SUS.

VCFA Residency #2 at Susquehanna University marks the end of my 1st semester, and the beginning of my 2nd semester as an MFA student. This liminal space opens up a portal of reflection and possibility. I am looking back at what I have discovered, found, and created—and I am deciding what I want to take with me as I step into this next phase of personal and professional alchemy.

Where am I now?
Working with Silas during my first semester was a great way to enter this program. The experience of being mentored and molded by a parallel, a peer, and a person I have a tremendous amount of respect, love, and admiration for—has catalyzed a “knowing.” Teaching and learning is such an intimate experience. The influence that an educator has as over their student, and the trust that a student brings in service to their desire to learn and grow is profound.
I entered this program with a few goals (wants and needs): to become universally employable and reach the highest rung of compensation within my current position as a tenured professor at The College of the Canyons (I spent much of my childhood and early adulthood experiencing scarcity as a result of financial strain; to further define and develop a shareable form of pedagogical practice in which student voices are centered; FINALLY! I am working to repair the muscle waste that my personal practice of making suffered as I poured myself into career, motherhood, marriage, and family. There are no regrets in that experience as my well of content is overflowing as a result of all that lifing.

Pursuing my MFA has served as a form of self-care. As I've dedicated time and effort to achieving these goals, I've reconnected with an essential aspect of myself.

Where am I going?
I was able to name and describe the teaching framework in the form of a manifesto titled "Imago Dei-sign." I'm debating reducing the title to "Imago Design" to create a more accessible entry point. I have developed a couple of exercises to test out on myself and with my students this coming semester as I teach. In semester two, I plan to add more exercises and workshop ideas to the framework, as well as begin compiling a "resources" section that shares books, articles, and podcasts that have informed this framework. I hope to collaborate with other educators who have an interest in teaching and learning through this lens with similar goals. I have begun using this language and framework to redesign/rewrite my Spring '24 course syllabi.

In my personal practice of making I discovered what it is like to create work with greater access to resources! With VCFA I have the space to emphasize quality, exploration, and iteration over quantity. This process is better adapted to my abilities as an artist who lives with Aphantasia, which is an impaired ability to form mental images. All of my visualizing happens through making and adjusting—completely outside of my mind’s eye. I may take longer to get to the place I want to go, and that’s okay.

In critique one of the things that James, Jimmy, Elana and Owen gravitated toward was the experiments that were working to resolve using two languages, and two messages to represent the same image while not giving typographic hierarchy to one over the other. It’s something I’ve wrestled with my whole career when designing content in more than one language. I feel a couple of the solutions I created are the closest I’ve ever gotten. I want to continue to play with this idea as well.

James Chae began a dialogue around my relationship with the visual culture that exists in the pockets of my identity/interests. What is the visual of Chicanx vs. Mexica? What is the visual culture of the Pocha who loves Punk Rock as much as Hip Hop? What exists visually in the historical and the contemporary around all of these things? That is a meal I can chew on for a while!

Reflecting on the pin-up critiques I can see the lenses of my human experience looking for resolution much in the same way that the type is looking for resolution. I am building a visual world that allows me to pour my whole self into it. Dissolving all of the compartments that I have been separated into by choice or by culture, into one big swell—washing away hierarchies of language, race, gender, or religion—while still expressing all those parts of myself. My current hypothesis is the more I make, the more those parts can co-mingle, and make a party.

01.13.24

Imago Design Exercise

COLORISMS

The Imago Design framework facilitates co-teaching and co-learning within a diverse community of artists, designers, and learners through personal storytelling as a means of weaving cultural literacy into the practice of teaching visual communication.

Overview
Learn how to send and receive personal stories, while using color as your primary language. Participation requires that you bring a printed photograph that you took yourself. You can pull a memory from your smartphone photo history, or a family album, you may want to take a picture of your favorite place in your home, a favorite outfit, a meal you love or a furry buddy.

Technical literacies gained

Using reference imagery to create color palettes.
Saving digital swatch palettes.
Live Paint Bucket tool (cmd+K)
Understanding the semiotics of color

Cultural literacies gained

Practicing vulnerability
Mining the lived experience
Listening to the subconscious
Listening to others
Empathy

Process
Use the color sampler tool to isolate a color in your image. Add this color to your swatch palette in a folder titled "color story." When you have 20 colors saved you can begin painting.

Fill each square in the grid with a color from your palette. Avoid creating another “picture” or “image” and instead, think of each square as a letter or a word that you are choosing to tell the story of this moment. There are no rules about how often you use a color, or where you place it on the grid. If you move your sampler over a color you aren’t feeling leave it behind. Edit if that feels right!

This repetitive practice is also a meditation. It will woo your subconscious into an active flow state. Focus on listening to what your mind is doing/saying as you work. Once you have filled your grid pin it to the wall under the sheet of paper with your name on it.

Reflection
Spend 5 minutes in quiet observation.
Receive the stories, and reflect on the following:
How does each color story resonate?
What do the colors mean to you/ what’s the vibe?

Write down a few words on the lined paper above each color story that capture the vibe, or how this composition makes you think/ remember/ feel.

Conversation
Take your feedback form off the wall, and turn your photo around. Take turns, and share aloud any of the reflective words or vibes that are in alignment with the story of your photo. What color stories are similar to yours? If someone else shared a similar photo or generated a similar color story—what is common between those two experiences? What is different?

*Inspired by the work of Jennifer Kapitulik, and Charles Gaines, Charles Gaines2

01.23.24

Code-switching

Growing up a mixed Mexican/White* person, with divorced parents meant I was constantly criss-crossing the threshold of my father’s Mexican world and the White world my mother lived in. Code-switching was something I practiced before I could understand its meaning or purpose.

When I learned about code-switching the behavior was so ingrained in me that the understanding was immediate, and the phrase was adopted without question. Like learning the act of consuming food is called “eating.” It’s a thing that people do.

According to the Harvard Business Review “[…]code-switching involves adjusting one’s style of speech, appearance, behavior, and expression in ways that will optimize the comfort of others in exchange for fair treatment, quality service, and employment opportunities.”

It wasn’t until watching the film ‘Sorry to Bother You’ by Boots Riley (of Coup fame), did I even think to unpack the “code” in code-switching. There is a scene in which the main character Cassius Green, discovers the power of using his ‘White Voice’ and experiences tremendous professional success as a result.

It doesn’t seem crazy to deduce that the others who require the comfort that code-switching provides are White people—which means the code in code-switching is white supremacy.*

As a mixed Chicana, the way the world reads me, or codes my race is often ambiguous. I’m asked if I am Egyptian, Persian, French, or Jewish more often than I am asked if I am “Hispanic,” Latiné, or specifically Mexican. As a kid, my dad saw this as an opportunity. It was suggested that if we should respond “I’m European” to racial inquiries, life would be easier. I chose to ignore this advice, not because I thought it was bad—but because I had no context for understanding. That lesson came later, when I was older, and learned about all the ways my dad had experienced anti-brown racism.

When people asked about my race, I answered “Halfsican.” I have no idea where I picked that up. When asked which “side” I identified with more, my answer was “…there is no side, I’m just me.” The implication of the phrase Halfsican leans on a widely held white supremacist belief—of who is dominant and who is othered—to be understood. I didn’t have to say “white-sican” for people to know what the other half of my pedigree was. My Halfsican experience is one of having people and situations dictate which part of me is preferable for them at a specific moment, and me having to negotiate whether the labor of code-switching is worth the reward (accessing privilege).

With this understanding, I’ve viewed code-switching as a superpower—I am able to Trojan Horse myself into the room, to get a seat at the table—and then put some real shit on the agenda. I recognize that the place I find myself in exists on a spectrum of privilege. What is an accessible superpower for me, is completely inaccessible for others at one end, and is an overlooked privilege for those at the opposing end. But, every superpower is a double-edged sword; and at some point, someone tries to wipe you out of existence, or you cross paths with kryptonite.

In the movie “Unbreakable” Elijah Price is a man who suffers from a bone-breaking disease and an obsession with Comic Book Heroes. He searches out his opposite—an unbreakable man, David Dunn—to confirm the suspicion that he is the nemesis to the hero of the story. A belief that gives his condition meaning. In his closing monologue, Elijah asks David “Do you know how you can tell who the arch-villain's going to be? He's always the exact opposite of the hero. Now that we know who you are, I know who I am!”

Something clicked in my head when I watched this recently. When a person views a situation as “same” vs “other”—their threat detection is activated and adversarial thinking takes over. When any historically marginalized population presents a problem they suffer as a result of unequal power structures, members of the dominant power structure interpret the message as their being a part of the problem — aka the “bad guys.”

In a conversation with my Faculty Union, a predominantly white group, I remarked on the noticeable absence of allyship in campus DEI efforts. I shared that the burden of DEI work is disproportionately placed on our BIPOC/ LGBTQIA/ Disabled community members. I emphasized the need for their allyship in our mission to make progress in areas of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and I expressed the importance of attending professional development days and student identity panels produced by our affinity groups. A vocal member responded to my statement with "Maybe we don't feel comfortable in those spaces because we are afraid that we will say the wrong thing." In response, I suggested they “attend and not speak, and instead try listening at first.” further clarifying that “These are learning opportunities and moments for centering marginalized student and faculty voices. You would be amazed at how much gratitude you will receive for just coming and listening."

In the tense silence that followed, I said a prayer, hoping that some of this would be heard.

Another faculty member spoke up “I teach math. What’s that got to do with DEI?”

I pretended this was an earnest question and offered an earnest answer. As I spoke I began receiving private text messages from members of the group, some of whom chastised me for “picking on” the Math professor while also asking me if I could take a look at their curriculum and help them figure out how to apply DEI to their disciplines. I was aghast at their inability to engage in a basic teaching-learning dynamic, especially given their roles as educators.

I had code-switched myself into the room and then code-switched myself out of their comfort zone, I’ve been here before—but this particular moment came with a new level of fatigue and I looked around the room for a second voice. A white professor joined the conversation, sharing how he had begun to do the work on himself, to unpack hidden biases and pro-actively implement anti-racist pedagogy in his classes. While I was grateful for his voice, I noted that no one pushed back on him, or balked when he used the R-word. When he says it, he becomes an affirmation of the goodness and correctness of all white folks.

I realize that this is a zero-sum game, where the goal of the collective is to continue to do nothing, and the resources being used in the do-nothingness are all mine. If the cost of admission is code-switching I don’t think I want in anymore—the energy it takes to disarm a crowd by policing myself, toning down the passioned volume of my voice, the speed of my words, and the moving of my hands are all too high a price in exchange for NADA.

One of my favorite writers, Marcie Alvis Walker, recently captured this sentiment in her essay Black Parade perfectly:

“I made a major life decision to no longer engage in provocative behavior. I’ve put my stick down and refuse to continue to poke the bear whether that bear be politics, religion, gender norms, sexuality, or race.

I’m going to continue to speak out about the foul weather that continues to besiege us all. And of course, I will continue to stand in solidarity with the voiceless whose hardships and suffering leave them breathless in this world. But most of all I will luxuriously and lavishly resist, joyously entering rooms that previously refused to accommodate bodies like mine. I don’t need to speak a word, just sit down at the table, smile, look into their astonished faces, and ask for someone to pass the butter. I will eat their rolls, lick up their gravy and unabashedly ask for seconds.”

*I use the word White as a shorthand for understanding a distinct American culture. My mom’s side of the family is Scottish and Prussian, and have maintained pieces of those cultures over generations. “Whiteness” was constructed to create “Americans.” In truth, the ancestors of “White Americans” are immigrants who were forced to shed their culture as the price of entry. My European ancestors benefitted from their assimilation more than any other group, and clumping all of their cultures into a monolith is the foundation that White supremacy is built upon.

01.30.24

La Lengua

When I decided to start making a more concentrated effort to habla mejor Español, I also began contemplating the nuances of language and various modes of communication. Speaking Spanish within Mexican American culture is a prickly subject. Heritage speakers who have maintained the language in their "American" lives often shame and disparage those who were never taught, or who have let it go. Jaqueline Delgadillo explains, "Language proficiency is another form of gatekeeping Latinidad. We see it with the term 'no sabo kid,' which refers to someone who isn't fluent in Spanish. It ranges from light teasing, like I was guilty of in my youth, to shaming and exclusion."

The complexity of speaking Spanish deepens as it is a colonial language. Although speaking Spanish more fluently allows me to embrace a part of my identity more profoundly and connect with my family and community more meaningfully, the ancestral language of my indigenous Mexican family is Nahuatl. Even though this language has been lost in my bloodline, I am making efforts to expand my Nahuatl vocabulary, refine my pronunciation, and delve into pre-Columbian Mesoamerican history and cultural practices.

In reflecting on what it means to learn language, and to pass on language I’ve looked back in appreciation for the overlooked languages that were passed down to me. Languages of art, craft, food, body, and spirit. My nana taught me to sew at a young age, and later I took up embroidery. "Drawing" with thread was a revelation. During a trip to Mexico, I was captivated by tiendas filled with embroidered tablecloths and pillow covers adorned with patterns of animals and flowers. Researching Otomi, Huichol, and other traditional Mexican fiber arts, I've collected textile items and books. However, learning Otomi embroidery methods has provided me with a nuanced understanding of my culture that objects and books alone cannot convey.

The practice of preparing and appreciating Mexican cuisine is language in my family that has been passed down without hesitation or shame. The desire to assimilate could not overpower the craving and the joy that comes with eating a mole tamale.

My friend Tanya’s mom, Marilou taught me how to live in a Mexican woman’s body. We spent Sunday afternoons learning how to use depilatory cream, and alter clothing made for güeritas to fit ours. She taught us how to iron our hair and use a magnified mirror to clean up our cejas. She taught us how to put on make-up, and make friendship bracelets.

The transmission of spirit and ancestral knowledge is a concept science is beginning to recognize as epigenetic inheritance, an adaptation that carries information from one generation to future ones in our genetic code. My ability to receive communication from a place of spirit and ancestral knowing is something I recognized in myself at a young age. As I've opened myself up to learning to speak all my languages, I've also become attuned to when something is being spoken to me in a spiritual language.

Regularly purchasing cut flowers and arranging them for my kitchen table has been a ritual since I began living on my own. This practice serves as a "limpia" for my home—a cleansing of energy. Recently, after putting together a bouquet, I grew curious about what this instinctively crafted arrangement might communicate. One ADD-fueled Google-rabbit-hole later, I learned that all the flowers I chose were native to Mexico, as were the gourds placed next to them. The central bloom in the arrangement, near black-purple dahlias, were used by the Aztecs to treat epilepsy. When I read this, I pictured hands pressing dahlia tubers into the soil, and I the mark those hands left on my DNA. I imagined their knowing that my son would live with epilepsy and that this intergenerational penchant for dahlias was their way of providing care and healing from the flower world. I felt a familiar tingle spread across my scalp and down my arms. Somewhere inside me is an ancestor who connected with the soul of the world through the dirt, they were a curandera, and they were reaching out through the sublime to say, "Estoy aqui, nimitzneki."

1 Behaviors, environments, and experiences can alter how our genes work, and leave impressions on our DNA, this study of this phenomenon is called “epigenetics.” Epigenetic inheritance is an unconventional finding. It goes against the idea that inheritance happens only through the DNA code that passes from parent to offspring. It means that a parent's experiences, in the form of epigenetic tags, can be passed down to future generations. (https://www.cdc.gov/)

2 Limpia - ritual cleansing (https://www.realizeyourbliss.com/books/#cleansingritesofcuranderismo)

3 Curanderismo - Pre-Hispanic healing practices and rituals belonging to the native Mexica

02.04.24

Holding The Center

Dr. Dori Tunstall discusses the essential role of authentic self-knowing in "doing the work," expressing that when we know ourselves authentically, we can quickly recognize situations in which we feel uncomfortable. If we then apply that knowing constructively, we can allow our discomfort to propel us toward making changes within the systems that disproportionately produce discomfort.

Much of how I teach (and why) stems directly from the discomfort I have experienced as a design student, a consumer of visual media, and an end-user of design objects.

One of the most uncomfortable parts of my experience as a design student happened in critiques of my work—discomfort in critiques is a near-universal experience for art and design students— but the particular discontent I felt was not run-of-mill. In the critique of an assignment that was used to demonstrate an understanding of “swiss international stlye” I received high praise and acclaim from one of my favorite professors. With each compliment a knot twisted in my stomach tighter and tighter. My takeaway from that critique was that I could design like dead white guys very well—but that’s not what I had hoped to be great at. The knot twisted into an anxiety over the thought that I might be expected to keep showing up as a great dead white guy, or that the acclaim from my professor might begin to silence my authentic voice. I decided after that crit that I was no longer going to wait for an invitation to show up as “me” in my work.

In the following project, I chose third-wave feminism as a starting point for content and aesthetics, I barred myself from using any of the design tropes that served me well in previous projects. Instead of minimalist, I went maximalist. I ran design experiments that filtered stories of third-wave feminism through an aesthetic lens of vintage-style pastries, riot grrrrrl zines, and lingerie, I was beginning to explore my design voice and allowing myself to be moved by my knowing and discomfort.

For most of the project, I felt as if I was teaching myself, as every leg of my process seemed to confuse and frustrate my professor. Week after week I would bring in piles of design experiments: there were glossy magazine collages, hand-sewn format experiments, silk-screened lace, and a cacophony of brightly colored typographic layouts that included a typewriter font, swashes, and the maligned Fraktur typeface in hot pink. “I have no idea what you are doing.” he said, the next week it was “I’m not even sure if this is design.” in a group critique the most memorable piece of feedback came form my friend Lance who said “It’s really girly.” in a tone that communicated confusion and disgust. At that moment a hot knife rushed up from my “knowing” and I replied “It is ‘girly” and that’s appropriate because the project is for a female audience, and it is about being female.”

After that critique I went and sat in my car in the parking garage, pulled my jacket over my face and ugly cried. I cried in frustrated understanding. These guys had NO CLUE what I was doing, and couldn’t offer any constructive feedback—because it wasn’t about them. For once they were not at the center and the result of their discomfort was to not even try to understand—but to wholesale opt out of engaging with the actual work. Periodt*.

I felt so much anger over being a woman who had just spent the better part of year being asked to step into the body of a dead white dude, to understand his experience, and then design like him—without any reciprocation.

With a couple of weeks left on the project I decided to no longer listen to the “men” and instead seek out feedback from someone who could understand what I was doing — Jessica Wexler had been my professor the previous semester, and she was a woman that I could identify with. We carried the same experience of being engaged with and molded by third-wave feminism. After a couple of meetings with her, with the benefit of her intimate knowing, I was able to synthesize the diasporic explorations into something whole. My discomfort gave way to joy and affirmation. I was able to see that I knew what I was doing the whole time, and how important that knowing was to my process. The result of this labor was a publication titled “Le Super Cake” it was loud, busy, sexy, joyful, celebratory—and still gloriously confusing to dudes.

While I ultimately found triumph in this scenario, there were many points where (without my knowing) I might have given up on my voice, I might have dropped out of school entirely. Furthermore, this process of centering my voice in my work, and presenting it for feedback in critique never improved (I’ll tell you the story of my Vicente Fernandez album art project another day). In every instance I sought out a member of my community who was a more seasoned designer and received their expert feedback (thank you Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Hazel Mandujano, and Ana Llorente).

What was a problem then, continues to be a problem now. Who holds the center in the critique process? Often the facilitator of the critique, the all-knowing professor holds the center. This dynamic is deeply rooted in the structure of design pedagogy, where the professor is a one-way conduit through which information, aesthetics, histories, and practices are passed on to students.

In my discomfort, I am advocating for professors to de-center themselves in the teaching and learning process, to offer themselves some relief from having to be the infallible expert. I’m not advocating for taking your hands completely off the wheel—there is definitely a time and place in the process for expertise, and guidance—but I think we would be much better guides if we allowed our students to teach us some things too. I realize that in all the critiques where I felt discomfort—my professors were feeling it too.

There is an expectation that we can give expert feedback and that the knowledge we received from the previous generation is sufficient enough for us to speak fluently. We have the grammar until we don’t. It’s an “oh shit” kind of feeling that arises when a student centers a language or experience that is unfamiliar to us. We panic in the expectation that we aught to understand well enough to speak intelligently—and we don’t. Too often the professorial response to this discomfort is to reject, gloss over, or generalize feedback in a way that contributes to erasure of the student.

In my discomfort, I am advocating for professors to approach unfamiliar student stories as you would a research and understanding phase in any other design process and begin with mad question asking. Semiotics is one of the easiest entry points to a work, and often the only thing we are missing is the context attached to a symbol within a culture that is unfamiliar to us. When we ask our students questions we decenter ourselves and preserve visibility for them. We instill confidence in their knowledge and their expertise. People love to tell their stories, to talk about themselves and their culture. In place of the fear of being “found out” as a non-expert, you will find a deeper and richer experience in which everyone in the room walks away with knowledge that has not been captured in historical canon.

*Periodt, pronounced and spelled with a final T, is generally credited to Black English. It has been specifically attributed to Southern Black gay slang. The final T of periodt follows a pattern in Black English where a final D can become pronounced as a T or a form of one. (If you want to get technical, this is known as final obstruent devoicing or glottalization—aka T Flapping.) Sunn M’Cheaux

02.09.24

Self Portraits

I read a quote in high school that said “Every work of art is a self-portrait” and I suddenly had an intimate entry point to artists work. Instead of asking “What is this about” I had a juicier question “What are you hiding in there?” I found that the more I learned about an artist, through reading memoirs and biographies, the more I was able to decode the secrets hidden in plain sight. Pablo Picasso used abstraction to paint portraits of his mistresses—he’s not a genius, he’s a liar! I find the more I understand the human psyche, the more I am able to decode the work even without a biography, and the more I am willing to look at the subconscious parts of myself through my own work. Self portraits give us the distance we need to look at the messy parts, or our shadow-self with compassion and curiosity, this is why I love making them. The revelation that exists in that practice, the fearless and open dialogue with my subconscious self is a practice of self-love as opposed to self-rejection disguised as self-protection. In that realm I also find beautiful surprises, stories, and passions passed down from relatives and ancestors.

Creation is spiritual communion. It’s where I see and hear the voice of GOD, the voices of my ancestors, and the voice of every version of myself that I have been. I want to continue my narrative writing practice and make more self-portraits from those stories.