It’s a visitor that ensures I am always cognizant of where I am with myself and my work. What I always have to remind myself is that it is okay to recognize doubt but that it cannot stay for long. Nearly a century after Virginia Woolf captured the perennial specter of self-doubt in creative work, author and television host Janet Mock offers:Ī consistent fear is: Am I doing enough? Does my work really matter? These thoughts plague many people, and I see it as common. “I can make money off drawing type? Drawing can be my profession?” This makes me understand how important it is to expose my kids to as many different “worlds” as possible. It was as if a lightbulb went off in my head. So I followed up, saying, “Working as in making money?” And he just said, “Yep!” I was a kid who was never not drawing.
I asked him, “What are you doing?” And he said, “I am working!” I was confused, as in my understanding he was just doodling, drawing, having fun. When I was about seven, on vacation in the South of France, I watched my uncle draw type.
Swiss graphic designer, entrepreneur, and Swiss-Miss creator Tina Roth Eisenberg attests to this sentiment with her own formative experience: Grace Bonney (Photograph: Christopher Sturman)Įchoing pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin’s poignant words about the importance of cultural modeling, Bonney writes in the introduction:Īctivist Marian Wright Edelman said, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Visibility is one of the most powerful tools we have in inspiring people to pursue their dreams and educating them about all the amazing options that exist. That’s what Design*Sponge founder Grace Bonney offers with In the Company of Women ( public library) - an invigorating and empowering collection of life-earned wisdom and practical advice from more than one hundred diverse women artists and entrepreneurs: painters, poets, designers, ceramicists, illustrators, actors, chefs, typographers, tattoo artists, and other creative mavericks from a kaleidoscope of ethnicities, orientations, and backgrounds spanning four generations. A powerful counter-force of visibility is to be found in shining a light on the rooms - the studios, boardrooms, showrooms, classrooms, and mansions of the mind - in which today’s creative women make their work, make their money, and make themselves. Today, as we awaken to a world in which equality is in real and imminent danger of being tossed into a time machine, we have to wonder what it takes to counter the forces determined to ignore, deny, or trivialize women’s work. Exactly half a century earlier, Virginia Woolf had famously insisted that a woman must have money and a room of her own in order to create. “Women had always made a significant contribution to the development of human civilization, but these were consistently ignored, denied, or trivialized,” artist Judy Chicago wrote at the height of the women’s liberation movement in her iconic 1979 celebration of women’s place in creative culture.
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