 Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Cristina de León and I'm the Associate Curator of Latino Design at Cooper Hewitt. I'm delighted all of you have joined us for our Enid and Lester Morris Historic Design Lecture. Though the museum remains closed to the public, we're thrilled to be able to welcome you virtually to this event and can't wait to see you all again in person soon, we hope. Thanks to the tremendous generosity of our trustee, Denny Morris, and her husband Lester, through this program series, Cooper Hewitt invites scholars, historians, educators, and designers to dig deep into our permanent collection and share their unique insight into our understanding of design as a social and cultural force in the world. Today, I'm excited to welcome Dr. Dory Tunstall, an accomplished design anthropologist, public intellectual, and design advocate. Currently she serves as the Dean of Design at Ontario College of Art and Design University, where she is the first black and the first black female to hold the position of Dean at the institution. Dr. Tunstall has held previous academic position at Swinburne University in Australia and at the University of Illinois. In addition, she has worked as a UX strategist for Sapient Corporation and ARC Worldwide. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Stanford University and a BA in anthropology from Burnmore College. Dr. Tunstall works at the intersections of critical theory, culture, and design, themes which will be addressed in her talk titled, A Change is Gonna Come, Black Speculative Future for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Collection. During the presentation, we encourage you to use the chat box at the end of the hour. We will open it up for questions which you may submit through the Q&A box. Please also note that the closed captioning is available through the icon at the bottom of your screen, and we will also be recording today's program, which you will be able to find on Cooper Hewitt's YouTube channel. And now I'm so honored to introduce the esteemed Dr. Dory Tunstall. Welcome. Good afternoon. I'm so excited to be here with everyone. So I'm going to share my screen. There we go. So let's all begin with a land acknowledgement. I acknowledge the ancestral and traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, and here in Wendat, who the original owner, Sikastodians upon the lands in which I live and create here in Takaranto. I also acknowledge the ancestral and Ape homelands on which the Cooper Hewitt sits and recognize the urban indigenous communities who have made New York City their home. To introduce, I'm Dory Tunstall, Dean of the Faculty Design at OCAD University in Toronto. I'm also the first and first black female dean of a faculty design anywhere in the world. And as a first black, I have chosen it being close to my heart and soul in my talk, a change is going to come, black speculative futures for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum collection. First, thank you to the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Enid and Lester Morse for contributing to the Historic Design Lecture Series. I want to thank Christina De Leon, Rebecca Armstrong, and Basiliki Guionapoulos for spending so much time with me to help me understand how the museum functions. I admit that all errors in interpretation will be my own. This talk is divided into four parts. Part one will look into the black collection that currently exists in the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum or a selection of that. Part two will look at the Cooper Hewitt's curatorial praxis. Part three will look at the Black People's Museum, which is my attempt in many ways to co-create a black collection. And then the fourth part will be selecting items for speculative black design collection that with a call to action might eventually become part of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky. It's been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change going to come. Oh, yes it will. So, almost a year ago to date, I was asked to give the Morris Historic Design Lecture, and I was so excited, so excited. Since my days with the US National Design Policy Initiative in 2008, I've greatly admired the museum and its programs. And I knew the question that I wanted to, I really wanted to explore was how can I tell a story of the black experience through the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum collection. Now, I am a professor, which means I have to define terms and so just to kind of level set by black, I mean individuals who self identify as well are socially labeled as black peoples of African descent, including Africans and African heritage peoples from the North American and Latin America. Again, I've spent six years in Australia, so I do understand that the term black also refers to the context of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Melanesian peoples, which is why I'm deliberately drawing a boundary around my discussion, so that I make sure that I'm speaking very specifically about a specific type of blackness that I want to engage with. And so by black, I'm referring explicitly to those who are African or descendants of the 12 million enslaved Africans who became part of the African diaspora. And as again this PBS images show that many of them ended up being sent to North America as well as South America and the Caribbean. So like a good researcher I started my search query and was excited to see there was 39,000 results for black design. So I thought this is going to be so easy. The difficulty is just trying to figure out which designs I wanted to choose. But as I began to go through the results. So much left after calling through references to European or European Americans who had the last name black, or references to the color black in an object. In fact, the search under black design was completely unsuccessful in terms of pulling up the results that I needed. In search like African American design design black African design black arts, I then started exploring collections through countries Kenya Ghana Jamaica Haiti Brazil anywhere I thought there may be black populations making things. And so this is just to say that the five objects that I'm going to talk about just gives a sense of what I was able to find, and to be able to construct a story about the first object. The first object is a South African beaded apron, circa 1896, give to the museum by Mrs Daniel Putnam Adams whose maiden name was Adelaide Barkley coop. Adelaide was a member of the advisory board of the Cooper Hewitt in 1968. And the Adams themselves are a prominent banking family who, according to the Ridgefield Historical Society in Connecticut, have a deep connection with the formal establishment of baseball as a national pastime in the US. The catalog itself gives very few details around the objects in terms of its context of use, or again where it specifically comes from in South Africa. In particular shape, and the fringe pattern at the bottom. It's most likely Zulu as opposed to in the belly or close and design. And like most beadwork the designs and themselves are meant to communicate social position and status, married or unmarried high rank or low rank. But an analysis would be required to decode the actual message in the beads in and itself. And that is really outside of both the scope of my expertise, as well as the scope of this talk. The second object that I focused on is a status cloth made from Rafia and originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, specifically the Cuba kingdom, and the show a group within the kingdom. In the late 19th century, the museum purchased this textile from the proceeds of the Al Plania Fleury fund in 1957. And this was a fund that was set up from the profits of basically the first design museum shop set up in the North America. And both the shop and the fund was established by the Hewitt sisters who are the co founders of the museum. They themselves provides greater details around the context of use so it being acquired within a man's lifetime and displayed at his death as part of the signs of wealth and social position. They were also used as items of trade. It describes the potential cosmological aspects of the designs and the process of making for example the men do the weaving, and the women finish the call. What are these two items telling me, or us about a black experience before the 1900s. They tell us that beautiful and meaningful objects were made with a great skill and craft and southern and central Africa, even during the processes of colonization. And yet, while this is a black experience as an African American is not directly connected to my black experience as a member of the African diaspora. As this PBS graphic shows, most likely my ancestors were brought to North America from West Africa, and specifically Angola or synagogue Gambia. So these objects don't really help me tell a story of the black experience, at least the one that I am wanting to tell. So I go to object number three. We jump from collections in the 1900s to 1968, specifically to the Prince Black Revolution, designed by award winning African American artists, love meals. He taught for over 40 years and served as chair for over 30 years of the art department at Spelman College in Atlanta. And as the Cooper who catalog notes, he made the artwork why he was overseas as a student in London as his way of connecting with the civil rights movement and the black power movements that were happening in the United States. And so the imagery itself evokes a sense of what was going on in the minds of the people at the time, love death and justice history stereotypes, a sense of what direction we're going in as a people and again just the beauty of our people And this print was donated as a gift to the Museum of graphic art New York in 1973. Object number four is the poster come Sunday, featuring the artwork of the famous African American artists Romain Bearden, both Romare building build burden. Romare Bearden, both made and acquired by the Museum in 1975, it was part of portfolio of 12 USA 1976 bicentennial prints, including posters from a wide diverse intersection of artists. Will Barnett, Joseph Raphael Janet fish. I, but, but the Towsky. Fairford Porter, Alan Kessler Clayton pond, Barbara Sandler Walter Bernard, Mark Walter Darby Bernard, Wendy mean. And again, compared to the revolutionary posters of lab meals. Romare posters evokes a calm mood, you have the yellow sun, blue sky, a girl and a kerchief holding a doll on the porch, an elder and a young child work at walking in green grass. And Romare's work is a good reminder of the black experiences of rest family and intergenerational obligation with a quote from Mary McLeod Bethune. We are the custodians, as well as the heirs of great civilization. So revolution and rest are two dynamic states for black peoples who are still fighting for our liberation. And again, is part of telling a story of a black experience. The fifth object I've selected is the movie poster for spikes leaves do the right thing, designed by Detroit born and LA based designer art Sims. It's one of several posters that art created for Spike Lee films, including New Jack City Malcolm X, the controversial bamboozled poster, crooklyn, Moe Bretta blues and when the lilies broke, which was the documentary about hurricane Katrina. These posters are important because they establish two dimensions of what could be defined as a hip hop aesthetic infused in graphic design. The do the right thing poster evokes like the light saturated color palette, aligned with like the music videos of a TLC or the fashion brand cross colors which just recently had an exhibition in LA. And stark graphics of the Malcolm X poster evokes a sort of blacked out militant aesthetic of public enemy which with Spike Lee lampoons actually in his movie bamboozled. What is key is the story that art Sims wants to tell about his work, which is why he donated it to the Cooper Hewitt. He has a very strong intentionality around the representation of black folks and then 2008 AIGA design journey article he states I love doing work for and about African Americans. I feel I'm reshaping history to show our beauty. So these are the five objects that I've selected. And there's not much more in terms of black design within the Cooper Hewitt's collection. I mean, again, there's, there's more African jewelry and textile pieces. There's definitely a few more posters. There's a group of black designs that are more contemporary that I'll talk about later on. So viewing time as a spiral, as opposed to a line. What I can say about these five objects is that there's a story to be told about southern and central African art in the 1900s and how it portrayed a sense of status and positionality within culture. And there's some black revolutionary posters that happened in the late 20th century. And like I said, there are a few objects that fill in the story more, but from the selection of objects that I was able to pull for for that from the collection itself. That's the limitation of what could be done in terms of how can I tell a story of the black experience through the current contemporary Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum collection. So can I do it? Can I tell the story? And my honest truth is in my opinion, I cannot, which begs the question, why? Why can I not tell this story? Somebody, it's been a long yes it will. So, of course, the meta reason why is that here in North America, we live in a society that's built on a white supremacist culture, which according to Jacqueline Battleoria and her book, The Birth of a White Nation, since 1681 European white bodies, lives and culture were legally enshrined as superior to those of indigenous and black bodies, lives and culture. So what's been operationalized within the context of the Cooper Hewitt relates to what I frame as kind of the four phases of its curatorial practice. And here I want to just thank Christina de Leon for the long conversations that we had about the history and current and curator practices of the Cooper Hewitt and again, my apologies for any errors of interpretation bear all my own. Phase one is from 1846 to 1932 in which the praxis really centered on the test test, making friends and family of the Hewitt sisters who co founded the museum. Phase two is from 1933 to 1963 in which the museum began to hire its first professional directors and curators. Phase three is from 1967 to approximately 2017 when the museum was brought into greater stewardship with the Smithsonian, and thus the professionalization of the curatorial staff move closer alignment with wider Smithsonian practices. And then phase four are kind of more recent efforts to open up the museum's curatorial practices beyond its professional curatorial staff and other internal stakeholders. So beat Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt, the co founders of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. The Smithsonian book which describes the sisters history written by Marguerite Massenter details just how amazingly smart and erudite and worldly. The sisters were and the deep mission around education and and good taste in some ways that was the focus of them co founding the museum. And yet I'll borrow from a quote from the pamphlet or the book itself to talk about what was their primary focus of collecting and so to quote. Sarah scrapbooks with news clippings about happenings in Paris, London, Vienna and Russia articles concerning major collectors exhibitions auction prices and more revealed the focus and learning about and purchasing objects in Europe. Sarah and Eleanor were also engaged with the directors of the Musée de Arts de Carratif, who offered advice about the organization and collection of objects for their future museum and accompanying library, unquote. The pamphlet goes on or the book goes on to describe the donations of European drawings and textiles and other decorative arts from their, again, their wealthy friends and family but it is clear that the original intent of the collections of the museum was to have the best of high design, high European design, and bring that to in many ways the industrial masses of the United States. In the second phase Kevin Hathaway was hired as the first professional director of the Cooper Hewitt in 1933 and Hathaway helped establish kind of more more professional systems of acquisition and cataloging increase of course the collection itself and set up a range of quite at the time blockbuster exhibitions. To increase the contribution in many ways of the museum to understanding American design and European design. Yet as you can see from this 1945 marketing image, there was a still strong European and European American focus in the collection, just based on who the collection was meant to teach so this is an image of him. This is a reference to engineering students from the Cooper Hewitt and again, as you can see they're all male, they're all white. And that influences, again, the notion of who the museum is meant to serve. And to shift in the 1960s part of the shift is again bringing the Cooper Hewitt in closer alignment with the rest of the Smithsonian curator practices and certain structures. And, and again, even in the objects that I talked about before there was a great effort in the 1960s to increase the number of black design and other representational designs within the collection. In this time you see a great sharing of objects between the different museums and a good example of this is both in terms of the sharing across museums but also in terms of the museum telling more stories about the black team Latinas experiences is the looking for design explorations, which was written and published on the website in 2017 by Mae Kodru, a summer Latino Museum studies program fellow and done and consultation both with curators at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Michelle Allison and Christina de Leon at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. So seven posts 1950 objects from across the two museums were highlighted so this is an image of art Smith's modern cuff from 1948. Here's Michael per years Dan chair from 2010 Alfredo Ross guards black power poster from 1968. Cheryl are Riley's tutor coin and trust encrusted table from 1992. Here's those poster world solidarity with Puerto Rico from 1981 Stephen Burke's roping stool design in 2011 and Caesar Pelle's drawing Indiana tower from 1981. Five of those seven objects were within the collections of the Cooper Hewitt itself so again, I did select five objects but of course there's more objects that exists within the Cooper Hewitt. But again, what is the story that they allow us to tell. The fourth phase is where we are now. And again with the opening up of wider contributions to the museum's curatorial mission. Christina described for me how the efforts before covert 19 kit that there were efforts for to have more staff from within the museum itself actually contribute ideals as to what should or could be collected. What I was quite thrilled to see is the Willie Smith Community Archive that was established to support those Willie Smith Street cold to exhibition. And it's again just a recognition how community actually determines the meaningfulness of design objects themselves. And these are the kinds of efforts I applaud and in some ways these are the efforts that I wanted to emulate in preparation for this talk. Then I go to my brother, and I said brother, but he winds up knocking me back down. So, disappointed that the Cooper Hewitt was not allowing me to tell the story that I wanted to tell about the black experience through its collection. I decided to ask my black siblings in the design to help me create a model of a black museum of design things. The term things in a very specific way, my own thinking about art design and craft are deeply influenced by the work of art historian and anthropologist Esther, Dr Esther Pastry, and especially the book thinking with things. And to the extent that I work is focused on the decolonization of design. The use of the term things helps us eliminate the implicit hierarchies in which objects are categorized as art at the top. The design somehow in the middle and craft of the at the bottom in terms of the status ascribed to the object itself and the financial renumeration given to the makers. So I'm interested in a crowdsourced museum of design black things. I created a Google forum and I asked my black siblings in design to help me source 10 design themes, which had to have three characteristics. It had to be made by a black designer or a majority black design team. It had to actually benefit black peoples, and it had to somehow help change the conditions of black peoples in North America. So I wanted to align them with a date of date ranges describe how the objects met the criteria and upload images, as well as provided information about who they are. So I posted a screenshot and link to black design Twitter, and people in the community came out in terms of reposting it and liking it. And this is where you start doing that fat that false math in your head where you're like I have like 10,000 impressions and 100 engagements so I at least should get 10 responses right. And I got Silas Monroe, who my mentor. So thank you Silas for making me feel as if I'm not a total failure by your contribution. Silas's contribution again he studies graphic design history so a great contributions fire devoted to young Negro artists from 1926. So again, the design team of sort of Aaron Douglas Richard Bruce needs it Langston Hughes Wallace Thurman. Again, sort of seminal texts that are important to like the emancipation reconstruction time and the black experience up into Jim Crow. But even he struggled with the criteria because in his suggestion for the survey graphic Harlem, Mecca of the New World, it had a black art director and writer but not a black designer. And so it just sort of show that this this exercise is going to be a little bit more challenging than I thought. And so I did have conversations at a really beautiful conversation with black designers about the project. And, but I wonder like why in spite of all the Twitter love that I didn't get more responses and thinking about that I posted it probably like two months ago, and all the things that are going on in the world. The truth is like black folks be tired. It's not easy, you know, being black since the 1500s but between the continuous murdering of black peoples and the disproportionate effect of coven 19 on black communities, we are tired. And so the tasks that I gave was a little difficult. But by us black folks is pretty easy and there's lots of things that you can do that just was made by black folks because we're very creative group a very creative community. But the list begins to drop significantly when we begin to think of things that were by us and for us. And this is, I refer back to your conversation I had with forest young the global chief designer design officer at Wolf Owens. And he's doing this amazing project where he's designing images for like 365 design things by black designers and inventions. And so he's going through his list. And I'm like well yeah that's by us but that didn't benefit us I mean like the invention of the, of the, the golf tee like that didn't benefit us maybe Tiger Woods that's the only person that benefited. So we went through many of these items of this list and what was by bus black folks it necessarily wasn't for us black folks. And if those that were for black folks, they may be not necessarily change things for our black folks. It's really interesting like whole areas of like architecture, for example, were eliminated, because in some ways many of the great architectural things that would be documented may by black folks but not necessarily for us black folks. And this includes the White House itself. So by us for us and change us as a criteria requires just again so much more research deep oral history and archival research than as black folks have the time to do in the time of the call because there's a lot of other stuff that we're having to focus on. And so in the absence of being able to do that deep research in some ways the examples are few and far between. But this project is important because hashtag black design matters and it matters because design is the tangible embodiment of our everyday lives and how we communicate the meaning of our lives to future generations. So I moved to part four of this talk. How could we tell a story of the black experience through the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum collection. What with that speculation look like and feel like. And again for this this speculative engagement I'm going to narrow even more the boundaries of by which I'm defining blackness to just the experience in the United States. And again I live in Canada, so I know there's other histories I live in Toronto so I know where the black culture is strongly Caribbean so I know these histories are different as well. Since the United States story is my story, I am more personally invested in exploring the nuances of that story as told through black design things. So the first object in our speculative black design collection is an icon legacy and people's weight used to measure gold dust. This one is dated between the 1400s and 1720s, which is why it can be placed in my life pre 161619 part of the exhibition. Now we would have to borrow it from the National Museum of African art, but it would allow us to tell us a story of making bias black folks. These are the designers from present day Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana were and still are exceptional makers who use a wide range of materials including copper. And it is definitely for us in terms of this was an object that was put to everyday use to weigh gold dust in exchange in the markets. And the catalog notes that it was actually small enough to be easily carried in in sort of a small bag or pocket or whatever way that you could carry it easily. But it also changes the perception of us, because I connected this object this I can wait to the story of the real historical figure Manta Musa, who is the richest man who ever lived, and who ruled Mali from 1312 Common Era to 131337 Common Era. And a devout Muslim, the Haji undertook in 1324 was noted for its large entourage of soldiers, slaves, servants, camels, horses, all carrying hundreds of pounds of gold. It is said that the gold that he provided just in a drop off stop to the Sultan and Cairo was so great that it reduced the value of the currency for 12 years. The education centers he supported in Timbuktu, the mosque that he built in Gal in Timbuktu, again speak to the greatness of African peoples before we were enslaved and brought to the United States. The second object in our speculative design collection is a burl bowl from between 1715 and 1850. This covers the time of the first arrivals of Africans to the United States in 1619 through to the about the American Rev. or just after the American late within the American Revolution. And to borrow it again from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American history and culture. But, again, it'll allow us to folk tell a story of the force migration of African peoples to the Americas. It is biased black folks because then decrease symbols in size on the room are originally created by the Giammen people of Ghana and quote to Vau as part of the Akhen culture which is the same culture of the weight. Each symbol has its own distinct meaning and form lexicons of complex per proverbs that are still used today. And the bowl is for us it was found in Mississippi among artifacts used by enslaved peoples of African descent. So it's a story that changes us. The bowl is a tangible testament to the continuity of culture and meaning past from our African ancestors in spite of oppressive systems that forbid the use of our African languages, the practices of our culture and even the maintenance of family and social structures. So in that sense, it's definitely an important part of the story we tell in our speculative design collection. The third, in respect to my Canadian home at the moment the third object in our speculative design collection is a page from the provincial freeman weekly, the first a weekly and then a biweekly news newspaper established by Mary Ann shod from 1853 to 1860. The paper was again by us, and although Samuel Ward and Alexander MacArthur we listed as the editor Mary Ann Shad and African American African Canadian woman was the true publisher. And when her family moved from Canada, due to the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which required the returning of escaped slaves and slavery and from slavery to the south. She established this newspaper in order to again advocate for the abolition of slavery for women's white rights and the suffragist movement, the education of black folks and generally be uplifting of the race. And due to the sexism of the time she first had to hide her gender, just by using her initials. And even when she came out as a woman and the main publisher the sexism and the critique of her blunt editorial voice led to financial difficulties that forced the publication to shut down. But this newspaper changed us because her activism put black voices, black intersectional voices at the center of the abolitionists and the suffragist movements. And so I can definitely chase trace that my position as a leader would not have been possible without Mary Ann Shad's achievements themselves. And the specific in our speculative black design collection is a contribution of another black woman, the folding cabinet bed by Sarah you good patented in 1885. It's by us. So coming from a family of carpenters just one or two generations out of slavery. Good was one of the first black women to receive a patent from the US patent and trade office. It's great for us, because as the end of the Civil War brought reconstruction to the south of the United States it also brought a wave of migration to the north, where black folks researching for better economic and social opportunities. Good had a furniture store with her husband in Chicago and customers would complain about the lack of space and their urban cramped living quarters. And so it is part of her creating again, sort of dignified objects that are practical use for the great number of black folks who again we're moving to the north. And it changed us because predating the Murphy bed by 20 years which by the way is actually in the Smithsonian collections. The folding cabinet bed sought to provide dignity to the cramped spaces that most blacks had to live in due to discriminatory housing practices. Both outlined in depth with St. Clair Drakes the black metropolis, or more recently and town, not he sees coats, the case for reparations and the 2014 the Atlantic magazine. The logic number five in our speculative design collection is the black is beautiful poster in the 1970s which is just shy of our 1955 to 1968 civil rights era, sort of time block by us. So through the stark black and white design of Robert gums and based on the beautiful photography of Kwame breath wave, whose photography exhibition black is beautiful by the way has been touring since 2019. It belongs part of that era because the posters in some ways represented the culmination of the activities of the African jazz art society and studios, and the series of shows and concerts, the establishment of the grand as a modeling agent and other efforts to support a vibrant black in Harlem, but also around the world. And I could personally speak to the power of this poster with the words of Marcus Garvey, the imagery of the beautiful grand as a models and the graphical clerical of the typography like this changed us. Because I can stand here before you with my hair puffed up in a natural Afro wearing Afrocentric jewelry and clothing, because of this poster, and the t shirts, and the posters and the flyers and the black splatation movies with palm clear and the hair care products. And the things that I can look in the mirror every day, and find my cheeky hair, my wide flat nose, my golden dark skin infinitely and breathtakingly beautiful. And that is the power of design. And it is a bit of a bonus because it's one of my favorites to add to the speculative design collection, the Budweiser sponsored advertising campaign of the great Queens and Kings of Africa produced first in 1975, and then throughout the 1980s. Budweiser commissioned 30 illustrations by 23 black illustrators, and my favorite are the three created by Barbara Higgins bond of which this one is one. And she also did the ones of manta moosa and shock as you know who again are some of my favorites of the series. And, and they were for us like they came out just as black history month was being brought into the US educational system in the 1970s. And I remember as a seven to 10 year olds attending every year the Indianapolis black expo and going straight to the Budweiser booth in order to get the latest King and Queens of Africa poster or calendar or booklet or whatever was available because I was so drawn in by the power of that name. And so, the images of King cannot time and Queen nefertiti of man to moosa of shock as we like these are the ones that when I close my eyes, and I think about the greatness of our African ancestors these are the images that I see. And it's changed us it's changes are visions of some under and coming to Africa are visions of Egypt and Michael Jackson's remembering the time our visions of Wakanda and black Panther, all owe their debt to these series of illustrations and designs and advertising for beer. But again so powerfully changed our notion of who we are and who, as black people, we have been and who we can be. So returning to our time spiral. The through these six objects you can tell a very compelling story of the black experience through the collection. It would just be one story and many ways it's very close to my story. But it just shows how powerful it would be if the National Museum of Design is able to use design itself to validate the beauty of the existence of black peoples in the United States. So let's make it happen. The first call to action is to have us the people do the archive. Again, this is what the attempting to do through my, you know crowdsource museum of black design things. But again, you know, maybe it's just taking the time to have this field out so that we can really begin to understand the meaningfulness of black design things. And again there's other initiatives that are doing this so there's the people graphic design archive, which the Cooper you it is actually a supporting quite deeply in terms of its advice that it's had provided to the organizers of this initiative. The next call action is pay us to be community curators. I often state that after the emancipation proclamation black folks should never work for free, because the whole world holds us reparations for our stolen labor during slavery. So pay us to be community curators because the work that we will have to do to create this archive is hard work, it's deep work, and it's valuable work for which we should be renumerated. I hire at least three black curators and those who know the work that I'm doing around the colonizing design for hiring three provides the, the start of a critical mass that supports black employees feeling free to be black in the context in which they're working. It's not a rich people to donate, but with no strings. You might have an amazing collection of items, but do they allow us to tell the stories of indigenous experiences Latinx experience Asian experience in the course the black experience. So give the give with the opportunity to allow the people to curate what is meaningful in their lives. Everyone needs to remember again why black design matters design is the tangible embodiment of our everyday lives and how we communicate the meaning our lives to future generations. And so if museums are not supporting us and telling meaningful stories, then these institutions themselves become meaningless. So that is my presentation, a change is going to come back spectacular features for the cupid here at Smith Sony and design museum. Just a shout out to trace seals. Who's the black creator of the Marsha and they are typefaces that I use in this presentation so black type matters as well. And here's my email Twitter and Instagram so feel free to contact me at any time to talk about these topics. Thank you so much for sharing. Thank you so much for that impassioned call to action and and your discussion of the collection. I want to make sure that we have time to get to the questions that are beginning to come through. I'm just going to get right into it. The first one is, in addition to diversifying the collection and the curatorial team. What other steps should a museum take to be more reflective and responsive to the black and brown experience. This is this experience, this like happens at all level like so again you need, you need, you need representation on the board, right. You need representation in the curatorial stuff and the management stuff you need, and you need, and you know, like, people underestimate how important it is to build authentic relationships with different communities. In some ways the assumption of hiring more people are part of curatorial stuff is you're hoping that they come with those connections to those communities and trust the institution enough to bring those community connections into the institution itself. If we have diverse you need diversity at all levels it has to come from like, you know, the level of power, the level of influence, the entry level and it has to be deeply deeply deeply embedded in a strong connection between the individuals in the institution, and the communities that you're you're just wanting to embrace right to understand, again how meaningful this institution can be to the lives of people. Thanks. Okay, the next one throughout your discussion you've highlighted how difficult it is to form a narrative on black design. As a history of art and design grad student narrative seems like the bread and butter of our practice. Do you have any recommendations on how to navigate these gaps in the historical record in order to in order to promote repair through scholarship. Yeah, I mean, you know, like, as I said that the challenge in in kind of crafting this sort of black design museum is, is, where do you find, where do you find the documents right many of aspects of our lives are not well documented. You know, if you if you're going outside of the contemporary moment. What I ended up doing which was really just interesting in terms of like this there's like the convert the the research that I did around the around Sarah Goods, like cabinet bed was like I started trying to find like are there any references to it to put in poetry. Is there any references to it and like I started going on these weird kind of tangents to try to and again not tangents just trying to find like for our community where where are the places where our everyday lives are mentioned so in the same way if I'm thinking about the contemporary context and I want to know what's going on with Christal, you know, like then I would go through a bunch of like hip hop songs and trying to find the reference of how they're talking about and how what role it's playing in life so thinking at the same sort of thing is like can I go to music. Can I go to these other forms of documentation of our lives which are not seen in the same way as as being part of like a sort of a visual patents, let's say archive, because there were ways in which we tried to capture our everyday lives and it's just a matter of finding those alternative formats and forms in which that knowledge is held. And again it's a thing where, again, we have to create the narrative bridge around it, and there will be gaps and again I'm like the queen of caveats in terms of saying well this is the limitations of my knowledge. But I think it's important again because because these these these things matter in terms of how we understand ourselves, opening ourselves to the different ways in which they would be expressed and expressed and addressed by our own communities is part of that stepping out to to to find to find the way to contextualize what what these objects could and might have meant right. What role can white curators play in helping to build these collections. I mean this is the thing where I always say like the work of decolonization is the work of white folks. And and because in some ways like they've set up the structures and they've set up the, they set up they've they've set up the limitations of possibility so the first work is kind of just opening up the limitations of possibilities by just making sure that you yourself are not closing down those possibilities, but it's also again like in the context of research is like it's helping to do the work helping to do like. I'm not, I think because objects have different meanings. You need in some ways a plurality of of ways of understanding and embracing and some for me some of that comes through like dialogue, right so I have dialogue with my white colleagues about a variety of things that actually helps me deep in my understanding, both in like the perspectives they have but also in terms of the gaps in their knowledge where I'm like oh, I just made an assumption about that but actually now I actually have to think about it because I have to somehow help help facilitate the process of pulling in that gap in their knowledge right so again none of this work like none of this work can happen like individuals sort of being separated off what we what we want is a plurality of experiences a plurality of objects and things in our collections, and without hierarchy. Right that because the meaningfulness of an object is not. It's not stratified it's I have a meaning to it you have a different meaning to it it's, it's nodal and lateral in that sense and so to the, so we need my curators to be part of that dialogue to be part of understanding the plurality of meaning that an object has have which then helps us see more clearly. Again, like how how how I'll just connect us to to to current understanding and future possibilities. Well, lots of questions are coming in so I'm just going to do rapid fire all of them because I'll try to make sure to try to make sure that I want to make sure that we can get to all of these, which are really great. So one question and I'm going to jump around a little bit. So, one question that came in is, how can you and young designers play a role in it and in an acting this change. There's a project that I'm working on now caught up. It's my future Toronto and so we've recruited these eight to 12 year old black indigenous and POC youth to basically to redesign the city. So I'm working on what their, what their current present and future vision of what the city would be. And I love those kinds of engagements because it's that that they bring such a fresh perspective of what is has been happening in the past and what is possible in the future. I think, you know, engaging the youth and in in in these processes of having conversations about their own history like you know if it's possible speaking to your parents and grandparents about what were the things that were meaningful to them. What were the things and why they were meaningful because again these design things are objects of transmission of values objects of transmission of use and so in some ways for young people is just asking the questions. Why does this matter. What is this thing. How is this connected to me. Telling their own stories from that process of like, ah, is this all of a sudden more meaning. And also, what do I need to be collecting so that I could tell future stories about the things that are actually important and matter to me as well. So almost everyone has to be like curation has no age limit. You start start young understanding. Again, what is it that you want to communicate to other people and what are the what are the tangible forms in which that communication can take, and then just make sure like you keep really good notes for his stories in the future to decipher that. Okay. So, considering more than 90% of museum collections live in storage and don't often see a gallery. How do you suggest a museum ensure that the growing collection of black designers get out to the community. I mean, actually, there's some, you know, like, I have a great advantage of living here in Toronto in terms of in some ways the museum culture that Cheryl Blackman who runs the kind of 11 city of Toronto museums, like they've been doing some really interesting work in terms of again, rethinking the sense of place where objects need to go. Again, I think digital engagement, and I'm really interested in more stuff that we can do around augmented reality where you have some re contextualization of objects and place that are really exciting and very resonant in some different black communities and how they might want to interact with objects. Those are some of the things that I think are happening that are really exciting and breaks us out of the modality of like, I need a white room, and everything on top of a pilth with like, you know, a plexiglass box and some lighting on it like the more we can move out of that understanding of how we display. The more, I think the more engagement and museum shouldn't just be in the place museum should be in the places where people are. And so I'm also very interested, you know, once we get past COVID of like how we can, how we can bring. Like what is the antique road show is, is an interesting model of like, how can you, how can you do a like, how could a museum engage in a kind of like an antique road show version of an experience that it creates where people where in some ways it might be bringing its own objects but it's also asking them to bring in objects to again some ways just have a really interesting dialogue around again what these objects mean and where they come from and what's their history and what their meaning could be within that. And so I'm interested in so many different ways in which we engage with things, and that opens up the possibilities of how we, how we bring things within the community and recognize the things that are meaningful in the community itself. Next question. Can you talk a bit more about the ways to avoid tokenism when hiring black curators. That's why I say three. That's why I say three, you guys have a minimum of three. And again, you know, we put this, you know, we've putting this into practice. Okay, like when we've hired faculty we had our black cluster hire last year and we brought in five faculty. And what happens when you bring in five is, I mean, what seems to be happening is that again, that are five these five very amazing individuals that we brought they, they are uniquely themselves, and they see them, and they speak about their cultural differences their background differences, and how that gives them a different perspective on on things that again we normally think of as being very similar but not. So when you when you hire at least for a minimum of feet you begin, there's no way that anyone interacting with those individuals will say, Oh, there's only one type of X, right, that in that diversity that they're there, they have to see that there's diversity in the group and then they have to extrapolate that guess what there's going to be even more diversity so I can't just tokenize this individual, because I don't see I see them both as part of a collective, as being an individual and that's tangible in my interactions and experiences in my everyday life of interacting with them. And so that's why I'm really keen on like just not having the one, never have the one. Even sometimes it's like, you know, having two doesn't even do it up there's something magic about like the number three, where it's like I can see the range of possibilities and three that I can't even see when there's two. So, this is a bit two part part praise per question. Dory this lecture was mind blowing and so inspiring. This is the kind of lecture I wish I would have had as a young design student, your research showed how much work is still to be done in design and design history. How can institutions and design schools in particular adapt your recommendations for the Cooper who it. Oh, that's. Thank you Silas. Silas, you asking this question in some ways is like ironic because you're already doing that work. You're already building the curriculum you've already built the classes right you've already dismantled those structures and put up new ones that so many people now have the opportunity to engage with because it's already recorded they have to pay for it right so in some ways I think there's so again there's so many beautiful activities and initiatives that that we are doing to take advantage of this moment, and what I mean by this moment is that there's this is a moment in which there is openness to listening to the importance of black lives and black experiences. Now how long that's going to last. I'm going to try not to be cynical about it, but what I but what gives me always that sense of hope is how, as a community we are taking advantage of this moment, and the documentation that we're doing around like how many black designers are there in 365 days of black design and here's your black history of black freak design like all of the ways in which you've taken advantage of that this moment, like we can't go back like we can't go back to that ignorance that exists before because we've done such a good job of making ourselves present and making ourselves able to to to be understood by ourselves as well as our allies and even some people who may not be our allies in the struggle for liberation and so the work is already happening and and the institutions are listening and and being open right like having this conversation today with the coup year that like they knew what I was talking about going to talk about a year ago right and and they're open and that just says a lot about what the possibility of change that we can do in all of the institutions that we are in in alignment with. How is it possible to work cross culturally, meaning in the present time anti Asian racism has shown a concerning rise in the past months. How can communities work together inside the museum but also outside to raise awareness to all the social issues injustices biases animating us perhaps Canada to a lesser extent. So I mean, again, the, the, the amazing thing that I find about like my Instagram feed is the diversity of people that I've somehow collected in my lives where I'm constantly exposed to the struggles of others. And what I've noticed in the past year is so much solidarity so like I have a pair of earrings that are like indigenous, indigenous support for black lives matter and t shirts that say, you know, indigenous sovereignty and black liberation. There's a there was the whole. And again right now with the rise of anti Asian. Again violence is probably just the best word to use that there's a lot of calls out around like first let's talk about the relationship because many of the ones who are perpetuating this violence or from the black community. And so there's been a lot of really important conversations that are happening in social media saying, you know, again, don't use this to to to bring forth anti black sentiment, but also black folks we need to come correct in the way in which we're thinking about our Asian allies and colleagues and, and understand the way in which the model minority hides the, the poverty, the discrimination and all those experiences that we share so you can't talk about what's happening with Africans in China, because the African American experience and the Asian American experience and the Canadian black and Asian experiences are very different and unique and these are different people and we are all sharing different positions in relationship to structures of oppression, but we all have to push together against those structures of oppression and so that work is happening. What's the role of museums in that I think you know again, many of our museums are closed and shut down. And I think the roles of museums and again you're beginning to see this like, you know, on in the publications is like is again helping to build a richer understanding of history and culture of these communities, and being quite explicit in showing the intersections right between these communities and how we have shared interest and how we have shared tensions between each other, and keep it very real in our understanding that again, the more we turn against each other the more that we turn against the real enemy which is the structures of oppression. And so the role of cultural institutions is to help us again build that nuanced understanding, so that we can see where where we are in alignment, and where we have our own differences and ourselves to go our own ways to understand how we fight structures of oppression, but understand we're all contributing to the dismantling and that's the thing that we need to be sharing is to, we're all in this process dismantling these structures. Once you've hired, at least three people got in representation on the board and across all levels of management. How do you know it's working, what metrics or tangible change would be able, would we be able to utilize as evidence of change. So, the metrics are the experiences of the people in the institution. Like, I, you know, I constantly know as an institution how OK University is failing, because I've built relationships that my students will tell me so. I've built trust enough in my faculty that they'll come to me and they'll tell me what struggles they're happening. So that if they come to me and they're saying, hey, I'm feeling good, I'm feeling supported, I'm feeling nurtured, I'm feeling like I can flourish in that environment. That is the only metric that matters. Is is the quality of their experience and sense of belonging. And so the work you have to do if wherever you are in that system is to be listening deeply listening to how people are describing their experiences. And when there is a misalignment between the values that you're you're you're putting forth by having all this diversity and experiences they're having is like instantly hold that institution accountable for changing it for changing it. And then they will tell you when when conditions are changed, they will tell you when they feel less stress about engaging with their colleagues, they will tell you when they feel supported. And so it's, you know, I could collect all the metrics in terms of like the numbers of people I can do tons of surveys satisfaction surveys. And those things are are important to the extent that institutions like numbers. But I know I will only know when we're successful when they come to me and they say, this is a place where I can breathe. This is a place where I can feel I can be myself, all of myself, don't have to leave anything behind because I know that all of who I am will be embraced and valued by the institution. And that for me, like I said, that's the only I'll, I'll report on those numbers, but the only thing that matters to me are those moments when when they feel like I belong here. Thank you for making me feel like I belong here. And that's how you know, it's the only way you know. And this next question, which just came in a few minutes ago, but I think it's a very interesting one. So forgive me everyone who's answered a question at the beginning and I sort of jumped over you but I'm just trying to think about variety. Considering most curators say their positions for long periods of time, or spend their entire career at one institution should people step aside to make room for curators of color. It's a hard one. Um, I guess the thing I, the thing that I most admire about some of my people that I consider like, like my deepest white allies is that some of them have been quite explicit about stepping aside and making room. It's not like they go on and do other things in different things, right. And so having the kind of sense of like where can I have, where can I make the most impact for the kinds of radical change and decolonization or diversity and equity, where can I where can I have that impact. You know, like that's the question that that one has to ask and and and I get it myself like, you know, I, I, I know for myself that like my value in in an institution is that I accelerate change. And I know that in some ways I have a lot of energy and whatever so I can actually take up a lot of space. So I am constantly thinking about where do I need to sit down in order to allow people to step up. Right. So the thing I've been doing now like I give so many talks. I've been delegating them to my other faculty members and you know and that has you know like most of my talks I get paid for. So like that has like financial implications. It has prestige implications you know depending on what the talk is but I know that in order to create space, I need to sit down. And sometimes I could work it out you know like where we can share the platform. Right, we can share the platform. But I'm learning more and more that I need to get out of the way in order to allow them to flourish in this context, but it also means I can be in different contexts so like, another example is like, I'm removing myself from a lot of boards that I serve on. And, and I'm suggesting to those boards that you should bring on this individual this other individual this other individual right. What this allow me to do is that actually then the the boards that I'm on that I'm moving towards being on now are the boards where I would say the people that I'm delegating to would not be seen yet as being ready to be on those boards, but by giving them the experience of being on the other boards that I've left. You know in two or three years they may be seen ready to be on those boards and then I'll move out of the way and I'll go to another board or I'll do another thing like that so. So it's, it's hard right because you have to always be thinking, where can I make the most impact and sometimes the place where you are, the way in which you make the most impact is to move on to somewhere else. And that's, again, something you have to reflect on for yourself, but I would say, I don't know, I'm a person I never imagine, and in my career I've never been at a place longer than 10 years. So for me I actually have a hard time imagining being at a place for my entire life. But that. But again, because I think that way and I understand that way I always saying like who are the five people that I can replace myself with when eventually I leave this institution. Because, because my role is to open up possibilities for others. I'm not going to be here forever. So I need to open up possibilities for others. I've done a lot of that like I've, you know, especially in the States. I had to do a lot of work to open up design spaces for indigenous designers. And sometimes fighting against, you know, other black designers saying no we need to sit down as black folks because these are the, these are the first peoples, these are the first peoples. So they need to get theirs first but before we talk about what it is that we need. And so, you know, so again in this nesting that we have of like privileges and ability to speak and ability to hold platform that there's places where we all have to sit down for those for other people to have the chance to stand up, right to stand up. Okay. Maybe one more question and, and then we'll, we'll close it out for for the afternoon. I mean, literally Smith archive and other examples, we see how much design history is held in personal repositories, and therefore outside of conventional history and scholarship of design. Can you say more about the power of the archive in activating and decolonizing museums. Okay, that's, that's, you know, technically speaking, my, my phone is an archive. It is an archive of everything I wear everything I've eaten to the extent to which I post what I do every day on Instagram you have like a, and I could go back, and again, Instagram and Facebook does it for me like three years ago this is what you were doing. This is what you're wearing. This is the people you're hanging out with. So I think digital allows us in some ways the capacity to to really our, we're already archiving our lives, right, we're already archiving our lives. The question becomes, how do we connect those personal archives to other people's archives to be able to tell broader stories of like the meaning of the moment or the meaning of the object that we're trying to in some ways focus on. And so, so in that sense, I'm, you know, like I'm, I've, I feel very optimistic that, let's say, the struggle with which I was trying to find objects that are pre 1600. The, the, the, the design anthropologist who follows in my footsteps 100 years from now, their challenge will be having too much to be able to even process and figure out although maybe they'll have artificial intelligence that will do half the work for that but I think right now we're in a we're in a moment where our ability to archive is really, really strong. And that means we're, we're better able to tell the individual and the collective stories that are really meaningful to us, and hopefully meaningful to to other people now and to the future. Okay, I think I'm going to stop there. One more. I'll be there. I'll be there. We have two minutes. I'll be I'll give a short answer. All right. All right. Good. So, thinking a little bit about what you're talking about in terms of sort of historical objects contemporary objects and everything that's in the middle. A question here. Do you think it is more important to to collect historic black design, or to collect things by contemporary black designers, therefore supporting their careers. Okay. So, the, I would say, the way I would approach it and this is why I kind of set up like this little time. The time spiral of different sort of key dates like, like, like say, if I was the Cooper Hewitt. Then what I would be doing is saying, let's say if I can only buy six objects per year, then I would try to make sure that those six objects are related to being able to tell that story, just in different ways, right. I would do it across those different categories of time, because again, I'm just saying that you, you, there's a very particular narrative arc to the black experience that you want to somehow be able to explore in different ways. In terms of supporting like again contemporary designers. I mean like I don't know. I have Christine, you might be able to answer this better like, I'm not sure they pay very much do they pay very much for the acquisition of design objects contemporary design objects. It depends. It's a hard sort of straightforward answer to give. We receive a lot of donations from designers who are very generous. But we also purchase objects we purchase objects directly from designers from their galleries. We get donations from collectors. So, it's a variety of ways. I guess my thing is like I in my imagination, I guess I would say that there's probably better ways to support contemporary designers if you're if you're sort of thinking about like that focus. But there's, again, especially because I've, I like I went through and saw the gaps I really think there's a there's a, there needs to be a concerted effort to kind of fill in those gaps first. Because I guess we have more time to be able to support contemporary designers and we can do it in different ways like you again we can do talks. I love, I love the series like the Cooper here it does where they like ask contemporary designers to curate like their own sort of like sets of objects of. So I think there's other ways that we could support contemporary designers and there's just such a, there's such greater work that needs to be done to sort of build a past archive that in some ways that would just be my focus for a while. I guess I was one minute over. Good answer. Okay. Well, thank you Dory, thank you for your time. Thank you for your inspiring words. It's obvious that so many people today really enjoyed listening to you and and learning more about your insights on Cuba here and its collection and what we can do. There's a lot of work to do, as many institutions across the United States and across the world have to do as well. And so it's, it's great to start these conversations to be open to have dialogue, and to invite our, our public to to engage with you and with us to we learned so much through these types of conversations. And that said, as we close. If you enjoyed this program, if you didn't enjoy this program there's a survey we want to improve this experience. We're trying to get better as we provide more and more virtual programs. So please give us your feedback. And I guess that's it. Thank you, Dory. You're incredible. So wonderful. And most of all, thank you to everyone who tuned in today, who spent this time with us, and who engage thank you so much.