Don’t let what you might do blind you to what you’ve already done — I’m mesmerized watching Eva Kalien’s reels of her mixed media sketches, but inevitably I want her to have stopped way sooner than she does. I am drawn to some of Eva Kitok’s early embroidery work, where parts of the composition are outlined with stitch, but otherwise incomplete. …

Your favorite work can tell you a lot about your next step. — In July, I will celebrate 25 years of working as a designer. Like many folks, the pandemic has prompted me to take a look back on my career and a look forward to the future. What pieces spark joy at having done them, and what does that tell me? Over…

A lesson from Mom — Note: My mother passed away March 26, 2001. This is a memoir-as-letter to her. I never told you about the sit-in I staged at the baseball diamond. But I was following in your footsteps. Or, more accurately, foot stops. I remember hearing the story of the time you staged a…

What would a future you find excavating the layers of past work? — I recently went down the rabbit hole of the Wayback Machine. My coworkers and I were coming up with concepts for an ugly sweater, and one of us pulled up snapshots of our company’s home pages over the years. Yikes. …

Listen up, millennials! — Gather around the campfire, young’uns. Let me tell you a spooky story about members of the ancient tribe known as the landline natives. When I was 3, my family moved from the city of Buffalo to a rambler in a new suburban subdivision, a house built by my mother’s brother…

Just when you thought there wasn’t a point… — I have 700+ pieces of art in boxes in my bedroom closets. That’s 100 times the number of years I’ve taken part in the Instagram-based #100DayProject. One hundred or more: • 4-inch square analog collages • 6-inch square fabric collages • Photo haikus • Re-imagined urban architecture digital montages That’s…

The biggest surprise about aging: Distracti… — About 10 years ago, I designed a set of souvenir postcards from the mythical country of Climacterica, as a gentle insider joke about life during “the change” for its female citizens. (For the men reading this, I’m talking about menopause). Each postcard used a dictionary entry as a springboard for…

At least, not for buttoned-up me — A Twitter survey: Who cried during their dissertation writing? Apparently, I’m an outlier. I don’t remember crying. Not about this, not about anything. I learned as a child to stifle negative emotions. What do I remember about writing my dissertation? Having the cleanest ever grad student apartment, thanks to my…