INSPIRATIONS: Trailblazers

While working on a project in Texas, I visited The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Its exceptional international collection of modern and contemporary art, including Gwendolyn B. Barrett's cover art apropos of the Holiday season pictured below, is housed in a newly constructed gallery that is itself a paragon of engineering and ingenuity. The building's atrium recalls NYC's iconic Guggenheim Museum, arguably the crowning achievement of Frank Lloyd Wright's late career. The Guggenheim is where I go to refuel my creative engine and find inspiration amongst the canvases. 

Art has the proven capacity to stimulate the mind, improve mood, induce pleasure, relieve stress and even speed recovery. It is both a reflection of the times and a signal of the future. More than that, as Edgar Degas opined, “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”

As a designer, artist and proprietor of a Black-owned studio, my stringent standards of excellence, innovation and integrity are driven in part by societal dictates that I, as a Black man, be twice as good, smart, diligent, dependable, talented and hard-working as my white counterparts in order to achieve equity or professional success in this industry - - this all while facing unrelenting scrutiny, rejection, discrimination and razor-thin tolerances for error. 

The barriers that once kept Black people from entering this profession or achieving mainstream success were rooted in racist laws and policies that barred them from schools and prevented them from taking licensing exams or belonging to professional organizations. Those barriers have been officially lifted, yet the field remains conspicuously white and segregated. As of 2022, the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards reported that of 121,603 licensed architects working in the U.S., only 2% are Black and only 566 are Black women. (NPR, March 2023)

I think of pioneers like Beverly Lorraine Greene, America's first licensed Black female architect (1942), who was hired for the Stuyvesant Town housing project here in Manhattan, a development African Americans were forbidden to live in at the time. 

Or like Harold Curtis Brown, a kindred New York-based interior designer who studied at the New School of Design and conceived the famed Cotton Club and Central Park South's Hotel Navarro which would later become one of Ritz-Carlton's first hotels. In the 1930's, when Black creatives were routinely refused hire by prospective clients and denied credit for the work they did produce solely based on the color of their skin, Brown decided to “cross over”, or pass as white so he could make more money.

The impulse within me to create beauty in a bleak world is as intense and enduring as my instinct to speak and to illuminate through my platform and my portfolio. It is my hope to be an exemplar through visibility and conviction to aspiring minority creatives who come behind me to boldly contribute their talents to shape a better world to come.