I want to be honest about who I am. If you handed me a week with no obligations, I would spend all seven days inside my own house and consider it a week beautifully spent. I have my desk, my snacks, my bunny, my husband down the hall painting a tiny man in complete, monastic silence, and every odd treasure I have ever collected within arm’s reach. Home is my favorite place on the entire earth. I built it that way on purpose, and I will not be apologizing for it.
But here is the uncomfortable truth I keep circling back to as an artist: home is a closed loop. Everything I make at this desk is built from things I carried in from somewhere else. The grand old theaters, the hotel lobbies, the party scenes, the funny little pageants that fill my work, every one of them traces back to a place I once actually stood. When I stay home too long, I am not drawing from a full well. I am remixing. The work does not get worse, exactly. It gets thinner, like tea from a bag that has already been used twice, and I am usually the last one to notice.
Which brings me to Texas.
I took a trip recently and ended up at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, mostly because it was there and I was there. In the lobby is a wall four stories high, filled with red boxes behind glass, thousands and thousands of them, each stamped with a little gold seal. I knew I would love the boxes on sight. I collect odd little objects like it’s my second job. What I did not expect was the lump in my throat. Because that wall is the paper record of a man trying his hardest to do right by people: thousands of documents that changed how this country treats Black and brown people, poor people, the less fortunate. All of it written and argued and signed because somebody believed equality and fairness were worth that much paperwork. It was beautiful. And it was melancholy too, because that does not seem to be a goal our government shares today. I stood at that railing for a long time, feeling both of those things at once, and I did not try to pick one.
The civil rights exhibits were always going to sit differently on me. I’m a Black woman raised in Atlanta. I grew up inside this history, in the city where the movement kept its home address. And the thing that struck me, room after room, was the agreement. For a stretch of years, it seems like the world had decided, out loud and in writing, that the standard was love, humanity, and respect for all people, and then it marched and printed and signed until the law caught up. So much progress, hanging there in frames, and me doing the quiet math against the world outside the building. The math made me sad. And still, standing in front of the Civil Rights Act itself, actual pages, actual pens, signatures made by human hands on the afternoon of July 2nd, 1964, felt like being introduced to a relative I’d only ever heard stories about.
And the art of that era, my goodness. I finally understand what my fascination was about. The design was bold, typographic, opinionated. People used graphic design, on posters and newspapers and signs and buttons and stationery, to carry the mood of the time, and the mood was bright, progressive, and unwavering. I took so many photos, fascinated by how it all translated across protest materials, canvassing materials, even the product packaging and decor of the day. It wasn’t my style at all, but it was meaningful. It was simple, it was beautiful, and it felt hopeful. I photographed one pamphlet from four different angles, and a docent watched me do it and very kindly said nothing.
And somewhere between the posters and the paperwork, the trip stopped being about the museum at all, because those rooms made me look hard at my own desk. If I’m being honest with myself, so much of my work these past couple of years has been created out of desperation, out of an unwillingness to slow down long enough to remember why I’m doing any of this. I’ve been in survival mode, creating to make sure the bills get paid, while the lovely ideas, the grand ideas, the ones that are mine to birth into the world, float around the back of my head waiting their turn behind my eighth summer-vacay-themed pack.
And I kept thinking: imagine if the artists in that museum had stayed home stifling themselves. Imagine the posters never printed, the buttons never pressed, the signs never lifted, because everyone was busy making whatever paid that month. Those artists went out and made things for the causes that mattered to them, and that is the artist I want to be. One who dares to make art that has an opinion. Art that’s whimsical and unconventional and authentic. Art with a history behind it beyond desperation and placation. Art that changes you a little when you see it.
Here is the thing I keep turning over now that I am back at my desk: none of that was ever going to find me at home. Not the boxes, not the posters, and certainly not the reckoning. I could have sat in this house for another year, doodling my eighty-seventh seashell, and never once slowed down long enough to remember why I make things at all. The world had to hand it to me, and the world can only hand you things when you go outside where it can reach you.
I used to treat leaving the house as the thing that interrupted the work. A trip was time away from the desk, and time away from the desk felt like time away from being an artist. I had it backwards. And I suspect a lot of my fellow homebody artists have it backwards too. The desk is where the work gets made. The world is where the work gets fed. Both of those are the job. Not the fun, optional part of the job. The actual job, same as the drawing itself.
So no, I am not reformed. I am still going to spend most of my life right here with the bunny and the snacks, and my perfect day still involves no real pants. But I am adding an errand to the job description: go stand in front of something you could not have imagined. A library. A stranger’s garden. A building in a city you have no business being in. Bring it home. Let it get into the work.
I came back from Austin with a phone full of photographed typefaces and about six things I need to draw immediately, starting with a wall of tiny red boxes.
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