Black Stories/21: Michele Washington

Michele Washington:
It was networking, yes, but it was your ability to land in a place where you could learn. And sometimes the smaller places would actually provide you with more skills than a larger environment.

Justin James Lopez:
Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Amazon’s Black Stories, where we highlight the stories of Black designers, researchers, and creative minds from all around the world. I’m your host, Justin James Lopez, and today I’m joined by Michele Washington as we talk about developing the ability to lean into discomfort and finding spaces that help nurture your growth and learning. Let’s hear her story.

Thanks again for joining me today, Michele. I wanted to start by giving you an opportunity to just introduce yourself to the audience here.

Michele Washington:
Thank you for having me. I’m Michele Washington. I am living currently in Chicago. This is my second time of living in Chicago, just relocated here in December. And I like to think of myself as a designer, writer, researcher, and storyteller, but also sometime I think of myself as a Black memory worker too,

Justin James Lopez:
Black memory worker. Talk to me about that.

Michele Washington:
I happened upon a session from Getty with some researchers and archivists and librarians, and they were talking about preserving Black culture and they defined it as Black memory workers. And I often feel that a lot of the work that I like doing outside of what I do daily for work, for my job, I guess I could say actually comes under being in a Black memory worker, like preserving Black culture, archiving Black culture, archiving design objects and artifacts and ephemera. And I look at it as that way.

Justin James Lopez:
It’s really important when you think about how much of history is forgotten, rewritten, restructured, erased, and it’s important to have these really secure archives of what it really means to be Black or a person of color in any specific space and how that evolution impacts the rest of the life that we’re living and the next generation, because I think that that’s something that’s really important that we many times overlook. And when it comes to your work in that space, what was it that made you feel like this was the most important thing for you to focus your efforts on?

Michele Washington:
I think some of it comes from researching. I also think about it looking at the past and marrying it with the future. And similar to what you said is that just identifying where can you find this content or this information. One of the things that I’ve learned sometimes is that when a person passes, a lot of times their work is just gone. It’s just thrown out because sometimes family members don’t know or understand the importance of their work. And I think even when you’re alive sometime your family doesn’t necessarily understand what you do as a creative person. They may be very proud of you and very thoughtful about it, but fully understanding that, do you actually know who did that? Who actually designed, redesigned, and developed it. I was listening to the show this morning Into America, and they were interviewing a man who was one of the earliest emergency, what are they called? The EMS people?

They go out in the ambulance. So Pittsburgh had the first EMS, but it really came from through the Black community with a group of Black people that decided that they needed to take care of their community to get them to the hospital because only the police would get you to the hospital, which meant that you could die or your condition could worsen. So he talked about just how the whole system developed and I was just enamored with it because it’s an invention that is necessary, but we don’t always know where it comes from. And I’m sure there are people that work in that space that have no idea where it comes from either.

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. I had no idea to be honest until you just said that, but I think that it just puts a staple on exactly how important this work is, because you have no idea. And I remember talking to Audrey Bennett who actually introduced us about some of the work that she’s doing in really connecting those dots between past and future so that people understand the impact of the work, which can sometimes be seen as invisible work, and really bringing that to light to see the impact that has been had throughout the generations and centuries really. And I want to take a step back. When you think about reflecting on your journey and in general as a Black woman in this industry, research design, storytelling in general, what would you say are the defining moments for you leading up to this point in your career that shaped your overall approach to this work?

Michele Washington:
I would probably say going back to graduate school twice, first time frat where I actually started out to do printmaking, which I still love and I will do printmaking whenever I get a chance to get my hands on some screen printing in a place where I could do it. That and then shifting into communication design and then working in the field and then the second time going back to SVA and doing design criticism. But I would say it probably goes back even a little further. My high school art teacher, Mrs. Gerard. Mrs. Gerard, was very instrumental in pushing you to pursue an art career. And I had an uncle, my father’s youngest brother who used to make fun of us and call us little apple head kids.

So my father’s youngest brother, he studied art at Columbus College in Ohio, then moved to the West Coast to San Francisco. He’s always been very inspirational in the creative area, but I would think also it’s your ability to get work and knowing that if you want to get that work, you have to be really good at what you do or what you want to do because I would say early on it was making connections and networking with people as we so say today I got a network. It was networking, yes, but it was your ability to land in a place where you could learn. And sometimes the smaller places would actually provide you with more skills than a larger environment.

And sometime you would find out as you started to navigate and move into other spaces, you might know more than your counterparts in different areas that you have picked up skills. Because I early on worked with Black publications, and so I learned color correcting for page proofs, how to go on press, how to art direct photo shoots, how to do go sees, which are like you’re picking models, how to scout locations, how to take a photography team on location where you were traveling. And I can think of a couple of places that I’m not going to name where I worked and they were my White counterparts that had never done any of that.

Justin James Lopez:
When you look at the difference, you mentioned sometimes you can gain so much more from these smaller spaces versus the larger spaces. Do you think that that’s attributed to the fact that you tend to wear more hats and have to find the solution versus there’s someone that’s... It’s almost like in larger organizations there’s always a person that they only focus on this one solution and then this other person only focuses on this other solution and it’s almost like blinders in the horses where in the races and they only think about the lane that they’re in. Versus at smaller organizations, you really don’t have that opportunity. You have to be able to solve this level of problem. And not just from a knowledge based perspective, but really from a grit perspective. I think it’s mental strengthening as well. Being able to say what do you do when you face adversity? And adversity is something that I think is, it’s not unique to the Black experience or people of color, but I think the adversity that is faced by those communities is a bit unique.

Michele Washington:
I do like the idea when you said when you work in those spaces, when they’re smaller, you learn a lot because you are wearing a lot of different hats and some of the larger spaces, they are people that do all those different things. You may have learned 10 things and they may have seven people that do that, so you’re no longer needed to do that. With all those environments, one of the things was, I know it’s a cliche, learning how to pick your battles and when to say what it is that you need to say or not say.

I remember in one large company that I worked, one of the things that I benefited from was that they offered these affirmative action workshops. I guess that’s the best way of phrasing them. And they were for people throughout the company, I like to think that they were for people of color rather than use the word minority, because I often think that’s diminishes our power of as people, Black and Brown people, indigenous Native American people of us not having power or being worthy or feeling empowered. But they offered a variety of different workshops that you could take advantage of. And couple were like over the course of two days that you did at the corporate headquarters, they would have a location and then they had some where you went to one of those conference retreats and they taught you mid-management skills.

Okay. So I’m a designer. If I wanted to be a creative director, what is the trajectory path of that versus someone that comes from advertising or someone that comes from marketing. They were really, really well organized and run, and they really provided me with a lot of good skillset of teaching you to be proactive, interactive, or reactive. I mean, you also got to meet people that worked in other divisions that you would normally never meet. And I would say that by me doing those workshops and retreats, it did create an adversarial and confrontational relationship with me in the art director. And I remember anytime I had to go get his signature, he would always make a sarcastic comment, but I did not let it bother me at all because I did have a goal and a mission. And I just felt like if this is a benefit that this company offers that I am entitled to it and I wasn’t going to let him discourage me from doing what I was going to do.

Justin James Lopez:
It sounds like education, and I mean you can also look at it from your background education and just learning, continuing to grow in that space is something that’s a really important theme for your life. And just having this almost cross disciplinary design background of looking at research, looking at design, looking at documentation or writing. How have you utilized those different spaces to create the unique experience in your career as far as being a storyteller, being a designer, being a design strategist and having all of these different hats that you wear?

Michele Washington:
I try not to wear them all at the same time. I feel that I have to pick which ones work for different situations and which ones I will use more often than not. I think it also depends on what projects I land on working. Now working contract with Coforma, which is a civic design firm. As a researcher and facilitator, I do get to bring in a lot of those skills, whereas working on other projects with other clients, I might be doing the design and the research and that’s not heavy writing. And then in teaching as an adjunct, it’s the design, writing and research.

Justin James Lopez:
When I think about the lessons that you’ve learned as a student, an educator, a teacher mentor, what do you think the key lessons that you want students in the traditional sense of the ones at university, but just students of life as the greater community and when it comes to navigating, transforming the design industry as we see it, what are the key lessons that you think are important for them to pick up on considering the work that you’ve done and continue to do?

Michele Washington:
I think that you always have to be willing to keep learning. And I think about a conversation I had with a colleague who I interviewed on my podcast, Curious Story Lab, but gaskin and talking about building new forms of knowledge as being very key and not always allowing the technology to define and control you building that new forms of knowledge. Where it could assist in aid you, it’s not controlling everything that you do. I think that you have to be willing to be exploratory and experimental and step out of a comfort zone that you may start having. That’s really critical.

I always think you need to make yourself notice to people and talk and just be clear about who you are and what you want. Out of a program, I think about that having taught graduate students in the exhibition and experience design program at the Fashion Institute of Technology teaching one of the first courses that they take for their graduate degree. It’s pushing them beyond your comfort zone. Your willingness to actually dig in and be really granular and grab a hold of different areas and sectors and learn is very pivotal and important. I think the first time I went to grad school, I ended up doing it part-time. The second time I went to grad school, I did it because the work was so intense. There was no way that I could even work a job.

Justin James Lopez:
So you mentioned the idea of your role as a educator mentor, and not just you specifically, but just the role as an educator mentor, it’s really pushing the students, and in this case graduate students or even undergraduate students outside of their comfort zone so that they can grow. And I actually fully believe that. I think that in order to grow, people need to lean into discomfort and it’s only in discomfort that we tend to grow the most. But where do you strike the balance between pushing someone outside of their comfort zone and pushing them to their breaking point?

Michele Washington:
I try not to ever do that because I think it’s too comfortable. It’s something that I had to learn over the years, how to read the tea leaves in the room and the comfort level in the room with students, because I’ve done graduate and undergraduate. And you’ve realized sometime that pushing someone to what you may feel what they need, that student may not be able to handle some of that, and you have to be willing to let go and pull back. You can suggest something, but if they’re not receptive and you start to push too much, you end up losing them.

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah, that’s fair. And I think that that’s why I ask, because I’m like, sometimes there can be a really thin line between just being outside of your comfort zone and people that have been inside of their comfort zone for so long that outside of the comfort zone feels like a breaking point for them. I want to take a step back because you also mentioned something about the work that you’re doing as a storyteller on The Curious Story Lab, which is your podcast where you’re working with in general, visionaries of color and working, how do we rework and reshape the future of the world in different spaces? And I wanted to just talk about that a bit because one, the lab itself and the podcast and the work that you’re doing as a storyteller there, and then I have some other questions about the future of some of these things as well. But yeah, tell me a little bit about that. What was the initial conception of the podcast and what role does it play in the many hats that you wear?

Michele Washington:
So I got into podcasting in graduate school at SVA. We had a podcasting class and I loved it. I really, really enjoyed it. And I think the first podcast I did was on this guy named Larry Hoops who taught this exercise holy hoop class in Central Park. And it wasn’t so great. And then I did something that was narrative on cast darn skillets. And in order to make the crackling sound of the skillet, grease like your frying chicken, I dropped droplets of water into grease. And of course they flame shot up in the kitchen and I never told my partner that part. So hopefully he won’t listen to this. But then I soothed out with some blues music.

And then I think my last project was on Masud Ahmed, who is a branding designer but before that, he had been a graffiti artist and Masud used to travel across country on freight trains. And I was really intrigued by that. So I really loved that. And he started telling me about how people were tagging freight trains and also just how he really got into being a graffiti artist. So that always stuck with me. Fast forward, I decide that I’m going to apply to be an A’Lelia Bundles Columbia University Community Scholar, and it is a program run by Columbia University, but you have to live north of 96th Street.

So it’s really Columbia University giving back to the community because they built Manhattanville Campus, which meant that people living in that area of hundred and 25th Street and north of that were displaced. So this is part of their giving back. And A’Lelia Bundles was a trustee for Columbia University and she was instrumental in starting this. And she is the great, great, granddaughter of Madam CJ Walker really. So my proposal was to do a podcast series and short doc films, and I wanted to not purely focus at all on graphic designers. I wanted to draw upon the experience that I got in decret where we looked at all these different areas of design and curation and research. So that’s why some people are architects, some people are photographers, some people are curators.

One interview is with Prime, who is interdisciplinary, where some people may know him as a designer, but he’s a designer. He’s a writer and he is a curator. I would say he’s a pivotal thought leader of the 21st century. There is Mabel Wilson who trans verses between architecture, writing and curatorial work. And she is a professor in the architectural program at Columbia University and they have the, I want to say it’s the African-American Institute or the Africana Institute, and she’s the director of that. But she also co-curated an exhibition at MoMA, the Reconstruction with Black architects. That was a couple of years ago, sadly, it did not travel. And then there’s Marcia Mentor who is the co-founder of Indigo Arts Alliance, which is an artist residency for Black, Brown, and indigenous artists.

So those are people that I’ve interviewed. I have some more interviews coming up. For me, it’s a lot of work. It’s been a fun journey. I like talking to people, even though sometime I consider myself an introvert. It’s been really helpful with me to talk and work with people in different areas. I’ve interfaced with Peter Robinson who is part of the Black Space Urban Collective and interface with him and his students at Cornell and working with them on research and interview techniques, but also on storytelling. So that has been an interesting process and that leads into me doing a lot of the storytelling aspect of what I like doing.

Justin James Lopez:
For sure. When it comes to shaping the future of design and storytelling. And I know that that’s a lot of the theme that you have around the Curious Story Lab, which we will have linked for anyone that wants to learn more about that or consume some of the content that you’ve been creating, which I think is phenomenal as well. What are some pieces of advice that you have for say up and coming Black designers or storytellers that look up to you and your work or aim they themselves to impact the design industry in the future?

Michele Washington:
I think that from what I see is that there are lots of young people that have stories to tell and they should tell them and explore new and alternative ways in media that you could use in telling your stories. Even if it’s in the written form, it does not necessarily have to be a paper or an essay, but maybe you are a person that’s in into syncopated beats and rhythms and how can you write something that’s abstract that riff us off of something that’s audio or provides a music way of thinking.

But the other thing that I also think that people can do with the storytelling is that you can mesh it with films and video and visual imagery. I think there’s just many ways of mixing media together to explore what it is that you really want to do and just go out and do it. I mean, if you think about people, that spoken word, go all the way back to Gil Scott-Heron. I feel like Gil Scott-Heron set the tone for much of what people started doing with rap and hip hop. So look at who did something like 40 or 50 years ago, how can you project that into 40 or 50 years in the future?

Justin James Lopez:
There’s a lot of similarities here because I consider myself an introvert as well, which is why I actually like the podcasting because I get to just meet one person. I’m just interacting with you and it doesn’t feel overwhelming for me. But also just the idea of my introduction to just the creative spaces storytelling was, spoken word as well. I remember one of the earliest artists that I heard was Saul Williams, and he was really impactful in my development and just understanding how to communicate directly and indirectly at the same time. How do you use visual elements from an audio space because he was such a visual artist to really communicate these really, really in-depth scenes that almost transports you from and transcends time almost. But it’s really powerful to just hear that and then to hear that as a part of your advice to the next generation, but also to just see how that’s impacted you and your growth as well.

Michele Washington:
Can I tell you my Saul Williams story?

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah, absolutely.

Michele Washington:
So I photographed art directed a photo shoot with Saul Williams for Black issues book review. And one of the designers that was working with me, Mira Bowman, she knew him really well from having gone to Spellman. So photographed him in the New York Rican Cafe. I still have the Polaroid from that photo shoot. And George Larkins was the photographer. He was great. He was really easy to work with, but he left his notebook there. So I saw it, I grabbed it and he called the next day. He said, “Oh my God, I left my notebook.” I said that I have it. So we connected and I gave it to him.

But it’s interesting that me having worked with some Black magazines actually was one way that connected me into doing some of this work. Because not that I want to name drop or whatever, but there were lots of major people in the arts that I could say that I got the interface with and work with art directing photo shoots and doing different things that I guess to me sometime was no big thing. I was like, “This is just your job. You’re going to talk to this person, you’re going to meet this person. You’re going to art direct this photo shoot,” and you could not at get all like, “Oh my God, I’m doing this person today.” You had to be really laid back and chill.

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. This is just another day at the office.

Michele Washington:
Just another day in the neighborhood

Justin James Lopez:
I totally get that. I find myself in those positions sometimes. I’m like, “Don’t be that guy. Don’t be weird. Just be normal.”

Michele Washington:
It’s funny because sometimes I talk to my partner about it, and I grew up in Atlantic City and my grandparents had a sit down white dining cloth where we had... We always say white dining cloths, we always joke, but they were really red tablecloths and seafood restaurant and it was seasonal. And there were these major Black nightclubs, which meant that you had, whoever was popular at that time would be the entertainers. And they would come to the restaurant for lunch or dinner, and my grandmother would give us a cross eye. Because sometimes you’d see somebody like Dan Warwick sitting there and she was like, “Don’t you go over there and say nothing to her?”

So you got got used to seeing these people and then because they were performing at the club, and maybe you see somebody like Slappy White, Pigmeat Martins, Red Foxx, they would be outside like the SAPs barbecue playing the dozens. So you would just stand there. So I learned early on not to get too overly excited. Maybe it’s just me being nonchalant.

Justin James Lopez:
It could be. Maybe you were genuinely not impressed.

Michele Washington:
Yes, that’s probably it. I would probably say it was more like that. I was excited about the possibility of... Let’s just say I was excited about who they were, but then I was like, okay, it’s just-

Justin James Lopez:
Another human.

Michele Washington:
Yes. They’re just human beings and they need to go sit and eat their dinner or those comedians, they need to play the dozens with each other, and so you just watch and then you go home.

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. No, that’s really powerful. Yeah. We’re coming up on time here, so I wanted to once again, just thank you again for joining us on this episode. You’ve given us so much to think about and a lot of really cool gems from so many different spaces and the hats that you wear. But yeah, thank you.

Michele Washington:
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed this. This has been fun. I was really nervous about doing this at first because I said, “Let me stop working at least 30 minutes before this so I can just decompress.”