Summer 2022, I participated in a unique gathering of Black and Indigenous artists, curators academics and other cultural producers hosted by the Haystack Mountain School of Craft in Deer Isle Maine and the Indigo Arts Alliance. Re/Union: Re-Editioning Black + Native Histories, engaged in a transdisciplinary approach to decolonize the archive of aesthetic creation and traditions. I met and learned from an intergenerational group from around the country. We shared cultural knowledge and history around food and art, while honoring our ancestors of water and land.

It’s been awhile, and every time I sit down to write you all, something big happens: the Delta variant mutates into Omicron just when we think the masks can come off; we lose luminaries like bell hooks, Greg Tate, Virgil Abloh and Sidney Poitier to name a few; Russia invades Ukraine; actor Will Smith gives comedian Chris Rock a slap heard around the world; scientists warn us that we must take action now to stop global warming, before it’s too late or else; and Judge (now Supreme Court Justice in-waiting) Ketanji Brown Jackson, is subjected to the grilling of her life…

It started in 2010. I was headed to Brussels to present a paper and participate in a conference of the International Committee for Design History and Design Studies, in Belgium. I stopped at a branch of JP Morgan Chase where I had an account to wire funds for the conference registration to the organizers overseas. I filled out all the paperwork and asked what the fee would be. “Forty dollars,” I was told …

God bless Ruth Bader Ginsburg, also known as the Notorious R.B.G., after rapper Biggie Smalls. May she rest in peace. Smalls, had a large physical presence in contrast to Ginsburg’s small stature, yet the comparison speaks to how much of an effective and productive powerhouse she was in the courts …

Masks have become so important to our safety and survival during this pandemic, and an added and essential accessory to our clothing wardrobes. Marketed as functional and fashionable in some cases in various materials and price points, they have become a way to express collective caring for our neighbors and others in the public spaces we move in …

I feel like I have turned a corner.

Six months ago, I caught what I thought was the flu from a colleague’s young daughter. Looking back I had many of the symptoms of what we now know as the novel virus Covid19. If it was, I intuitively did all of the right things: got in bed, drank lot of fluids, watched my fever and stayed home …