Triangle

I never planned on becoming a textile designer—even graphic design wasn’t on my radar—but I knew from the time I could hold a crayon that I was going to be an artist in some form or another. Sure, my childhood plan actually included being an art-making professional soccer player who also wrote books, but drawing and painting were always on the forefront of my mind. I didn’t realize until I grew up how much the textile prints of my childhood influenced my vision and color sensibilities, and more to the point, my outlook on the world, even.

My childhood room was filled with Marimekko fabric, just like the rooms of countless other kids born in the 70s and early 80s. Marimekko’s car and truck bedding was ubiquitous for boys, but I had a less common design— colorful rolling hills dotted with trees and little houses covered my windows and bed. Prints were everywhere. The bright daisies on my bicycle’s banana seat epitomized the joyful designs in my daily life. (I saw the exact model of my purple bike on East Broadway on the Lower East Side as an adult and snapped a photo for everlasting reference, and that seat still makes me smile.) Subtlety didn’t seem to be a thing back then. Wallpaper, carpeting, toys and packaging all seemed to utilize prints to cheer you up. It subconsciously seemed that the world was conspiring to make people happier.

I got an MFA in Painting & Drawing right around my 25th birthday, and other than the Lilly Pulitzer golf skirts that I cut up and wore with combat boots, I still didn’t put too much thought into the prints that influenced my mood. A year after moving to New York City and working at various freelance art jobs, I realized a steady income might be a good thing. I took a job at an accessory company that mostly specialized in cheap cosmetic bags as gifts-with-purchase for expensive cosmetic companies.

They needed someone to draw the bags. I was excited about bags at that point in time, and couldn’t believe my luck in landing the job. Soon it became apparent that I was also needed to design graphic layouts, the bags themselves, and textile prints. My glee in being tasked to do this was like being a kid playing school, where I was the teacher and my stuffed animals were the students: I didn’t have any bonafide qualifications in my own mind, and this wasn’t my real thing. But I loved it. A couple of years and a few thousand textile designs later, the imposter syndrome wore off, and I still experienced joy in creating prints for work as a counterpart to painting and drawing. I’d get lost in music and the design process, and it usually wouldn’t feel like work at all.

By then I realized how intensely prints and color affected my state of mind, and I consciously gravitated to the happy aesthetics that surrounded me in my youth, hoping they had a similar impact on others. There were invisible narratives behind my prints. I finally took stock of how much Marimekko had affected me, especially when I was commissioned to design a poppy print eons after landing my first bag job. How could I not be influenced by Marimekko’s famous poppies, which I’d always loved? While I aimed to put a new, unique spin on my poppy print, I knew I wanted to retain an echo of the feeling of Marimekko’s design. While mine doesn’t look like the Marimekko print aesthetically, except for the fact that it portrays poppies, I think it carries a similar energy.

In celebration of my inspiration, I purchased some fabric yardage of the Marimekko poppies—massive bright yellow and lime green flowers floating on a white background. The idea was to cut a circle the size of my antique kitchen table, which a had painted white, then affix the fabric on top and cover it with glass.

I was après-divorce, and a friend who came to visit noted how much the energy of my apartment had changed, lifted. I tried to enhance that new energy with small changes that amplified the mood even more, and my new table top was part of that effort. But I was intimidated to cut my beloved fabric, and I asked my mom, an expert on anything vaguely sewing or pattern-related, for advice on how to do it.

She laughed and said, It’s not really complicated! Just iron the fabric, pin a tack in the center with a string, tie a pencil to the end, and trace the edge of the table top…and then just cut it with scissors! Right. Nothing to it. I followed her instructions, and though there were some slight imperfections in my circle, it worked as planned. I placed the round sheet of glass I had purchased on top of the fabric. And it really does fill the room with positive energy.

Sometime during that year in 2013, I became aware of a contest to design and paint an 1,800-square-foot pedestrian plaza in my neighborhood on the edge of the Lower East Side and Chinatown. This plaza was a triangle that marked what I felt was a newly burgeoning local hot-spot, a place on the brink of transformation. Yet it didn’t feel like the kind of transformation that obliterates history—it felt like it was embracing it with a respectful effort to rejuvenate the forlorn and abandoned vibe that had befallen this little area. My imagination raced. Not only could I enliven my own home, but I hoped I might be able to enliven my neighborhood, too.

But, oh… there was other work to be done first! I had commitments and a thousand-and-one other priorities, it seemed. I didn’t have time to create a submission. I was exhausted. Blow it off, I told myself. But as I drifted off to sleep one night as the contest deadline neared, an aerial image of the triangle appeared in my mind, with a design of my prints superimposed over it. There were several parallel bands of different patterns traversing the area—an image as clear as if I had just designed it and retouched it onto a photo on my computer screen. It was as though a little voice accompanied the image, saying, You need to apply for this. The next morning, I woke up and simply executed what I had imagined as I lay in bed.

I won the contest. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I somehow knew the project would mark a new phase in my life. In the end it really did—a string of events stemming from the plaza led me to my current job and a new direction for me with a focus on community activism. But the question of how I was going to pull off executing this project came up once again. Incredibly, one of the few old shops that remained around the triangle was a sign shop that also made giant laser-cut plastic templates. This was my solution for several of my repeat prints. Yet there was one print where templates just weren’t workable—this design was brocade-like and the repeat was too vast, not a consolidated single motif. I had officially named the print Garden Party, but in my head it was really Cut Velvet Couch.

The print was reminiscent of my grandmother’s blue and beige velvet sofa in her Brooklyn house from my distant memories and old photos. She had grown up on the Lower East Side, a place which I could barely imagine as a child in my leafy little town, but then I found myself living there as an adult. Astonishingly, after enrolling my son in kindergarten, I learned that my grandmother had gotten her elementary education in the very same building as him. What inspired my print design was something that caught my eye in a tattoo shop on Avenue B where my grandmother grew up, while walking home one morning after dropping my son off: a blue and beige cut velvet couch, with a similar pattern as the one I remembered.

My Cut Velvet Couch print definitely needed a spot on the triangle, but in early June 2014 when it was time to actually install my work, I didn’t feel confident about pulling it off. I came up with a tentative plan: I would have a 12-foot print made of my pattern on heavy photo paper by a printer that produced oversize work for backdrops and large-scale ads. Thinking I needed a way to transfer the design, I purchase a few pouncing wheels online in different sizes, after learning that they were a way to punch tiny holes in artwork on paper, which you could then dab with a bag filled with chalk to get the desired outline on the surface below.

When I got the giant print back from the printer, I realized there was a problem: the paper was so thick and glossy that none of the pouncing wheels were able to adequately punch holes through it. The slight indentations were self-healing; my method just wasn’t going to work. Trying to think of a different solution, it became evident: Just cut it with scissors!

I remember envisioning myself as Charlie Brown with his tangled kite stuck in a tree as I assessed the situation. How would tell the positive forms from the negative spaces as I was cutting? And how would I ever roll up up this intricate web of a design and transport it to the site? And would it flap in the wind when I laid it down, making it impossible to decipher what the pattern was? Despite my doubts, I got out the orange-handled scissors and began cutting as best I could, gingerly sitting on top of the paper when I had to, trying my best not to completely detach any sections while trimming away the negative shapes. And after what felt like miles of snipping, I was done. Or I hoped I was.

If you’re anything like me, you feel defeated when attempting to neatly fold a fitted sheet. Rolling up the template reminded me of this. As I looked at the giant tangled mass of paper, which I noted had taken a nice slice of my project budget, I couldn’t clearly make out the pattern in it. I hoped for the best and rolled it up, with its wayward straggles of paper poking out all over the place.

I started the installation in early June. I had used the bulk of my budget to hire a specialty paving company to create a gleamingly smooth surface for painting the triangle. My first step was easy: measuring out and delineating the sections across the plaza that would contain each print. Next I worked with the giant plastic templates for the easy repeats. Then came the poppies, for which I trusted myself enough to look at a hardcopy of my design and freehand paint the outlines. Cut Velvet Couch awaited.

On my last day of stenciling the design onto the plaza, I carried my messy roll of paper down East Broadway to Division Street, where a woman named Natalie waited for me. She was one of the staff from the neighborhood agency that had sponsored the competition, and she had become a friend in the process of actualizing my design. I unrolled the stencil and and to my utter gratitude, there was no wind and the weight of the paper left it perfectly in place. I taped it down for good measure and got out my chalk. I once again felt like I’d never know the positives from the negatives, but as I began tracing, I realized it didn’t matter so much. A little fudging was okay. I’d figure it all out later, which is what I did, drawing an X in the sections that would become positive red shapes on a sky blue background.

As I went over my chalk lines with paint and filled the shapes in, my print started coming into focus. I felt both incredulousness and great relief as the triangle morphed into my vision. I titled the installation Modern Tapestry, and though seven years down the line, it has been paved over and my work is now gone, a sign with my name and my rationale for creating it still stands beside the plaza. In it, I referred to my the piece as “a response to the beautiful, varied texture that is produced where diverse traditions merge in the face of change. It also murmurs of the modern and the traditional in the same breath, uniting them with color.”

As it turned out, the project was both the result of and a marker of further change in my own life. As I was painting it, neighbors young and old came out to bring me water as I worked in the hot sun. A Chinese woman who didn't speak much English gave me a cushion to rest my knees on and lots of chocolate. A mourner from a funeral came over to talk to me after the procession. A resident who lived in an adjacent building shot aerial photos from his window and became a friend.

I was ecstatic that the community seemed so supportive of the project, and I loved that the process turned out to be a community event, bringing out Chinatown and Lower East Side residents. It felt miraculous, just as I had hoped, that with a combination of luck and timing, the triangle became something of a neighborhood hub. Restaurants and coffee shops opened around it, replacing the empty storefronts and revitalizing the area. People came to sit and hang out in the triangle at the city-issued tables, relaxing on café chairs, benches, and the big boulders that were placed to block out traffic.

In September of 2014, I started my new job, which brought into sharp focus my need to pair art and design with public policy and political activism. I was commissioned to paint several other street art projects on the Lower East Side in the ensuing years. What started as practically a dream in my exhaustion turned out to be a tangible milestone in my life, and I'm immensely grateful for that. I know this project greatly increased my happiness, and I’d like to think that Modern Tapestry also made the people who walked though it and lived around it a little happier, brightening their day, too. If it did, I’ve got my childhood textiles to thank for that inspiration.