I Was There w/ Dr. Cheryl D. Miller - Part 1

Cheryl Miller: 00:00:10

The whole DMV is rich in the African American community and we got a variety of fine art degrees with schools that had no graphic design programs.

The nearest was MICA in Baltimore and I saw portfolio after portfolio, people bringing me painting portfolios, sculptor portfolios, fine art, photography, nothing specific to graphic design. And what I saw was the disenfranchisement. It broke my heart that nobody told my community, you gotta go to school for this.

I felt responsible because I had a job and the difference between me and any of my peers that are looking for a job, I had a graphic design education. My community was the greatest suffering because they didn't know.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:01:00

Welcome to a special two part episode. Of the Works in Process podcast featuring.

The one and only Dr. Cheryl Holmes Miller. In part one, we begin our in depth conversation with Dr.

Cheryl, exploring her history of documentation and the importance of preserving her work. Stay tuned for part two where we'll dive deeply into Cheryl's legacy in the field. Now let's get started. What's up everyone?

Welcome to Works in Process, the podcast about uncovering creative methodologies from people doing inspiring work. In each episode, whether I'm talking to a designer, an educator, an entrepreneur, we learn the hows and whys behind what they do.

Through experiences and determination, my guests explore the techniques and inspiration that have helped them navigate their creative careers. I'm your host, designer and educator, George Garrasegi Jr.

Join me as I continue to elevate the creative process by shifting the focus to how we work over what we produce. Today is kind of a big deal for me. I have the honor of speaking with Dr. Cheryl D. Holmes Miller.

She has been on my bucket list for this podcast for a while and I'm so excited to talk to her about her book here, where the Black designers are. Dr. Miller is a leading voice in diversity, equity and inclusion in graphic design industry.

She's an American bipoc communication designer, writer, artist, activist, theologian, and best known as a design justice advocate and decolonizing historian.

She lectures widely and has been a professor at Art Center, College of Design, University of Texas, Austin School of Design and Creative Technologies, Howard University and the University of Connecticut. Dr.

Miller has also been awarded an AIGA medal, a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award as a design visionary and she's an inductee into the One Club for Creativity's hall of Fame and an IBM Honoree Design Scholar. Welcome, Dr. Miller. Can I call you Cheryl or should I call you.

Cheryl Miller: 00:02:49

Oh, George? Absolutely.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:02:53

Thank you again for agreeing to be on a show. I can't wait to hear more about the book and the process behind it and the impetus. But before we get into it all, let's do some fun Icebreakers.

Are you ready?

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:04

Okay.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:06

Coffee or tea?

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:07

Coffee.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:08

Toast or a bagel?

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:10

Toast.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:11

The DMV area or the New York City? Metro area?

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:14

New York City.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:16

Designing or documenting?

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:18

How about designing documents?

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:20

You want to have a little bit of both. And past or future?

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:24

Future.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:25

Lovely. And then next I do some word associations. Right. So what's the first thing you think of when you hear these words? Creativity.

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:32

God given.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:33

Determination.

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:34

Persistence.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:36

Business.

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:37

Money.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:38

Failure.

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:39

Not my vocabulary.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:41

Community.

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:43

Us.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:44

Education.

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:45

Empowerment.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:47

Mistakes.

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:48

Get over it, don't make them get over it.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:55

Skills.

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:56

All you can get.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:03:57

History.

Cheryl Miller: 00:03:58

You have to know where you're going.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:04:00

Opportunity.

Cheryl Miller: 00:04:01

You better take it.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:04:02

Accessibility.

Cheryl Miller: 00:04:04

Everyone. Future is ours to see.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:04:07

And last but not least, process.

Cheryl Miller: 00:04:09

Just do it.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:04:11

I love it.

Cheryl Miller: 00:04:12

Thank you.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:04:12

I like this fun way of starting the episode. So we heard at the top of your bio. At the top of the episode. Right.

I read a truncated one because I think if I read a full one, we might be here for a while.

Cheryl Miller: 00:04:21

Yeah, I know.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:04:23

And for my listeners, I don't know if you know Dr. Miller and if you don't, please pause this episode. Go do some research and then come back.

Go look up her articles as part of AIGA Print, even her master's design thesis. Get yourself ready for what we're going to be talking about.

You're the ultimate super hyphenate designer, writer, activist, theologian, and deconalizing historian. Do you feel like you're all of these titles all the time? When did you notice that?

Cheryl Miller: 00:04:50

Always. It's a sense of call. I'm called to. This I recently shared with Eric over at Think. And Dorie Tunstall interviewed me for Fast Company.

You don't do what I do without call and purpose because you'd have given up long time ago. And so it's taken a lifetime to do this work. I started young and it's the only thing I ever wanted to do. I didn't know the journey was so complex.

When I was a child, I was inspired very early. At three, my godmother was a painter. I always tell the story. I won my first award. I became award winning when I was 10.

It put me in a zone before the civil rights era where I was kind of like the first kid. I've always been in this first thing. I started young.

When I think of visual art artists and African Americans, I think of the toll of visual art conversation. Painters, sculptors. I launched out into this design Area where there weren't many of us. We didn't have a rich history of it.

Not like we are as visual artists, painters, sculptors, collages. We African Americans have a rich visual arts story. I got out in the first Wright Zone because I was young. I haven't done anything else.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:06:08

I've been doing this the whole time.

Cheryl Miller: 00:06:10

Never did anything else, never studied anything else, never worked at something else. In order to do this. I've been about this. I don't know anything else. I don't have a memory without this.

And with a sense of that call, again, inner direction. I'll go do this, go do that. I get a sense of urgency for the things that I see to do.

And so what we have now is a prolific career of seeing things that needed to be done. And nobody's paid me to do it. I just had the wherewithal to see that needs to be done. And so we've done it.

And now I have this prolific CV of all these things that I felt needed to be done.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:06:51

Right.

Cheryl Miller: 00:06:51

So we've done it.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:06:52

I've been a fan of your work before I officially even knew what that it was your work. Right.

The multiple print articles, the impact you've had on my contemporaries, I think was after the first state of black design that I reached out to you on LinkedIn. And you were so accommodating. Right.

And even led to, you know, you asking me to jury some senior thesis at Lesley University with Professor Christina Lamour Sansone. And I was so honored to be on a panel with Eddie Opar and Trey Seals, people that I was obviously big fans of and never knew until that day.

And then I met you officially last year at the AIGA National Conference in New York. And it was such a great thing to take all this virtual communication and kind of have this more communal moment.

Can I ask you what it was like, this idea of you being. For me, that conference was a lot of people being there after a long time of COVID Right. Not being able to see each other.

And this being one of those big moments, but also you being there.

And for me, it was bridging the gap between your contemporaries, people like Stephen Heller, Debbie Millman, Michael Beirut, but also connecting that to people like Silas Monroe, Kalina Sales, Forrest Young. What was it like to be there in those situations?

Cheryl Miller: 00:08:05

It started with my main memory. I listened to the things I remember because in the process of living, we hear a lot of things and we don't remember.

Things resonate each day, you know, like, oh, wow, that was A really good meal, but I can't remember. Oh, it's just, you know, it was the sauce or something. Something sticks with you.

I was sitting next to Kalina, maybe on the right of the theater, and four rows back, I started tearing up. Steve put up a picture of Paul Rand holding his son. And I said, nobody knows. I can't imagine anybody else in this building that knows that.

That's Paul Rand holding Steve's son. Steve's son was there as a grown man during the documentary conversation. And I kept saying I was here, too.

And it was a New York guidepost moment to some of what we perceive as a standard to design and community. This was your finest. I sat next to Kalina and I asked her after, did you worry about me? She says, well, I saw you kind of tear up.

Yeah, but you have to ask her what she thought. I was there, too. And I'm not up there. I'm down here.

And when Silas and the Next Generation were up, I'm like, I don't know how the stage was curated, but if you're going to talk about this era, I don't recall. Not one of my peers other than me could have sat with them. And I thought, well, this is pretty much the way it's always been.

I got a fight to say that we were here, Dorothy was here, the story was here, and they jumped over a generation in the next theater event, whoever curated it, they went straight to Silas. They went straight to rightfully so. But the Black Elder who was right there. I'm contemporary with Mike and Paula.

They all know me in the firm and aig, and I've been with this a long time. So I always have to be mindful that no matter what I do, I'm always kind of missing. And I have people now say, I never knew.

I don't know anything about you. I'm like, okay, it's nice to meet you. And so to be an advocate for the advocacy of my message, I have to stay with it all the time.

Nobody's thinking about me like that. No one thinks about me and the message. Unless I'm like, I'm all over social media. You're going to know my friends. You're gonna know this history.

You're gonna know this book. This is a rare moment in publishing my story. Nobody else has this story. Eyewitness, Right.

And my editor, we worked hard, painstakingly, to footnote every memory. I'm a detailer. If I made a mistake, it's because I made a mistake. But it's not because I'm coming up with fake news. I have a team on my footnotes.

I don't know who curated the show, but I would appreciate it have been there too. Because I was there too. You skipped over those of us who are left in my generation. And you skipped over to Silas and the gentleman that wrote Meg's.

And there was. I forget who else it was.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:11:22

The person who was doing people's graphic design archive.

Cheryl Miller: 00:11:25

Okay, so when you're going to talk about the origins of black and brown coming out of mid century, you forgot me, you forgot Dorothy. I'm carrying her message. And that's why I pitched to have the breakout. I knew I wasn't going to be considered like that.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:11:42

Right.

Cheryl Miller: 00:11:43

I already know it.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:11:44

Right. I was with you on the second panel discussion with Silas and the other people were there. Me, Kalina, were sitting next to you.

And this is why I bring it up. I sensed exactly what. You just verbalized that feeling. And knowing that this other breakout room was going to happen probably right after.

Cheryl Miller: 00:12:00

This, I pitched the breakout room for you all. You submit the proposals, they decide who's going to have the presentation.

I knew that in this 50 year moment of celebrating New York and Pentagram, I had to pitch my proposal so that you all could at least come to see each other. I assume responsibility to make sure that we're remembered.

Not necessarily I'm remembered, but that you're remembered because I brought those that have cherished with me in relationship. I never call mentors and mentees and stuff like that. I don't like all of that.

We connect and I give you what I have and you love me back and we carry on. Go on and do something with it or don't do anything with it. It's up to you. I'm not much on titles and I'm not much on that mentee mentor thing.

Look, I met you and I want to tell you what I know. You take it or leave it, right? And so these were guys that I've had this type of relationship with and I wanted you to meet my friends.

So nobody really asked me questions. They. It wasn't about me, it was about, I want you to meet each other, I want you to network.

I want you to see that we are here in this conversation too. I think I opened up the set saying, I want you to know I was here too. This is your history. I write about Dorothy Hayes. She was here too.

And if I don't tell you, you might not know. And I want you to remember that we were Here too. And so are you.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:13:25

Right.

That's one of the things I remember the most about that side room conversation was you putting all these other people on a platform and letting us know about that. And there was this sense of definitely, we were here too. Right.

And one of the things that I just thought about right now was when you hear usually about decolonizing design, usually it talks about like this breakdown. But every time I think about what you're doing, you're actually just wanting to be included, not tearing down other things.

You're looking to say, we were here too.

Cheryl Miller: 00:13:57

And my courses and work now I use my story as an example. What is your story? You have to do the work. And that's what I've done for my community. I've done the work necessary to say, we were here too.

And so are many the generation of designers and scholars and students now and practitioners. We have to stand up and do the work to say, we're here, now. We're here too.

I'm really excited about the community that you teach, the community that I still have a reach for because I want them to be bold enough. And so my work is just whether you remember anything of my story or not, I wanted to be an example that you can do this too.

Not only were your ancestral origins and ethnicities and where you come from before you got to America, or whether you're in America or whatever, your story and your histories were here too. And so my work is to teach those classes and fill up my Google Doc with your papers, because you're the ones that are going to be published.

You're the ones that, you know, have the next story. You're the ones that have the next practices. And my boldness inspire you to get your voice out there. That's all I'm doing.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:15:11

Right.

Cheryl Miller: 00:15:11

So the answer to your question is, the minute I saw Paul Rand hold Steal Steve's baby, I said, there's not another person in here that knows that. And I felt like I had a responsibility. You're looking at an important artifact. That's Paul Rand. We won't let Paul Rand die in our cannon.

I want you to know that's him. I wanted to stand up and say, you guys, that's Paul Rand.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:15:31

Right. Not some random person.

Cheryl Miller: 00:15:34

Right. And it's Steve's slide deck, and that's history. And I guess what I was saying is I was there too.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:15:40

Yeah. And I think that's such a resonating thing, just personally being part of that experience, but also feeling that air in the room.

I think a lot of us who were with you in those side rooms, seeing you sign all these books because you're writing the forwards to the Black Anthology of Design or the Races on Talk. We were all like, okay, there's something missing. This conversation is missing. So I kind of want to transition. Right.

This idea of this, what was missing. And you were here, too, thinking about that moment where you're like, oh, I have something coming out next year.

And so I want to talk a little bit about the origin story of this book and talk about it in a way where we're looking at it not just in just your history, but in the way it's produced, what you decided to put in and leave out, and obviously the impetus, what personal frustrations or desires during your own personal journey started to commit you to this deep research and advocacy scene in your book here where the black Designers Are.

Cheryl Miller: 00:16:37

Well, before I came to New York, I was in the DMV area. This is not current conversation. This is civil rights era, you know, when they killed Martin Luther King era. So much was going on.

I was a teen, and when I went to school, I left Washington. Then when I came back, Phil and I got married and we both graduated in 74. We came 73, we got married and we graduated college. 74.

And so right there, that's four, five years after they killed King. We just didn't have a presence in the business in Washington D.C. because of its geography. It's a government town. It's an association town.

Then the programs you had, Howard, Marilyn Yu, University of Maryland, American U, Georgetown, and Corcoran School of the Arts. Everybody just had a fine arts program. Okay, okay. And this is still early, the process of understanding how we study design. Design.

And in the book I talk, I even quote Christina Academia. And the BFA was really kind of an art college coming out of the 60s, 50s and 60s. That was a new thing.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:17:50

Right.

Cheryl Miller: 00:17:51

Because you learned by apprenticeships. There was no getting a BFA for this stuff. So the whole business is young. The geography in the area has low numbers of black folks in it.

And the closest school that had a program was MICA because they're art school. DC Wasn't. It was government association.

You had to pass a social service exam to work for the government, no matter whether you were an artist or not. It was a local and federal government town with a few corporations. Marriott, which started like hot shops.

Hot shops was like a little in and out burger place like that. And they Marriott turned into hotels M and M, Mars Candy. There weren't any corporations like that.

And so everything was government contract, association, lobbyists, organizations like that.

When I came out of school, it took me a minute, but we got married and I got my first job at wtop, which was a broadcast graphic artist, where I met Bob Johnson and BET Story. My first job, I was in television. And I did television all the way till I got to New York.

I was a broadcast designer for 10 years before coming to New York City. In that 10 years, out of the few black designers who had jobs actually doing graphic design. So we had Milton Clipper.

Carol Porter was an artist there. Another gentleman, Mr. Ford, I can't call his name. And they were all. There were media jobs, as I can recall.

And I had a friend that worked for the telephone company. There weren't many of us. I always been this kind of standout figure.

I would see job seekers with fine art portfolios from neighboring schools trying to get graphic design jobs. The ones that would break my heart the most was the black community.

I did everything that I could do to conduct portfolio reviews, guide people, network. And most of what I would say is, you gotta go back to school. The whole DMV is rich in the African American community.

And we got a variety of fine art degrees with schools that had no graphic design programs. The nearest was mica in Baltimore. And I saw portfolio after portfolio.

People bringing me painting portfolios, sculptor portfolios, fine art, photography, nothing specific to graphic design. And what I saw was the disenfranchisement. It broke my heart that nobody told my community, you gotta go to school for this.

It hurt my heart, years of it. I conducted portfolio reviews and I started coaching and speaking into the lives of young designers. My whole career.

I felt responsible because I had a job. And the difference between me and any of my peers there looking for a job. I had a graphic design education.

My community was the greatest suffering because they didn't know. So 10 years of seeing portfolios that had no future.

I cataloged the pain and discomfort of seeing a computer not prepared to address the future of what it is now. This is out of the civil rights era. We're turning a corner. I'm in a government town. There are no corporations.

And so it was a survival of the fittest. And those who had designed degrees, mostly despite color, were able to work. But there was a whole huge community running around, lost.

And because I opened my door and shed some love. And somehow, too, I'm here doing the same thing. My first one, I love her.

She'll shake her head, she'll Tell you, Chairperson Robin lynch was really one of my first at Howard University. I was her thesis coach. I remember she did a thesis on the grid. And when she finished, I said, robin, you gotta go to school. She listened.

See, the key is to listen. Listen is more than hearing. Listening means that you're hearing, you're doing, you're taking action on the advice, right? Okay.

It's not that I don't know it all, but if you take action on something I tell you, I guarantee you it's going to work. Oh, she's had a fabulous career. She went to Yale. She hated me for telling her the truth.

Went to Yale, came back to New York full up the ranks of creative vice president, kind of work with the record industry, a couple of them. And now as chair designer, SUNY purchase. And so she's one of my first to be almost looking at those retirement years now, but she's one of the first.

She needed more education to compete and she grunted at me. They must have had an alumni day or something. And she and David. John Walker took a picture in Yale studios and sent it to me.

John is out of my tribal generation now. Robin was out of my tribal generation then. I don't do mentor, mentee. My buddies, my younger ones have grown up.

I'm proud to say we all have like a family. We all have the same mo. I'm so proud of those that have spent time with me.

They're award winning, they got more awards ever, and it's because they put in the work. Carol Miller's is in the story of family in so many lives, and then it doubles down. I've got grandchildren and great grandchildren.

They don't even know where their cares come from. So I've been kind of given this, whatever this recipe is for love of design. When design doesn't love you. Yeah, when design doesn't love you.

I've been giving design love for a long time, and it's come back to bless me with so much honor and respect. I've taken nothing for the journey. I've never had a grant. Nobody pays me. It's a call whether I'm recognized or not.

There's work that has had to be done. I've been a blessed woman to be able to be in a position to get the work done.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:24:02

So let me ask you, you mentioned this idea. It's about the listening, which I think is really interesting. And when I read this book, this book reads like oral history.

It doesn't feel like you're reading a book. It feels like you're being told a story. How much of that is by design or by the nature of our culture?

And I mean that bipoc culture where a lot of stories have been passed down. And that's kind of the nature of what we do versus having stuff in the history books.

Cheryl Miller: 00:24:26

I'm a memoirist with intentionality.

When I look at childhood reading, when you want to write and be an author, a lot of times the first thing you know, they always say, be a reader if you want to be a writer. My early books I resonated with the Diary of Anne Frank. These are the books that just come through D.C. public School.

We're going to read and the Color of Water. And I love memoirs. To me, they're like living epistles or a living eulogy.

Really good eulogist will go over someone's life and give you the bottom line so you don't have to live it and do it. A real good eulogist will eat the fish and spew out the bones of someone's life and tell you what the purpose was so that you don't have to do it.

The genre of memoir has so much wisdom. The difference between a memoir and an autobiography is that it encapsulates particular period of time. It doesn't tell the whole life story.

I have two memoirs, okay? And so as a reader, I enjoy, because they're telling me true stories.

If you've lived through something that you're going to give me some wisdom, I don't have to. You don't tell me twice. I love memoirs. I have a dear friend that is acknowledged in my first book, Black Coral.

I didn't know that she was an acquisition editor for memoirs. I met her when I first moved to New York. Her name is Carol Hall. She's retired now. She was with Simon Schuster and Wiley. And I knew her socially.

I used to ride the train with her and talk to her. Oh, I got a story, I got a story, I got a story. Almost my whole life and career knowing her.

And finally after my mother died, it's something about when people die. It gives you a permission to. I don't know, it's like heaven opens up. You get records, you get answers.

You'd be surprised after someone's death, the things that come to light. And we had so much family, racial history, mystery that plagued my family.

You know, I'm part Filipino, part Native American, part African American, and I'm white.

I have four grandparents, four different places and most unique, both all, you know, I have four families that sit at four Different Thanksgiving tables. And they all resonate to different cultures and different races. I had to unpack that.

One of the things I had to unpack in my first memoir is, where's my Filipino family? It was driving my mother crazy. The story of the Filipinos coming, how they got to St. Thomas, how in the world is she Filipino?

And how'd she get to, you know, how she. On my birth certificate, Negro? I mean, this is really insane. And I got involved telling this story to my friend for years.

It wasn't until my mother passed that I found the Filipinos, her father, birth records, birth certificates, everything. And I wrote the document. Carol helped me. Editor. I had three editors, learned the process of editing.

e year that Obama was running: 2008

I've always been one. When you get an obstacle, you make books for people. So I made an imprint, which required getting my book accounts, printers, and all of that stuff.

I had to do it for myself. We published a book, and little did I know through the whole process that Carol was acquisition editor for memoirs.

She taught me how to write a memoir, and that was my first one. We started working on the manuscript, and the first thing she took my manuscript. It was about 400 pages of research and so forth.

And this is where I document all of my Afro, Ghanaian ancestry, and I'm Danish, and all of that stuff that comes to this conversation. She said, pick five memoirs, read them and come back while I read this manuscript. I said, okay. And that I did.

And when I came back, she said, what did you learn? And then she said, she gave me back the 400 pages. And she says, write it again.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:28:35

Insane.

Cheryl Miller: 00:28:36

Yeah, but I'm a great memorist now. And I upticked my writing from studying at seminary. A whole nother story. How in the world I get over there. But that really.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:28:48

That's a whole nother story.

Cheryl Miller: 00:28:49

But it's. All these steps all have pulled me to this place of scholarship and documentation.

And so from the genre of learning memoir as genre, I was coached by the best, and I did the work plus the research that is pivotal in my work. So I got into this. Where in the world did we come from? And why are we disenfranchised? And why are these kids coming to my desk all the time?

By the time I got to New York, I faced graduation at Pratt grad school. Eitan Manasseh was the chair. I'll Never forget it.

He had a loft across from Lincoln center, and they were calling all the design students in for graduation. He said to me, cheryl, we have talked about you in this program, and you cannot design a project for graduation. I said, I'm in design school.

I'm graduating. Design program, graduate school. I can't. And I'll never forget. He looked right at me. He says, that would be too easy for you.

You need to make a contribution to the industry. Life had pivoted me. I talk about it in the book. I got recruited to risd and there was so much going on that I didn't know what I know now.

And that's what the book is about. I'm tracking just teenagers walking through an assignment that I didn't know I was being called into. I just wanted to draw and paint, man.

This one way deep. And I'm like, oh, my God. I walked into a tsunami of all kinds of racial tension and prejudice.

And I'm like, man, I just left DC hand dancing and wanting to go to college and driving around with my convertible in Miller. I mean, you know, it wasn't way deep. And it got deep. And so all of this. My father died on me.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:30:44

I went up. I read that, right?

Cheryl Miller: 00:30:45

Yeah. He died on me. I'm like, man. Well, I knew it. He was a chain smoker. Then my research, doing the first memoir.

He would light a cigarette, forgetting that he had one burning. That's how bad he smokes. And I came home. He took me up to RISD by Thanksgiving. I came home. They told me, your father be dead in 10 months.

They had pancreatic cancer. The cigarettes went right to his belly.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:31:07

Oh, man.

Cheryl Miller: 00:31:08

Yeah. And two weeks before I was to go back to risd, he died. And my mother was a young widow with my brother. I said, I can't go back. I can't go to Howard.

I can't go to America, and I can't come back. I don't know where I'm going, but I can't go back to Washington to study. And so Michael was there, and the deans called.

The next thing I know, I was at Micah. And the first day, Dr. Leslie King Hammond, she had just graduated John Hopkins, brand new PhD, art history, African American History and an adjunct.

And they put me in her arms. They said, this kid is supposed to be in Providence. Her father just died. She's in Baltimore. Take her.

I never had a design mentor or take an interest in me until I met Elisa Zamir. So that's a long traveling not to have Any design influence or anybody that thought about me with design.

But Leslie always thought about me with academics and writing. So when I came out of Aton's, Miller, you're not designing your graduate last requirement. And back then, we had pay phones and flip phones.

I remember I came down his loft and grabbed a pay phone and I called her. I had my little long distance card called. I said, Dr. King, these people are not letting me graduate with a design project.

And then she says, well, you know what you got to do. I said, yeah, I know what I got to do. I gotta write my way across that stage or we're not going across stage. So she'd been my academic coach.

I learned the rigor of scholarship with her as a reader. We knocked out this infamous Transcending the problems of the black graphic designer to success in the marketplace that has taken a life of its own.

It's the thesis that just keeps giving right. By the time I got to seminary, Union became my client.

I was designing a publication, and I got involved, and the admissions officer encouraged me to apply. And I'm like, I'm being invited to seminary. And that is. And the story in there, I have to leave that for my Women in Design book. What happened?

I gotta leave you something else. Right. But this is Columbia University. All of academia up there, they don't pride themselves necessarily on making ministers.

They want you to be historians and scholars, intellectuals, right? So I got into Union and thrived.

And I learned not only how to do the history, not only how to do the scholarship, but I learned the different theologies. And seminary is not religion. You better know, it's not Bible college.

And so you better know some faith before you go in there, because you'll lose it otherwise. Up there, you gotta be thinker, a writer. You gotta read a couple of languages. Greek, Hebrew, German, French. Learn, get your spark notes.

Figure out something. You gotta work with biblical scholarship and archives. I learned the rigor of this and became inspired by the liberation theologians that were there.

So Cornel West, Dolores Williams and Katie Cannon, and. And a whole string of the early womenists who were the answers to the feminist movement.

You know, there's a book, White Women's Christ, Black Women's Jesus Doing Justice Work.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:34:31

I mean, there's so much impacted in there.

Cheryl Miller: 00:34:33

Yeah. So you're studying this as a course of curriculum. And so all of this is upticking what I already had been doing.

And having gone through BFA, MFA, logically, I would have wanted a PhD but the disciplines don't transfer over. I Couldn't get on a PhD. I would have had to start over and get a Master's of Divinity and then get a PhD.

So I ended up, instead of going into an art PhD program, I have two masters, okay. And I got invited into the New Testament biblical PhD program because I didn't know I had those skills.

And so when you come into the Master of Divinity program, they spot early. Who can compete? You know, who can do the work, basically? Who can read and write?

Who has the ability and the rigor to be able to do any of the biblical PhD programs? I passed a couple classes and got invited, and I'm like, oh, I didn't know I was that deep.

But I had to do family with Tulip, and we had some other priorities. So I got my mdiv.

And, you know, I had a charge at graduation from our president at the time, and he said, I'm going to give you a charge from Union Theological. Let it be known that when you write and when you speak, let it reflect that you spent time in the walls of Union Theological Seminary. I know it.

That's something that's different. I know it's a gift of God. I don't own it.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:36:05

Right.

Cheryl Miller: 00:36:05

But it got sharpened where Leslie started me off.

I was inspired to get the tenets of history and scholarship and research and doing this justice or making things right by the truth, you find I needed to own my own skillset. So all of it came together, and basically I take care of telling the truth.

The things that I find I paid the price to professionalize occupation and vocation. I had a design scholar that inspired me to produce this work that lives and breathes in our lives, I went about perfecting that skill set for myself.

When I found myself studying theology, which was extremely demanding. It is not Bible college at all. Okay, so here we are.

I have these truths to tell, and I believe, like I said, if I make a mistake, I could make a mistake, but I believe in proving it right.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:37:04

It seems like you've been obviously tasked.

Like you said, the Hand of God designed this idea that taking all these information, all these different points, and figuring out a way to put them together.

I think when you're looking at a book like this, which is memoir, wrapped in history, wrapped in design, and then realizing this call to action from your mfa, your Pratt advocate, to be like, you need to be doing something different, right? You can't just design something.

I think it's really interesting that somebody saw something in you and you kind of initially was like, I just want to Design a project. And you were tasked of making this larger than life accomplishment. And like you said, it's taking a life of its own.

What do you think were the most challenging parts about writing this book? And what do you think were some of the easiest parts?

Cheryl Miller: 00:37:56

The most challenging was to get a publisher to publish me. My peers have loads of books. I won't call their names. I got one of them now running neck and neck with me on Amazon.

And those books are full of pretty pictures. I'm 70. I'll be in December. I'll be 70. Two years. I've been in this business 50 years and you're going to tell me this is my first trade book?

Just go to Amazon and see who's running on bestsellers, first new releases. Listen, if you're on the AIGA conference, I have presentation here where I have my editor from Princeton Architectural.

And she's going to be there and I'm going to ask her, trade is the gatekeepers, okay, of who gets published and who gets seen. And I'm gonna ask her some tough questions.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:38:49

Nice.

Cheryl Miller: 00:38:50

So we just have had a round of scholars that are all behind you, and I keep tearing. I bother them all the time. What's your next book? We got to be more than the first door that opened to print. We got to be more.

You have to keep writing, okay? Or your book will go out of print. Recently, I had someone from Emory Douglas write me in support of a request to the publisher to republish his book.

Okay, These things go out of print. I believe Professor Psyche McFunderquire's African alphabets went out of print, but it's back in print, okay?

So if we don't keep writing and becoming relevant, okay, we go out of print. And so part of my advocacy now is use the books in your syllabus. Decolonize your conversation.

Since I'm one of my favorites, I work with all the time is centered and I have essay number 13 and I'm always pushing. Put the book on your syllabus. I'm in the AIG educators. Put the book on your syllabus. This is how I use it. Put my book on your syllabus. Right.

Every year when they're ordering, it should be like rain required. Weeding the trade. Trade is business. They'll keep printing if people keep buying.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:40:10

Right?

Cheryl Miller: 00:40:11

The hard part was getting published. Terrell Miller getting published.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:40:15

Wow, that seems amazing in the light of everything you've written and all the things you've done. To be like that was the hard part In My head. I was thinking all the other stuff was the hard part. And your.

Cheryl Miller: 00:40:28

Because my life was already written. The story was already written. Believe in the work. And they tell me my pre orders are one of the best for Chronicle books.

So for all the Chronicle books coming out in fall, I'm one of the best selling already. Nobody's even seen the book.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:40:45

What's the easiest part?

Cheryl Miller: 00:40:47

I know what I'm doing and it's me. I was there. I'm here. I wrote the story. The easiest part was I wrote the story.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:40:58

Once you just said I was there. Right. I had to skip over a quote. There's a beautiful quote that I love in this book.

I'm old enough to have lived the history, young enough to remember it, and bold enough to tell you the truth of it all. I was there. I think that's such an amazing opportunity to be like, right. I live in this moment of when it was happening. It's currently happening.

And I can tell you all the history to it in this moment. That's got to be such an empowering perspective to have. And to have all of the information still with you and be able to write a book like this.

Cheryl Miller: 00:41:29

Only have a few peers that are alive. I don't know what they're doing. I don't stay in touch with them. I've run this race pretty much solo, kind of like blinders like this.

I can't worry about who's in my other lanes. I know a lot of people. A lot of people know me, but I only know what I'm supposed to do. And I'm burdened to leave everything I know before I go.

And because I've lived through so much and I write. I'm a writer. My father, when I told him I was going to art school, he said, make sure you keep your academics, you know.

And I'm like, yeah, that's your backup plan. I'm like, yeah, okay. He says, I'll support you, whatever you want to do. Just be the best. Papa said, me, well, you're gonna do it. Be the best. I hope.

And I said that. RISD's keynote graduation, the best or not, but I did my best. So, Papa, I hope you're happy with that. You threw. Threw me under the bus.

She died on me. And put. I had to figure this stuff out. And I'm like, well, I hope you sure are happy, you know, and so I've had to.

And one of the things that I talk about young students, as mixed as I am, it was hard, you know, you're alone, Your whole community looks like something else. I'm 5ft 2. Only my hairdresser knows I'm a black woman and a mysterious colored.

And so you can really bipoc kids can really get in fetal position in a corner. And I'm like, no, no, don't mourn on this. Use it to your advantage. And more importantly, if you're left and forgotten, use the time.

If you're in solitary space, use the time. I found it's okay to be alone because I could get a lot of work done.

Believe it or not, other than the fact that Miller's been with me since he was 16, I didn't have a lot of dating interference. He bought me my first drafting table. It's. It brings him joy to travel with me and help me. He's a businessman taking care of everything for me.

He's my publicist, really. He was right there. And we were kids, you know, you'll see me on Instagram. There's Miller in the background in a cameo.

And now he travels with me when he can. It's a pleasure that I shared this memory with him. We're a design couple. He would come in the evenings after his job and help me with my books.

I had lawyers and accountants, and I didn't have a freelance business. I had a business. And there was a lot of responsibility. He would come and help me with the payroll, accounting and expenses.

And he would say every morning to me, if it seems like I'm all over the place now, you know, everybody you know, I'm seen all over the place is Miller and me. We were in New York. And every morning he would wake up before, you know, we would get ready. I would go to the studio. He would go to work midtown.

He'd say, cheryl, sell. And I said, ah. Said, cheryl, every day. Sell. And by the evening, I'd meet him for dinner someplace. Who'd you sell? Who did you say Cheryl Miller to?

I was like, nobody. He said, cheryl, you gotta sell. Okay, we got a lease. You are paying for computers. You are paying for Macintosh.

You are on the 15th floor or 353 Lexington. You got responsibilities. Sell. And so I learned to tell somebody every day what I'm doing, what I believe in, and why I do, what I do.

The business had a mission. I've done every part of my career in practice, even now as a professor. And writing, I have meaning and purpose.

There's intentionality with everything I do.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:45:08

So in writing a book with such depth and importance requires a lot of persistence. Right. What tools or strategies do you use to keep going? And how can younger creatives apply this to their own processes or long term projects?

Cheryl Miller: 00:45:26

It's got to be in you, George. You know, I do design like Serena played tennis. She'd be losing and you think the whole thing is over.

She'd go in a corner, drink some water, change her racket, take a deep breath, and next thing you know, she won the whole thing. I've seen Serena Williams come up from the grave on the court.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:45:47

She's amazing.

Cheryl Miller: 00:45:49

I do design like Serena played tennis. I can't say anybody can do what I've done. I was made for the journey.

People are asking me questions now that I feel a responsibility to share, you know, some personal truths. My personal truth is I've been at this center. Wow. And God has kept me and I see urgency.

And now since pandemic, and, you know, I'm no spring chicken with it, I have some things I have to do now. I have a lot of support and interest. When I pick up the phone and say, can you help me do this? They want to buy into my projects.

I knock on doors that now won't open because I'm well meaning and I have a track record of it. I'm not new to this. I'm true to this. No, I haven't written. Nobody's given me any money, no grant, no organization, no nothing.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:46:42

Right. Right.

Cheryl Miller: 00:46:43

Which is amazing.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:46:45

Definitely.

Cheryl Miller: 00:46:46

Anybody that knows me knows that I've really been in it to win the war. Which means you got to win a lot of battles.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:46:54

Right.

Cheryl Miller: 00:46:55

Because the truth of it is, unless I'm Michelle Obama, okay. And Judge Jackson just got a memoir, what kind of royalties am I really gonna get here? Not enough to retire on. Okay.

So what's important is I gotta tell the story and pray for the best.

George Garrrastegui Jr.: 00:47:15

What a great conversation. I can't believe you just finished part one of this amazing episode I had with Dr. Cheryl Miller. It was such an honor to be on the call with her.

And I can't wait for you to listen to part two.

Cheryl Miller: 00:47:27

The Works in Process podcast has been created by me, George Garaci Jr. And the content transcriptions and research have been done by OR Schiflinger and Stephanie Arazzo. And this episode has been edited by RJ Basilio.

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Until next time, remember that your work is never final. It's always a works in process. SA.