To many of our listeners, this guest needs no introduction. She is someone who has burst through seemingly impenetrable ceilings – glass and otherwise – to claim leadership roles historically held by men. She rose through the ranks as a strategic industrial designer before returning to ArtCenter, her alma mater, for a transformative stint as Chair of our Product Design department. She was also a driving force behind ArtCenter’s innovative DesignStorm program, through which major brands engage our students in developing new products and ideas. 

The force of nature I’m describing here is none other than ArtCenter Provost and President-elect, Karen Hofmann, who is the first woman to serve in either of those roles. On a personal and professional level, I couldn’t have asked for a better partner in leading this College through the uncertainties of Covid-19 and the enormous logistical, creative, social and emotional adjustments that went along with the transition to remote learning and back. Thanks in no small part to Karen’s dedication and unflagging optimism, we’ve emerged stronger and better equipped to face the future than we’ve ever been. And, come July, Karen will be poised to build on those achievements when she takes office, upon my retirement, as ArtCenter’s first female president.

Throughout her tenure as provost, Karen tackled a set of complex challenges with an eye toward ensuring ArtCenter’s health and longevity. Karen managed to keep calm and carry on, facing each new obstacle with a solution-minded determination that is the hallmark of every great designer. In fact, it was almost as if she was making the case, in real time, that there is no better person to lead ArtCenter through the uncertainties that lie ahead.

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When we first heard from Jackie Amezquita four years ago, she was an ArtCenter Fine Art student on the cusp of graduating. In a raw and revealing interview, she traced the arduous path she’d walked to find the stability she needed to risk everything for her art. 

Her remarkable journey (captured in E14 of Change Lab) began in her native Guatemala, where surging violence and poverty had forced Jackie’s mother to migrate to the United States to provide for her family. At age seventeen, Jackie followed her mother’s footsteps to the US (quite literally), and barely survived a dangerous border crossing. After years spent working as an undocumented nanny to put herself through community college, Jackie eventually earned her Bachelor of Fine Art at ArtCenter. Her thesis project drew international media coverage when she bravely embarked on a second grueling walk from the Tijuana border all the way to Downtown Los Angeles. 

The power of her resilience and grit continues to stand out as an example of a purpose-driven artist whose message brilliantly aligns with her chosen medium. We’ve held her story close to our hearts, and the hardships she’s transmuted into art resonated all the more this season as we explore the alchemy of creativity and adversity.

It’s for those reasons that We’ve asked Jackie to join us as Change Lab’s first returning guest, even as she puts the finishing touches on her MFA thesis at UCLA. We waned to know more about her investigation into grief and displacement, and we were fascinated by the bravery and creative energy it took to revisit her trauma and to give depth and dimension to a painful story that needed to be told.

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Aimee Mullins is a true polymath. Her passions and professional pursuits are as varied and boundless as the awards and groundbreaking strides she’s achieved within her many chosen fields. She broke new ground in athletics as the first amputee in history to compete against able-bodied athletes in the NCAA’s Division 1 track and field events. She went on to set records in the 100 and 200 meter races and the long jump.

Her poise and athleticism led to a career in fashion as a runway model for Alexander McQueen and as a global ambassador for L’Oreal. She then added acting to her portfolio with roles in wildly varied projects ranging from artist Matthew Barney’s Cremaster series to Netflix’s Stranger Things. Through it all, Aimee has continued to make sense of the many trails she’s blazed in a series of influential TED talks that have been viewed by millions and translated into 42 languages. 

It was her paradigm-shifting talk on the “opportunity of adversity” that offered a veritable proof of concept for the ideas we're exploring in this season of Change Lab. Her powerful argument for the creative leaps that result only from the hurdles we face resonated deeply with the idea that the human imagination feeds on challenge and uncertainty – a familiar concept to regular listeners of this podcast. 

Aimee contends that we meet and exceed our goals because of—not despite—each obstacle we encounter. An insight she’s earned the hard way navigating the world as a double amputee. Her insistence that “good enough” isn’t good enough has led to advances in prosthetic design that would never exist without her. In fact, Aimee contends that disability itself is a misnomer better attributed to a broken piece of machinery than a human being whose differences are the source of their strength. We all have much to learn from Aimee’s self-determination, curiosity and wonder.

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We’re lucky as artists that we can recover much faster because we can express. Nature recovers and we recover. 

Lita Albuquerque is an artist whose body of work has often defied the strictures of convention and, ultimately, canvas. Over the course of her celebrated career, her paintings and sculptures outgrew the traditional materials contained within her studio and expanded to inhabit the land and people around her. 

To experience Lita’s large-scale installations (often tinged in an ultramarine blue pigment all her own) is to dance with dichotomies. At once grounded and transcendent, intimate and epic, earthly and celestial – Lita’s work, above all, is a celebration of how we connect to our environment. 

It’s a creative worldview that was put to test in November of 2018 when the Woolsey Fire engulfed the hills around Malibu and destroyed her home and studio. Suddenly, the place in which she spent decades raising her kids and making her art was gone, along with a vast archive of completed works and works-in-progress. 

It was a monumental loss that would have been devastating to any artist—and particularly so for Lita, whose creative imagination has always been intrinsically connected to her environment. But Lita could not let her grief paralyze her because she had to get to work on the long list of pieces previously commissioned by collectors. That backlog turned out to be her saving grace. Eventually she found that the process of creative expression had resurrected the parts of her she feared the fire had claimed forever. 

Over the course of a Change Lab conversation alternately stirring and sublime, Lita generously retraces the harrowing path she’s walked to a place of recovery and renewal she simply describes as “back.”

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Client hypothetical. This is the term pioneering architect and designer Eileen Gray used to classify the many Modernist masterpieces she designed in the absence of actual paid commissions. She was simply making things because that was what she was made to do. 

Gray now stands alongside other towering talents whose under-recognized body of work were later exalted by their artworld peers. First among Gray’s admirers is artist Kim Schoenstadt who spent the past two years creating an entire exhibition inspired by the way Gray essentially designed her way through the many challenges laid in her path. 

Enter Slowly, The Legacy of an Idea, which opened last fall in ArtCenter’s Mullin Gallery, paid homage to Eileen Gray as heroine of Twentieth Century Modernist design despite the fact that her work was often misattributed to her male collaborators and counterparts. Indeed, for much of her life, E-1027, the house she designed in the South of France, was credited to superstar designer, Le Corbusier, who did little to correct the record. 

Shining a light on Gray’s legacy was a task tailor made for Kim, an artist best known for her “mash-up drawings” layering elements of architecture and history. She’s also demonstrated an equally steadfast commitment to moving the needle toward gender parity in today’s art world through her Now Be Here project.  

We were particularly fascinated by the idea of an artist who creates a body of work based on the struggles she shares with an artist from another era. It’s an act of deep empathy and bravery and a perfect example of how adversity and creativity often coexist on the path toward redemption.

Please enjoy this conversation with Kim Schoenstadt

Selections of music in this episode were provided by Paco Casanova and J.C. Furmanski.

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James Meraz joined the faculty of ArtCenter’s Environmental Design department in September of 2001, shortly before 9/11. In the wake of that tragedy he wavered about how to proceed with his planned curriculum. How would it all be relevant? In the end, he resolved to lean into the uncertainty of that “cataclysmic moment,” realizing that the only way out of the pain, chaos and confusion was to go through it. 

Above all he discovered the value in staying present and connecting with others when things fall apart. Of course, he had no way of knowing how much he’d come to rely on those same skills when another catastrophe struck much closer to home. 

In June of 2019, James’ twenty year-old son, Luke, died. James and his wife were immediately thrust into every parent’s worst nightmare. But as they were pummeled with wave after wave of agonizing grief, James eventually felt called to move toward the pain in order to understand the lessons that might benefit him and others – all of which we cover in our Change Lab interview that cycled through tears to moments of transcendence.

James’ journey has been an arduous one. The pain of loss remains an ever-present burden he’s dubbed “the backpack.” But by bringing his creativity to bear on an unbearable situation, James has discovered opportunities for reinvention and even a kind of rebirth in the projects he’s undertaken to support young artists and vulnerable communities in Luke’s honor. 

Like the skilled designer he is, James has continued to ask himself the hard questions and has found renewed meaning in the simple act of showing up, even when part of him wants to give up.

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The next season of Change Lab debuts on March 23. We’re calling it Forged in Fire: Make to Heal and we’re looking at the ways in which adversity can be a conduit for creativity and, more importantly, how creativity can offer solace during the hardest of times. 

You’re not going to want to miss a single episode of a season that explores the connection between heartbreak and hope on the path toward resilience and reinvention. 

Please join us for a raw and revelatory season of Change Lab created in response to these extraordinary times to nourish, heal and inspire.

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As Google’s vice president of hardware design, Ivy Ross is breaking new ground in the physical world for a trillion-dollar company synonymous with building tools for navigating the virtual one. Since assuming the role in 2014, she’s been tasked with translating a corporate identity consisting of a primary colored logo and blinking cursor into three-dimensional products and environments that are inviting, accessible and add value to people’s lives in ways big and small. 

Ivy oversees the team responsible for Google’s entire eye-catching suite of curvy, pastel-hued devices including the Pixel phone and Nest home safety system. And she’s also the creative visionary behind Google’s first retail store which debuted this past summer in New York City. It takes a special kind of moxie to forge ahead with a plan to open up to the public during a time when many stores were still shuttered. But Ivy is a true iconoclast who understands the value in bringing unconventional thinking to bear on high stakes challenges.  

Lorne had the great pleasure of getting to know Ivy through her role as an ArtCenter Trustee. During their time together, they quickly discovered a kinship around a shared interest in the role the imagination plays as a catalyst for change, particularly when combined with the physical act of making and doing. 

Transcendent might be the word to best describe the expansive conversation they have in this episode. The two explore the opportunities the pandemic has presented to improve our connection to each other and to the planet. They also explore their shared interest in the work of Carl Jung and how creativity can be a portal to accessing the life we’re meant to be living even when it’s not the one society has laid out for us.

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In the two decades since she graduated from ArtCenter with a degree in Transportation Design, Tisha Johnson has blazed trails for female design leaders in industries dominated by men. Her success has been propelled by her genuine passion for each phase of the design process, from research to experimenting with materials to aligning aesthetic beauty with human need. 

The results of her efforts are written into her ever-evolving career, which includes transformative stints heading up design teams at Volvo and Herman Miller en route to her current role as head of global design at Whirlpool. Tisha’s growing list of achievements has done little to dampen her palpable excitement for the fundamentals of a job she views, in its simplest terms, as making things that make people’s lives better. In order to do that well, she’s committed herself to a lifelong learning process as a designer and leader, both in the studio and out. In fact, she’s even been known to use her twin passions for surfing and motorcycling as laboratories for design thinking and doing. 

For Tisha, good design is a feeling. And that feeling, in a word, is freedom. It’s part of the purity of spirit and infectious enthusiasm she brings to everything she does. Even now, from her perch atop the upper rungs of corporate America, she speaks of her new role strategizing future generations of home appliances with the reverence and excitement of someone who has just landed her first job. 

I was particularly taken by Tisha’s description of the design process as a dialogue between materials and maker, which echoed themes in my book about the discoveries that happen through physical engagement. Over the course of a conversation that felt at times like a masterclass on design strategy, we also covered her thoughts on how research and careful listening guides the teams she leads, the role of empathy in design and how her work at Whirlpool in connection to what she calls “the hearth of the home” can move her to tears.

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For novelist Aimee Bender, magic is not a limited resource. Nor is it something to be feared, coveted, mistrusted or monetized. In her view, rather, magic is an everyday occurrence woven into the fabric of our lives captured in fleeting moments of transcendence all too often overlooked. 

No wonderment, however small, seems to escape Aimee’s notice. And as her readers can attest, her comfort with uncanny occurrences can be found throughout her celebrated novels and essays. Whether she’s writing about a child’s ability to taste a parent’s depression in her bestselling novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake or a young woman confounded by inanimate objects that spring to life in The Butterfly Lampshade—Amy’s work gives voice and validity to the things we know and feel but can’t explain. 

Aimee and Lorne share an interest in exploring the unknown and making sense of it in their writing. For me it’s best summed up by the subtitle of my book: from spaces of uncertainty to creative discovery. Whereas Aimee describes her connection to this terra incognita as a way of acknowledging “the presence of ghosts” and making room for a “different kind of thinking.” 

Aimee is the rare artist whose warmth and gregariousness match her vast talents. And as you’ll soon hear, this conversation was no exception. As she sought to illuminate the mysterious and sometimes tortured nature of the writing process, she regularly invoked her students with deep affection. So it should come as no surprise that her creative writing classes at USC are among the most popular in the program.

Aimee and I also discussed the way creativity provides a “lab” for experimenting with uncertainty and how, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, writing, on a good day, can feel like dipping a cup into the river of ideas and delighting at the surprises discovered within it.

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To experience one of Ann Hamilton’s installations is to be transported into a world of invention unlike any other. Recognized for her large-scale public projects and performance collaborations, Ann uses space as her canvas and fills it with a sense of mystery and drama that is as inviting as it is provocative. 

Though much of her work is, by nature, transitory, its impact and ideas endure. To get a sense of the experiential texture of her work, look no further than her extraordinary 2012 installation, the event of a thread, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. The hauntingly beautiful piece filled the large space with billowing white fabric panels and an array of swings inviting participants to experience a joy and weightlessness too often relegated to childhood.  

In this timely and incisive Change Lab interview, conducted the day before the 20th anniversary of 911, Hamilton explored the ideas animating CHORUS, her public art installation at the World Trade Center Cortland subway station. The piece, visible from the platform and passing trains, consists of a field of marble mosaic weaving the texts of the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights onto a wall beneath the spot where the towers once stood. 

Change Lab listeners will recognize her ideas connecting making and exploration as core to the themes explored throughout this show. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could more artfully illuminate the creative power and exhilaration that comes from braving uncertainty and lingering in the mysterious “I-don’t-know.”

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