To celebrate 20 years of Design Matters, Debbie Millman revisits highlights from her conversations with groundbreaking artists Bisa Butler, Deborah Kass, Marilyn Minter, Amy Sherald, and Ai Weiwei. This anniversary collection brings together the voices of five visionaries whose work challenges conventions, sparks dialogue, and redefines the role of art in our culture.
Debbie Millman:
Hello there. This is Debbie Millman, and I’m so excited to share something wonderful with you. This month, I am featured on Apple Podcasts as one of their creators we love. This is a big-time honor for me, and I’m so thrilled in the ways that Apple has acknowledged the 20 years I’ve been podcasting Design Matters. A big thank you to all of my friends at Apple Podcasts for their generosity and support for the last two decades.
Deborah Kass:
In the mid ’70s, what was happening in the art world was thrilling.
Amy Sherald:
I had like three people start crying while they were looking at the work, and I was like, “What is wrong with y’all?”
Ai Weiwei:
Writing is difficult, but to do art is … It’s just too easy for me to do it.
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, we’ll hear from some of the many visual artists that Debbie has interviewed over the years.
Bisa Butler:
I’m using pieces of fabric to describe her, not just because they’re pretty.
Marilyn Minter:
I liked porn. It turned me on.
Debbie Millman:
At the top of the podcast, we always say that I talk with creative people about how they got to be who they are, and that is really what I try to do. I try to get into the formative events of my guests’ lives. Their origin stories. With the many artists I’ve interviewed over the past 20 years, the conversation almost inevitably turns to how they started making the art that they later became known for, their subject matter and their style, and every story is as different as the artists themselves are different from each other. On this episode, we’re going to hear some excerpts of the origin stories of some of those artists. Deborah Kass is a multimedia artist who combines a pop sensibility with politics, feminism, and art history. I interviewed her in 2017, and as with a lot of my guests, I wanted to hear about her education.
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. So what was it like going there?
Deborah Kass:
My father had just died, so I was in a completely altered state because it was unexpected, and he was only 47. So it was a very weird time, and 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. But it was fun. I mean, it was fun to be with really ambitious people my age.
Debbie Millman:
It was at this time that you made one of your first paintings. I guess, would it be fair to call it appropriated paintings?
Deborah Kass:
Yeah. I guess after Applesauce, my appropriation of Charles Schultz, this would be my next major appropriation.
Debbie Millman:
So Ophelia’s Death after Delacroix. Can you describe it for our listeners?
Deborah Kass:
Yeah. It’s actually a very large rendition of a small oil sketch by Delacroix called Ophelia’s Death. I think his was like eight by 10 inches, a very small little thing, and mine was maybe five feet by seven.
Debbie Millman:
Six by eight.
Deborah Kass:
Oh, six by eight. Even bigger. And it was a redo of this painting, and I just repainted it.
Debbie Millman:
Deb, you’ve written about how David Diao, 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 Kass:
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 Millman:
Your time at school was rather interesting, I guess is the word I could put it. And I found an interview wherein you described 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 had video cameras. We went from Pittsburgh to Lexington with our thumbs out on the road. A lot of those students would transfer to CalArts. 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 Kass:
That is all true. It really was. I was out there and I had a ball.
Debbie Millman:
It sounds like it was kind of perfect.
Deborah Kass:
I have to say, and I was madly in love. I was madly in love. So I feel like I had the world’s best first love affair, the world’s maybe not best art education. But for somebody dying to break out of Long Island and being a nice Jewish girl, I did it in spades and I had a ball and it was something else.
Debbie Millman:
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 and 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 Kass:
I think 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. 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 kind of a new thing, was Elizabeth Murray’s work, which was incredibly important to me. So was Pat Steer’s work, Mary Heilmann’s work, Susan Rothenberg’s work. And all of these women were really talking about abstraction and representation at the same time, but 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, 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, and they were abstract paintings so I don’t know how that was communicated, but it was communicated extremely strongly to me who was sort of already obsessed with post-war painting because of all of my time at MoMA. And you can understand why if I loved Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray would be a huge revelation. And I said to Elizabeth once, I said, “You know, you ruined abstraction.” And she said, “Deb, what do you mean?” And I said, “Well, before you, it was universal. Once it was you, it became specific.” And that was a really big change. I felt-
Debbie Millman:
I felt the same way when I looked at her first … The big giant canvases all out of proportion and shape and-
Deborah Kass:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, it’s incredible.
Deborah Kass:
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. It just felt different. I don’t know. Something about seeing a little bird on a grid felt different. Mary Heilmann’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 Millman:
How did that influence the kind of work you were doing at that time?
Deborah Kass:
I’m not sure it influenced me specifically in terms … It’s like I never made a Frank Stella painting except when I used Frank Stella. But it was never to me about, well then a piece of work like that. It’s more what it meant philosophically or what it could mean-
Debbie Millman:
What it opened up in you.
Deborah Kass:
Well, what it opens up, period, and where you can go with that information. So then I go back to the late ’70s, 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 sort of critical work in relationship to the culture and representation, us painters called them The Photo Girls, and it was Laurie Simmons and Sarah Charlesworth and Cindy Sherman and Louise Lawler and Barbara Krueger and Sherrie Levine. And what I am 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.
And here were all these women doing critiques of photography and media and inserting their subjectivity in and seeing what it looked like from their point of view, and that was incredibly interesting and radical. So art history paintings came from a combination of those ’70s women and what they’d done with the history of abstraction and post-war painting and what Barbara, Cindy and Sherrie, as I love to say, were 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 certainly the one I loved and knew starting with Cézanne. It’s like the stuff I just loved. And 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 Millman:
Deborah Kass from 2017.
Amy Sherald became a global phenomenon when her official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama was unveiled. That painting now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Most of Amy Sherald’s subjects are vivid, colorful portraits of black Americans, which was one of the topics we talked about when we spoke in 2018.
After you got your master’s degree in fine arts from MICA, you left Baltimore to return to Georgia to take care of your ailing family, several members of your ailing family, and you didn’t paint then for four years. You said that caretaking satiates something inside you. That you didn’t miss painting when you were taking care of your family, because it comes from the same place.
Amy Sherald:
It was really interesting that I didn’t, because really for a short time I was like, “Do I even want to paint anymore? But then what else would I do?” It’s a salient part of who I am is I like taking care of people. Some people are just born with empathy and they’re just born to do that. And so I really enjoyed the challenge of caring for my great aunt who was 94 years old and making sure that she was comfortable. So I put her in a position, then I would go lay in that position to see how it felt and then adjust it based on what I thought was comfortable and uncomfortable. So just really being intuitive about what she needed.
Debbie Millman:
While you weren’t painting, while you were taking care of your family, did you question whether art was your true path, whether you would go back to it? Did you have a sense that-
Amy Sherald:
I did. Yeah, I questioned it. And I tried to make some things work out while I was there. Tried to get a studio. But it just didn’t work out. If I had done all the things that I wanted to do at the times that I wanted to do them, then maybe I wouldn’t have been at the right place at the right time for some of the greater things that happen, including being able to paint Michelle Obama.
Debbie Millman:
Let’s talk a little bit about your style and your process. I’d like to talk a little bit about your use of color. Early on, you had a friend who suggested that it would be easier to paint flesh if you did so in grayscale first, and he suggested using black and Naples yellow over black and white, which comes out very silver. And you tried it and liked the result of the gray skin and decided to keep it. Can you tell us a little bit about why you chose to move forward with that specific look philosophically?
Amy Sherald:
I was going through the process of trying to figure that out. It’s just those two colors where they’re not over the black and white. I prefer it to the black and white because it’s an icier kind of gray. But I think because the work that I was doing in graduate school, it wasn’t what I needed it to be and when I tried to go back to it, I knew inside of my heart that it wasn’t sophisticated enough to get me where I wanted to be. And after the journey of spending a year trying to figure out what I was going to make and not being productive in the studio, going there, sitting and leaving there feeling like, “Is this ever going to work out?” Because I couldn’t figure out what it was. And having that epiphany where I saw the movie Big Fish and it clicked for me what I thought was necessary that I felt like was missing from the conversation in the contemporary art world.
And so I really knew that I wanted to make these images of these paintings of black people that were just that. Just paintings of black people. And so for me, I think I was subconsciously a little afraid that the conversation would be pushed into a corner, and I didn’t want the work to be marginalized in that way because I needed it to live and to be bigger and to exist in a different space. And so that’s, I think, why I settled on that. And I say all of my decisions, of course at first are aesthetic. So things look cool first and then you’re working on them, and then you sit back … Because you’re streaming through your subconscious and so it’s hard to be aware of those two things at the same time. So when you’re done, you sit back and you look and you have conversations with people and yeah, I think that’s what happened.
Debbie Millman:
I have two questions about that. The first is about your decision to exclusively paint people of color. You did that while you were at MICA. How did you arrive at that decision?
Amy Sherald:
It was a natural decision for me. I don’t think it was a choice because I mean, I don’t think white people sit around and think I’m only going to paint white people. They paint their ideal selves, and I’m painting my ideal self. People ask me at artist talks like, “Are you ever going to paint anybody white? We think you should.” And I’m like, “Well, I think you should reconsider what you’re asking me because you need to take a-“
Debbie Millman:
Awfully assumptive.
Amy Sherald:
“You need to take a little walk around the museum, and you should probably open up a history book or two and then get back at me.” Because I think it’s really interesting how they can see the absence of themselves, but they can’t translate that and see how I may feel that there’s an absence of myself within our history, and just in general. So it’s just really funny to me when that happens. But I mean, I have no reason to paint white people, because like Harry James Marshall said, he’s like, “Whiteness has been perpetuated for centuries.” It’s like, what do I have to do with that? I have nothing to do with that. So I’m wholly committed to putting more images of people that look like me in museum institutions and changing the expectations of what people think they should see when they go to a museum, and creating spaces for black people to walk into places like that and be confronted by an image of themselves where they will feel loved and affirmed.
I also think that other people who are non-black can look at the work, and possibly because you subtract the way that we identify with each other through skin color, to possibly be able to internalize blackness and see themselves in a way in these images. I always say I totally identify with Reese Witherspoon, Legally Blonde. I watched that movie and I’m like, I’ve internalized white women to the point where I can look at her and see myself. And I think for me, I think that’s really an important part of the conversation about race in the States is there’s still a separation.
Debbie Millman:
Your paintings are extremely emotive. You can’t help but feel something when you’re looking at the people that you paint. Has it always been that way? I haven’t been able to find much of your early work. It almost feels as if your work came out fully formed and-
Amy Sherald:
You will never ever see the old work. No.
Debbie Millman:
But there is a certain presence to every single portrait you’ve painted, and it feels as if it just happened that way. How did you get to that particular moment in your work and know that that was what you wanted to continue to pursue?
Amy Sherald:
I honestly can’t say that I knew that I was doing it when I did it. I think the first moment that that thought even crossed my mind … Because I always say I have a healthy amount of self-doubt. I just don’t think I’m that great. I told people, I’m like, “I’m not here because I’m the best painter. I’m here just because I worked hard and I didn’t give up. And sooner or later, everybody else gives up and you don’t, so you end up at the top.” But I-
Debbie Millman:
Do you really believe that?
Amy Sherald:
I mean, kind of.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, you’re extremely young. Your paintings are just unbelievably amazing. It just feels like it’s more than just working hard or luck.
Amy Sherald:
Yeah. I mean, it kind of is because it’s not empirical. There’s two million people trying to be artists at the same time as you, and who gets to be chosen and then who’s chosen and then who’s still going to be there in 25 years. It’s like there’s strategy to that. It’s definitely in a lot of ways, it’s not random because there’s ways to do it. You just have to be aware and look at the system and see how it works. But yeah, I didn’t know I was doing it until I had a show and I had three people start crying while they were looking at the work, and I was like, “What is wrong with y’all?” So it was just really a moment for me. I was like, something about what I did is moving these people, and I don’t quite understand how to explain it. I mean, the way that I explain it is that I’m so particular about the people that I paint and what kind of energy they hold within themselves, that maybe somehow that is what’s translated into the work. But I don’t know.
Debbie Millman:
Amy Sherald from 2018.
Ai Weiwei is a world-famous Chinese conceptual artist who, for decades now, has been a thorn in the side of the Chinese government for his provocative art and activism. In 2022, he published a memoir called 100 Years of Joys and Sorrows. I spoke with him that year in front of a live audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City.
How similar or different was your approach to writing to the way that you approach art?
Ai Weiwei:
Writing is difficult, but to do art is … It’s just too easy for me to do it. So I cannot even compare this to …
Debbie Millman:
You write about how you believe the best things that happen in our lives and the moments we treasure most are those when we don’t consciously understand ourselves.
Ai Weiwei:
Which is true. Like now, I don’t understand why I’m sitting here.
Debbie Millman:
Are you having any fun at all?
Ai Weiwei:
Yeah. It’s nice to be here.
Debbie Millman:
Talk a little bit more about how you think that lack of consciousness creates openings for things to happen.
Ai Weiwei:
You’re less prepared and that means you’re more bold because you don’t have this clear sense how dangerous your situation is. I think that helps a lot.
Debbie Millman:
Do you like danger?
Ai Weiwei:
I think any true happiness or the moment is always related to danger.
Debbie Millman:
In what way?
Ai Weiwei:
Because you are breaking the normal rationality which trying to protect you, and so then very often you have no way to start something new.
Debbie Millman:
At the onset of starting something new, do you experience insecurity?
Ai Weiwei:
Why we need to be so secure? We are staying here all the time anyway.
Debbie Millman:
Do you ever have moments of doubt?
Ai Weiwei:
Always.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Ai Weiwei:
Because I couldn’t figure out all those things, why we are here and where we are going from here, and it’s very hard to figure it out.
Debbie Millman:
Do you do a lot of planning?
Ai Weiwei:
No. I always listen to other people’s order. Like now. I’m waiting for the question, but I never really planned things.
Debbie Millman:
You created 100 million ceramic sunflower seeds for an installation.
Ai Weiwei:
It’s not created. It’s I ordered from workers in China. I paid them the salary and 1,600 lady, women, that’s what they do for two years.
Debbie Millman:
100 million sunflower seeds.
Ai Weiwei:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
So I’ve been visiting a number of different artists’ studios over the last year, and almost everybody that I visit now has a lot of assistance. They’re an artist, but they have a lot of people working for them.
Ai Weiwei:
Because they’re lazy or because they-
Debbie Millman:
Well, I mean that’s, I think, an easy answer. I think that makes sense if you’re thinking about somebody making something by hand in the traditional way, but it does allow for an artist to produce more work, to get more work out there, to be more prolific. If you were sitting yourself painting ceramic sunflowers, if you were making 100 million of them, you’d be doing that for the rest of your life. So does it change the way you view the art if somebody else is helping you?
Ai Weiwei:
It changes the way I view the art, because all those sunflower seeds still stays in my warehouse because it’s too many and nobody can ever handle the medicines. And also if you see every artist produce so much, but if you go to MoMA, the museum, you see what they hang in there is about works happened in a hundred years ago. Like Van Gogh or-
Debbie Millman:
Right. He didn’t have a bevy of assistance.
Ai Weiwei:
No. They’re so timid. They don’t know how to handle the art of today, and they’re so … I don’t know. They don’t even drink, but they seem so drunk.
Debbie Millman:
Do you view the art differently though? Do you think less of it if there’s more assistance in making it?
Ai Weiwei:
I don’t know. You ask too many serious questions.
Debbie Millman:
I’ll lighten it up a little bit. Let’s talk about hope.
Ai Weiwei:
That’s easy.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that the consequences of hope are to show the condition of our heart. I’ll say that again so that the audience can really appreciate it. The consequences of hope are to show the condition of our heart.
Ai Weiwei:
That will end up tragic.
Debbie Millman:
I actually was going to ask you if that means you’re an optimist and now you’re telling me that it’s tragic. Why is it tragic?
Ai Weiwei:
Because being real can be very damaging, and it can be very tragic in our society.
Debbie Millman:
Then why even think about hope?
Ai Weiwei:
It’s just as human, we constantly make mistakes. So think of hope as one of them.
Debbie Millman:
You think hope is a mistake?
Ai Weiwei:
Most likely. I cannot see every hope is mistake, but …
Debbie Millman:
What are your hopes?
Ai Weiwei:
I hope the hope is not mistake.
Debbie Millman:
Ai Weiwei from 2022 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Marilyn Minter is an artist whose photorealistic images are beautiful, erotic and also quite provocative. I spoke to her in 2021.
While you were in school, I understand that you called the factory to learn how to make silk screens, and they told you.
Marilyn Minter:
They told me how. Yeah. I was always ambitious. I was always ambitious. Remember Evergreen? You’re probably too young to know Evergreen Review, but it was this really radical magazine in the ’60s and ’70s and it was on the back pages of Evergreen, the number of the factory.
Debbie Millman:
Incredible. Yet you’ve said that at that point in your life, you had no confidence.
Marilyn Minter:
No, none.
Debbie Millman:
But you were ambitious, and I think that’s such an interesting combination of attributes. You were no confidence but ambitious. So would you say that you had a tiny bit more ambition than lack of confidence in your ability to even have the courage to call the factory?
Marilyn Minter:
I didn’t have any problem at all asking for help. It was really that moment in feminism where I just decided that there was no difference. Even though I know now there is a real difference between males and females, but … Like we don’t have upper body strength. Things like that I learned really the hard way. But I was just determined to be able to do anything that guy could do.
Debbie Millman:
You began collaborating with German expressionist painter Christoph Kohlhofer upon moving to New York in 1976. It was at that time that you began making the hardcore porn that resulted in your getting beaten up by art critics, so you started beating up the paintings with a belt sander, which led you to the work that you did next. Why was your work perceived as so threatening at that time?
Marilyn Minter:
It seemed really natural for me for women to start making images for their own pleasure and amusement. Because I liked porn. It turned me on. And I thought that feminists should own sexual reproduction. And I started making those images, and there’s a long story why, and I’ll make it as quick as I can, but-
Debbie Millman:
Oh, you don’t have to do it quickly. It’s fine.
Marilyn Minter:
Well, in the ’90s … No, I guess it was in the late ’80s I saw this … Well, I was always concerned why male artists got so much more attention than female artists. It was always in the back of my mind, this doesn’t seem fair. I pay a lot of attention to art history. I love art history. And so I knew the work of Joni Mitchell, and I thought, “Damn. She just kicks ass. She’s so good. Why isn’t she getting the same amount of attention as somebody like De Kooning?” I know Pollock changed art history in a big, big way, but why wasn’t she just as important? She made just as radical a move. And I saw Helen Frankenthaler changed art history in such a big way. Why wasn’t she getting the attention a Morris Lewis was getting, or Kenneth Nolan? And so with that background, I went to see this really great show of Mike Kelly at Metro Pictures.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, Mike Kelly.
Marilyn Minter:
Yeah. And a great artist. And the paintings were paintings of … They were sewed onto canvas, stuffed animals and stuffed animal sculptures and dolls. There were dolls and he did tables filled with candle wax and he made banners out of felt, and he did decoupage chest of drawers of lips and mouths. And it was really like mining a 13-year-old girl’s brain or an adolescent child. This mall culture and glitters and rainbows. And I thought, “Wow. This is this intellectual man. If a woman artist had made any of this work, she would get no attention whatsoever.”
Debbie Millman:
Oh, she would’ve been ostracized.
Marilyn Minter:
I don’t know. Ostracized or considered essentialist. And I thought, “This is so brilliant. He’s making a picture we all know is a thing that exists.” People were enraptured by it. So I thought, “Well, what is the one subject matter that women have never touched?” Because if a woman made this, she’d be totally dismissed. But if a man made it, it changed the meaning. So I was asking questions. I said, “Well, what happens if a woman takes sexual imagery and owns it and makes reproductions from it?” And then that’s how I got into working for porn. And I only knew about two other artists, Judy Bernstein and Carolee Schneemann, who I really admired, that had worked with porn. And I thought of them as working with soft-core porn. So I thought, “Well, it’ll only work if I do cum shots, really hardcore things.”
At that point, cum shots were kind of hardcore. And this was in the late ’80s. So I made this one series called The Porn Grid, and I really thought everyone was thinking just like I did. And what I was doing was repurposing imagery from an abusive history. There was that whole feminist movement that really believed that all porn was evil and bad and exploitive. And of course it’s very hard to argue against that. But I was trying to make the case that nobody has politically correct fantasies and that it’s time for women to make images for their own amusement and their own pleasure. They should own the production of sexual imagery. And it frightened the hell out of everybody, and it still does by the way.
I was asking these questions and since I didn’t have any answers, which I still don’t, by the way, that was my downfall. Because it was so easy to categorize me as a traitor to feminism and an anti-feminist. And I basically got kicked out of the art world. Shows closed. My show closed a week early. I couldn’t sell anything. I got excoriating reviews in The Times and The Village Voice, and I was pretty devastated because I thought everyone thought … I wasn’t ever trying to be titillating but I somehow knew I was on the right path, and basically the internet exploded and my side won.
Debbie Millman:
What do you think people were really upset about?
Marilyn Minter:
I think they’re really upset about the fact that women tried to own this power. Because women have always known they have this power over men. A kind of a power, sexual power. And men are frightened by it, I think, and other women are frightened by it. And I don’t think we’ve even had anybody talking about how very rarely does anyone write about how women owning the production of it is so scary to everyone. And it still is. But I’m an old lady, so I can get away with it. But when I was youngish, I was in my early 40s. Young girls still, if they work with any sexual imagery, get terrible shaming in the art world today.
Debbie Millman:
So you think that it’s more acceptable that you do it now because of your age?
Marilyn Minter:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, there’s this picture, I always use this as an example. There’s this very famous Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of Louise Bourgeois holding this giant dildo and she’s grinning and everyone thinks she’s adorable. But if a young artist, if a young beautiful artist had that, you just can see that people, both men and women get so terrified of that. And that’s one of the big questions for me is why is it so … It’s okay if I … I can do anything Now in terms of sexuality. What’s that all about? Why isn’t anyone investigating that or writing about it? I think it’s fascinating.
Debbie Millman:
Do you think it has more to do with the more permissiveness of the time or the slightly more tolerant times in terms of sexuality, marriage equality and so forth?
Marilyn Minter:
Well, I mean there was no trans people in the ’70s. I mean, there was no fluidity. There was no gender fluidity.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it was hidden.
Marilyn Minter:
Yeah. It was totally hidden. As a matter of fact, there was no language for it. And the fact that there was no language, nobody knew what was going on. There was nothing written. I knew so many people that were “asexual” and they were just probably in the wrong body. The beauty of today is that we’re finally looking at everybody who’s been ignored, who’s been written out, who doesn’t exist. It’s a beautiful thing really for me to see the diversity that we’re accepting as normal and not as this kind of … I remember Christine Jorgensen. Do you know that name?
Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm.
Marilyn Minter:
Yeah. She was like the first transgendered person.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Marilyn Minter:
Swedish. Yeah. And then right after that, there was sort of one, but they were these oddities. They weren’t part of the world now. The language didn’t exist, and that’s what we heard. The language didn’t exist for women to work with sexual imagery either. It just didn’t exist. We were unladylike if we even knew about it or something. I’m not an intellectual, obviously, but I just felt the disparity and how all this was very wrong somehow. Women should be able to make images for their own pleasure, basically, or to look at images for their own pleasure.
Debbie Millman:
Marilyn Minter from 2021. Bisa Butler is a fiber artist who has created extraordinarily vivid quilted portraits of African Americans. When I spoke with her in 2022, I wanted to know how she found her medium.
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 and 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, and we also had to take fibers. And I would say that I felt like Howard didn’t want those craft courses because they wanted this African-American aesthetic. But it was also this feeling like we want to get away from stereotypical old-time Negro crafts, if I’ll say that. So I think that they felt like fibers, quilting, basket making, knitting was something that people did on plantations or something that people did down south. That was an uneducated thing to do. So 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 white women.
And so the women’s movement has different categories and different hangups and different things that they were pushing. And so they were saying, we’re embracing women’s art, women’s work. This craft work was revered. And so they had pushed it that every art student, even if for art education, art history, had to take fibers. And thank God, my professor at the time, Kurt 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, and she wanted us to sort of dabble in all of the major fiber. We did surface design, we did weaving, we did felting, which I had never done. I thought it was so much fun.
Debbie Millman:
I love felt.
Bisa Butler:
Have you ever felted?
Debbie Millman:
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:
Oh, it’s because it’s just not even in the realm of what you do. It’s fun.
Bisa Butler:
Isn’t it the feel of that wet wool? It connects. 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 clothes. And she had an assignment for us. She said, “You can make a quilt. It can be out of squares in 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 a still life.” So I made a little oven mitt-sized piece of a corner of the classroom, and there was stuff in there that we used in fiber, so it looked kind of domestic. There was a blender, and I suppose maybe somebody was blending. I don’t know if we blended inks or however it was. But I did that, and then I was like, “Okay. So I can make pictures of realistic things with fabric. I want to do for the final project, my grandmother’s portrait.” My grandmother’s health was failing, and 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.” So she was getting very ill, and I was painting her on the weekends. And then when I finished painting her, she hated that painting. And I-
Debbie Millman:
Is this the same grandmother that re-sewed your dress?
Bisa Butler:
Yes. 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 her ancestors were Creoles. And she hated the painting. She said I made her look old. And so while that happened, I thought, “Okay. How about I make a quilted portrait of her for class? I can fulfill my assignment. I have my final project and I’m able to give something to my grandmother.” So I used all these fabrics that the teacher had donated. She had some black fabric with purple flowers, and my grandmother’s name was Violet so I thought, “Okay. This kind of looks like violets.” Use some of that, use some lace. But while that was happening, I was coming up with my own aesthetic without realizing that I’m using pieces of fabric to describe her, not just because they’re pretty.
And that portrait, I still have it.
And my grandmother was so happy with it. She used to lay it … By this time she was bedridden, and so 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 and it was special because she loved it. And how I portrayed her was her wedding photo, so she was happy with the way she looked. And I should have that too. Who wants a portrait done of them while you’re literally dying? I didn’t connect that. I didn’t understand that she still had her own vanity and was still a beautiful woman, and she saw herself not as the sickly elderly woman. And so 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?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Bisa Butler:
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. And so I understood that of her before she passed that that’s how she saw herself, and that’s how she wanted to be seen. And I was glad that I was able to do that, and that sort of kicked off my entire second half of my life.
Debbie Millman:
Bisa Butler from 2022.
You can hear the full interviews and dozens of other interviews with a huge variety of artists and other creative people on our website, designattersmedia.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the next several weeks, we’re going to continue with more special episodes culled from the two decades I’ve been doing Design Matters. Yes, this is the 20th 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.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced by 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.