Where Are the Spaces Designed for Us? On Invisibility, Age, and the University's Design Failure

My journey as a Black woman has traced an arc from hyper-sexualized object to invisible body. As a young woman walking to music lessons in Philadelphia on Germantown Avenue, I navigated catcalls and advances past three bars, feeling unsafe in a world not designed for black little girls to walk in. In Cuba after architecture school, wanting only to see the Hotel Nacional, I was propositioned over a dozen times along the esplanade, my long braids marking me as a prostitute, because only sex workers could afford hair extensions there. In Hollywood, security guards repeatedly directed me to extras parking and the extras food line unable to imagine I, a black woman,  was the production designer.

Now, at 55, a graduate student at UC Davis, I have crossed into a different territory: invisibility, disrespect, and dismissal. My gray temples, once dyed, now mark me. I don't know where to get my hair done because I don't know where Black bodies gather in Davis. Is it time to go upstairs like Fellini suggested in the harem scene of "8-1/2". Women of a certain age are simply supposed to go upstairs and disappear.

I ask myself - Where are the spaces designed for  women over 50? Where do Black women of a certain age gather in Davis? Where can I feel comfortable, be myself, kick back?  Where can I have a hot flash?

I have worked in design for 30 years. I hold an MFA in Scenic Design I got in 1996 (when I was the appropriate age of 26). My résumé includes Emmy nominations, Art Directors Guild Award nominations, a Dramalogue Award, numerous residencies. Just last year...or was it the year before? I was interviewed by the LA Times,  House Beautiful and Set Decor. I sat on an IATSE panel in Design, was in fellow for Women in Film, presented at UCLA, received residencies in Key West and Cornwall. What happened to that person?  Does she still exist?

In my Introduction to Design Section, where I TA,  every second is scripted on a "Road Map", as if I would have nothing to contribute myself after three decades in theater, opera, film, and television design and teaching design part time since 2000. I am told repeatedly that I'm "an artist, not a designer." Some say design "means many things." Others suggest I might look into other programs. I'm treated as a first-year MFA student, as if I am young and dumb and I am told "I will understand the design process better later."

When I was the right age for Grad School

What was all the work for? The MFA? The Ivy League degree? The magazine articles? The thirty years of working 60 to 80 hours a week? Do I just accept invisibility and shut my mouth? Should I leave the world for the young, accept that, as John Irving wrote, life is all downhill after 15?

Was I too uppity to think I could return to school and find a place for me there? That my experience would be valued? That what I have to say would matter?

I ask myself, where does the older student fit into the university? This program seems to be "one size fits all," but whose size? Whose body? Whose experience? Obviously not mine,

I feel myself wanting to hush. I feel myself being hushed before I can even speak. It reminds me of being a little girl when people asked if I had a middle name. I said no, and they asked, "Oh, could you not afford one?" After that, I learned to say it first, "I don't have a middle name, couldn't afford one", insulting myself before others could. Taking the power of explaining my name before it could be used against me.

I think of my grandfather, a Greek immigrant who fought for coal miners and steel workers. I think of my Black grandmother, who left South Carolina at 12, made her way to Philadelphia, supported herself as a washer girl. I'm almost embarrassed that micro-aggressions and discomfort would bother me at all, given what they endured.

But maybe that's the point. Maybe I shouldn't be embarrassed. Maybe the question isn't whether I'm too arrogant or need to embrace "beginner's mind." Maybe the question is: Why hasn't the university designed space for me? for us?  For women who have lived full professional lives and return with knowledge, scars, and stories to tell? For Black women who have navigated worlds not built for them and still achieved? For bodies that don't fit the imagined default student identity?

And maybe you are asking me, If everything was so great before, why am I here? And I am not sure anymore.  But if you had asked me a few months ago I would say because education should be lifelong. Because I have more to learn and more to give. Because I love textiles and wanted to learn as much as I could about them. Because I believed there would be room for me.  But I should have known there wouldn't be.

Before I knew about intersectionality.

Ethel Mairet - Unwraveling the Knots - Poster for Women Studies 145

 

In Response - On Country Learning (Sheehan, Moran, Harrison

 A lot of this article feels emotionally close to the world of yoga that I have inhabited since the early 90s. It speaks to my time studying at Kripalu, the Ghosh College in Kolkata, India and in the Sivananda Ashram in Los Angeles. I try to connect my yoga life with my design life but they are not always complementary.

I think it's hard for us to know the effect of colonization on design because it is the water that we fish swim in. We unconsciously use so much language that we are not aware of. When I was living in Munich in my twenties, a German friend of mine described the day as gas oven hot. Me having a Jewish father hearing that from a German was triggering and unacceptable. But he had never considered what that phrase might imply. What seemed horrifying to me was normal for him. I think that happens all the time in big and small ways.

When talking about how to decolonize design, the authors speak of designing by "…building relationships with knowledge outside the human mind." For me, my point of connection to these words means experiential knowledge. Listening from the heart. Listening from the stomach. Understanding that the mind is just one brain center.

When I was working on sets in Hollywood, I used to have to do an incredible amount of designing fast. I couldn't always do the research I wanted to because the deadlines came up so fast and often the scripts changed at the last minute, and I was no longer prepared for the new things I needed to design. When I was faced with these situations, I would trust my intuition on how to design and decorate the set. I relied on instinct and that I had read and embodied the script enough to make quick decisions. I always believed this place of deep intuition was a very creative, honest, and authentic place to design from.

The authors ask us to learn through connections and the ways things connect. I am not sure I have done that, but it is something I can strive for. Maybe like in the Eames and Eames film Powers of Ten I can practice zooming way out and zooming way in when designing. I can ask myself where and how can I be more connected to other people, to place, to heart, to spirit, to the ancestors. That is something I would like to do.

The authors suggest that we should listen to people with all kinds of experiences.  I learned about active listening when studying yoga therapy at Kripalu. In this modality, listening is more important than speaking. This is a strategy as a designer I have used often when working with directors in film, television, and commercials. I really try to listen beyond words to understand how to make the environment that the director wants. Because words are only one form of communication (and often aren't reliable), I try to understand tone of voice, gestures, and emotions so I can get the set right. I don't always succeed. Sometimes I forget. But sometimes I get it right and even exceed expectations.

Years ago I did a rodeo movie called, "Cowboy Up." Being an African-American woman from Philadelphia I didn't understand much about white rodeo life in Central California. I spent a lot of time with the local bull riders where we were filming in Nipomo so I could make authentic sets. I walked around with them, hung out with them their bunk houses. I fed the animals with them; I even sat on a bull. Once that time was spent I began to understand more but also understood I didn’t know enough and never would. So I asked them to help me, I said, "I'm just a black girl from Philly, can you help me tell your story accurately?" And they did help me. Explaining what items would be placed where in the rodeo. Bringing keep sakes from their families houses to make the sets more authentic. We co-created and I am proud of the work.

But my life in film has been a life that has contributed tremendous waste. Buying thousands if not millions of dollars of things that have very limited use. When we recycled, when we donated, it was just performative.

The authors speak of a definition of design: "Design is how all living beings co-operate to co-create." A few years back I heard a lecture on Deep Ecology. This idea really resonated with me. "Deep ecology is an environmental philosophy that promotes the inherent worth of all living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs and argues that modern human societies should be restructured in accordance with such ideas." I think this means a design that does no harm in its materials, the people who make it,  the people who use it, and all beings everywhere.  It's like the meta meditation we use a lot in yoga therapy that ends:

"May all beings be happy."

"May all beings be peaceful."

"May all beings be safe."

"May all beings live with ease." 

When I was at Arrowmont School of Craft this summer I heard a lecture by Zeke Leonard who has a motto of only using things that are around to design with. He has made a practice of making banjos and guitars out of old pianos. He proclaimed, “Make stuff out of things not things out of stuff.”

My aunt Frances and my grandmother were readers of dreams, and a lot of my design ideas come in dreams or meditation. I think this is the ancestral knowledge (I don't consider myself indigenous) that has been passed down. The idea that problems can be solved in dreams is something that everyone on my mom's side of the family believes.

The author speaks of places where memorable steps can be made. In wine this is a term called terroir, meaning the taste of the place where the wine is grown, the soil, the climate, the topography.... These factors all give it a specificity. I think objects that lack a specificity that are not sited fall short. The opposite of the terroir idea  seems to be when the authors speak of design that disregards context.

I had the opportunity to study at Stitch Buffalo this summer. An organization that provides refugee women with a place to do their traditional crafts and/or learn other techniques if they wish, and/or sell their work. The store at Stitch Buffalo is a marvel. Everything there is handmade by local refugee people (mainly women) who work in the space. Anything you buy will make a profound difference in someone's life. I met many of the women and they were incredibly proud to show me their work. I think this is an example of design that exemplifies the message of the article.

The art and design I want to do (and maybe already do a little bit now) is centered on giving voice to the voiceless, telling the stories of people and places that have been forgotten or left unexplored, and reinterpreting religious texts, myths, and folktales through a modern lens. I want to explore the realms of spirituality and identity, as well as cultural intersections. History, memory, light, wind, climate, temperature, the moon, and stars. I want to practice the yogic principles in design, make a design of ahimsa (non harming).  It's like the mantra I end with when I teach yoga; Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu - "May all beings everywhere know love and peace, and may the thoughts, words, and actions of my own life contribute to that love and peace for all"