Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators: Conversations on Design and Race

By Kelly Walters

In Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators, Kelly Walters collects twelve deeply personal interviews with graphic design educators of color who teach at colleges and universities across the United States and Canada. The book centers the unique narratives of Black, Brown, and Latinx design educators, from their childhood experiences to their navigation of undergraduate and graduate studies and their career paths in academia and practice. The interviewees represent a cross-section of ethnic and multiracial backgrounds—African American, Jamaican, Indian, Pakistani, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, and Brazilian. Their impactful stories offer invaluable perspectives for students and emerging designers of color, creating an entry point to address the complexities of race in design and bring to light the challenges of teaching graphic design at different types of public and private institutions. Interwoven throughout the book are images that maintain cultural significance, from family heirlooms to design works that highlight aspects of their cultural identities. Readers will gain insight into the multitude of experiences of Black, Brown, and Latinx design educators who teach and work in the field today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781648960314

Kelly Walters

Kelly Walters is an artist, designer, researcher, and founder of the multidisciplinary design studio Bright Polka Dot. Her ongoing design research interrogates the complexities of identity formation, systems of value, and the shared vernacular in and around Black visual culture. Walters is an assistant professor and associate director of the BFA Communication Design Program in the Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York.

Book preview

Preface

Throughout my career as a design educator, I have consistently engaged with questions related to graphic design and race. Many of the concerns I faced racially as a student—how my design work might be perceived, how racial content is addressed in design, how to find my place in the design community—have continued on in other forms as an educator. Some of the most urgent questions for me right now are: What are the experiences of Black, Brown, and Latinx graphic design educators in college classrooms today? How does our racial identity influence our work? What are the challenges and strengths of teaching graphic design at minority-serving institutions, predominantly White institutions, or historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU)? Most importantly, what does being Black, Brown, and Latinx mean in the context of the United States or in the field of graphic design?

I decided to unpack these questions with a group of design educators in preparation for a panel at the 2020 College Art Association Conference (CAA). I led interviews with eleven design educators, many of whom would eventually participate in the CAA panel, in order to learn more about their unique insights into this field. As a way to share my own path, I was interviewed by design educator Anne H. Berry. It was critical for me to see what similarities we shared as graphic design educators and as members of the Black, Brown, and Latinx communities. Our conversations got real. The vulnerability and openness of our discussions led to rich—sometimes difficult—exchanges around the shared challenges of growing up as people of color and the paths that led us to become the designers and educators we are today. Patterns emerged that revealed perspectives on navigating the immigrant experience, growing up in predominantly White spaces, facing financial considerations that influenced the types of colleges or universities we were able to attend, experiencing challenges in undergraduate and graduate design programs, handling toxic work environments, and defying parental expectations.

A secondary aim of this book is to foster a dialogue around the specific observations of Black, Brown, and Latinx design educators who teach at a variety of institutions: private art schools, small liberal arts colleges, large public research universities, community colleges, or minority-serving institutions and HBCUs. Knowing the type of institution offers insight into the privileges and challenges that come with such affiliations and how they influence one’s trajectory. When coupling the institution with the regional contexts each designer hails from (Connecticut, Tennessee, Florida, Toronto, and India to name a few) one can clearly picture how these educators might be racially perceived in their design communities. The intricacies of race as it takes form in the inner city versus a rural environment or the suburbs create vastly different experiences for people of color in design.

The designers in this book also represent a cross section of Black, Brown, and Latinx communities—African American, Jamaican, Indian, Pakistani, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, Brazilian—and some have multiracial backgrounds. This is only a sampling of the many racial and ethnic communities that see themselves as Black, Brown, or Latinx and is not a monolithic view of people of color, a term that has its own complications. The facets of our identity that connect to the languages we speak, our socioeconomic standing, or our gender identity create additional cultural intersections—intersections that reflect characteristics of how marginalization, social hierarchies, and colorism take place within our ethnic backgrounds.

The stories and insights shared here—interwoven with images of objects that maintain cultural significance for each design educator and quotes that resonate with their understanding of identity and representation—are imperative for both students and emerging academics, especially Black, Brown, and Latinx designers, to hear. They will see aspects of themselves in these interviews. It is essential for the design field to engage in deeper conversations about how race, racial identity, and design education intersect and influence the way designers of color may position themselves in the world. Our perspectives need to be shared in order to serve as reference, inspiration, guidance, and validation for the many Black, Brown, and Latinx designers who are studying and working in the field today. The future of design and design education depends upon building an archive of reflective and introspective representations. The stories from the Black, Brown, and Latinx designers in this book offer necessary discourse from individuals who are making change, expanding definitions in the field, and redefining the design landscape for all who follow after them.

Kelly Walters

October 23, 2020

DAVID JON WALKER is an African American designer and Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. He is principal of Rhealistic Design, a small design consultancy that specializes in branding and collateral for special events for nonprofit entities and that partners with small minority marketing agencies to help build their portfolios. Before joining the faculty at Austin Peay State University, Walker taught at Middle Tennessee State University.

DAVID JON WALKER

Typographic layout for the 2019 Senior Design Show at Austin Peay State University. Design by David Jon Walker.

Can you share a little bit about where you’re from and how you got into design?

I’m from Nashville, Tennessee, and I went to an HBCU for undergrad—Tennessee State University. We didn’t have a traditional design curriculum. Our only design classes were Desktop Publishing, Introduction to Web Design, and Introduction to Photography, all under the studio art degree. I came out of the program in 2004. I had a professor, Dr. Herman Beasley, who gave more lab access and equipment to students who showed the initiative to learn more. At the time, the art department had just bought and installed InDesign, and I’d seen a couple of folks dabbling in Flash, so I decided to learn the software. We were using Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker, and Macromedia Flash in the courses. Some of our projects consisted of laying out magazines and creating editorial designs, but there wasn’t any real depth of instruction in terms of constructing how those things should look or feel. We did comparative research to figure out on our own how to produce pieces that actually looked usable.

For me, attending an art program at an HBCU without a specific design track meant a lack of exposure to the design luminaries we currently look up to today. Album artwork and party flyer design were very prevalent and prominent on campus at the time. Publications that I saw at church rounded out the extent of my critical design exposure. Even though as students we were exposed to book covers and magazine ads in design practice, the curriculum in my program did not prepare us to go out and get design jobs.

After graduation, I interned at a larger church here in Nashville with John Girton, a design professional who was an in-house creative and local entrepreneur. He taught me so much more than what I had learned in school, as far as how to utilize design software collaboratively and how to view design critically. As a start, he gave me a strong introduction to typography and how it worked, including the variation of weight within a font and the science behind design decisions. That was basically my creative safe space at the time, so I started producing design work for actual clients under him. Following that opportunity, I landed my first large freelance job at my alma mater, working with the media relations department to produce billboards, magazine ads, and whatever else they needed, or simple stuff like T-shirts. Nothing complex, no real visual system building outside of making sure that everything matched aesthetically if there was a campaign. I kept them as a client for a couple of years and then felt that my portfolio was strong enough to apply to graduate schools. Upon being accepted into and attending graduate school, I learned about AIGA, and this was my first exposure to being around people who had similar interests in design and life pursuits.

Where did you go to graduate school?

I went to graduate school at the University of Memphis. It was free, thankfully. It’s so funny; after you make a choice based on economic circumstances, you say, Man, I could’ve gone to another school. I loved my program, but after you get out of school you begin to ask yourself, What does my design network look like? How does the network function? Who do I become as a designer? Who can judge my work? I mean, I don’t have buyer’s remorse, but if I had done a little more research, maybe it would have been different. Maybe I would have gone elsewhere.

As I mentioned, graduate school was free for me. I attended the program on an assistantship and was also fortunate enough to be selected for a university fellowship. I thoroughly enjoyed graduate school, especially from the standpoint of feeling like I was finally in the mix. I’d never been in an environment where everybody was talking about design and knew what I was talking about. I didn’t have to overexplain what I was trying to create or the reasons I was trying to create it. It was this atmosphere of inclusion based on the discipline and not based on race, religion, or creed. However, I was the only person of color in my graduate school design classes. There were seven students enrolled in the graphic design MFA track, including five full-time and two part-time students. Within the entire graduate art program while I was there, there were just three of us Black students: one student of color in photography and one student of color in art history. Since we were all on our own tracks and trajectories, we really didn’t cross paths other than making intentional contact. Because I was the sole Black student on the MFA graphic design track, this reinforced the mentality of, I’m finally in this place where everybody understands what I’m saying, but nobody looks like me.

Coming from an HBCU, where people did look like you, what came to light with that realization—in comparing your undergraduate to your graduate experience from a cultural perspective?

A lot of people’s futures are dictated by their primary existence. What I mean by that is that both of my parents were college educated. Both of them had advanced degrees. One was a college professor and administrator, while the other was a city school system administrator. The schools they chose for my sister and me to attend, growing up, were predominantly White. They were public schools, but they were predominantly White. A friend of mine I had gone to elementary school with recently sent me a class picture on Facebook. We had attended kindergarten through twelfth grade together. In that picture from sixth grade, there are about twenty kids, and out of the whole group five are Black. I still have great relationships with them to this day; some of them are out-of-state and some of them are still here in town. But all that is to say that I was prepared early on to be one of the few persons of color. Based on the math, it wasn’t altogether strange for me to be the only Black person, of seven, in a graduate program. To be honest, going to the HBCU after my primary and secondary schooling was a culture shock.

That’s funny because your background sounds similar to mine. I think the reason I didn’t choose an HBCU was that I was worried about that culture shock—the reverse culture shock, in a way. I had been in an environment where I was around mostly White people for school. Then I went to a PWI (predominantly White institution) for undergrad.

Yeah. I went from an HBCU, an all-Black school, to a state PWI for graduate school. I’m teaching at a state PWI, and I’ve only taught at state PWIs. It is the culmination of learning and growing up in a life of doublespeak or code-switching. That’s a very real thing, code-switching. I talk to my own children about being able to transition between our communities without losing their sense of self, but I’ve always wondered, What is my level of authenticity? We live in this duality. I guess the authenticity just comes from knowing who you are, and what you are, and the possibilities of navigating almost any space. Clearly, as Black professors, we are ambassadors for all sides. We are ambassadors for people who grew up having had a Black experience, but