I plan, design and produce books, working closely with authors, artists and curators to help them present their ideas. The books are about art as well as a range of themes including history, politics and culture [Dada, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, Art and China’s Revolution]; identity and society [Becoming Edvard Munch, Peggy Preheim]; place [Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, River of No Return: Photographs by Laura McPhee, The Great Wall of China]; process [Matisse: Radical Invention 1913–1917]; and art collections [The Société Anonyme Collection, The Cartin Collection, Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum].
In addition to books, I occasionally take on other projects such as the research and design of publications, maps and a website for the National Park Service. For eight years I designed and produced a triannual magazine for Yale University School of Medicine, meeting scientists and doctors, learning about their work and presenting their findings. From 1990 to 1997 I was a founding partner in a small design firm. I managed the office finances, directed designers and designed and managed projects for museums, non-profit organizations, hospitals and colleges.
I am a lecturer at Purchase College, School of Art+Design, State University of New York. From 1995 to 2000, I taught photography and writing to adolescents in public schools, and then developed a four-year program for teenage mothers that was featured in The New York Times. Their stories were used to educate others through presentations, a website, a public radio series and exhibitions. I think about designing a publication as similar to developing a curriculum: the material for both must be presented in a clear and meaningful way. It also has to engage.
My interest in publications that use art and literature to educate goes back to 1989/1990 and my thesis at the Yale School of Art on Direction magazine. Published from 1937 to 1945 by Marguerite Tjader Harris, Direction was a vehicle for artists and writers to speak out against fascism. With information from interviews with Paul Rand, who designed many of the magazine’s brilliant covers, and Tjader Harris’s unpublished diaries, I wrote about the magazine and its contributors who include Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Mann, Le Corbusier, John Heartfield and Margaret Bourke-White. I then created a prototype for a contemporary magazine inspired by Direction.
With all my projects, the design and structure grows out of the content. Once a
plan is established I give careful attention to the many details involved in refining
the design and managing a complex editorial, design and production process. I
enjoy this process, as much as the people I’m working with and the stories they
have to tell.