Recent piece for Hyperallergic, “African-American Designers Hidden in Plain Sight.” We see objects like the View-Master and New Breed dashiki, both by Black designers, often in our daily lives and yet find them almost nowhere in the places where we preserve and examine our culture. Read more here. 

Peer reviewed article forthcoming fall 2018 in the academic Journal of Visual Culture. Guns are usually designed with great attention to their aesthetic, ergonomic, and functional component parts. Yet, their contemporary manifestations are considered so culturally and symbolically fraught—especially in the United States—that guns produced in the last century have rarely been presented as industrial objects…

I wrote this article for Hyperallergic in July 2018 outlining a topic that has been percolating in my mind for some years, namely thoughts on why curatorial effort isn’t always acknowledged by museums and the press.

I wrote a review of By the People: Designing a Better America for the Journal of Design History, Volume 31, Issue 2, 25 May 2018, Pages 213–216 https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epy019

I wrote a review of the seminal digital art history resource, SmartHistory, for caa.reviews.

In conjunction with Items: Is Fashion Modern? and the related free online course Fashion as Design, for which I was an instructor (mo.ma/fashionasdesign) I spoke with designer Howard Davis about the New Breed, the Afrocentric boutique he cofounded that operated in the 1960s.

From humble origins as an undergarment, to mass-produced fast-fashion staple, to highly collectible (and highly priced) commodity, the white T-shirt is a quintessential product of twentieth-century modernity and the ultimate sartorial and psychological blank canvas. Read my essay for Google Arts and Culture.