TENURE NARRATIVE

Queer X Design is both a chronological accounting of the many types of design produced by
LGBTQ people from the early 20th century to today, and it is a kind of treatise-by-example on
design history. While I don’t overtly theorize the precise outlines of design as the organizing
logic and aesthetics of human production,

The audience I imagined for Queer X Design was a general one; but I especially imagined a
college Freshman (that home to college transition is an important one for many LGBTQ youth,
who may have endured rejection at home but who also looks forward to the possibility of
coming more fully into themself once college begins).

I know of course adoptions in Ohio, Kansas, Texas, and here in California; and it is one of the
great joys of my career to know that the book is in the hands of students. Indeed, the book has
been cited as an important resource in teaching an inclusive history of graphic design by the
design historian and curator, Ellen Lupton, in her new book Extra Bold, which spotlights Queer
X Design in the context of a non-binary, feminist, and LGBTQ resource guide.

The book has brought welcome challenges in who I thought would be interested in the book
I never thought I’d be speaking to so many tech companies

IT has also spawned fan posts—one user on Instagram (@ ) dedicated the 24 days leading up to
pride month (June) 2020 by illustrating and reflecting on a different object from Queer X Design
each day. This kind of engagement, especially on the part of design educators and young
designers, has profoundly moved me; and it is why I wrote the book in the manner that I did—
as an idiosyncratic (queer is in the title, after all) history of design, broadly considered.

Unlike Queer X Design I imagined a more limited audience for Bound Together, including
academics, contemporary artists, and leatherfolks (for whom there are few truly reliable
academic sources on the leather community’s history and cultural politics). The book was
released in January 2020 and by March the country and much of the world was on lock-down.
At the time that I write this it is unclear whether academic publishing and activity will continue
on, or be rightly altered by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Bound Together

The next book project, Poverty and Practice, examines the material conditions of artistic
practice in the United States post-1960, with a particular focus on poverty as a circumscribing
condition. The book aims to reevaluate the literature around class and art, suggesting a move
away from Marxist frameworks to one of economic justice (the difference might be analogous
to the way we talk about theory and practice in art school—both are interrelated, but address
essentially separate aspects of how art is produced and interpreted), while illuminating
particular histories of artists and their work, with chapters devoted to the work of Harmony
Hammond, Beverly Buchanan, and Laura Aguilar. The book is inspired by Harmony Hammond’s
essay, “Class Notes,” that appeared in the feminist journal Heresies (1977), in a special issue
dedicated to lesbian artists. She was one of the first artists in the post-war period in the United
States to articulate a holistic assessment of poverty as a guiding condition for most artists, and
especially for artists who inhabited marginalized identities during this time. Poverty shapes
artistic practice at every point, argues Hammond, including making choices about, “imagery,
permanence, scale, ways of working, and concepts of art education.” So instead of investigating
art about poverty as the delimiting condition of my study, Poverty and Practice seeks to
illuminate something much more expansive, and potentially field-defining—that is the extent to
which a contemporary history of art might actually be a contemporary history of poverty.

While archival sources are rich with untapped potential (Beverly Buchanan’s papers are at the
Archives of American Art, and Harmony Hammond’s at the Getty—in the coming year and half
of research I will be consulting both with some frequency), there is a dearth of published
sources that tackle this topic directly. As a response, the book will feature excerpts from
interviews with over 100 artists working across the US—and the entire interviews (audio and
transcripts and selected artworks) will be available via an online portal. In this respect I hope to
create new primary sources for the scholars that come after me.

In the next year I plan to put together grant proposals for a USC Zumberge, a Warhol writer’s
grant, and XXX. Ideally these funds would pay for the participation of the living artists (if
poverty is the subject, then, in my mind, the production of the book should model a more
responsive economic relationship to art and artists), and go towards lowering the cost of
publication and the MSRP of the subsequent book (again, there’s an opportunity to propose an
alternate model of knowledge production and dissemination).

Amartya Sen, Judith Butler, bell hooks, and the artists themselves, provide me with the
theoretical framework for rethinking poverty as a condition of lack, to one of resources
withheld on the part of local, state, regional, and federal social programs (with various degrees
of intention). The introduction will provide an overview of U.S. poverty policy taking place in
the time period between the Poor People’s March to Washington D.C. and Trump’s 2016
inauguration speech, which is commonly referred to as his “American carnage” speech, wherein
the president presents a dystopian exegesis on the American Industrial landscape (in both
literal and figurative senses).

Each “case-study” chapter focuses on a specific moment in the artist’s career, one in which
poverty shaped artistic choices in ways that are both obvious and subtle. The first chapter is
dedicated to Harmony Hammond, as she is the first to clearly lay out a complex theoretical and
pragmatic discussion of artistic practice and poverty. I track her use of found and scavenged
material (a common story found in many artist’s biographies, especially as it concerns
assemblage sculpture) in a series of works BAGS / PERSONAGES. The second chapter concerns
the work of Beverly Buchanan, an artist who, because of financial concerns, moves from New
Jersey/New York City to Macon, Georgia. While in Georgia Buchanan makes a series of
sculptures that illuminate various histories of enslavement—responsible for both the economic
wealth of the enslaving white population, and the continued disenfranchisement of the
enslaved and their descendants. These works, perhaps in a more subtle way that would at first
appear, prefigure and catalyze the “shack sculptures” that Buchanan would come to be
somewhat famous for.

The third, and final case-study, focuses on the LA-based photographer Laura Aguilar. A hallmark
of Aguilar’s oeuvre is the use of her own nude body as a prominent figure in the natural and
built landscape. Usually, this turn in her work is assumed solely to be a conceptual choice—but
interviews reveal that Aguilar used herself as a nude model because she didn’t have the funds
to pay a model to do the work for her. The economically pragmatic choice thus engenders a
broader conceptual understanding of what might result from focusing on a nude, brown, poor,
lesbian, fat, disabled body (all identities that Aguilar embraced).

The conclusion will offer some insight as to how we might imagine systems of support for
artist’s otherwise, illuminating what we might demand from local, state, regional, and national
governments, and how we might shift our interpretive frameworks to be inclusive of, but not
overdetermined by, any one vector of analysis. In short, the conclusion asks readers to
incorporate frank discussions of poverty and artistic choices that result from poverty’s presence
and long shadow in US art communities. IN this way, I hope the book is a path-breaking one,
that introduces a new hermeneutic paradigm in contemporary art history and criticism.
Economic precarity is felt by most artists at some point in their careers, so it’s time to start
talking about it!

Finally, I have been in discussions with the publisher’s of Queer X Design for a second book, this
one ideally dedicated to the history of sex toys and sex toy design—such a book could offer a
body-centered spin on contemporary theories of UI/UX design, by insisting on our capacities to
“pervert” design towards pleasurable aims. This would continue my work with sex communities
in a way that felt organic and generative. I have also put in a proposal for AfterAll’s One Work
series, dedicated to Rei Naito’s Matrix (2010), a permanent installation on Teshima island,
located in the Seto Inland Sea in Japan. This series provides an opportunity for art historians to
focus on a single work.