Diversify Design

If you are in Kalamazoo, the Kalamazoo Institute of Art has a couple of upcoming events this week with the designer Wilson W. Smith III, the first Black designer for Nike.

The rest of us can access his great Ted Talk https://youtu.be/LKAaAZb8UvE?si=bZRpAegHGjeIEztH

I've included a photo here of one of his iconic designs, the '96 Air More Uptempo, made famous by Chicago Bulls player Scottie Pippen.

https://www.beautyinenormousbleakness.com/ is a project by Washington University in St. Louis to research and document some of the Japanese American alumni of their School of Architecture who were incarcerated in internment camps in WWII.

Beauty in Enormous Bleakness Beauty in enormous BleaknessThe Interned Generation of Japanese American Designers “If I hadn’t gone to that kind of place, I wouldn’t have realized the beauty that exists in enormous bleakness.”-Chiura Obata, sumi-e painter, former incarceree, and father of Gyo Obata Clipping of January, 19...

The surprising 2nd life of a 1958 building whose iconic interior was designed by Helen Lui Fong

A Googie Icon Was Supposed to Die. Instead, It Became a Chick-fil-A A 1958 Googie landmark by Helen Liu Fong is meticulously restored in Los Angeles. Discover how preservation and adaptive reuse aligned.

The Crown Makers: Historic and Contemporary Black-Owned Milliners

On certain Sundays in Black America, a hat is not an accessory so much as an announcement.

It enters the room a half-second before the wearer—wide brim first, then the ribbon’s quiet logic, then the feather that seems to have been persuaded into place rather than attached. In the best examples, the hat does what architecture does: it directs attention, establishes scale, implies ceremony. The body becomes a building. The aisle becomes a runway. And for a few hours, in sanctuaries and fellowship halls and repurposed storefronts, the world’s hierarchy feels rearranged.

That rearranging has always been part of the Black milliner’s work. The popular story of American fashion still tends to treat hats as a seasonal flourish—here for Easter, gone by summer—or as a quaint relic from the era when men wore fedoras to work and women wore pillboxes to lunch. But in the places where Black milliners have made their living, hats have been a persistent technology: of self-definition, of respectability politics navigated and subverted, of grief ritualized, of joy engineered.

And, crucially, of entrepreneurship.

Read the full article at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2025/12/21/the-crown-makers-historic-and-contemporary-black-owned-milliners/

From the Smithsonian History Museum, highlighting the work of Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner, a . Video about more of her inventions about her inventions in the comments.

Artist Jacqueline Bishop discuss her tea set which platforms and gives agency to the role of the market woman within the enslaved peoples of the Carribean.

The story behind... The Keeper of All The Secrets Artist Jacqueline Bishop speaks to historian Stella Dadzie about the influences behind her ceramic artwork, now on display in the Queen’s House

A Diversify Design moment from the

Paul Tazewell Is First Black Man to Win Oscar for Best Costume Design for ‘Wicked’ (Gift Article) He won for his work on the Broadway musical adaptation “Wicked.”

With thanks to Dr. Ezra Shales for highlighting this designer for me:

Lewis Temple – NB Historical Society Lewis Temple (ca. 1800-1854) invented the toggle iron, the only tool to have revolutionized the whaling industry in the nineteenth century. Temple was born in Richmond, Virginia, but whether he was enslaved or free at birth and at the time he left Richmond for New Bedford about 1829 is not known. On...

Classic midcentury!

As the first Black American designer to receive the Museum of Modern Art’s Good Design award, A. Joel Robinson was declared “one of the most promising newcomers in the highly competitive field of fabric design” by Ebony Magazine in 1952. His award-winning fabrics were produced by L. Anton Maix Fabrics. 🔴🟡

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Textile, Roman Candles, 1951; Designed by A. Joel Robinson; USA; Linen. This object is part of Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection and is not currently on view.