true that you’ve been watching the soap opera “Days of Our Lives” since you were 7 years old?

Catherine Opie:

You got that right when I was taking a sip of water.

Debbie Millman:

Sorry.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah, yeah. I could tell you everything that’s happening right now up to date with “Days of Our Lives,” but it’s—

Debbie Millman:

Oh my goodness.

Catherine Opie:

I have. I literally have. I could tell you about all the characters, all the history of the characters. I’m a walking encyclopedia of “Days of Our Lives.”

Debbie Millman:

Why? What is it about “Days of Our Lives”?

Catherine Opie:

It’s something that I watch with my mom. I guess that they, I don’t know, they became another place of a dysfunctional family for me, all the drama. If that drama was the drama, then do I have to think about my own drama, so to speak. And then you just get tied up in it in a really dumb, hokey way. And it’s something that I could talk about with my mom. Yesterday, I called her with this, literally a conversation I had yesterday. “Mom?” “What?” It’s like, “OK. If Lani is really the daughter of this character and Abe is the father, does that mean that they had sex when Abe was going out with the sister?”

That’s literally a conversation I will have with my mom. And she’s like, “I don’t know. We’ll just have to see. It’ll have to unravel.” So it gives a little touching point for mom and I in this shared history of these characters in the life of Salem. And then I’ve run into the characters in LA. And I even had one of the characters come to my studio for a studio visit. And I’ve always wanted to make still lives. I’m putting it out there on Design Matters, maybe you can help me make it happen.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I would love that.

Catherine Opie:

I want to make still lives of the set of “Days of Our Lives.”

Debbie Millman:

OK. This is going to happen. You heard it here first, listeners.

Catherine Opie:

Do you watch the soap—

Debbie Millman:

Isn’t that with the one with the—

Catherine Opie:

Hourglass.

Debbie Millman:

Hourglass? Yes.

Catherine Opie:

Yeah. It’s the hourglass. And so are the days of our lives.

Debbie Millman:

Catherine Opie, thank you. Thank you, thank you for creating such important, extraordinary work. And thank you so much for joining me today on Design Matters. It’s just been an honor, an absolute honor.

Catherine Opie:

Well, thank you. It was a fantastic interview and I really appreciate it.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. Thank you. You can see a survey of Catherine Opie’s work in her extraordinary new monograph simply titled Catherine Opie, published by Phaidon. 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.

Debbie Millman:

If you smush the word sartorialist together with cartoonist and add a dash of artist, what do you get? Well, you get Carly Kuhn, that’s what. Carly Kuhn is The Cartorialist. Her fashion drawings on Instagram got attention, but she was culled out of the entertainment business, where she’d been working, into the life and labor of a full-time artist. She joins me now to talk about the turns in her wonderful career. Carly Kuhn, welcome to Design Matters.

Carly Kuhn:

Thank you for having me.

Debbie Millman:

Carly, is it true you can do a spot-on impression of Janice from “Friends”?

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah. I don’t know how spot-on it is. And I don’t know at what point I declared this, but it’s pretty loud and piercing. So I don’t know if you want to hear it or not in your ear.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, yes. Can you share—

Carly Kuhn:

Oh God.

Debbie Millman:

… the impression please?

Carly Kuhn:

Chandler Bing.

Debbie Millman:

That’s wonderful.

Carly Kuhn:

I hope people stay on after that piercing noise.

Debbie Millman:

Actually, I have to tell you, I can do an impression of Lois from “Family Guy.” And I know that you used to draw “Family Guy”-esque type characters. Peter.

Carly Kuhn:

Oh God, I love it. I feel like there’s a world where they kind of almost blend into one another.

Debbie Millman:

Right. Actually, I think Lois and Janice would be good friends.

Carly Kuhn:

Yes, they would.

Debbie Millman:

… in an alternate universe. Carly, you’re a native New Yorker, but until very recently you lived in Los Angeles, and I understand that your dad played for a long time in a classic rock cover band. Your brother is a filmmaker and a cinematographer. So would it be fair to say you grew up in an artistic family?

Carly Kuhn:

Yes. And I also have a younger brother who is also very artistic, and my mom is very creative, and my dad is actually still rocking out in that cover band. I feel like the combination of my parents and growing up in New York City, where it’s the hub of culture, and fortunate to grow up around theater and fashion, and just people-watching lent itself to being exposed to creativity so early on.

Debbie Millman:

I read that you grew up singing and acting, and even did theater at a sleepaway camp.

Carly Kuhn:

I went to this camp, Point O’Pines, in Upstate New York, and it wasn’t a theater camp, but I think you had to participate in the plays. And I was a little shyer when I was younger. And I think I even, when I went to day camp, I was either told this memory or I have this memory of getting up on stage and crying at an end of this summer performance. And it’s funny because then I would later go on to slowly grow within camp, getting bigger and bigger roles. I think my last three years I was a Doo-Wop Girl in Little Shop of Horrors. And then I was Adelaide in Guys and Dolls. And then I was Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar, which was performed on parents’ weekend; an uplifting performance not so much, but we grew up going to Broadway musicals, and we’re definitely a very musical family. Both my brothers and my dad are all incredible piano players. I quit when I was in fourth grade, which I still am very sad about that, that I didn’t—

Debbie Millman:

I know, right?

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Anybody that has kids that’s listening to this that want to quit piano, don’t let them.

Carly Kuhn:

I know. But we did … even recently, we were all together and there’s a lot of singing by the piano, which is one of my favorite things.

Debbie Millman:

At the same time while you were doing this, you were also doodling dresses, and thought you might grow up and become a fashion designer. But I actually read that that was just one of the many careers you were imagining happening. What were some of the others?

Carly Kuhn:

I think comedy was always a throughline, watching “SNL” growing up.

Debbie Millman:

So you wanted to be on “SNL.”

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah. And I would later go on to take improv classes at The Groundlings.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Carly Kuhn:

But I don’t know if it was how some people have that set goal. My older brother always knew he wanted to be a writer, director, a filmmaker. And I think for me and my younger brother, we had different interests, but maybe we weave to different things and hobbies and career paths along the way, and then landed in none of those fields.

Debbie Millman:

Right.

Carly Kuhn:

Well, you know, creativity.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Carly Kuhn:

But an unexpected one.

Debbie Millman:

You have a really interesting and unusual path. You went to Syracuse University and got your degree in science, television, radio and film. And while you were still in school, you got an internship working on the television show “The View.” So tell us all about that. I need all the juice, all of it.

Carly Kuhn:

I believe it was the summer before I graduated college. And our main job as an intern on “The View” was wrangling the audience members as they were waiting on line, which I believe they overbook usually with these shows for the audience because people don’t show up. But I guess it was a very popular summer, and we would be outside waiting on line and have to turn people away. And people were not happy about that. I got called some names, even though I’m like, “I’m just a lowly intern. I have no power.” But it was that first foray into the world of entertainment, and getting a little bit of a thick skin, and also being exposed to being on a live set, which was exciting. And being an intern, you got to shadow and pop in in all the different departments. And so—

Debbie Millman:

Who were the hosts at the time you were working there?

Carly Kuhn:

I know Whoopi, Elizabeth, Barbara.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, what was that—

Carly Kuhn:

And—

Debbie Millman:

… like? See, that’s where I was wanting to take this. I wasn’t sure if she was still on the show at that point.

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah. Well, I wouldn’t say I personally worked with her, because we didn’t really interact much, but I think it was just that magic of Hollywood or the entertainment industry and seeing these people up close. I think it was really cool to just see all these women. It was very fast-paced. And it was a little bit of an intro into that world, which I ended up working in.

Debbie Millman:

Did you witness any of the on-stage or off-stage debates/fights?

Carly Kuhn:

I feel like I did. My memory is a little murky. I feel like sometimes I wish I remembered things more vividly. So I can’t fully remember, but I have a vague memory of being in the control room and witnessing whether it was fights or even just the chaos of a live show and what’s going on in the control room and being like, “Go to camera one, go grab, no, go to camera two. Oh my God, what are we doing?” Like that chaotic newsroom. So I think that it was something that was cool to see and experience.

Debbie Millman:

After you graduated, you figured you’d continue in television, but you were persuaded to consider joining an agency. And the example was like Ari from “Entourage.” And you got your first official job as an assistant at Creative Artists Agency. So I have three questions about this particular part of your life. How does one get a job at a place like Creative Artists Agency? What kind of work were you doing? And just generally, what was it like?

Carly Kuhn:

When I graduated I never thought I was going to leave New York City at first and go to Los Angeles. But I think I knew I wanted to be in television, and thought maybe scripted, and just knew that there was more opportunity. And I think I had a friend that had moved to LA and was working at an agency and said, “If you don’t know exactly what you want to do in the industry, working at an agency is a really great stepping stone because you get an overview of the whole industry when you work at like a CAA, and they represent writers, directors and actors, and all the different areas. So you’re learning all the different facets of the industry.” And so the way I got there, I think it was a family friend of a friend.

I do think sometimes it becomes who do you know? I think if you go to a certain school and alumni, it may … I think a Syracuse connection got me into the door. And when I interviewed, sometimes people have to start out in the mail room, which is like that famous grunt work. And I interviewed with this younger agent. And she said to me, “You’re the least qualified on paper, but you remind me of a young version of me. So I want to give you a shot.” And I was able to just start on her desk right away. And what you’re doing is essentially “rolling calls,” is the industry term. So you get on the phone, make the calls like, “I have so-and-so for Steven Spielberg.” And they patch you through.

And you’re expected to take notes and you’re adding names to call sheets. And then you’re also managing inbox emails up the wazoo, where you’re setting up meetings. For agents, it’s all about setting up meetings, and lunches, and dinners, and drinks. And it’s really fast-paced. It’s also really great to do, I think, especially in Los Angeles, because LA is a very spread-out city. It can feel very lonely. And the agency world is almost like a grad school for the entertainment industry. Everyone is around the same age, right out of college, or just one of their first jobs and just looking to make friends. And there’s an event or something for anything you can imagine, a birthday, or this, or that, and everyone’s going out together. And that’s how I made my group of friends.

I didn’t really know anyone when I moved to Los Angeles. And going back to your point about “Entourage,” Lloyd was the assistant to Ari. And so I joke, I was that character. Just went from that boss, and then worked on her desk for six months, and then had to go to a more senior desk that was a little more chaotic. And I definitely developed a lot of thick skin from working there, but I think it—weirdly, even though it doesn’t directly on paper—seems like it would lend itself to being an artist today, but I think a lot of those skills of just having to think on your feet, work in a fast-paced environment, maybe helped me later on navigate later things.

Debbie Millman:

At the same time you were doing this, you were also performing at Groundlings, which you mentioned. Groundlings is the legendary improvisation and sketch comedy theater. At that point, were you still hoping to get a gig on “Saturday Night Live,” or Second City, or something that was more standup related?

Carly Kuhn:

I don’t think it was an actual goal. I’m sure deep down there was like, “That wouldn’t be the craziest thing I would turn away if someone’s like, ‘You should be on ‘SNL.’’” But I—

Debbie Millman:

Discovered at last!

Carly Kuhn:

I know. If someone wanted to just put me on, I probably wouldn’t have turned it down, but no, I think it was again why I went to CAA first—I was searching. I think I was always searching for what I wanted to do. And I remember I auditioned in college for an improv group freshman year. I didn’t make it, and that was that. And I definitely enjoyed it. And when this came about, I think I was dating an actor at the time, and he had friends that were doing it. And that was another great way to also meet people.

It’s really fun when, when I got to start Groundlings and I was taking classes, A, to be in a class environment again, when you’ve been out of college even for just two years or a year-and-a-half and you’re feeling lost and you just want a little bit of praise. Once you’re being yelled at at work, it’s good to be like, “Good job, Carly.” But it’s so silly. And I was meeting people that were so different and eclectic. And I feel like I had like a really weird period when I was at Groundlings because everyone’s just doing voices and you’re just picking up everything around you and just soaking it in, soaking in all the weird characters around you.

Debbie Millman:

At that point, though, from what I understand, you had stopped drawing, but you began again—correct me if I’m wrong here—after an unusual experience getting high.

Carly Kuhn:

It’s so funny, because I’m not someone who smokes. I’m so anxious on my own. And just, it was like one of those LA nights in Malibu, a friend had it. I haven’t thought about this in a very long time. I’m blushing because I’m such a like, “Oh my God, I’ve smoked pot.” But my friend who is a little bit more of the earth, and hippy-dippy, and always had a notebook on her … and we were in Malibu, had that experience, and it wasn’t anything that crazy. It was probably not even anything, but yeah, it reopened up that creativity inside me.

Like you said, I hadn’t really drawn in a while and I just started doing these little doodles in her notebook, and it then started up again while I was still at CAA. I just would draw friends on their birthdays, then slowly their bosses would see it and they’d be like, “Oh, that looks like a weird Tim Burton character. Can you do me?” But I just think I was excited. It was something that I rediscovered, but didn’t really know what it was going to become. It was just, as I said, that continuous path of searching to wanting to be more creative.

Debbie Millman:

At this point, you began working for Chelsea Handler on her television show “Chelsea Lately.” You started as an associate producer and then as management of development and production at Chelsea’s production company. But you were continuing to draw and began sketching daily. When did you begin to start thinking that this could be something more than just a daily artistic practice, but the possibilities of a career?

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah. When Instagram came along, I remember sitting at a dinner table with a friend, and I think I had maybe done a drawing of her or something. And she was like, “You should start an Instagram account.” I was like, “OK. I’ll go for it.” Again, I didn’t really know what was going to happen, but I was doing these drawings. Initially I started just drawing my little weird Tim Burton–esque characters. And then I guess just what was on Instagram at the time, in the beginning, it was a lot of fashion photography, fashion bloggers, street style. And it just—organically, I shifted from just drawing the little characters in my mind to, I would see an image and just feel inclined to interpret it in my style, but I would just credit who I would draw, and say, “Inspired by so-and-so.” And at the time I think I even thought Instagram was just like a photo-editing app. I didn’t know it was this public form of expression.

Debbie Millman:

Interestingly, I decided to go back to your first post. So I scrolled all the way back.

Carly Kuhn:

Oh my.

Debbie Millman:

You posted your first image on Jan. 29, 2014. When I did that, I started to look at mine, too. And I was so bad at Instagram at the beginning that my first image is in the wrong direction. I didn’t know how to rotate.

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah. I—

Debbie Millman:

And so it’s in the wrong direction. But your first post was a black-and-white illustration of a pixie girl inspired by a Jan. 14, 2014, post on the website Sartorialist. So talk a little bit, if you remember, about that first post.

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah. I don’t know if I can place myself in that—

Debbie Millman:

She almost—

Carly Kuhn:

… moment.

Debbie Millman:

… looks like Edie from Andy Warhol’s days, Edie Sedgwick.

Carly Kuhn:

I don’t fully remember. I think what I remember is that someone, one of my friends, was like, “I can’t believe you’re putting your art out there for people to judge you.” And I, at the time, was in an improv group that would perform in this random hole in the wall on Melrose. I think it was called Neon Venus. And maybe we would have four or five people there. Usually there were significant others, maybe a little bit more. But that was so vulnerable and scary of your face in front of other people’s face, being like, “You’re at a grocery store you’re bumping into someone you haven’t seen in 10 years. Go.” That was so scary.

So in a way I do feel like it was exciting to just be able to do something creative and put it out there, and I didn’t have my name on my account for, I don’t know how long. I don’t know if it was because I was … eventually, while I was still at “Chelsea Lately,” I still didn’t have my name on The Cartorialist, because again, it’s such a weird thing, and when you’re drawing and you’re working in comedy, you don’t want to be like, “Hey guys, I draw on the side, check it out.” You know?

Debbie Millman:

Right.

Carly Kuhn:

And—

Debbie Millman:

Side hustle, yeah.

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah. So I think in that way it was just, I do have a memory of it just being fun and exciting that I stumbled upon this new, or old-new, creativity again. And I do think that’s why I say, like, I think the improv in Groundlings allowed me—even though you don’t think improv Groundlings to artists is a normal path—but I think it gave me that confidence to put myself out there.

Debbie Millman:

How did you come up with the name Cartorialist?

Carly Kuhn:

I think it was that the world was fashion, and sartorial, and Sartorialist. And then I had this kind of cartoon quality to my work. And then my name being Carly, that like ‘C’ sound. I think that I just blended the words together of just sartorial, cartoon and Carly. And they had a baby, and it became The Cartorialist. And in hindsight it’s great, but also I’m like, “Ugh, it’s hard for people to say and spell.” But I do, I think that there’s something that people get a sense of the two worlds combined.

Debbie Millman:

Carly, while you were in college, you took only one fashion illustration class. Looking at your early work, it’s really well developed, and you have a voice and a style that’s completely unique. How did that happen without any training or consistent practice through your life at that point?

Carly Kuhn:

Well, thank you, first of all. I think that it really was the product of repetition in a weird way. I would see an image, and draw something, and do that almost every day as just having something as a creative outlet, and just trying to stick to something every day. And I even remember when I started out, I would sometimes use pencil because I didn’t want to mess up. Once I start doing it a little bit more on Instagram, and maybe people were starting to recognize it, then you get scared, and I would draw an image and use pencil, and then go over it in pen. And I felt like I had these mistakes within my art early on and wasn’t sure if people liked that. And there were these flaws within my art that I realized that that’s what actually people gravitated towards, these perfectly imperfect lines.

And I nixed using a pencil. I like drawing with pen because if there’s a line out of place on a hand, or a leg’s a little wonky, or an eye is not in the right place, I eventually leaned into that. And I think it was only because I just started. I was doing it every single day, a little bit every day. And when people were like, “Oh, how did you find your style? Or how did you get good?” And I say, “It’s not about getting good. It’s about becoming confident in what you’re doing.” Maybe this person over there, this fashion illustrator, was drawing the perfect model on a runway. And I liked drawing the people backstage, seeing the weird angles, and doing it, and finding myself gravitating to the things that were a little weird, a little bit off.

Debbie Millman:

You have such a unique eye. I feel like there’s an ease to your lines that is so unique. It doesn’t feel like there’s tension in the drawing, or struggle. It just feels very natural and almost instantly birthed.

Carly Kuhn:

Thank you. I think there’s that improv side of things, too. “They say yes, and …” is this like motto, and improv where you’re just supposed to … if someone throws you a line, no pun intended, they say something to you, and you’re supposed to, “Yes. And we then went to the park.” Instead of saying, “No, it happened this way.” And I feel like, weirdly, that’s how I approach my art, very improvisational. I don’t usually plan out what I’m doing. I do maybe have a stack of notebooks of failed drawings, because as I said, I like to draw with pen, and because I don’t feel like I get the same quality of line when I’m drawing with pencil, unless I’m doing something different and that’s the style. But I still, even with pencil, don’t usually erase. And I think that there’s magic that can come when you’re just going and you’re not planning it out. Even with murals that I later did, that can be a little scary on a wall and not planning it out.

Debbie Millman:

On Oct. 8, 2014, you did an illustration featuring Sarah Jessica Parker sitting on the stoop of the brownstone that she lives in in the TV show “Sex and the City.” She’s sitting on a stoop. You can’t really see her face, but she’s trying on shoes. What happened after you posted this image?

Carly Kuhn:

I saw the image. And at the time, Instagram was that it was instant and it was chronological. And I remember I drew the drawing and I think I posted it under an hour from when she posted the photo. And I was sitting at lunch later that afternoon and I looked down at my phone, and I get a text from my older brother, Joey. And it says, “OMG, SJP.” And I was like, “What? Oh my God.” And she had reposted my drawing and was just like, “Wow, that was quick. Love it. X, SJP.” And the New Yorker girl inside of me just was like, “Oh my God.” You know.

Debbie Millman:

Any girl anywhere.

Carly Kuhn:

Anywhere, yeah. It was just a shocking moment. I didn’t really know what was going to come of it. But it really did kick off like a next round of things that started to happen, all organically through Instagram, and just showed me the power of that platform.

Debbie Millman:

After the Sarah Jessica Parker repost, you started to get your first requests and commissions. One opportunity that came in was from Prada. Talk about what you did for them.

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah. That was all through Instagram. I remember I just got a blind email. You set these emails and wait for something to come in. You email yourself a couple of times, like, “Just want to make sure it—”

Debbie Millman:

Test.

Carly Kuhn:

“… works.” Yeah. Testing. And I remember I got this email, and it was for a digital sunglasses campaign called Prada Raw. And they were tapping six fashion illustrators, or just art illustrators, to interpret the line of sunglasses. And they were going to pair us with an animation house, and they were going to turn it into an animation. And they had it all up on this website, and it was going to be this big thing. And a friend’s significant other came in to help negotiate for me, because I was just like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

And let me tell you, it wasn’t all roses, like, “I did this Prada Raw campaign. It was great.” It was dealing, A, with people in Italy, so there was a delay. I didn’t really know what I was doing. And I did these drawings, and I remember I turned it in, and the guy was like, “These actually aren’t what we thought you were going to be able to produce for us. You’ll get paid, but we’re not going to use it.” And I was like, “Let me try again. I want to make this work.” I didn’t want to just give up. And you had to draw 50 different images, slightly different from each image, because it’s animation. And a lot of the other illustrators worked on computer. I did everything by hand.

So I had to redo everything by hand, but again, I just knew the opportunity was such a big opportunity and they stuck with me, and it ended up happening. So it was an early lesson, in hindsight, of just saying yes to stuff and then figuring it out along the way or just learning along the way, even though I was terrified by the ask at the time.

Debbie Millman:

As commissions continued to come in, you ultimately felt comfortable enough to leave your day job with Chelsea Handler and pursue a career as an artist and an illustrator, which is quite astonishing, given the notion that you were not ever planning to do this.

Carly Kuhn:

Right, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Was it a hard decision for you to make? Were you nervous? Were you worried about surviving, continuing to get jobs, continuing to be the it-girl?

Carly Kuhn:

The thing that was interesting was a lot of that happened while I was still at “Chelsea.” At the time, my boss, he said, “We’re going to be going on a hiatus.” Which, in television, some shows go on a two-month hiatus and then come back. And it was February. And he said, “We’re going to go on a hiatus, but we want you to come work for us back again in May, as a producer on this show.” So that was a point that I told them, I was like, “I have this Instagram. And it’s been doing this thing.” And then that’s when they pulled it up in the room, they’re like, “Who are you? What is this double life you’ve been living?” But it was a great way that I didn’t have to make the decision to quit.

I was actually getting paid through that and was able to have it be like a test, like, “Should I do this? And if not, after a few months I could always go back to this job.” But I think because I was open to saying “yes” to a lot of different things and just not being so one-path oriented, if that makes sense, saying like, “I only want to try and be in galleries.” Or, “I only want to try to be a New Yorker cartoonist.” I think because it was open, that allowed me, in a way, to be more open to a lot of different kinds of jobs.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve written about how, when this new career path all started to come together, people felt free to offer you all sorts of advice about how to run your business. Some people felt you should only make originals and not sell prints. Others thought you should partner with a gallery right away. Others thought you should make greeting cards. How do you make sense of all the advice and ultimately forge a path of your own?

Carly Kuhn:

I think it’s still a constant struggle. I think because I didn’t go to art school and this wasn’t an intended path, I had definitely an insecurity of “where do I fit in?” I didn’t know if I fully felt like I wanted to go that commercial route and just start doing greeting cards. But I also didn’t really feel like I was someone who could be in a gallery or an art gallery. And I think it just became a lot of trial and error. And what presented itself, I think I got connected to someone at the time who was doing Absolut Art, which is another online art platform. So that was, I think, the first art prints that I ended up doing. And eventually I would create my own art prints. But it’s hard to say how to navigate it because I still feel like I’m still navigating it.

And I do think that I sometimes still get worried or I’ve been paralyzed by, “If I do this, am I not going to be able to do this?” Or, “If I do this, am I going to get stuck in this world?” And I think I felt that way within the fashion illustration world that I got categorized into in the beginning. I didn’t view myself as a fashion illustrator, but it also tied to Instagram illustrator. That was another kind of insecurity that crept up, because why can’t you just be called an artist? But even, and now today, I’m like, “But why is that a bad thing, to be called this or that?” Again, I think it was because I didn’t necessarily ever view myself as an artist or that to claim that word, and it wasn’t my intended path. That’s I think what has made that struggle of “where do I want to go or what world am I allowed to go into?”

Debbie Millman:

You said that at the time you were also bothered by the term “fashion illustrator.” Why did that bother you?

Carly Kuhn:

Being an artist and a creative is also so tied to your identity and where you are in your life. And I feel like I was in my late 20s, going through some life changes, relationships and everything. And I just think my identity, I didn’t really know who I was. And I also, in the beginning only drew fashion illustration drawings or fashion-inspired drawings and nothing else on the page. I didn’t share photos of myself. I didn’t share inspiration photos. And I didn’t really feel like I was coming through. I remember when I met a friend in person after she had followed me, and she said, “I just assumed you were this fashion girl that did her hair, and always had a full thing of makeup on, and would wear these amazing dresses.” And that’s not who I am.

I wanted to explore more of who I was. And even though I am not my art, it does feel like they’re connected. And then, on the other hand, I think because I discovered this artistic side of myself later, I was just at the beginning of it. And so I didn’t want to be put in a box if I wanted to do something completely different. And I think that’s what happens with Instagram. And my career did happen in front of people, live. Real time, they’re seeing me try new things. And so I felt kind of constricted by what, “oh, well people started following me or liking my work because I drew the red dress. So I have to continue to draw the red dress.” And I think that’s a struggle that a lot of creatives probably have even today that build something on a social media platform. Like, “If I shift the direction of what I’m sharing, are they going to stick around?” But you also want to not just do things for other people. You want to do it for yourself, but it is this line to have to balance.

Debbie Millman:

How do you manage that?

Carly Kuhn:

I think it really just has to do with growth and time. I think it really, where I am today, is very different from that. I think it’s also because I feel confident in who I am as a person, too, and where I am in my life. So, weirdly, I think it’s getting older, having more experiences, working on yourself, and getting to a good place where you feel confident in yourself, so you’ll lean into what you want to create versus what you think other people want to create.

And usually that’s what people respond to. And people will come along that journey with you. I think when I started doing these faces, it was kind of a response to me feeling stuck in this one world, in fashion, this feeling, like, “OK, there’s another fashion week coming up. People are expecting me to draw this. But I don’t feel creatively inspired to draw that.” And that’s where the one-line technique came into play. It was almost meditative for me and a way to break out of this anxiety of feeling like I had to do something, I had to draw off of an image. Now I could just put pen to paper, not feel like it has to look a certain way, try something different. And it was a self-soothing exercise that morphed into then a different kind of style. And people came along the ride with it, and some people didn’t, and that’s fine.

Debbie Millman:

Do you get a lot of feedback from your followers and fans?

Carly Kuhn:

I’m lucky. I feel like I don’t have too many haters, but once in a blue moon, I remember, I think at the height of when things were going on, I remember someone said, “I like art, but this isn’t art.”

Debbie Millman:

Oh, please.

Carly Kuhn:

Things like that. And I think now I obviously am able to laugh at it and be like, “They probably … maybe they’re having a bad day.” But I think it is really exciting, too, when people say, “Oh my God.” I’ve had certain drawings where I’ve incorporated the text into … that’s just maybe as simple as like, “Can I have a hug?” And I’ve had friends reach out to me and say, like, “This really turned my day around.” Which is the most incredible thing. Or a stranger DM that to me, or comment. So I feel like there’s more positive feedback that has come through the social media platform that is really special, that something as simple as a little drawing with just, like, “I love you.” Or, “I’m thinking of you.” Or whatever it is, or even just the image itself, how it can impact someone’s life, is pretty cool.

Debbie Millman:

In addition to Prada and Absolut, you’ve since been commissioned by Elle magazine, Bombay Sapphire, the jewelry brand Alexis Bittar, Capital Records, and more. How do you get most of your clients now?

Carly Kuhn:

It really has been through Instagram. I don’t know a percentage, but I would say the majority of all of those you named, and what has continued to happen, has been through Instagram. It’s just a simple either DM or they email me, which is crazy.

Debbie Millman:

You’re also working, making fine art. And you do sell prints now. Do you have different methodologies in how you approach working for a client or working for yourself?

Carly Kuhn:

For commissions on the more traditional art side of things, they tend to be more the faces that are a little bit more abstract. So when it’s that, it’s a little bit more of the trust within me as the artist that the person that’s commissioning me knows this style is a little bit more free-form. I’ve definitely limited the kind of commission work that I’ve taken on now. And that’s just from experience, and learning, and saying “yes” to a lot in the beginning, to be able to say “no” now to commission work that I don’t necessarily think is what I think is my best work or what I enjoy doing. I don’t know if that answers the question.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. You’ve also moved into home furnishings and installations. How different is it for you moving from two dimensions to three?

Carly Kuhn:

When I switched from the digital page, to then the page to installations, to then textiles, that was an exciting transition because I think there’s a lot more room to play when you work in design and textiles. And I remember when I started creating wallpaper, what maybe was my original drawing was maybe a simple figure on a page, on a white blank page. When you put that into a pattern, or a repeat pattern, or you add color … typically my work was a lot of black and white. And I feel like I unleashed this, or discovered a different side of my style, when I was designing more for textile or wall coverings, because it is a different medium. It’s being viewed in a different way. You can take risks a little bit more because maybe a piece of art on a wall is a very specific thing.

And I really have found this love for design, and home, and textile. And so I’m working on launching a design studio hopefully by the end of the year, which is really going to be wall coverings and textiles, and focus on that, and still pick and choose the things that I do. And I’ll still always share, because it’s still … the core of what I’m doing are these drawings. And I just really have a love for being able to play a little bit more and have things be within the home. So that’s something that’s exciting.

Debbie Millman:

When do you officially launch? Are you doing this on your own? Are you partnering with a home furnishings manufacturer? Tell us everything about this. I think I’m getting a scoop.

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah. I am working with a company that will be actually producing the wall coverings and textiles. And they’re based out of Brooklyn. So they’ll be actually creating it, but it will be something I’m doing on my own. I want to test it out, and explore, and see where it goes. And I think I can have the control over it. And I feel like because I have an audience of people that have already expressed interest in it, and I had wallpaper for a hot second, and it was very well received. So I think it will be good to be able to put it out there on my own. And I’m hoping by fall, winter, to put it out there.

Debbie Millman:

That’s really exciting, Carly. Will it be under the name The Cartorialist, or your name?

Carly Kuhn:

I think it will be Cartorialist Studio.

Debbie Millman:

Congratulations on this super exciting news. It’s really quite—

Carly Kuhn:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

… wondrous to watch the path of your career. Carly, the last thing I want to talk with you about is your recent wedding, and your move back to the East Coast. So first the nuptials. I understand you got your marriage license at the Honda Civic Center in Anaheim. How glamorous.

Carly Kuhn:

Super sexy.

Debbie Millman:

And you were both wearing sweatpants, from what I understand.

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah. We got engaged, actually, the weekend of lockdown in New York City, Central Park. It was Friday the 13th, March 13.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, wow. A day before the lockdown, yeah.

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah. Real time, poor Danny, already having the anxiety of having to propose or not having to, the anxiety of proposing. And meanwhile, the world is going crazy. We were supposed to have an engagement party, and last minute canceled. But the two families got to be together, and we sang by the piano in very Kuhn-Matz fashion. The most important thing for Danny was that his grandma would be able to be there. So we brought the wedding to grandma. We did the marriage license at the Honda Civic Center, but we were lucky to just do just our two families in Boca at grandma’s house, at Boo-boo’s house. And—

Debbie Millman:

In Boca? Yeah.

Carly Kuhn:

In Boca, in December. And my younger brother, Jake, is a tech wizard and he works in events. And so we didn’t do the Zoom wedding. We actually did a YouTube link. And it was cool because friends and family were watching from all over with their kids, with their parents, and it was in Florida. And then we came back to LA. And we didn’t think we would ever be moving. But as we were thinking about starting a family, Danny’s from Michigan, I’m from New York. And both of our families spend time a lot in Florida. And we decided as we start that next chapter, we want to be closer to family. And that was really the main reason for moving. So moving to Miami, staying in a warm weather climate. We’ll have to adjust to the humidity, but we’ll get through it.

Debbie Millman:

I saw on Instagram that you designed your own wedding invitations. How was that for you? Cobbler and shoes kind of thing?

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah. I think there’s an expectation with certain things that I do, like, “Oh, are you going to do the drawing for this?” But for this case, I did want to do it. It felt special. And especially because it wasn’t with everyone getting to send out a little … I still sent out a paperless post with the drawing on it. And it had that New Yorker style, which felt like us. So it was sweet. And no one was telling me, like, “Oh, can you make these edits?” I got to just do what I wanted.

Debbie Millman:

That’s the nice thing about working for oneself, right?

Carly Kuhn:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Do you anticipate this move to Florida influencing the direction of your practice at all? Is this where you’re going to open up an in-person studio? How do you see the work being any different, if at all?

Carly Kuhn:

I think that the reason I decided to want to launch this studio was because moving, I don’t really know where we’re going to live. We’ll probably be in an apartment or condo for a little bit. Whereas in LA I thought we were maybe going to be in a house and starting a family. I wanted to have something that not felt like a little bit more traditional, but be able to focus on something. And that one of the things that I realized that I love about what I do, of all the different kinds of things, is being able to draw anywhere. I think with design, like wall coverings and textiles, and moving to this new city, I’m able to do that in whatever type of space that I’m in. So if it’s not a bigger space, that’s OK. And I’m open to seeing how I’m influenced by Miami. It will feel very different. I’m excited about that because I definitely feel like my art and home design meld together. So I’m excited to be able to explore a new city and welcome the new inspiration that will probably come about.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I can’t wait to see what you do next. Carly Kuhn, thank you so much for sharing so much about your life and the way you work. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Carly Kuhn:

Thank you so much for having me.

Debbie Millman:

You can see more of Carly Kuhn’s work @thecartorialist on Instagram and read more about everything she does, and I’m sure her upcoming studio, at cartorialist.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 with you again soon.

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 artist 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 3, so that you wouldn’t be afraid to sleep in your own bed.

Bisa Butler:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

You also won a blue ribbon in the Plainfield sidewalk art competition when you were 4.

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 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:

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 7 and 8, 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, OK. 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 a sewing room. … 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’d 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, “OK, 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 Ken doll. They had no elastic. They had the whole stovepipe thing going. But I think, if I can recall, that was the first thing that I sewed.

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 the 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 on “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 my husband—we were going to Miami for that. It 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 hem. 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 hem was crazy. Nothing was cut on the bias. It was all kinds of wrong. But I figured … 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 hem 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 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 learned 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, AK. 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 were 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 of Bad 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 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 canvasses instead of white canvasses 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 struggled 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, OK, 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 like you spend half a year painting. I had 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, were 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, “OK, 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 D.C. 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, OK, 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 10–15 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 an 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 turpentine, 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 had 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 of, 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—were 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 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 fibers. 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 actually have done quite a bit of art with felt letters.

Bisa Butler:

Oh. How did I not know that?

Debbie Millman:

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

Bisa Butler:

OK.

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 it still life.” I made a little oven-mitt–sized 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, “OK. 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, OK, 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 used all these fabrics that the teacher had donated. She had some black fabric with purple flowers. My grandmother’s name was Violet. I thought, OK, this looks violet, need some there, need some lace.

Bisa Butler:

But while that was happening,  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 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. 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, “OK, 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 co-workers, 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. 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.” 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 in downtown Newark. I was livid. I remember him grabbing the quilt, and he had it 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 other 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 after hours, maybe 5 or 6, and my kids were small. They were running around in this empty gallery. Charlotte was saying, “This is the space. 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’ 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’ 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, OK, 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 5 to 8. 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, OK, 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 eye? 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 U.S. 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 photos. I’m very interested in that and I stayed. As I transitioned 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 in now, working from 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 would I 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 I. 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.” … I’m like, “Why did they make this?” But I love …

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 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, as 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 like a detective or anthropologist, because there may be only this one photo of this person. This photo was taken by a 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 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, 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 crisis 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 has 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 in 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 were 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, “OK, 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 like little tricksters and the jokesters. I want people to see each one of them is valuable, each one of them is an individual.

Debbie Millman:

Bisa, their entire lives are 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 Art 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. 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.

Debbie Millman:

It hardly matters what medium she’s working in. It could be film, it could be fiction, it could be digital media or performance art. Whatever it is, you always know it’s work by Miranda July. Her singular combination of strangeness, humor, awkwardness, curiosity, great feeling and beauty come shining through in everything she touches. Her latest projects are the movie Kajillionaire and a monograph of her life’s work thus far. She joins me today from her home in Los Angeles to talk about both her life and her career. Miranda July, welcome to Design Matters.

Miranda July:

Hello.

Debbie Millman:

Miranda, the first thing I want to ask you about is your interest in the I Ching. I understand you’ve been using the same I Ching since you were a teenager, and have said that, “You can fool yourself, but not the I Ching.” Has it helped you navigate your life?

Miranda July:

Well, I don’t want to overstate it. Yes, I’ve had the same one that my friend Jonah Peretti, in high school, gave me. Trivia fact, he went on to start Buzzfeed.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, wow.

Miranda July:

So, I guess the I Ching helped him and The Huffington Post. I usually only use it in times of great duress, which those times are semi-regular, so that would cut across my whole life. But yeah, it’s not like a daily ritual unless I’m really suffering. And then, the thing you want to do really badly that’s self-destructive, it generally advises against that and towards a patience that can be really, really hard if you’re the only one holding the torch for it. I look for multiple sources to remind me that sometimes you just need to wait it out, wait out that time. This is good advice for someone who tends to jump. That’s my default, is action. So that’s a mixed thing. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You were born in Vermont as Miranda Grossinger, but were raised in Berkeley, CA, where your parents ran a New Age independent publishing house, and they worked on two very loud IBM Selectric typewriters. You and your brother helped out a lot with the business. What kinds of things did you assist with as you were growing up?

Miranda July:

I remember sorting mailings according to ZIP Code. I remember the book rate stamp was pretty exciting to me. And then also just packing books, learning how to pack books. Really super-practical stuff. I think by the time I had any skills, actual skills that I might have learned, I was no longer willing to work for North Atlantic Books. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I read that you lost interest in school around the fifth grade. How come?

Miranda July:

Fifth grade. Well, that sounds young. Now that I have a child, I’m like, “Uh-oh, that’s too soon.” Honestly, I think I was a little older when it hit me, like, “Oh, I thought I was going to be good at this, but I’m not. And I think I’d best put all my energy into something that I am good at.” And I started writing and directing plays outside of school, very pointedly not wanting to bother putting energy into things that would only amount to being a student production, wanting them to be real things in the world. And I don’t know if it was just the heartbreaking sexism that makes a teenage girl suddenly feel like she can’t be smart enough in a particular way. I had the personality where that forced me to reinvent myself in a really proactive way, so it wasn’t a great loss, but I do remember a sad moment of realization.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve talked about how loneliness is a very old, dear friend of yours. When did the sense of being lonely begin?

Miranda July:

Oh. Yeah. I don’t think there was a beginning. I think that was always there.

Debbie Millman:

Born that way?

Miranda July:

I don’t know. Who can speculate about whether it’s your soul or whether it’s all the circumstances? But I do remember from such a young age always being in conversation with either … this doesn’t meet my standards now, but I considered it a guardian angel, was how I … my angel, having these very reassuring conversations where she would just let me know I was OK. And then later, literally making cassette tapes where I would do one half of the conversation and then fill in the blanks so I could have a conversation with myself. Not that I was so alone—I had an older brother who I’m close to and always had really dear girlfriends, but as I now have my own family and many friends, I can always re-find it and it’s so much a part of me. It’s not something I’m trying to solve.

Debbie Millman:

Do you still have those tapes? I know you have quite an archive of your work.

Miranda July:

Yeah. There’s one I remember looking for. I was desperate to find it, and I knew I had saved it all these years. The only reason was because it was really incriminating and it had a lot of conversation about sex on it with another girl. And we were only in first grade, and I remember thinking that’s too young and this can never get in the wrong hands. And that’s the only reason I still have it, is because I could never dispose of it, I could never be careless with it, I always had to know where that was.

Debbie Millman:

It’s interesting because you’ve stated that you’ve always been interested in sex, even as a kid. And there’s a theme running through a lot of your work about childhood sexuality, whether it is the 7-year-old boy in your first full-length feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, or the two 11-year-old girls and the relationship that they have in “Something That Needs Nothing,” a story from your first book, No One Belongs Here More Than You. Where does this fascination come from?

Miranda July:

Yeah. I don’t know what’s normal. I think it’s tied to the loneliness, from what I can tell. If we’re wanting love or if we have a lot of longing, that can become sexualized really early and forever, and that sort of longing feels sexual. And for a kid, I’ve always liked things that were not allowed. So that was clearly not allowed and yet kids knew stuff and … my friend had an older sister, so she kind of knew everything, although on this tape it’s really obvious that there are some big holes in our basic understanding. But the main word we use a lot is screwing, which is a funny word for a 6-year-old girl: a lot of talk about screwing.

Debbie Millman:

Where do you think you would have heard that word?

Miranda July:

Only from her older sibling.

Debbie Millman:

OK.

Miranda July:

But I think we didn’t know of any other words. So, that was the one we used. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

When you were 16, you co-created a magazine called Snarla, about two friends named Ida and July. And you did this with Johanna Feynman, who characterized it in your monograph “in large part by a petty criminality or manic disregard costumed as punk feminist praxis.” And so I’m wondering if you would agree with that, especially at the time you were making it. Did you have this sense of being this post-feminist moment?

Miranda July:

Yeah. Well, we know we were post-feminist, but we definitely had this very entitled sense of reclamation. I say entitled because in what way were we suffering so badly that we needed to steal so much from Kinko’s, but we did to make all those copies. I discovered that their passport photos were taken with the same film that fit into the sixties Polaroid Land Camera, and they stored that film just right in the cabinets that had the paper cutter on them and all the supplies. If you opened them, there was paper and there were also dozens of boxes of this really expensive film. So—

Debbie Millman:

So you stole the film.

Miranda July:

I stole from Kinko’s. There’s no way I could have bought that film, but we were figuring out how to be writers and we did both become writers and that was the start, and we were mostly writing about each other, honestly. We had a really big friendship, in which we were figuring out what we thought politically, and in terms of art, and our sexuality, and our feminist politics, and music, and … so there was a lot of ground we were covering.

Debbie Millman:

Johanna came up with the name July, and you legally changed it in your early 20s. And you said it was through your friendship with Johanna that you really became an artist. Was that because of the way that you were making art, or talking about art, or was she challenging you in some way to think differently?

Miranda July:

I think of it this way. We met in basketball camp. We both still had long hair and we were like, “Maybe …” I think she actually was good at basketball. She was good at a lot of things, but I don’t know why I was joining. It was like a summer JV basketball camp, and we literally went to one day of it, met there, discovered we lived a couple of blocks away from each other, and just didn’t go back. And we, within months, had both cut off all our hair. Oh, no. She went for a Debbie Harry. She’s like, “I’m just going to fuck my hair up.” And I remember thinking, Well, I really cut all my hair off. I was like, “Yours still looks really pretty.”

Miranda July:

But we both just became increasingly punker, and our relationship to school did really change, and our voice as young women became the primary thing, and she actually left. She was so smart that she graduated a year early all of a sudden and went to Reed, which was the only reason I started visiting Portland.

Debbie Millman:

Well you went to the University of Santa Cruz, but dropped out in your second year before moving to Portland. At that point you said you approached the world with a thief’s mindset. In what way?

Miranda July:

Well, I think somehow the scrappy DIY attitude that frankly my whole family had—you run your own business in the house, everything is recycled—any way that you could not spend money on something had to be good. And so I actually felt guilty if I bought things, and I felt like I had done something morally right if I stole them. I know it seems like how could … and then I’m sure there was some sort of undertow … who does that if they don’t on some level, not so much want to get caught, but really enjoy a dare. I did have this from a really young age, this “I’ll do anything on a dare.” And it was a continuation of that, the high of it. And also I wasn’t alone. Literally everyone I knew at that time had a bag that was particularly good for shoplifting, because it had structure to it.

Debbie Millman:

Maybe you were stealing because you felt like you didn’t have enough.

Miranda July:

Yeah. I was hungry on a lot of different levels. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I read that you were fired from your waitressing job for embezzling, but you’ve said that you actually weren’t doing that. You were fired from Goodwill for shoplifting—

Miranda July:

Which I do.

Debbie Millman:

Caught shoplifting Neosporin at a drug store. I remember shoplifting as a kid, too, but mostly it was because I was jealous that people had things that I didn’t, and I wanted them really badly.

Miranda July:

Right. I’ve come back to this in my work. There’s a way in which that all ties in with the longing, right? And especially if you’re longing on some sort of deeper soul level, it can really feel material.

Debbie Millman:

After you arrived in Portland, you started a video chain later for female filmmakers to share their work. Initially you called this The Big Moviola, but after a cease and desist letter from Moviola Digital, you changed the name to Joanie 4 Jackie. And you’ve stated that you approached the project as if it were a job, though your actual jobs at the time were waitressing, cashiering, stripping, locksmithing and taste-making for Coca-Cola. So, you actually named a Coca-Cola beverage, I believe. Was it Coca-Cola 2? Is that right?

Miranda July:

It was Coke 2. Yeah. The most brilliant name anyone’s ever come up with. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

What was stripping like for you?

Miranda July:

It wasn’t a wild idea in the culture that I was living in the midst of. So, in a practical sense, I remember my girlfriend and I broke up and she moved out, and so we were short one third of our rent, and me and my friend who were left got to the end of the month and we’re like, “What are we going to do?” And she said, “Well, one of us could strip, and it can’t be me because I wear glasses.” And so I went down and did it. Went down to Mary’s spot in Portland. In a most practical sense, I was like, “Oh, I can do less work for more money and have more time to make my movies and performances and do Joanie 4 Jackie”—all those things were taking a lot of time, and if I could make a bunch of money and go on tour, that was huge for me.

Miranda July:

And also it came out of a general interest in strangers and intimacy between strangers and also in the dare thing: You’re not supposed to do that. That’s the main thing you’re not supposed to do as a young woman, is take off your clothes in front of strange men. So, to cross over that threshold was a little like having a superpower, like “Oh, this is no big deal at all. Not only can I survive this, but I can twist this to my own means,” is how it felt. So, I didn’t have to feel fragile in a way that I think I had felt growing up, and that was a lot of what I think I was doing at that time, was testing out, am I perhaps stronger than I was led to believe, coming out of my family? And ultimately I’d be like, Oh, I’m strong enough. Not just to do this, but to stand on stage doing my work in front of a thousand people. This bravery can be put to better use.

Debbie Millman:

Miranda, there’s a lot of physicality in a lot of your movies—body physicality—and I get the sense that you’re very comfortable in your own skin. You seem to use your body with a great deal of ease. Am I right about that?

Miranda July:

Yeah. It’s something I don’t think about a lot, but I guess that’s turning out … that’s true. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

It’s something that I’ve tried to figure out in watching a lot of your work, how you can get so comfortable with your own skin in your own body. You seem to have almost a lack of self-consciousness of it at all. And is that something that you’ve always had?

Miranda July:

Yeah. I think it a little bit has to do with performing. It’s like going through the atmosphere to the moon or something—a whole lot of stuff just burns off from the sheer intensity of that process. And some of the things that are burned away are a layer of self-consciousness that … since there’s nothing I wouldn’t do if I had a reason on stage. I feel so free there. I don’t understand the taboos that have to do with the body. You have this one thing, this is it, really, this very finite, physical being. And so to be particularly hung up with it, or hide it, or not make use of all the ways it can be, just seems heartbreaking to me. So, sometimes I think just in daily life, I’ll move in a strange way or take off my clothes or something just to have made use of it in that day.

Debbie Millman:

Do you ever feel self-conscious?

Miranda July:

I do. I know exactly that feeling, but I think I enjoy the feeling of remembering that doesn’t matter, that it’s like a feeling like a little shame, and then the joy that comes from blowing past it. It’s not like it’s not there, it is, but it’s exquisite to realize it has so much less power than it thinks it has.

Debbie Millman:

So you just push through the discomfort.

Miranda July:

Yeah. And then it’s like, “Oh, there’s a whole vast world here waiting on the other side. The water’s fine here.”

Debbie Millman:

In your story “Something That Needs Nothing,” there’s a lot of heartbreak in that story for a lot of reasons. But at the end of the story, I kind of got the sense that you were comfortable in the heartbreak that that was like you were comfortable feeling all the feelings that had to do with heartbreak. And I was wondering, because of that, you’ve said that that story was one of the two more autobiographical things that you’ve written, that that was something that was true of yourself as well, that you didn’t shy away from heartbreak or resist heartbreak in any way.

Miranda July:

Well, the romance that I was writing about there was truly devastating. But yesterday, I was with a friend, and I’d been kind of high. She knew I’d been sort of high for various reasons, including my movie just came out and I was sort of in an unusual space the last couple of weeks, but I was feeling sad yesterday, and I was feeling sad about feeling sad, about coming back to this kind of sadness.

Miranda July:

And I said to her, “Well, the thing about the high is it’s only itself, but the sadness leads to everywhere else. It’s the road through my work, usually, to a million new thoughts and ideas and projects and feelings.” So, as much as I loved feeling just kind of happy for a little while, it doesn’t lead anywhere new. It just is itself, which is sort of the great thing about joy. It is itself, and the moment. You’re kind of suspended.

Debbie Millman:

Let’s talk about your latest film, Kajillionaire. I can’t imagine that it’s not devastating for it to have been released during this really crazy, surreal time.

Miranda July:

Yeah. I mean, there was a point in the year where I kind of couldn’t even really talk about it when people would bring it up. As we all did, we understood that our particular disappointment was echoed in the disappointment of every person we knew. But my particular one was like, “I was really excited to go back to Cannes.” This was my year of travel, for a person who mostly is at home writing, and to just have to move on and … the biggest thing was to not have the movie come out in theaters.

Miranda July:

I mean, I always remind myself, the thing you fear is not exactly what will end up happening. It hasn’t been, and I guess the thing I couldn’t have guessed was that the most important thing is that the movie connects with people, and who’s to say whether being in the midst of a pandemic helps or hurts that as long as they can watch it? Which, actually they can. I began to actually think maybe … I mean, not like I’m a prophet at all. I don’t mean that, but maybe weirdly I made this for us now. I am just kind of a believer in understanding reality as it plays out, rather than thinking some other thing was supposed to happen.

Miranda July:

Like, “No, this is what was supposed to happen because this is what happened.” And yeah, so many things that I thought were very personal to me, that inborn loneliness, kind of that level of anxiety, that in the movie is tied to the big one, the idea of surviving or not surviving this natural disaster, and just a million other little things that as people started to watch it, I was like, “Oh, I think they’re taking it more the way I meant it than they were in my brief …” It played at Sundance and it went very well, but this is different. The movie is less weird in a way because the world got weirder.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Miranda, I’ve been a fan of your work since your early days before your first film, when you were doing performance art. I’d heard about you and I’ve been following you, and I’ve seen all your movies, read your book of short stories, your novel. I do think that this is your best work. I think Kajillionaire is absolutely brilliant. I think it’s really hard to watch at times. And I think it is sort of weirdly prophetic, the scene where Old Dolio is about to get a massage and then can’t be touched, can’t allow herself to be touched, was just one of the most powerful moments in cinema that I could remember in the last couple of years. It took my breath away.

Miranda July:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

It is really a tour de force. Congratulations. It’s a beautiful, beautiful movie. What’s interesting is you’ve said this about the characters, which is fair, but I think there’s even more to it. You say there’s a nasty, villainous, slightly evil righteousness to this particular family.

Miranda July:

To those parents. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

To those parents. Yes, to the parents, because they are. I mean, and you kind of are hoping … I mean, at least I was hoping, they have to redeem themselves. They have to end up being good, maybe for my own selfish needs—but they’re not. And how hard was it to write such evil characters?

Miranda July:

I mean, I guess what I was most interested in was their logic. To themselves, they’re right. It’s their daughter who’s strayed and needs to be brought back into the fold. It was so important to me that as this daughter character gets free … for the first time, we suddenly see her without the parents in Melanie’s apartment, that all she wants to do is go home. She’s super antsy. She wants to go back. And I really relate to that.

Miranda July:

It’s so satisfying in movies when people just get free and they go to New York, but I’ve never been able to do that that cleanly. It’s always two steps forward, one step back, and that’s the ache of life to me.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Miranda July:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

The movie is about a family of small-time con artists, a mom played by Debra Winger, incredibly … just a brilliant casting. A dad played by Richard Jenkins, and their 27-year-old daughter who heists their way through life. Evan Rachel Wood plays Old Dolio. You’ve described Kajillionaire as deeply personal, but not autobiographical. Given how much research I did in your past about feeling nervous, about bringing clothes into the house when they were new, when you were little, and the various shoplifting escapades, I was wondering if it was influenced a bit by your sense of what people feel they’re entitled to or not.

Miranda July:

Yeah. I think I’ve always been aware of that, that being an outsider didn’t necessarily make you radical, that that could have its own rigidity to it, and being conventional didn’t mean that you weren’t avant-garde in terms of this emotional space you were creating. That’s something I think I came out of my family, like desperate to prove, and that is partly the privilege of growing up in Berkeley and the heart of outsiderness.

Miranda July:

And yet, not feeling free exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think for me, the trick always is to find the story, the fiction that can hold all of these feelings, and it has to be a fiction because I have to be somewhat unaware of the story I’m telling. And in that way it can come from the depths, so it’s free, it’s not self-conscious. It can be smarter than me in a way, because I can only intellectually go so far, and we’ve already established I’m not even that confident about that side of things, but there is this other kind of agility, this sort of fluidity. And if I can be caught up in the joy of that, even when it’s heartbreaking … that’s why there’s humor in these things is because I’m having a pretty good time making it. It just so happens to be devastating. I got to the end of writing that first draft and really was kind of like, “Oh no, how did I end up here?” Of all places, this is … I never would have willingly gone into this heartbreak between parents and children. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

There was a moment in the movie where it feels … and it’s probably about 15 minutes, maybe not even, maybe 10 minutes before it ends, where everything makes sense. Every single decision that you made as the writer and director makes sense at that moment. Was that an arduous process?

Miranda July:

It was a lot … I mean, there’s a lot of craft in there, that’s where all the rewrites, and then continuing into the editing process, realizing, “Oh, I got this far with the script, but I can refine this and make it even sort of tighter.” Alongside this process with the unconscious is this person figuring out how to write and how to tell a story. I’m alternating between fiction and movies to do that, so I’m using a lot of muscles that got strong in writing The First Bad Man.

Miranda July:

I think I was sort of warm and ready for this. I mean, I really love that in other things. There’s a nerdy side of me that just loves where there’s the moment where suddenly you look back and it all makes sense, but in a different way. I remember thinking, This is a little dicey. It’s one thing to do this with a book, because you can always keep changing it until it works. But with a movie, the more you can move those pieces around, the more free you are to do that, the more if it doesn’t work, you can still fix it. But I knew that wasn’t going to be the case with this movie because past a certain point, as you said, it all has to work.

Miranda July:

I remember watching the rough cut, which is always agonizing for a director, and it’s just the movie put together, all in a row, according to the script. I watched it, I felt like jumping out a window, and put my head down and I really felt bad. I was like, “I don’t want to be crying when I lift my head up because that’s so hard for the editor, and this is my first day with this new editor.” And finally I realized I’m going to have my head down forever. I just need to … and I sat up and I, “still …” She could see I was crushed. There’s so much work ahead of us. And I was like, “But I think the ending works.” It was like I knew that that was kind of the main thing. Anything else we could repair. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. It’s an exquisite ending. You’ve written, directed and starred in all your movies, but you didn’t have an acting role in Kajillionaire. You said that the fact that there was no role for you in this movie was a relief, but there’s also a part of me that thought, given how youthful you look, you could have played Old Dolio. What made you decide to deliberately keep yourself out of the movie?

Miranda July:

Well, I mean, for one thing, yeah … that’s a very nice compliment. I don’t think I could have done that, but in thinking that I had no part, I got really excited right away about all the female roles I was about to cast, and a female lead. I’ve never had that to offer, and I had already in my mind that this next third movie, whatever it was going to be, was going to be bigger, and so it kind of fit with that.

Miranda July:

I was like, “Oh, for it to be bigger, I’m OK with this movie to have familiar faces.” I think that’s interesting. And now I have something to offer a familiar face. I have a great role. That was just only exciting to me. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

In the movie, one of my favorite lines is, “Most happiness comes from dumb things.” And I’m wondering if you agree and, if so, what dumb things bring you happiness?

Miranda July:

It’s funny. Clothes. There’s no point in clothes for me other than pleasure. It’s just the thing I do every day. Clearly. I mean, being in quarantine makes that even more clear. Why do I keep putting on these outfits? It’s just joy. It just makes me happy. And kissing is kind of a dumb thing that makes me happy. I only like to cook sweet things. I’m not much of a cook at all, except for cakes and cookies and things like that.

Debbie Millman:

More of a pastry chef than a cook. More of a baker than a cook.

Miranda July:

Yeah, yeah, which is not like super useful as a parent except for joy, and for this … I think it’s not a well-rounded thing I’m providing. Yeah. That’s about it. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah?

Miranda July:

Just those three things.

Debbie Millman:

Those are wonderful things.

Miranda July:

Kissing, cakes and clothes. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Miranda, my last question for you is about a quote from the artist Starlee Kine that closes your monograph. She states that you recently told her that you don’t feel like you’ve done anything really great ever. And Starlee goes on to state that you didn’t mean this in a self-deprecating way, rather it was like a bar that you have inside you that lets you know, that you have to keep pushing towards something you don’t feel you’ve yet reached. My question is this: Do you think you’ll ever get there? And if so, do you think you’ll be able to recognize that you’ve arrived?

Miranda July:

Oh, probably not. I mean, yeah. It’s funny. I said it to her more just speaking, trying to describe the agitation, the unrest that I live in, that it’s not like I’m walking around in this deeply satisfied state. I’m really proud of Kajillionaire, except for all the parts that I think I could’ve done better. And there’s always those parts to everything.

Miranda July:

I think that unrest is just … it’s not solvable. It’s not supposed to be solved. It’s like what you get if you’re an artist. In a way, it’s a gift. It is its own reward, sort of, but it means that you can’t be seeking peace, it’s not like the ultimate … you can’t have that be the thing that you’re trying to get to because it really … yeah. I mean, it feels pretty clear that that’s not going to happen, but there are some really, really great fleeting moments.

Debbie Millman:

And those are so wonderful to have witnessed. Miranda July, thank you so much for sharing your original and beautiful voice, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Miranda July:

Thank you so much.

Debbie Millman:

Miranda July’s latest movie is Kajillionaire, and it is remarkable. And you can see a monograph of her work as well, it has just been published by Presto. You can see a comprehensive overview of her work on her website at MirandaJuly.com. This is the 16th 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.

Debbie Millman:

Here are a few things to know about Jonny Sun: Jonny is spelled without an ‘h,’ he’s Canadian, he has a master’s degree in architecture, and he’s a doctoral candidate at MIT. But that’s not all, not even close. In 2017, he published an illustrated novel called Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too, then he illustrated a book written by Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame. In 2018, he collaborated on an interactive multimedia installation titledoThe Laughing Room. And finally, he just released a brand-new book, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations, which we’re going to talk all about today. Jonny Sun, welcome to Design Matters.

Jonny Sun:

Thanks so much for having me, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:

Jonny, I understand that you posted an app idea for a dog-walking service, where a dog shows up at your door, and you have to get out of the house and go for a walk with the dog. How’s that working out for you?

Jonny Sun:

Oh, I feel like I posted that as, mainly as a joke, as a fun, throw away idea, but I—

Debbie Millman:

As a pet mother, I can tell you that I think it’s a great idea.

Jonny Sun:

Oh, great. I mean, I thought it was a great idea too. I hope someone saw it and is inspired to make that, but I tweeted that at a moment in my life where I was in a depressive episode, and that was a fun way to talk about my inability to leave the house or get out of bed, and I thought like, Oh, if only.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I’m sorry to bring up a bad memory.

Jonny Sun:

Oh, no, it’s great.

Debbie Millman:

But I do think there’s something really true about it. There are times when I don’t go out of the house other than to walk my dog.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah. And I thought, like, “If only a dog could show up at my doorstep and give me that excuse as well …”

Debbie Millman:

Time for a walk, trick or treat. Jonny, your parents immigrated from China to Calgary, Canada, in the 1980s, and then you all moved to Toronto when you were 11. Your parents were both medical researchers and PhDs. Did you grow up in a very academic environment?

Jonny Sun:

I feel like, I would say I grew up in a very supported environment. I think my parents … I’m stuttering a bit because I feel like, I wonder what it means to grow up in an academic environment specifically, but I feel like I grew up reading a lot, and every time we’d go somewhere, my parents would somehow find a new book for me to read or get me a book that I wanted, or books were a constant thing that was in our house and that I was constantly consuming. My parents also put me in music lessons and art classes, and also had the afterschool like math and science workbooks, but it really felt like a very holistic kind of supported childhood.

Debbie Millman:

What were you like as a child?

Jonny Sun:

Oh, that’s a good question. I feel like, I don’t know if my answer would be the same as what other people would say. I feel like that’s the hard part of answering a question like that. I feel like I was very precocious and energetic, but also quiet and shy. I loved art and drawing in particular, and was always drawing and reading, but then that also somehow, I think, fed into maybe like a more internally focused life than an externally focused one in a way. But I think as I grew up, I got, in a sense, more and more reserved and quiet.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve said that you think your feelings of being an outsider and not able to connect, that they come down to you as an Asian Canadian and not really feeling at home anymore. And you’ve written about how, by the time you got to high school, you felt virtually invisible. You felt that you evaporated in groups and never spoke in class. How did you manage through that?

Jonny Sun:

It’s interesting because it feels like, wow, that is true; I also have memories of high school that were deeply social, and I had very deep and personal, like close one-on-one friendships with a few people. I feel like I wasn’t very good at the group thing, but I was really good at the one-on-one friendship thing, almost like the therapy friend thing that I write about in my book, which is much more focused on one-on-one and conversation and listening and sharing feelings and secrets and stuff. But definitely in high school, there was that feeling of outsiderness.

Jonny Sun:

A lot of it was, I think, mediated by the fact that I moved to Toronto, and that the city I grew up in was no longer the city I was living in, and there, I felt like a pretty deep sense of displacement or disconnection, and I think that led to a feeling where I was like, “This is not the city I grew up in. I’m trying to figure this out as I’m also expected to be a person and grow and make friends.” And so I think that really contributed to that feeling of loneliness and quietness in high school. But I will say that I also made a decision in grade nine.

Jonny Sun:

I was enrolled in all the usual core classes, but then I saw that drama class was an option. And I was a voracious movie and TV person at that point, and my parents had taken us to the Blockbuster every weekend, and we would rent. That was like my film school early on, that every week I’d get to watch four or five movies that I chose, with very little parental oversight, which was great. But I was interested in film and acting, and writing, and directing, and all those things, and I saw that drama class was an extension or a way to connect to that in a sense.

Jonny Sun:

And so, my one step that I’m very proud of myself for taking as a ninth grader was saying, “I’m terrified of speaking out loud or being seen, but I’m going to take this drama class.” And it really opened up a creative side of me that I’m very grateful for.

Debbie Millman:

You say that when you enrolled in that local drama class, that you did this to try and change your fate.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And I love that, that sort of very intentional, “I know this is going to be excruciating, but I’m going to do it anyway.” But I was wondering when I read that, I was wondering, what did you think your fate was at that time that you were trying to change?

Jonny Sun:

It’s interesting, I’ve been thinking a lot more about this, about the identities that society tries to box people into, and kind of like what it means for an external source to define you in ways with more pressure than perhaps an internal personal definition could exist. I mean, Toronto is like a very kind of Asian city, and definitely in my high school I had a lot of Asian friends. And there was kind of like the in-joke among the Asian kids at school. It was like, “Oh, we’re going to all take the Asian six pack,” which was biology, chemistry and physics, and then calculus, advanced linear algebra and geometry, or something like that. Three math classes, three science classes.

Jonny Sun:

And I ended up doing that, but at the same time, I also thought, like, You know what? Drama feels like it’s not within those confines or within that definition, and this is something I’m legitimately interested in. And that ended up becoming a place where I found a lot of really close friends that I still talk to today.

Debbie Millman:

I understand that acting and hanging around with actors gave you what you refer to as permission to perform the way you wish you could be.

Jonny Sun:

Ooh. This is cool. Where are you getting all of this information? This is awesome.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, that’s all things you’ve said, and I love them, and I felt like they just felt so true and authentic to me because I also was a drama kid in high school, and it gave me that same sense of freedom and a sense of being bigger, part of something bigger than I was on my own. And so, I was really, really curious, what permission you felt that gave you.

Jonny Sun:

It feels like in drama class, and I think, by extension, sort of like being in community with like actors and performers and creative people and theater people, it feels like there is that fostering of a space of trust and a space of community, and a space where you are allowed to be whoever you want to express yourself as because you’re surrounded by all these people that are doing just that. But back in ninth grade, there was that element of, I think I credit my drama teacher a lot, Victoria Dawe at Northern, in Toronto, for creating this space that felt very trusting.

Jonny Sun:

There were kids from all different cliques; there were the jocks, and a few math kids like me; there was everyone, all from throughout the school. But in this black box theater, we were part of one community.

Debbie Millman:

It’s interesting, in my high school, the jocks never were a part of the theater clique. Jonny, when did you start collecting joke books?

Jonny Sun:

Oh, that was when I was a kid. First, for whatever reason, that felt like the type of book that showed up at every garage sale, like “101 Jokes About Football,” or like “101 Space Jokes.” I still can remember the shelf of used books there, and they’re all very thin, but just collections and collections of all these different kinds of books of one-liner jokes. They were all probably terrible jokes, but when you’re a kid, you’re just like, “Oh, this is …” That was one of my introductions to joke structure and humor, and the very structure of a joke of the setup and the punchline. But yeah, that was always the joy for going to a garage sale of like, “Oh, let’s see if there are any books that are joke books that I don’t have yet.”

Debbie Millman:

Is it true that as you developed your sense of humor, you started to give every presentation you had in your biology and English classes as comedy sketches?

Jonny Sun:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, would I love to see footage of that.

Jonny Sun:

Oh, man. There was one I remember. This was as I realized I was interested more and more in writing comedy and writing plays, and writing little sketches and stuff that I started doing that through kind of drama and through playwriting class, and started reading this playwright that my drama teacher introduced me to called David Ives. His work is very short, kind of surreal, absurdist, humorous plays. And that was like, it was a lightning bolt for me of like, “Oh, I didn’t know you were allowed to do this.” And I remember he has a play called The Death of Trotsky, which is all about Leon Trotsky dying over and over again in different scenarios, and there was sort of like a surreal Groundhog Day loop associated with that, but there was a little bit of a spark in my head of like, “Oh, you can just like take subjects and put them through this filter or through this machine of story, and suddenly, you have a story that’s also about the subject.”

Jonny Sun:

And so I started doing that for like … in biology class, I think there, I did a sketch. I don’t even remember what the sketch was about, but it was about meiosis, I think, and mitosis, and cell splitting, but I think there was a genie involved, I think there was like, I got one of my close friends who was very much—he became a doctor—very much into science and research and stuff, but I got him to play the genie, and it was really fun for me. And the best part was that my biology teacher at the end gave us a good grade because she was like, “Well, you included all the stuff that you needed to include in the presentation.

Jonny Sun:

“It was just not like a PowerPoint presentation, it was a play, but you got it all there, so I have to give you a good grade.”

Debbie Millman:

Now, initially, your journey in theater and comedy ended with high school, as your parents wanted you to do something more secure, especially given how good you were at math.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

What did your parents want you to do at that point in your life?

Jonny Sun:

It was interesting because the more I think about it too, the more I realize it wasn’t just about what my parents wanted me to do, but I was also caught at a crossroads of what I wanted to do, where I was. For as much fun as I had, and how invested I was in theater and playwriting and drama, I was also, I think, equally as excited about and invested in the maths and the sciences, and that expressed itself as the thought of going to engineering school. And I just couldn’t figure out how to make up my mind about it. And two conversations I remember for having to make that choice was I asked my mom about it.

Jonny Sun:

She took me through the thought process of like, “Well, what do you want to be?” And I didn’t really know, but I said, “Maybe an engineer, maybe a writer or an actor or a performer.” And then she said, “Well, think about the engineers that you know, and they all had to go through engineering school, but then think about all the writers and the performance and the actors that you look up to, and how many of them necessarily went through theater school to get to where they are.” And through talking about it, she helped me realize that if I went to theater school, I cut off the path almost completely to be an engineer, which isn’t necessarily true, but it felt that way. But if I went to engineering school, there was still an option that I could pursue kind of that creative writing life afterwards or during.

Jonny Sun:

And then I also talked to my drama teacher, and her perspective was like, “Listen, if you can live without wanting to be a writer, you should do that because writing is a stressful, hard life. It will torture you. It is a very difficult kind of mental process to constantly live as a writer. And so, if you can do it, and the inspiration to write or the desire or the need to write doesn’t come back to you, then you’re free in a way. But if you try to do it and realize, ‘Oh, no, I still have that compulsion,’ then it’s going to find you, and then you’re going to end up wanting to write, and you are going to end up writing regardless.”

Jonny Sun:

And so both of those conversations felt very freeing, and so I thought, OK, I’ll go to engineering school. And then as it turns out, while I was there, I found out that the engineering school I chose, which was the University of Toronto, the department there of engineers also put on a comedy show every year, which was a perfect thing for me.

Debbie Millman:

The Venn diagram of your life.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah, exactly, and it turns out like the Venn diagram for the engineers who also were interested in sketch comedy was very small, the overlap was tiny, but it was there that I met a lot of my people, it felt like. That’s where I met my girlfriend who then became my wife. And yeah, that felt like a really special convergence.

Debbie Millman:

After graduation, you continued on to the Yale School of Architecture, where one of your professors stated that your drawings had a very distinct sensibility. They were more Marimekko than Michelangelo. What made you decide to go on and get a master’s degree in architecture? Did you think at that point you might be an architect?

Jonny Sun:

I thought about it; I think I had like an idealized version of what architecture was when I applied to architecture school. And I certainly had an idealized version of like what an architect does as I was entering into that field. For me, the biggest thing was, here I was at the end of engineering school where I still had a deep passion for engineering, especially for structures and structural analysis, and I learned all about bridges and the designs of bridges and how they reflect the physics of bridges. And at the same time, I was also still interested in theater and playwriting and drama, but architecture to me represented a combination of those, where you needed that kind of like structural brain as well as a creative and artistic brain, and so, I thought that would be like a cool …

Jonny Sun:

I also had heard it described as sort of like art school, but with a little bit more engineering involved. And I don’t know how true that description was, but it was more of a hope that architecture would be the thing that felt like it combined those two things.

Debbie Millman:

While you were in architecture school, you began to tweet at least one joke every day.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

However, your first tweet, on March 26th, 2009, was simply a statement, and you stated, “Japanese money looks so badass.”

Jonny Sun:

That’s right. That was—

Debbie Millman:

It was such a random first tweet, “Japanese money looks so badass.”

Jonny Sun:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

When and why did you turn to jokes?

Jonny Sun:

That’s a great question. OK, about the first tweet, that was 2009, you said, that was during engineering school. I think at that point, Twitter had just come out, and it was like the joke that everyone said, or the joke that I always said, it was like, it’s like Facebook, but it’s just the status update part of Facebook. And that’s how all my friends used it; that’s what we thought it was, of like, the joke about like, “Oh, I’m eating a sandwich now,” or like, “Just watch this movie, thought it was pretty good.” That was what we were doing.

Jonny Sun:

But the reason I started tweeting jokes on Twitter in architecture school was that, in engineering school, I had that sketch comedy group and I was also doing Second City and writing and found some friends at the Victoria College Drama Society that I performed and wrote with and stuff, and basically all those kind of creative communities I had no longer access to when I moved to the U.S. and when I moved to New Haven. So, I thought like, “OK, I’ll turn to the internet to do this,” where on Twitter, there were people who were telling jokes and it felt like there were like creative circles and really interesting kind of poets and writers and artists who were also just telling weird jokes and writing weird shortform poems and things, and I was like, “I’ll do that because that feels like a community I can participate in from anywhere.”

Debbie Millman:

You said that you initially did this to keep your comedy brain sharp. And I understand that you thought Twitter was funny in a way you didn’t know you could be funny.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And I’m wondering if you could share what that funny was like for you.

Jonny Sun:

Well, because a lot of kind of the comedy stuff I’d been doing in Toronto and in college was performance-based sketch comedy and plays and theater and stuff, and I think all of that confirmed to me that I don’t think I’d ever be able to be a performer. That I had so many friends who were incredibly talented performers, that they knew how to be on stage and use their body and their voice as an instrument in a way that I didn’t and that I still don’t; I don’t feel like I totally have control over myself and the way I speak out loud in real time and the way I inhabit space, I guess, but my friend, I had some friends who were amazing at that and it made me feel like, OK, I don’t think I could be a performer, but I’d love to be a writer, and I’d love to … My thought was like, I’d love to write for them, and that’d be amazing.

Jonny Sun:

And then when I was on Twitter, Twitter is not performance, right? Twitter is writing and reading. And I think particularly what was interesting about Twitter was, there was so much play with like voice and with character that most of the people that I followed that I thought were doing interesting things were not tweeting as themselves, they were tweeting as like a dad who loves coffee, or like—

Debbie Millman:

God.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Shit My Dad Says.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah, exactly. There was stuff like that that felt like there was like a layer of performance involved with it, but the performance still ended up being something that was a written thing. So, it was different from “101 Jokes About Football,” and it was different from sketch, and it was like performance but through writing, that I really got excited by.

Debbie Millman:

You said that part of your working theory on comedy and maybe all art is that it’s supposed to feel like an inside joke, but you’re supposed to try to get everyone to feel like they’re in on the inside joke. And I’m wondering if you still feel that way. And if so, how do you go about doing that?

Jonny Sun:

I still believe that it should feel like an inside joke. I don’t necessarily know if it’s possible for everyone to feel like they’re in on the inside joke, but I do like the idea of being generous with who you extend that welcome to. One of the things that I am thrilled with in both my humor writing and in my non-humor writing is when people say, like, “Oh, I thought I was the only person who felt this way,” or, “I didn’t even know that I felt this way,” or, “I didn’t know you could express this in words.” That’s what I appreciate with humor, about humor, is the feeling that like someone could tell a joke, and suddenly, we’re all friends. Right?

Debbie Millman:

Right.

Jonny Sun:

Everyone in the audience is friends with the person telling a joke and with each other because we’re all—

Debbie Millman:

United in shame.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah, exactly. And I think shifting as the person who is the one writing the joke or writing the thing, there’s also something I didn’t realize until I started doing it, that the connection also extends that way too, of like, I’m writing about something that makes me feel lonely, and when other people understand that feeling as well, suddenly, I’m sharing a thing with someone else; I’m no longer just isolated in this feeling.

Debbie Millman:

While you were honing your comedic skills, you initially wanted to keep your identity a secret, because you were afraid of the harassment that you might receive as a Chinese Canadian doing comedy.

Jonny Sun:

Sure.

Debbie Millman:

Once people knew it was you, did you experience any vitriol or bullying?

Jonny Sun:

Yeah. I wish I could say I didn’t, but yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Me too.

Jonny Sun:

… When I started really writing humor on Twitter, I—first of all, everyone I was following was also writing under anonymous accounts and like different characters and stuff—and my thought was like, OK, I just moved to the U.S. I feel pretty alienated, so, I’ll just quickly draw a little alien cartoon. And then I kept my name because Jonny Sun sounds like a pen name anyway, and especially tied to an alien, I mean, you’re like, “All right, yeah, it’s an alien, it’s the sun, it’s space-themed,” and then after the book came out, when I changed my profile picture basically to a picture of my face, there were tweets that were like, “When did I follow this …” slur for an Asian person, or people would just use racial epithets and stuff.

Jonny Sun:

But for the most part, and the thing I want to focus on is that there was also a real sense of joy and community in being more of myself online, in the sense that there were people who sent me essays they had written when they found out I was Asian, and they were Asian too, and they had written things of like, “Oh, I’d never had a person who did the stuff that I was interested in to look up to who looked like me.” And there were people who said that they cried when they realized, which was really touching in the sense that if you looked at the kind of broad Twitter comedy landscape at that time, it was very rare. I think I overlooked the harassment and the bad stuff because there was a lot of joy and nice things that came out of that.

Debbie Millman:

Well, one of those things was your first book, Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too, which is a beautifully illustrated story about a sweet and lonely alien sent to observe Earth, and while here, he meets all sorts of characters that have different perspectives on life and love and happiness, all while learning to feel a little bit better about himself. And you named the alien Jomny, which was also the name of the author. You changed your name for the book, you used the same name, Jomny, J-O-M-N-Y. Why Jomny?

Jonny Sun:

This was kind of an extension of like the alien thing on Twitter, where one of the things that I loved about Twitter was the idea that you could really create a sense of character and then create a sense of voice just through text. And so, when I was like the alien character on Twitter, there was a fun in doing these typos to create a sense of like, “Oh, whoever’s typing this is imperfect, is making mistakes, but is not too self-conscious about their mistakes that they’re going to try to fix it and make everything perfect,” that the mistakes are going to just stay there. And something I got really excited about and zeroed in on was making sure that the typos and the grammatical errors that I was doing on Twitter were not associated with sort of like making fun of any accent or any sort of existing kind of grammatical error that people could make.

Jonny Sun:

Growing up as an Asian writer, I also am very aware of the ways people can use grammar—

Debbie Millman:

As a weapon.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah, as a weapon, exactly. And I also grew up correcting my parents’ academic papers. And so I was very careful not to do anything that could be read as like making fun of English Second Language speakers or people learning English for the first time, and I really focused in on the idea, like the keyboard-based typos of like the thing, the reason Jomny, J-O-M-N-Y, is because I got really excited about the ‘N’ key, and the fact that next to the ‘N’ key on the keyboard are the letters ‘B’ and ‘M.’ In normal people’s tweets, that typo exists, where instead of an ‘N,’ their thumb accidentally hits one of the keys next to it, and so I really focused on that where like, Jomny, the ‘M’ is there because it’s an accidental ‘M’ next to the ‘N.’

Jonny Sun:

And then I extended that to the title, Everyone’s a Aliebn, where there’s a ‘B’ next to the ‘N,’ because that’s also like a thumb error. Yeah, that was kind of the play that I was doing there.

Debbie Millman:

How did you develop Jomny? Did he come fully formed? Did his attributes as a character evolve over time? Talk about the way in which he came to life.

Jonny Sun:

The bio that I had on Twitter was, “Alien confused about human language,” and my head canon for that was that human language was like emotion and was like the ways to interact with people. So, this alien who primarily is confused about learning what emotions are, and this journey of getting to know people and learning these kind of deep human feelings and thoughts and anxieties and emotions. I think that was tied to a personal awareness of my emotional kind of identity, and the emotion that I was going through at the time, and especially as I was focusing on the book. I was also learning more about my anxiety and my depression and my mental health, and I started seeing a therapist, and I started talking to my friends about it.

Jonny Sun:

I feel like the thesis of the book is sort of like, if you are able to be open with yourself and with other people, then it helps other people open up and then you can connect with people better. And so that idea of like “everyone’s an alien and you’re an alien too” really means like, yeah, let’s all share in our confusion about the world, and together, we can find community.

Debbie Millman:

One of your book blurbs stated, “Read this book only if you want to feel more alive.” Do you remember who stated that?

Jonny Sun:

Yeah, I’m looking at it at the back of my book. That was—

Debbie Millman:

Cheater, cheater. Hey.

Jonny Sun:

I know. I have my books right here. Yeah, that was Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Debbie Millman:

So, you first met face-to-face backstage at Hamilton, after which Lin tweeted, “I met Jomny Sun, it’s a goop night.” How did Lin first become aware of your work? How did you end up backstage at Hamilton? Give us all the details.

Jonny Sun:

I still don’t actually … you’d have to ask Lin how he realized who I was. At some point, I had followed him forever, I had followed him since In the Heights and since when I had the chance to direct the sketch show from college. It was just a musical and sketch show, and the musical element was we took existing musical numbers and rewrote them to be about like engineering and student life and stuff. But I ended up using two songs from In the Heights and rewrote all the lyrics, these like very dense-layered rhyme schemes to be about engineering life and student life and stuff.

Jonny Sun:

But I had been a fan of his forever, I had followed him forever. I think I tweeted at him a few times, but at the same time, I was just doing my thing and writing, and at some point, he just followed me back and we just started being friends on Twitter, the way that that phenomenon feels like it naturally happens magically sometimes, and then I don’t remember how I ended up seeing Hamilton. I think I was going to be in New York anyway for something, and I messaged him, and he said, like, “Oh, there’s like, we save the standing room seats at the back sometimes and I’ll make sure you get one.” And I think that’s the first time that I saw Hamilton.

Jonny Sun:

And then afterwards, I waited for him at the line outside the theater, and he said hi, and we crossed the street and got a slice of pizza and hung out for the first time.

Debbie Millman:

You then illustrated Lin-Manuel Miranda’s book Gmorning, Gnight!, which was a collection of Lin’s morning and evening tweets. Talk about how that book came together and what it was like to collaborate with Lin.

Jonny Sun:

It was a phenomenal experience. Lin had been doing these tweets and it was a regular practice for him.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. I love those tweets.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah, me too. And I think more and more people had tweeted him and said, like, “Can you please turn this into a book?” And I remember, he tweeted out at everyone, kind of being like, “I’m thinking about this, but I’m not sure.” And I saw that and I texted him and I said like, “I have thoughts.” I have now done a book that ostensibly was kind of like based on Twitter, but not really, but had like, was blurring the line between Twitter and the book. And one of the things I said was like, “For me, the drawings in Everyone’s a Aliebn were really important because it was something that you could see with a book that didn’t make sense to me as like a web comic or something that you could post online.”

Jonny Sun:

And so I talked with him for a bit, and he was like, “Great, I was thinking about drawings too and I was wondering if you would be interested in illustrating.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, absolutely. I wasn’t trying to pitch myself for this, I was just giving you my thoughts. But yeah, that sounds amazing.” And the process of doing the book was cool. There was a third person who worked on the book with us, her name was Cassandra Tidland, and she compiled a bunch of Lin’s tweets, and she was the one in charge of curating the thread of them and choosing which ones. And then the process of illustrating them … I spent a couple of days with Lin at his home, we hung out and I spent the days asking him about the context for every single … it was like a long-form podcast interview.

Jonny Sun:

I wish we got the thought to record it, but it really was me going through every page, being like, “When you tweeted this, Do you remember what day it was? Do you remember what time of your life this was? Do you remember what you were talking about?” Because some of them are a little more abstract, some of them are a little more cryptic, and he had an answer for every single one. From his answers, I suddenly had all this material to go off of. And the illustration process was trying to be really specific about Lin’s life. And I always think of it as like a portrait of my friend in a hundred drawings, where none of the drawings are of his face, and so it was a lot about like objects that were important to him, or places, or settings, things that were important to his kids, stuff like that.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, it’s sort of a nonrepresentational self-portrait.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah, exactly. And yeah, my hope is that people can see the drawings and feel like somehow they know Lin a bit better, or people who know Lin already can flip through them and be like, “Oh, this is like the slot machine at the bodega,” and stuff like that.

Debbie Millman:

You said that the idea of your current book, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections and Illustrations, started while you were working on Gmorning, Gnight!

Jonny Sun:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

How so?

Jonny Sun:

For a while, I was just making sure I wrote down things, and like, I mean, this was a practice that I had been cultivating since before Twitter when I was trying to think of any idea could be an idea for like a sketch or a play. And then when Twitter started happening more and more, it was like, any idea could potentially be a joke or a poem or something to write. And I think I just continued maintaining that practice, and eventually I was just writing down little bits of realizations and little bits of feelings and things that I discovered about myself, the things that I wanted to remember in terms of like how to cope with loneliness or anxiety or depression. And eventually, I had a lot of that stuff.

Jonny Sun:

And the book then also made me think about kind of the idea of like, how do you do a bunch of short pieces and make them feel cohesive and make them feel like a whole? And how do you do that as a collection of essays or longer-form writing? And then my wife, who was not my wife at the time, she did notice I was writing all this stuff and I was enjoying it, and she said, “I think this should be your next book, that clearly, there’s something about, there are recurring themes and ideas through this stuff.”

Debbie Millman:

And is it true that you wrote most of Goodbye, Again on your phone?

Jonny Sun:

Yeah, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Wow, that’s talent.

Jonny Sun:

Oh, thanks. Honestly, the thing that makes it easier for me is that when I open up like a Word Document on my computer, suddenly, it feels too formal and it feels too scary of like, “Oh, now I have to sit and be a writer,” whereas like if I open the Notes app on my phone and jot some stuff down, that doesn’t feel like I’m writing, it feels like I’m just taking notes; it feels the same like physically as I’m like texting a friend, right? That helped a lot in terms of just like gathering ideas and figuring stuff out and not feeling self-conscious about like, I am writing a book.

Debbie Millman:

You originally wrote the book during the year you were supposed to be taking a break. And in the introduction to the book, you state this: “From this break-taking, these essays came. A year of trying to take a break became two years, then three years of writing and putting these pieces together and working on this book. And over those three years, working on this book kept me some consistent sort of company as I navigated some destabilizing goodbyes of moving out of different rooms and different apartments, and leaving different cities, and then some destabilizing hellos of trying to find ways to live in the new places I landed in.” Jonny, what was the biggest thing you learned about yourself during the process of writing this book?

Jonny Sun:

Oh, man, that’s a great question. This might just feel a little meta, but I think there’s a level of anxiety that I always carry with myself; there’s always like a level of alarm for me of like, “I’m not doing enough, I don’t know what I’m doing, people will think I’m a fraud, I’m bad at what I do.” There’s constantly that thing in my head. And I think through doing the book, it made me feel like, “Oh, all those periods in the past where I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, those all went into the book now.” So there must have been some version of knowing what I was doing back then, and it helps give me a little bit more comfort that like maybe right now, I’m also doing all right, even though it doesn’t feel like it.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, the perspective of time. Yesterday, I learned a Korean word. The word is han, H-A-N, and there’s no actual English translation, but it sort of means beautiful sadness. And it was interesting that I learned that word in preparation, completely unrelated to my interviewing you because I thought that’s the word that describes this book. It’s this beautiful treaties on love and longing and sadness and solitude, and I’ve picked a few quotes that I wanted to ask you about.

Jonny Sun:

Sure.

Debbie Millman:

In the book, you write, “You can’t outrun sadness because sadness is already everywhere. Sadness isn’t the visitor, you are.” And I was wondering if you felt like sadness was just part of the constancy of your foundation in some way.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah, definitely. Even in the happiest moments, sadness exists. And so, that passage at the beginning of the book was about, can I run away from it? Or can I push it away? And then, near the end of the book, there’s a passage that I have about sadness again that’s called “Visiting Sadness,” and it flips the perspective and it treats sadness as like, as a visiting bird that will come and will go, and then you can observe, and then you can … and it’s not worth trying to keep them out because they’ll find a way in, but as they’re here, you can observe them and see these birds, and then they’ll leave eventually. So, I wanted to present like two ideas of sadness.

Debbie Millman:

Interesting that you should say that because I’m about to share two quotes with you about a topic. You write, “In the same way that sadness is always there, I find the idea of work and working comforting. It feels like I can leave everything else behind, but as long as I am with myself, I can always work. I can always do something with my time; it’s something I can always turn to.” And then in another passage, you state, “The only way I feel able to take a break is if I stay up all night working, or if I stay up from multiple nights working until I finally exhaust myself physically and mentally to the point where I am forced to stop working because I am incapable of producing any more usable work at least for a day.

Debbie Millman:

“I fear that I have learned to look forward to burning myself out like this, to love this numbed exhaustion, because it is the closest thing I can get to some form of rest. And I’m sad that this is the only way I allow myself to actually take the rest, because it is the only circumstance in which I can see rest as productive. And that resting, at this point, is the only way I can get back into working shape once again.” I feel so similarly in so many ways. You burn yourself out—I end up getting sick. It’s the way it’s for me, that resting comes when my body just forces me to stop. Talk about that, that sense of overachievement, workaholism, however we want to call it. Do you think that work helps distract you from sadness?

Jonny Sun:

Yeah, I think there’s … well, I also want to preface that I think a lot of my attitudes towards work and productivity probably come from engineering school and architecture school, and then like being a Ph.D. student and like that. And I’m still working hard to undo it, but for a long time, I was just deep into it, where I was like, I’m in it. In engineering school, I stayed up like four nights in a row and gave myself a stomach ulcer that made me miss a bunch of exams. But then I remember feeling so horrible. And then a year later, some of my friends, we were talking about working, and someone was like, “Oh yeah, did you hear that some guy was working on his bridge project so much that he gave himself an ulcer?” And like, “Isn’t that cool?”

Jonny Sun:

There was a bit of like a celebration of like, “Man, if that guy got an ulcer, I could do that too.” And they didn’t know I was that guy. And so, being in that position of going through it and knowing it was miserable, but then seeing other people really celebrate … it was shocking and terrifying.

Debbie Millman:

I think it’s just a human thing that somehow we feel more worthy if we’re doing something productive.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

I think for me, I think it comes from really deep-seated self-loathing, and that if I do this thing that makes me useful, that maybe I’m not such a waste, or something like that.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah, I think that’s true. I also think about a lot of it as like, we live in a productivity culture and a culture where one of the only ways that we can argue for our own existence or we can argue our value of ourselves is through the work we create, which I think is fundamentally flawed—but it is something that we can’t escape.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Well, it’s addictive, absolutely.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve said that the most productive years of your life so far have also been your loneliest. Has that changed at all now that you’re happily married and have somebody that is standing with you?

Jonny Sun:

I feel like it’s changed and I feel like I’ve done a lot of work and Elissa has helped me do a lot of work on myself and trying to understand this better, but certainly, us being together in one place during the entire pandemic has helped me really reassess my priorities, and I do not like the feeling of having to be in the same room as this person I love and not having time throughout the day to interact with her and talk to her. And so, that’s absolutely shifted my balance, I think.

Debbie Millman:

I have one last quote that I want to ask you about, and then I’d really love to ask you to read one of my favorite passages from Goodbye, Again. But this last quote is a long one. You write, “A friend asked me after an objectively good and exciting thing happened, if I celebrated it. I laughed it off with a, ‘Ha, no,’ which I still feel bad about. I didn’t mean to make my friend feel like it was a dumb question, it’s just that I’ve made the concept of celebrating anything such a foreign thing to me, because if I do, that means it’s happening, and if it’s happening, that means I can severely screw it up, and if I severely screw it up, that means it will not be happening anymore, and if it is not happening anymore, that means that everyone will know that I severely screwed up, and this all causes me to get so anxious that I feel more likely and more able to screw the thing up than I did before.

Debbie Millman:

“And so, I found that in general, it’s just easier to ignore it and just try to get through it without imagining, and then willing into existence all of the ways I can go about messing it up.” Jonny, how did you get your hands on my diary?

Jonny Sun:

Sorry, I just probably did, I took all your thoughts and probably just thought as my own ones.

Debbie Millman:

I was like “whoa” when I read that. I’m doing a little column on printmag.com about what matters to people, and one of the questions is, “how long does the feeling of accomplishment or pride and accomplishment last for you?” And so far, I think the longest amount of time for anyone that I’ve asked this question to was like five minutes. So, I completely relate to this, and I’m wondering why is it that humans have such an incapacity to feel good about what they’ve accomplished?

Jonny Sun:

Yeah. I spend my time, a lot of my time, thinking about that too. Just like as an aside, I already feel like I’m not the person who wrote the book; to me, the book was such, it existed with me for so long. And I knew that as soon as it would be published, I would feel very distant from it, and there’s a sad distance from it. I tend to, and I’m trying not to, but I tend to identify myself using the projects that I’m currently working on, that like, when I was working on the book, I could be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m an author because I’m working on this book.” Now I don’t feel like an author because I had written a book, but I’m not actively working on a new book, so, I don’t know if I can hold that label and hold that identity anymore.

Jonny Sun:

And also to understand that there’s no value in trying to compare myself to other people because we’re all different and we are all at different stages in our lives and our careers and like—

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, and that’s why we have Instagram photos.

Jonny Sun:

Exactly. So, I’m trying to really not feel like I should be doing something else. I’m trying really hard to just be like, “OK, the book came out and I can be happy with that and just sit with it for a bit.” But that’s hard.

Debbie Millman:

I hope you can do that because the book brings so much happiness to people. It’s just one of those books that is beautifully, happily sad.

Jonny Sun:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

I can’t put it in any other way. It’s han, it’s han.

Jonny Sun:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

There’s so many other things that you do that we really haven’t gotten a chance to talk about, and I just wanted to mention them because I think that you are a poly-hyphenate—you’re an author, an illustrator, a screenwriter, a playwriter, an artist, and I’d like to ask you about some of your more recent projects. You’ve also worked on Netflix’s animated series “BoJack Horseman,” the Emmy-nominated show. You worked on an art installation, as I mentioned in the beginning of the show, called The Laughing Room. Talk about The Laughing Room because that one, I think, is super special.

Jonny Sun:

Yeah, The Laughing Room was fun because what I’ve been trying to do is find a way around focusing on the things I’m studying in my dissertation and my Ph.D., which is mainly about online community and virtual place, and what it means to exist and be present in a virtual online space, whether that’s like a social media platform or whether that means like the Zoom window that we’re looking at each other with, and like what it means emotionally and psychologically. That this is a place that we inhabit, even though it’s not one that we physically inhabit. So, that’s a constant question that I’m trying to untangle and figure out with my dissertation.

Jonny Sun:

But The Laughing Room essentially is an art installation. We built a sitcom set and we put a living room set, and we put bright lights and made it feel very artificial, like you were on the set for a sitcom. And then we, me and Hannah Davis, who is a programmer and an artist, who’s brilliant, she created an algorithm that was trained on hundreds of hours of standup comedy. And essentially what the algorithm does is it listens to everyone who’s in the room, and it will decide when to play a laugh track based on if the algorithm decides if the thing they said is funny or not.

Debbie Millman:

So, it was laugh-track worthy.

Jonny Sun:

Yes, exactly. And so we created a sitcom set and we replaced the live human audience with an algorithmic one. And the joyful thing and the thing that Hannah and I always talk about, is like, it’s exciting that the algorithm isn’t perfect. The uncanny kind of imperfection of our algorithm was the point of like, it would laugh at wrong times, or it would be silent after someone told me a very obvious joke. And the question was like, does that make people uncomfortable when they’re in the space to have the knowledge that they are being observed or listened to or recorded and reacted to? And the other thing is like, how does that change your own perceptions of like, if you’re funny or not, or like who you’re performing to?

Jonny Sun:

And it was a metaphor or like an analog of this feeling that I get online all the time of like, when I’m on Twitter and I’m telling my jokes and I’m writing, how much of that is being seen by the people who follow me? Versus how much of that is going to an algorithm that’s like a middleman, that is going to determine if it should be boosted to more people, or if it should be limited in its audience. And I think as we exist in these deeper phases of social media, there’s more and more algorithmic curation and control, and this performance to an algorithm as opposed to a human audience. And so, all those questions I wanted to put into The Laughing Room and make it like a real-world example of that.

Debbie Millman:

Before we close the show, I did say I wanted to ask you if you would read one of my favorite passages in the book, and it is titled “How to Cook Scrambled Eggs.”

Jonny Sun:

Sure, absolutely. So, there’s a section in the book that’s called “How to Cook Scrambled Eggs,” and it’s essentially a series of egg recipes that tell like a story about me and my parents and what I … my childhood and my growing up. And particularly, I wanted to explore the things that I inherited from my parents. So, this first section is “How to Cook Scrambled Eggs.” “Ingredients, eggs, oil or butter, pan, heat, thoughts. Place a pan on the stove and set the heat to the lowest setting. Wait for the pan to get a little tiny bit warm, then add oil or melt butter into the pan. Meanwhile, crack eggs into a bowl and whisk them until smooth. Pour the whisked eggs into the very slightly warmed pan, and stir slowly, constantly. Keep stirring the raw egg fluid, keep stirring the raw egg fluid. Never stops stirring the raw egg fluid.

Jonny Sun:

“Stir, noting that if it doesn’t look like anything’s happening at all, that means you’re on the right track. Stir, noting that if it looks like nothing will ever change, that means you’re doing it right. Keep stirring the raw egg fluid. Stare at the eggs you’re stirring until you forget everything else. There is only the egg fluid. Watch it swirl as you stir it. Never stop stirring. As soon as you stop, the eggs will set and burn. Just keep stirring. Keep zoning into the egg cyclone until you forget that you are the one stirring it, and until you forget yourself. Let the yellow raw egg juice be what centers you. Let your mind swirl the way the raw eggy glob swirls around the pan. You’re in egg world now. Everything is egg. Stir, thinking of eggs, stir, scrambling your thoughts of eggs.”

Debbie Millman:

Jonny Sun, thank you so much for creating work that matters, and thank you so much for joining me today on Design Matters.

Jonny Sun:

Thank you so much for having me, Debbie. This was such a pleasure.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. Jonny Sun’s latest book is titled, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections and Illustrations. And you could see more about what Jonny is up to on his website, jonnysun.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 with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:

If I have to describe Ping Zhu’s distinctive style of illustration, I could pile on the adjectives. Painterly comes to mind, bold and colorful, funny, cute, especially her animals—striking and memorable always. And if you don’t know her by name, you’re likely to have seen her work in The New Yorker, on wallpapers for Google Meet, on ads for companies like Reebok, on book covers and on illustrations inside the books themselves. Her new children’s book is The Snail With the Right Heart, which was written by Maria Popova. Ping Zhu, welcome to Design Matters.

Ping Zhu:

Thank you so much for having me, it’s great to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. Ping, is it true that when you sing songs to your dogs, they run away from you?

Ping Zhu:

I think that’s true. I think I torment them maybe a little too often. And now there’s only one of them, but yes, they used to flee together, and now it’s just one.

Debbie Millman:

Do you have a particularly bad singing voice, or did they just not like the tunes you were picking?

Ping Zhu:

I think I’m a little overbearing sometimes, just an overly loving mother, maybe.

Debbie Millman:

I actually loved when I read that, because I also do the same thing. I make up all sorts of songs. I have two cats and a dog, and I make up songs for all of them and constantly sing them. My wife this morning was like, “OK, let’s try another tune.”

Ping Zhu:

Yeah, it’s weird. We have such strange parts of ourselves come out when we talk to animals. I feel there’s just this honesty, and you won’t be judged for it somehow. Maybe by looks or their body language, but not by language and other human things.

Debbie Millman:

True, true. So, Ping, I know you grew up in California in a town East of Pasadena called Arcadia. And when you were little you liked to play alone and make imaginary worlds. What kind of worlds were you creating?

Ping Zhu:

Well, I think there was anything from just pretending my surroundings were something else—like a closet could be just this secret layer, or when you go outside and climb a tree, it’s somehow more incredible, like a tree house or there’s something else to it. I think it was because we grew up with not too much, so the imagination was where all the richness came from. And it wasn’t so much of escapism, I think it was very much out of curiosity, just natural wild imagination wanting to make more out of a situation that didn’t seem like very much. So it kept me entertained.

Debbie Millman:

Your dad came to the United States to go to college at the University of Washington in Seattle, where you were born, and you then moved to Rhode Island where your dad earned his Ph.D. And you then finally moved across the country to California when your dad got his job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL. Now, I understand that both your parents studied meteorology. Did your mom work at JPL as well?

Ping Zhu:

No, she actually wasn’t able to continue working in meteorology when she got to the U.S. because of language barriers, and she ended up having to also take care of us, so her career trajectory changed. But for my dad, he stayed at JPL for a few years and then ended up switching jobs to more of data management, computer engineering ends of things.

Debbie Millman:

Well, you’ve said that pursuing the arts wasn’t an option for either of your parents. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about why, and if they could have, if they would have.

Ping Zhu:

Yeah. They grew up in China during the cultural revolution, so there was a huge limitation on personal choice I think during that time. And they met in college. And at the time, a lot of people were just pushed into careers or into directions that they tested well in. And because my parents did well in the sciences, that’s the direction they went in. But my dad was the one who really introduced me a lot to art in a way as far as taking me—

Debbie Millman:

He took you to museums, am I right?

Ping Zhu:

Yeah, exactly. And I think my mom was the one who helped send me to art class when I was a kid. I mean, driving me and picking me up for weekend after weekend for years is no small feat, either. So it was definitely something that helped with developing my interest in art. But I think actually now my mom actually has started picking up drawing classes; she’s been taking these little virtual drawing classes online. And it’s been really sweet to see her also learn how to draw after all this time. I think maybe between the two, my dad would have chosen to pursue some kind of art, although it’s hard to say because I also know that there’s a lot of unknowns and instability with being an artist for a career. And maybe even if he could have done it maybe out of practicality, I don’t know, during the time when he was growing up, maybe it wouldn’t have been very practical. So it’s hard to say, but I’m glad that they both appreciate it.

Debbie Millman:

You actually fell into your first art class quite serendipitously. I understand when you were 12 years old you only took the weekly Saturday class initially because your friends were taking it, and you wanted to hang out with them. So it wasn’t something that you had a bugger about because you wanted to pursue this specific discipline.

Ping Zhu:

Yeah. I just wanted to play all the time, like all kids do, for the most part. Maybe it was because I had to go to Chinese school after school during the week, so I felt like I never really had any time to do things that were fun. The drawing class was definitely like a hangout excuse. And gradually over time, my friends either lost interest or their parents decided to introduce them to other activities, and I just kind of stayed. I don’t remember saying anything about wanting to leave or wanting to stay, I think it just remained there and I continued, and it never got boring for me.

Debbie Millman:

Were these the classes that you attended that were taught by Chinese draftsmen who only spoke to you in Chinese, or was that the school that you were going to that your parents were sending you to?

Ping Zhu:

It was the Chinese school drawing class. It was different from Chinese school academics, which was during the week. All my art teachers were from Asia, and they would speak to me in Mandarin. It was interesting to also learn art through that because the language translates differently sometimes. And there’s some things that I felt like they could explain better through Mandarin than in English, of course, because tha
t wasn’t their language. But I appreciate now in retrospect having that different perspective on how they taught me painting versus how I’ve learned it through college. And it was nice to have that experience.

Debbie Millman:

I understand that the way you learned through your Chinese teachers was more technical than conceptual. Do you feel like that gave you a different perspective than the other kids that were in the more American art classes?

Ping Zhu:

I didn’t really understand drawing as something that could be anything more than just these Saturday activities, especially when I was younger, because my parents didn’t seem to express like, “oh, if you keep doing this, you could do work in this, and this could be your job or career.” I think it was purely recreational for a long time. So learning how to draw technically felt kind of practicing, doing anything well over a period of time, just practicing and exercising these muscles. So I guess I didn’t mind the lack of conceptual thinking because it felt very much focused on just trying to be better at something that you weren’t good at yet, like anything in school.

Ping Zhu:

I think it didn’t really dawn on me until maybe partway through high school when I realized that this was a career—there were schools made for these kinds of things, people do this for a living. And then all of a sudden, it just became … probably the interest accelerated a little bit then just because it all clicked in together. And maybe it was simultaneously because I was not the greatest student in school, either. So I was like, “Oh, maybe I have this escape or an alternate path that I can take instead of having to force myself to be interested in things that I really truly just was not interested in.”

Debbie Millman:

One thing that I discovered in my research was you saying that it felt good to pretend you had some secret power since you were so average at most things, and drawing could be yours. I also read that you didn’t have a lot of friends in high school. So I’m wondering if that was really true, and if drawing became your way of communicating with the world?

Ping Zhu:

I think that my attitude in high school was one that’s probably familiar to other angsty teens, where you feel like it’s you against the world; you don’t really want to be a part of what everyone else is interested in. I really was interested in … similar to the imaginary worlds that I felt like I lived in when I was a kid, just like I could make something better for myself even if it’s not entirely real or that other people understand necessarily. I think I was very OK with that … it’s not so much isolation as it is independence because I felt very monitored at home. My parents, they just had a very watchful eye over what I was doing. So in a way, yeah, it was like a freedom, it was liberating to be able to do something that maybe they didn’t fully understand or that other people didn’t understand. And it was exciting.

Ping Zhu:

It wasn’t that I didn’t get along with people in high school; I think what I turned to when I felt like I wanted to express myself was more of artistic expression, or drawing and getting my ideas out there. And now I do regret isolating myself that much. I think it would be nice to obviously still have connections to that part of my life through people who you can share memories with and stuff. Now you’re like, “Oh, it would have been nice for someone to remember something that maybe I forgot during that time because I don’t have that perspective so much.” If there’s any high school students listening to this, don’t ignore everybody.

Debbie Millman:

And then there’s always Facebook, where the high school people seem to always be able to be discovered. How did your parents feel about your growing interest in art? Were they supportive of you moving in that direction professionally?

Ping Zhu:

I think they started to get a little nervous when I became interested because, like I said, it was something that they didn’t fully understand. And they ended up, I think, trying to corral me in directions that were very similar to what their friends’ kids were doing or interests or doing well on tests, things that they could really compare and see progress and understand that. It was hard for them to just accept that somehow this 16-year-old person was going to know what they were going to do for the rest of their life with that sort of attitude. And I do feel like a lot of what they tried to do was not necessarily to discourage me from that, but it was more so they wanted to make sure that it was something that I could really commit to or that I knew what I was getting myself into rather than just it was a phase.

Ping Zhu:

I felt annoyed a little bit at the time that I felt like I had to fight for this. But in retrospect, it does feel like they did it from a place of concern and care rather than true discouragement that they weren’t going to speak to me anymore if I decided to become an artist.

Debbie Millman:

Well, commercial illustration isn’t the easiest career to pick, and certainly not the most secure. And it’s actually incredibly courageous for anybody to choose a life as an artist. Did you feel at the time … you only applied to art schools ultimately, you only applied to art schools. You got into all the schools you applied to; you ended up at the ArtCenter in Pasadena. But did you have a sense that this was really possible, that this could be a direction in your life that could be successful, or were you just going along with the flow of enjoying what you were doing?

Ping Zhu:

I started out trying to trust my instincts the best I could. I really did not know what I was getting myself into. It was like grabbing onto small bits of things that were familiar. It’s like, “Oh, this is drawing. Oh, this is painting,” and trying to understand that in the context of how to make it a career. Definitely through high school, I had no idea what I was doing. I just stumbled across the concept of being an artist for a living, so applying to art schools felt very logical because it felt like that’s what people do after high school: You go to college. And my parents were not in support of having me take a year off or to experiment to see what it was that I was really interested in. It felt like you were running out of time, like if you didn’t seize every opportunity that you could while you were young, that somehow the age was going to work against you.

Ping Zhu:

And so I actually ended up applying only to art colleges because it felt like a compromise between, OK, I’ll do this, but I want to do what I want to do. Yeah, nothing made sense to me. And I think it was because I was very young. I was 17 years old, I had no idea. And also a lot of my classmates when I was in college, they were older than I was because a lot of them came from different backgrounds or they changed careers and they were very dedicated to this new trajectory. So for me, I felt like I went from hanging out with a bunch of people my age, 16-, 17-year-olds. And all of a sudden, I was around 25–30-year-olds when I was 18. But that really did help me I guess understand illustration a little bit faster becaus
e I had all these people who had different and more mature life experiences. And I think they tolerated me as their younger classmate who really just didn’t know anything about anything. I was curious, but it didn’t help me very much until later down the road, I think.

Debbie Millman:

Early on at school when hanging up your work for your first critique, you felt that nearly everyone else’s work was better. Really, given how much talent you have, really?

Ping Zhu:

Yes, there’s no way that isn’t true. It’s because they were older, they had better experiences, they had time to practice. They might’ve even gone to a different art school. I was very intimidated. There was definitely times when I probably didn’t try very hard because I knew it wasn’t going to be very good. And I think I had to learn how to build my own confidence and try and make the most out of the situation I was in because I was around such talented people, and it would be foolish to waste that on self-pity. Yeah, it was pretty scary actually, in retrospect.

Debbie Millman:

You stated that while you were in school, you were constantly apologizing for your work, but it’s also where you learned to stop apologizing for your work. How did you learn that?

Ping Zhu:

Well, that’s something I think I’m still figuring out.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, me too, me too.

Ping Zhu:

In part I felt like I was wasting people’s time putting up work that wasn’t good or wasn’t strong. This was mainly maybe the first two years, two or three years when I was in school. And I just didn’t have any confidence; I had no idea what I was doing. Everyone else seemed very much like they did their research, they had references, they had an understanding of art history, just a general perspective that was much more rich than mine. I think the apologies just came from, “I’m sorry, this isn’t my best work. I’m sorry, this is rushed. I’m sorry, I did this wrong, I didn’t have time to do this.” It was all things that I could have done or I wanted to do, and it was nothing about what was actually in front of us, and there was no conversation.

Ping Zhu:

I wasn’t opening a conversation about what I was trying to do. And I think that I probably wasted a lot of moments in critiques, where we could have actually just talked about where things could be better rather than like, “OK, imagine this situation around my work.” I think people were all there to learn, and it took me a while to realize that. And growing from that really did help to move past and therefore figure out how to become this illustrator, which was what everyone was there for, really.

Debbie Millman:

Was there a time in college where you felt equal to your peers or where you began to understand your perspective and your talent, or did that come later?

Ping Zhu:

I think hard to say only because with being young, it always just felt like I was playing catch-up. And it’s hard to know if you’re seeing equally because somehow I always feel like everyone’s little sister or trying to fit in with everybody else. I don’t know. And that could still be something that I’m working on now to try and make sure that I respect my own work and make sure that I could stand up for it and what it’s valued at. But I would hope that people saw me as an equal just because it’s so isolating on its own. Anyway. Hard to say.

Debbie Millman:

Do you think that that sense of yourself fueled your ambition?

Ping Zhu:

I think so, because I kind of felt like that underdog in a way, maybe. No one knew who I was, and I could just come out of anywhere, I could go in any direction. I didn’t have a style already or anything like that. So in that way, it made me pretty excited to think like, Well, I could try other things, or, I can figure things out along the way while I’m here. But I think there’s a natural competition that you experience when you see a lot of very talented people. And you can’t help but just either want to follow the drift that’s behind them just to keep up with them because it was inspiring; it was great to be around people like that. I think a lot of my really close friends are from that time in my life, and the age range spans between people who were the same age as me versus people who were married with children already. And it was cool to be able to have that during that time.

Debbie Millman:

Talk about the op-ed class you attended with Brian Rea, the former art director at The New York Times and the current Modern Love column illustrator, and your professor at the time, Paul Rogers?

Ping Zhu:

They are great, they have helped me so much when I was in school. And those are memorable turning points for me because I was meandering a lot during my college years where I just wasn’t sure. You see someone do something great and you want to try and go in that direction, and then you lose sense of what you’re actually interested in. I think by the time I took that class, I think it was a combination of Brian and Paul being my instructors, but it was also my other classmate Owen Freeman, who was their TA. That class really did help explain illustration in a way that no other class had really explained to me before, which was, oh, here’s something that I’m familiar with, which is media, newspapers and things that you can see on a daily basis, here’s art within it. And here’s a very broken-down way of making art in order to do this. One plus one equals two; this could possibly be your career or at least an entryway into one.

Ping Zhu:

I felt like that was where a lot of things started making sense. It was like, oh, here’s an article, and there’s so many articles in this world that need art accompanied with it, just like books need covers and just like posters need information.There’s all these applications. So it was very much like a real-world experience type of class. And it was thrilling to be like, “Oh, I don’t know if I have one day to do this or if I have one week to do this. And maybe I have to limit my ideas.” It was this speedy fun bootcamp that I had multiple opportunities to try different things within that context. And it was very fun; it was very nice to be able to believe that it was real, as well.

Debbie Millman:

The class was based around the op-ed page in The New York Times. And from what I understand, when you’re working for the op-ed page, it’s an assignment that you have to come up with an idea in two hours, draw it, explain it, and I think, to quote you, “not lose your head in the process.” Whenever I talk to anybody that’s done work for the op-ed pages, whether it’s Paul Sahre or Brian, I’m just astounded that it’s actually possible to do something like that—to get an assignment, be told what it is you have to create an illustration for, come up with a range of ideas, come up with a kickass idea, sketch it, draw it, file it. Two hours—really, two hours?

Ping Zhu:

It can be quite quick. And I do think that the exciting part was when I was able to make a piece that was based on just something that everyone got it at the same time. We were all illustrating the same articles for class. And it actually was a nice confidence-builder because it felt like we were all starting in the same place. It was almost this pop quiz, like where are you and how do you see things? It was nice because I felt like I could keep up, I felt like I had ideas that were able to make sense in this context. And I didn’t necessarily have to be this expert or lived very many years. We’re reading this information, and what we’re gleaning from it is just how we’re understanding the words and the context and building a scenario from that.

Ping Zhu:

It was a mix of, of course, your own understanding and knowledge of things, what kind of metaphors you could bring in. And I think it was nice because it was validating for the very few experiences that I did have, and also things about having grown up with Chinese parents, Chinese immigrant parents. Other life experiences like that all of a sudden started coming in where it was like language or the way that I saw things or things that I learned from my painting teachers who spoke to me in Chinese and metaphors in Chinese that made sense language-wise. Sometimes there are very strange juxtapositions, and it’s not talking about the thing that it’s explaining, but it’s used in a way to explain a bigger situation. And I feel like a lot of this cut-and-paste and collaging of what I had already on hand was what I had as a toolkit for any of this. This type of work is just that.

Ping Zhu:

So it was validating, and it was confidence-building. It was fun and exciting. And I think the time limit thing was actually a positive as well because I think I would struggle with long-term projects. If I had a week to do it, I’d wait until the last day to do it. And all of a sudden, you’re here under this time crunch where two hours was all you had. So there was no time to really let your mind wander, you just have to pour out the things that you could think about at that moment and try and make the best of it. The practice of that was also using different muscles, and it was very cool to be able to do that.

Debbie Millman:

It feels very mysterious because it’s not even about … I mean, of course it’s about being able to draw and technique and style and so forth. But I think the best illustrations in the op-ed pages are the ones that surprise you in connecting ideas. And it always amazes me when I see things from people like Christoph Niemann, who can create an entire language, an entire story, within a stroke. It feels so completely foreign to me. It really is a very different language that somehow, when spoken by great illustrators, becomes universal.

Ping Zhu:

Yeah. I think something that I’ve also learned over time and found to make the most sense to me is what is something that we can all relate to we’re trying to communicate. I know it’s the commercial arts, but it’s really communication arts. So the baseline is that you want people to understand what you’re making, you want people to be able to solve your visual, to solve the image for themselves so that they can see and make sure that it makes sense to them. I love Christoph Niemann’s work for that reason, because he uses things that are so ordinary and everyday that people are familiar with, and he’s able to distort them and push them into these new realms and create secondary worlds. And all of a sudden, you just wonder, how come I couldn’t have thought of that?

Ping Zhu:

Ultimately, I think it’s this way of trying to connect with other people and not have them feel like you’re explaining it to death for them by giving them an opportunity to also use what they know in order to understand what you’re saying. And I think that middle ground is a good place to be.

Debbie Millman:

In 2009, during your final months of college, you visited New York City to gather some firsthand illustrator experience by bringing your portfolio around and knocking on doors. And Brian Rea had given you the contact information for Leanne Shapton, the great, great Leanne Shapton, who at the time was the art director of the op-ed section. She’s also an extraordinary illustrator. And she agreed to meet with you. Talk about that meeting and then what happened subsequently?

Ping Zhu:

I was so lucky that she was willing to meet me. I was so grateful to Brian for giving me the contacts that he had. This was the time before having an iPhone or iPad and all that. So bringing the physical portfolio felt like it still made a lot of sense. And I work in painting, so all this stuff was in a classic portfolio. It was like I look like clip art going to tote my portfolio around.

Debbie Millman:

Nice. Old school, old school.

Ping Zhu:

But I did what Brian suggested—I wrote emails, I trusted him. And she wrote back to me, and she was very generous with her time and said that I could come by The New York Times office and show her some work. And actually going to the Times building felt so, it was like a pilgrimage in itself, you feel.

Debbie Millman:

Oh yeah, I feel that way too. Every time I visit, I feel the exact same way no matter how many times I’ve been there. It’s like Mecca.

Ping Zhu:

Exactly. She was earnestly interested in my work. We talked about it, I explained what the projects were, showed her some of the stuff I did in Brian and Paul’s class. And it was very overwhelming. Anyway, so I did end up just going home; I think I was leaving New York in a couple of days. And Leanne emails me, I think two days before I left, and offered me a job, which was just … I mean, everyone remembers their first job. I don’t even know if I really read everything that she was asking me to do, I just saw would you like to and then by this day and just skimmed that email. I was like, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, please, yes.” And it was for the now non-existent op-ed letters page. It was just this tiny little stamp-sized image that was a response to people’s letters that they had written in.

Ping Zhu:

And I think my article was about the difference between reading out loud versus reading in your head or something like that. So at the time, I was very invested in drawing animals and using animals as this connective tissue between articles and art. I also learned that that’s not necessarily the most functional way to make illustrations because they don’t always translate as far as visuals go. You can’t just put a bird in just because the article has nothing to do with birds, and you just want to use a bird character. Sometimes, it just doesn’t make any sense. In this case, I remember sending her a bunch of little sketches, and one of them was this elephant reading out loud to, I don’t know, another little group of elephants or something, which, like an image, it’s going to be like two by one inch. Where could you even draw a crowd?

Ping Zhu:

I wasn’t thinking at all about what the dimensions were, how much detail would be rendered, I was just to
o excited at the time. She said that they were all really cute and nice, but that having an elephant reading could be misinterpreted as something that was about Republican politics or just things that I had never thought about and would not have been thinking about. So it was really great to have someone who was able to explain to me for the first time that not everything can be used to say everything. I immediately changed all of that to humans instead because on another level, animals don’t read, they had nothing to do with reading.

Ping Zhu:

I ended up making it a scene in the subway because I felt like maybe just as an homage to my New York visit that it would be nice to use the subway as a location where people were constantly reading to themselves, but in this case were reading out loud to each other or something like that. So that was the end of my first job. And I felt very much like, is this possible? It actually felt possible for the first time because that whole thing wasn’t an actual disaster.

Debbie Millman:

What did your parents think when they saw your first published piece in all things, The New York Times?

Ping Zhu:

They were pretty much like, “Oh, it is real, this job is real.” And it helped confirm a few things for them, and my mom bought the paper. When I finally did get paid for that job, she made a fake jumbo check and laminated it for me, which was very sweet. So it was nice.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve stated that there are a lot of similar habits and procedures that you’ve learned from your work with The New York Times that you follow in your other editorial assignments. And I’m wondering if you can share what some of those are.

Ping Zhu:

It’s a lot of the same problem-solving. There’s always some context for the illustration, there’s always going to be dimensional restrictions, there’s always going to be things that the art director wants. And I think the process in making an editorial piece varies of course based on whatever the article may be. But I try to use each of those opportunities to explore things that I’m interested in or techniques or colors, these tiny opportunities, so that my work doesn’t all end up looking the same again and again. But the way that I figure out what I want to make oftentimes involves a lot of writing and note-taking in the beginning, just almost word dumping, and really rough thumbnail sketching just in order to not continue to think about those things as I’m trying to think of ideas on top of that.

Ping Zhu:

So I make a lot of lists; I do preliminary sketches. I try and figure out what the color language could be for each of these assignments because I feel like half the information is just the emotional connection with the colors themselves and those combinations and how that translates. I also try and gauge how art directors and clients are as far as what they’re looking for, what they reference when they are hiring me to do something. Is it something that I’ve done before? Is it something entirely new? Do I have an opportunity to push my ideas a little bit more into an abstract realm or should we stay more literal? Can we use animals again? Can we go back to people? It’s a little bit of just feeling it out as much as you can through an email.

Debbie Millman:

You graduated shortly after your first published piece in The New York Times, and you’ve been a freelance illustrator ever since. In that time, you’ve worked with some of the biggest and most prestigious clients and brands in the world: The New Yorker, Google, Delta, Coca-Cola, Patagonia, Pentagram, Warby Parker, Reebok and so many more. That’s just a real short list, as well as illustrating books, and we’ll talk about that in a bit. How do you get your clients? Do you pursue them? Do they come to you? Is it a combination of both?

Ping Zhu:

I started my career with an agent, and I did that because I thought maybe that was the answer to how to get these clients that don’t know who I am yet. And I don’t know if she was my silver bullet in any way. I learned a lot about that experience just as maybe how I wanted to run my business more so than who the clients necessarily should be. It’s always hard to answer this question only because most of the time you never really know how someone saw your work. It could be something in the Times, it could be someone else mentioned your work, it could be so many things. I was fortunate enough to start my career in the early waves of social media. And it was the time when things were still quite pure and people were very interested in other people and seeing how these things work.

Ping Zhu:

So I was using Instagram for taking photos of my food and nonsense things. And eventually, I was just taking photos of snapshots of drawings that I was making. I was lucky because people started just following me or they would leave comments, I would see their work. We started building these small, little friendship groups on social media. And I imagined that that had something to do with exposing my work to different groups of people early on. But I do think the editorial realm, when I did do a few New York Times pieces, maybe two or three New York Times pieces later, people were reaching out more consistently than they were in the past. And I think there was definitely a combination of luck and taking jobs that at least had a wide and big readership.

Ping Zhu:

I also think it’s great to have help from your peers. We’ve pooled art director names before just so that we can all get a chance at sending things out to be able to hopefully get a chance at having them see your work. And maybe if not now, then maybe months from now they’ll think of you for something. And that’s just the hope. So the consistency in staying on the radar has definitely been something that’s helped me.

Debbie Millman:

Jessica Hische, the great illustrator and lettering artist, recently did a workshop on pricing, which it seems like every designer in the world wanted and needed and tried to take. How have you learned about pricing your work? Can you talk a little bit about … for the young designers and illustrators out there that are seeing you as a role model, how do you know how much to charge someone?

Ping Zhu:

I actually used Jessica’s pricing back when she wrote the article for Fast Company. And I thought it was really helpful because there was really no other information out there like that. And since then, I think she’s made an updated version, which is great. But a lot of the pricing comes from just the budgets that are already existing. I find that editorial pricing stays very much within the same realm, between a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, depending on the size of the piece. And I also think most of the time clients already have a number that they’re coming to you with. But if they don’t, a lot of the times I refer back to a job that’s similar to that or I consider what they’re going to be using it for. I consider if I’m ever going to see it again, if I can never have ownership over it again.

Ping Zhu:

And all those things are me
asurements of not just your work, but the future work that you could do and also the past work that you’ve done. It’s a reflection of your personal value as an artist, which I think a lot of the times we devalue or it’s hard to stand behind how much you think you’re worth. So there’s a lot of benefit in talking to other illustrators, and hopefully friends or peers who are open about those conversations. There’s a great website called lightbox.info that is a crowdsourced website where illustrators have contributed their information on what they’ve made for certain jobs, who the client was, did they pay on time? What were the asks? So on and so forth. And it’s a great way for people to at least see what other people have at least made. So if you don’t have an immediate community of illustrators, it’s nice to be able to go on there and have a reference point for any of that.

Debbie Millman:

Talk about your process for creating your illustrations. Do you still work primarily with gouache?

Ping Zhu:

These days, I’ve actually been working a lot digitally for different projects, which is nice. But the feeling of painting with paint is never going to be replaceable for me. I work on paper, and I keep it as simple as possible, really. I have a drawer of paints, and I use a pencil to put in my linework after I’ve sketched out an idea on the computer, printing out the Xerox blind drawing and then using a lightpad to trace it onto the paper that I use. I’ve also over time have realized it’s been easier for me to do a color sketch on the computer with digital colors because I don’t want to be making those decisions while I’m painting. And it’s saved me a lot of re-dos actually, as well.

Ping Zhu:

I also have scanned in all the swatches of the paints that I have in order to make sure the digital colors that I’m using in my sketches are the same as the ones that I can actually reproduce in person. So a lot of fluorescent colors are really great in the computer, but they just don’t really exist in real life. I want to try and create as realistic of a roadmap for myself as possible. And then when I move on to painting the actual thing, it’s almost like that’s when the actual act of just making the piece comes together. It feels nice. It’s almost like cooking a recipe that you’re just really familiar with, and you’re just able to enjoy that process.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, there’s a real ease to it. I love that you said that working with gouache means that you’re taking tiny risks every time the paint touches the paper.

Ping Zhu:

Yeah. It’s a finicky material. And over the last few years, I’ve switched from using water-based gouache to acrylic gouache because the water-based gouache is very sensitive and you can’t really layer it very easily. If I sneezed on it, it would just disappear; it would just become a different thing. And it’s also the act of painting I think with something that you can’t really erase … it’s different from oil painting, where you can scrape it off and redo it. But with gouache, you see all the evidence there. And I think part of the painting process for me, and maybe the reason why there’s a lot of fluidity and movement, is because oftentimes those gestures are natural gestures. They’re the textures of the brush, they’re the movement of my actual hand going across the paper. And sometimes things don’t end up being the way you want, so you either have to calculate those risks or you have to find a way to make them look intentional. And that is part of the fun as well.

Debbie Millman:

Your most recent book was illustrating Maria Popova’s latest effort, the children’s picture book The Snail With the Right Heart. Congratulations on such a spectacular result.

Ping Zhu:

Thank you. Yeah, that was a wonderful project to work on with Maria and within Enchanted Lion.

Debbie Millman:

The Snail With the Right Heart is based on a real scientific event, and it’s a story about science, the poetry of existence. It’s about time and chance, genetics and gender, love and death, evolution and infinity—just a couple of light topics. Concepts made real in the concrete finite life of one tiny, unusual little snail named Jeremy who is discovered living in a pile of compost in an English garden. Can you share what happens in the story next?

Ping Zhu:

So Jeremy gets discovered on a little pile of dirt, and I think he ends up resembling and representing this idea that nature and life is something that can flower into many different things, and maybe not when you expect it to, and sometimes not in your lifetime. I don’t want to spoil the book too much, but it was really wonderful working on a story that had so much life and so much time and so many little moments that felt very relatable and other things that were so abstract that you can only really imagine what those situations were like at the beginning of time.

Debbie Millman:

Right. Well, what’s interesting about Jeremy is that his heart is on the right side of his little body, as opposed to the left. And I think that emerging from this wonderfully singular snail’s life, because it’s about like one in a zillion chances that this could happen to a snail or a person, is a real invitation not to mistake difference for defect. I think that’s one of the underlying themes of the book that I love so much, and to really welcome diversity in every life no matter how big or small. Did the subject of the book influence the style of your paintings or the way in which you approached doing the artwork?

Ping Zhu:

Yeah, it definitely influenced it in the sense that I wanted to be able to capture the moments of the dinosaurs on Earth versus being able to see the process of snails mating, all the way to the future and beyond. I think I treated a lot of the paintings with the more watercolor treatments rather than very opaque laydowns of paint. It was a combination of really letting the paint bleed in moments, just letting the natural elements of that expose itself rather than trying to contain everything and make it very perfect. There’s a little bit of both. And it was nice because I hope that that at least lends itself to the kind of randomness that is also our life and these mutations and things.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I think one of the things that I like so much about the book and the illustrations and just the story in general is how it can be related to on so many levels. It’s a wonderful children’s picture book, but it’s also a very universal story about life and what it means to be different and what it means to love. That’s a rare thing to be able to do, especially in a slim little book. So congratulations, it’s quite an amazing accomplishment.

Ping Zhu:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Ping, I have two last questions for you. My first one is this: Not too long ago you went back into your LiveJournal account and found an entry that you wrote when you were about 15 or 16 that stated, “I’m going to be an illustrator.” So you stated it way back that day. H
ow did you feel reading that entry so many years later and seeing how you manifested your reality?

Ping Zhu:

I think I wrote that when I got accepted to college, and maybe it was just a declaration of my major. But it’s actually a very pleasant thing to hear because I don’t oftentimes get to tap into past me. And I guess in a way I’m thankful for past me’s determination and almost blind ambition in wanting to try this as a life because I don’t know what else I would have done. I feel very fortunate that I’ve been able to … it’s certainly not a career that I was able to do by myself. I had a lot of support and help along the way. I hope to also continue to help others who are interested in doing this as a life and as a career.

Debbie Millman:

My last question is this: When you won the Art Directors Club Young Guns Award, you were asked to finish the sentence, “Despite what you might think, illustration is not ____.” You finished the sentence by stating that “illustration is not about illustration.” So my last question is what do you think it’s really about?

Ping Zhu:

Illustration at the end of the day is a job. And I feel that these past few years I’ve really tried to distinguish the difference between what a job is and what my life is. So much of my early years were focused on dedicating my life to illustration rather than trying to set certain boundaries in order to maintain a level of balance in my life. And I wanted to be able to continue to be at my career and something that I can use as a tool to keep myself alive and also make work that’s interesting and communicates and hopefully inspires people. I guess it’s a little complicated these days, but I hope to shift the scales a little bit on the things that are in my life in order for this to continue being part of it and also for other parts of my life to also have opportunities to grow.

Debbie Millman:

Can you talk a little bit about why it’s become complicated?

Ping Zhu:

Yeah. The fact that I’ve used a lot of my own experiences, a lot of my own thoughts and ideas to make work better or make work good, comes at the expense of my own energy. And maybe instead of being able to work on a project or something that would be fulfilling for myself, it’s then spent on something that’s for someone else. It’s kind of like finding your personal boundaries between your professional life and your personal life.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Well, I really, really look forward to seeing where you go next. And I can only imagine that it will be wonderful.

Ping Zhu:

Thank you. That means a lot. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and giving me this chance to hopefully share a little bit about myself.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. Ping, thank you so much, thank you for making such beautiful work and being so open about the way that you work. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. I really truly look forward to seeing the great work you make next.

Ping Zhu:

Thanks.

Debbie Millman:

“Creative director” is a catchall job description. In the case of Fabien Baron, it doesn’t catch all that he has done in his illustrious career. He’s designed some of the world’s biggest and most prestigious publications. He’s designed books and perfume bottles and furniture. He’s shot and directed films. He’s created some of the most memorable ad campaigns of the last 40 years for clients including Calvin Klein and Dior and Balenciaga. And he’s created singular groundbreaking looks for Harper’s Bizarre, Vogue Italia and Interview. Vanity Fair once called him the most sought-after creative director in the world, and indeed he is. Today, he joins me on Zoom from Paris, France. Fabien Baron, welcome to Design Matters. Bonjour.

Fabien Baron:

Bonjour. You have such a lovely voice.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, thank you. Fabien, the photographer Glen Luchford has insisted that you are the Elvis Presley of graphic design.

Fabien Baron:

Oh my God.

Debbie Millman:

And I’m wondering if you know why he stated that?

Fabien Baron:

No, I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t.

Debbie Millman:

Do you know that he even said it?

Fabien Baron:

Well, I know Glen quite well. From those days, the back days when I was at the Harper’s Bazaar and I hired him to work on the magazine and to do some stories. And there was one story actually that he did that I really liked. What he did was Kate Moss going around the city and 42nd Street and just taking very [inaudible] type of pictures that were really amazing. That’s how I met with Glen.

Debbie Millman:

Maybe it’s the breakthrough groundbreaking part that he was referring to. Fabien, your father, Marc Baron, was a legendary art director in Paris. He worked mainly with two publications. He was the founding art director of the left-wing daily Libération, and the sports daily L’Équipe. Is it true that you were a newspaper delivery boy for the—

Fabien Baron:

Well, not a delivery boy, but I’ve worked under my father, so I was really the go-to guy to do anything at the magazine. It would be doing at the time, photo stats, which were taking the pictures and blowing them up different sizes.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I was a stat girl at my student newspaper in college.

Fabien Baron:

Oh, really? OK. Good. So I used to do that and I used to do mechanicals and putting all the mechanical part of the magazine on pages. And I was doing a lot of Letrasets. I don’t know if you remember that.

Debbie Millman:

Oh yeah. I still do them, just for fun.

Fabien Baron:

I used to be really good at it. I used to be really good because you had to pick the size. It had to be 100%. So I used to be really good at it. I could type something exactly to the length I want, in the size, by just guessing. So it was a fun game.

Debbie Millman:

Knowing that about you now, I could see how that training helped in the creation of some of your typographic constructions. There is a sort of puzzling to them and placing them all together in a way that if I don’t think he knew how to do that by hand, you wouldn’t be able to do it on the computer.

Fabien Baron:

Yes. Actually, the first time I did this kind of graphics, I did it with a Xerox machine. And I was at Italian Vogue at the time. We didn’t have computers or anything, so we had to work everything manually. So I used to take the font and use the Xerox machine and blow them up on the Xerox machine and collage the pieces by cutting them out, basically.

Debbie Millman:

You said that your father was super bright, super smart and very educated. But I also understand that he was quite hard on you in your early days as a designer. In what way?

Fabien Baron:

I guess he wanted me to learn, and learn the proper way but also learn the hard way, because he wanted to make sure this is something I was going to do and something I was going to love. And when it’s hard and you’re still in love, that means it sticks. So I guess he was really tough in the way that we used to work. I was responsible for everything. Every time there was a mistake, it was me, even though it was not me. So he just wanted me to be responsible for everything. So it was not very gentle, let’s say. And I guess at the time, it was not like it is now. Now, you have to be extremely gentle with people and you have to be extremely polite, extremely proper. He was not like that with me, at least.

Debbie Millman:

I read that your father felt that the objective of graphic design was to get the reader involved with the editorial content of the publication, and you talk about this quite a lot. But at the time, you were also reading Francine Crescent’s French Vogue, and you were enthralled by the photography of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin. Did you feel that that was in conflict with what your dad was teaching you?

Fabien Baron:

No, actually. I didn’t feel it was in conflict. I think it was good, proper balance. His teaching was quite journalistic. It was quite like classic journalism. And at the same time, felt like … I think access to magazine, like French Vogue and all these photographers and looking at those visuals, I was really intrigued how you would create such visuals. So it was something that I was really very looking after. I would devour those magazines when they would show up in the house, because the visuals were exceptional and I really had no idea how you would put this type of visuals together, how you would create them. The photography part and after, how you would come up with those ideas, those concepts and everything. I was looking at that, extremely intrigued. At the same time, what was important at the time, especially in newspaper, is to pass the information the proper way. To make sure the reader would understand what you’re trying to say.

Debbie Millman:

After a gigantic fight, I understand you left home and his supervision and you moved into your own apartment. And at that point, you stated that he was still your hero and you still looked up to him, but it took years before you were both fully reconciled. What did you fight about?

Fabien Baron:

I don’t remember. I don’t remember what the fight was about, but I know that I left that day. I don’t recall at all. Isn’t it the case most of the time? You don’t remember what the fight is about, what you remember is, did I leave or didn’t I leave?

Debbie Millman:

The feelings.

Fabien Baron:

Yes. I definitely left, and it was a while before … not that long either, because I liked him and he liked me. I was quite upset. I was not so happy about it, to be honest. It’s not a good memory, that part, but it was time for me to go. Some kids, they leave their parents nicely and some don’t leave their parents nicely.

Debbie Millman:

Ultimately, you’ve said that the relationship with your father gave you a sense of how to treat people.

Fabien Baron:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

What do you feel that he most taught you in that regard?

Fabien Baron:

I think what he really gave me is a good sense of what this job was about. A good sense of, deep down, you have to remain a journalist, to a certain degree. In anything you do, it’s going to make sense, it’s got to be understood, and it’s got to be clear. But also, I think he gave me a discipline and a work ethic that I don’t think I would have gotten if it was not through him. The level of discipline in which I work is quite surprising for some people, I’ve heard. I’m very keen. And it’s a search to perfection, into trying to really find that place, which is difficult to find, that really … I think perfection is quite a good word, even though you understood that you cannot obtain perfection, but you can come close to it. And it is because you can’t obtain it that you continue to search for it.

Fabien Baron:

But that puts you into a certain category of people that you understand that this becomes your life and that you’re going to be professional about it. A little bit like an athlete. I’d do anything to make it right, basically. Just like an athlete would wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning if they need to train. So I’m very similar. I’m ready to do anything to make this right. So part of why I get results is because of that discipline. I think if I wouldn’t have that discipline, I wouldn’t have done that many things. I would have been very hesitant into trying new mediums. And I think it’s that rigor, but also that need and that search to perfection that allowed me to experiment and to try new mediums quite easily, without hesitation.

Debbie Millman:

You attended arts appliqués in Paris for a year before dropping out. What made you decide to leave school at that point?

Fabien Baron:

I felt I was wasting my time. I knew pretty much what I wanted to do. And I don’t know if I wanted to be an art director because my dad was an art director and I wanted to show him that I’d be a better art director than him, or if it was because I really knew the calling. So that one, I still cannot answer, really, but I knew what I wanted to do. That’s for sure. So knowing so clearly what I wanted to do, I didn’t want to waste my time. It’s part of being the athlete in me, that, “OK, let’s go run. Let’s not waste time.”

Fabien Baron:

So even though I had a good time that year and I had very good friends, and it was lovely to be at school and to experiment different experiences and do different work because this art appliqués, they teach you graphics, photography, textile, drawing, painting, modeling. They do so many different things, and that was quite interesting. I didn’t feel I needed to do it. I needed to work right away. I was already, even with my father, helping him doing certain things. So I felt like, I’m going to do this a couple of years, I’m going to waste my time. Might as well go to work and go at it right away and really learn the real job that I want to do.

Debbie Millman:

You also got your first camera when you were 17 years old, and you stated that while art direction is how you make your living, photography remains your personal love.

Fabien Baron:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

What motivated you to become a professional creative director versus becoming a professional photographer at that time in your life?

Fabien Baron:

I guess that’s my father. I think if my father would have been an architect, I probably would have said, “I want to be an architect.” I think that’s what it is, because right now you would tell me, “Would you like to be an architect?” I would say yes. There’s so many things I would like to be. And I think the mediums of anything that touches with art in general, they all kind of overlap. I learned throughout the years and experimenting with different mediums that actually, the most important thing is not the medium itself. It’s more the point of view that you have and how you want to express it. And certain mediums are easier to express your point of view than others. So the photography was something that I felt really close to myself, probably because of those French Vogue photographers, Guy Bourdin …

Fabien Baron:

And actually, the first time I got my camera, the things I was doing is I was going with my sister around trying to do a Guy Bourdin picture. I would make her pose in some things very similar and I would do pictures like that, with saturated colors. I didn’t have a flash, so it didn’t work perfectly, but I was experimenting and I was really intrigued by the imagery side of magazines rather than the journalistic side of magazines. So my training was being very journalistic. There was this other side that actually was not taught by my dad. That was the old process of image-making. And that started by taking pictures for myself. And then as I went along, it got more and more, I got involved on the art directing side of making an image.

Fabien Baron:

Then I became the art director that was good with type and good with images. So there was a definite conflict because of the photographers and the level of photographers I ended up working later on, for me to also be a photographer. There was a conflict of interest, to some degree. “Why this guy’s being on set with us? He’s seeing everything we do. And then he’s going to go take pictures and maybe he’s going to take pictures like us.” So there was this conflict going on and I wanted to be really respectful of that. So I never really involved myself as a photographer in my early years as an art director. It’s much, much, much later on that I decided, “Oh, OK. But maybe I should do a story.” And that step was a really hard step for me to take.

Debbie Millman:

Why?

Fabien Baron:

Because of what I just told you, that conflict of interest. I was afraid that photographers would start seeing me as a competition rather than seeing me as someone helping them.

Debbie Millman:

Did you find that that was the case?

Fabien Baron:

No. No, it was not. That was all in my head, I guess. In the meantime, I did a lot of personal work. That’s why I put m
yself doing landscape photography, and started doing work that was not fashion related. At the same time, it just happened to be that way. I think it was good because it allowed me to experiment with something else, something that was not fashion, something that was not related to a model and related to a style.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Well, you’ve said that when you are confronted with restrictions, you sometimes do your best work. And so maybe this restriction of not doing photography in fashion gave you this opportunity to explore something that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

Fabien Baron:

Yes. I also forced myself into doing the step and repeat, meaning taking a picture and going over and taking the same picture, same picture, same picture, and trying to look for that perfection of it and to see the difference between each one of them.

Debbie Millman:

So I would say that your ocean pictures certainly do that.

Fabien Baron:

They certainly do that. And they’ve been going on since 1983 and I still catch myself doing some sometimes.

Debbie Millman:

In 1982, a girl you knew from New York came to visit you in Paris and you ended up falling in love. You then decided to move with her back to New York. So you sold your motorcycle, you sublet your apartment. And with only $300 in your pocket, you moved to New York City. Was living in New York something you had always hoped to do, or was this a spontaneous decision after falling in love?

Fabien Baron:

The way I grew up in France, actually, the way most kids my age grew up in France, they were quite Americanized in many ways. The music was coming from the States and from London. The movies were all coming from America. The culture was very much an American culture, and anything that was new was coming from there. So I felt I was not … you know when you’re in the courtyard with the other kids playing? I felt I was in the other courtyard basically getting the scraps from the good courtyard.

Debbie Millman:

Oh yes, I know that feeling well.

Fabien Baron:

I thought it was much better to just check it out in the U.S., especially New York. There was this aura around it, around New York at that time in the ’80s. That was really amazing and I just wanted to go there.

Debbie Millman:

I’m a native New Yorker, but I didn’t move to Manhattan until 1983. So I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’m about a year or so behind you. And New York at that point seemed to be this mystical, magical place. Aside from your girlfriend, you knew only one person in New York, the great Véronique Vienne. She’s also been on the show. The art director at the time from Women’s Wear Daily. Did she help you? Did she help you get settled in the magazine community?

Fabien Baron:

What happened is, actually, I was freelancing in this magazine in France, this fashion magazine in France, and Véronique Vienne was asked to come and redesign the magazine. And when she came, she had a graphic formula and right away I kind of attacked her and worked with her really rapidly and tried to show my skill. She was really impressed that I would understand so quickly what she wanted to do. We got on on the right foot, but rapidly, I told her, “I really want to come to New York. I really want to come to New York. Can I come to New York?” So I bugged her to come to New York, and she basically invited me. She had very little choice. I was relentless.

Debbie Millman:

What a surprise.

Fabien Baron:

Thinking back of it, I was kind of like, my God. Seriously. I was really insistent. And she invited me, even though she was about to move to California. And she invited me and I stayed with her, and I worked at Women’s Wear Daily, and I was an intern there. And I stayed two months, and then I went back to France. In the meantime, during my time in New York, I met this girl that you’re mentioning. And a year later, she showed up in Paris, and that’s when I decided, “Oh, let’s go back to New York and check it out.” And I went back and then I just knew her and her partner at the time. I had $300. I called him up, and Véronique Vienne was already in San Francisco, so she was not part of this.

Fabien Baron:

But he basically organized a meeting for me with a couple of people in New York. But one of the meetings was actually with Alex Lieberman., which was a great meeting. And I knew who he was, I was very impressed about who he was, and had the meeting. And when I came to see him, at the time, he was on the Vogue floor; he had an office there. We met and he spoke French right away. He said, [inaudible]. And he was right because my English at the time, let me tell you, was not that good. So we spoke in French and he was very fond of French people and very fond of my work because I showed him my portfolio at the time. And he said, “What do you want to do?”

Fabien Baron:

I said, “I would like to become an art director. I would like to work in magazines. I’d love to work at Condé Nast. And he said, “Well, have you heard of this magazine? We’re starting this new magazine. It’s called Vanity Fair. It would be very nice if you want to meet with the art director and see if you guys get along.” So he sent me to, at the time, the art director was Lloyd Ziff. And I met with him and we talked, and he liked me very much and logically had the job. But then I got a phone call from Alex Lieberman, who said, “Well, Lloyd Ziff is not going to stay with us any longer, so the Vanity Fair gig is not going to happen. Don’t disappear. You’ve got to stick around here. I’m going to find you something else in the meantime.”

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. So I graduated college in 1983, and in 1982, Vanity Fair had been relaunched. And I thought it was the most glorious magazine in recent history. Just the idea that this was a beautiful arts and literary magazine that David Hockney’s socks and feet were put on the cover. Phillip Roth was on the cover. I desperately wanted to work at Vanity Fair as well. And being a very young designer coming from a state school in New York, I knew the chances were very slim, but I sent my portfolio into Condé Nast as well. This is 1983, so this is a year later after you. And I got a call back from Charles Churchward, who was then the art director.

Fabien Baron:

That’s correct.

Debbie Millman:

I didn’t meet with Charles though. I met with human resources, and the resources women did not like me, so I didn’t get the job. But the idea that the art director at the time thought there was something in my portfolio really, really buoyed me for quite a long time. So it’s so funny how life has its circuitous turns. One thing I didn’t know about you at all and had no idea, Fabien, I read that your first job in New York was actually at Johnson & Johnson.

Fabie
n Baron:

That’s correct.

Debbie Millman:

Working on a new design for their internal magazine. I was shocked when I learned this.

Fabien Baron:

That is correct.