Looking as Discourse: An Interview with Tishon Woolcock
Image by Angelo Maneage
The theme of the 2022 Cleveland Humanities Festival is “Discourse.” Zach Savich, a Cleveland Review of Books board member and associate professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art, asked a group of artists, writers, and scholars from Cleveland and beyond to address the topic, “How is looking a form of discourse? Or: how does looking become discourse?” Their responses explore some of the ways in which private and shared experiences of vision contribute to culture, conversation, identity, and collective exchange.
Zach Savich: This series explores how more private experiences of looking are (or can become) forms of discourse, of collective exchange. How do you think about this topic, as a designer? It seems a little different, since in design it's even more obvious that all experiences of seeing, of visuality, are already embedded in exchange.
Tishon Woolcock: My personal design philosophy is that design is 90% communication. I see the work that I do as an extension of language, which means that much of the time, I’m trying to tease out the most distilled form of a message or story, usually to provoke an action. Because I work in exhibit design, the actions I find myself trying to provoke are dialogue, appreciation, or personal reflection. A lot of times, I try to imagine a single person in a large group and what that experience is. I think a lot about the difference between seeing a movie in a crowded theater vs. seeing it alone, at home. Just being in the presence of others shifts the way you experience it. Even if you don’t speak a word to the person next to you, you’re aware that they too are seeing what you’re seeing. If you’re a particularly empathic person, you probably pick up on some of their vibrations. In my mind, when a design is most successful, that mutual experience won’t solely be about the design of the experience. It’ll be about the subject, story, or message that you and this hypothetical stranger took away from the experience.
Savich: How does this connect to projects you’ve worked on?
Woolcock: The firm that I work for, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, describes the museum experience as learning in public. As an art director, a lot of my concerns are centered around how we see what we see, or to be more specific, how we experience what we experience; the full range of senses comes into play more often than not. Our teams take great care in determining the appropriate modes of storytelling for each project. I’m on the Social Projects team so almost all of the museums and exhibits I work on are related to history and social justice, which sometimes means being sensitive to how we bring forth potentially triggering subject matter. That consideration alone is dialogic, as it assumes an audience and aims to facilitate their ability to receive the content.
Savich: Your poem "A House for Names" considers an experience of watching a family find "among the names their own" in a museum you worked on. I've been thinking about the magnitude of the lines: "throughout the south / trees shed branches in shame / whole buildings converted / to houses for names." Could you tell us more about this poem?
Woolcock: The poem was written in 2014 about the time I worked on an update to the exhibits at the Tuskegee History Center in Tuskegee, Alabama. The center houses an exhibit that documents the history of civil rights activism in the area. From the early 1900s through the 1960s, folks in Macon County played a huge role in the civil rights movement. Tuskegee University, which was home to scientist George Washington Carver and the famed Tuskegee Airmen, is located there. Tuskegee is also the home of Fred David Gray, a civil rights attorney and activist who litigated several major civil rights cases in Alabama, including a case that challenged Alabama’s segregated bus laws. He also successfully represented plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. public health services for the horrifying Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which a group of African American men who’d contracted syphilis were unknowingly left untreated for 40 years. More than 100 of them died. The Tuskegee History Center was formed as a monument to the victims of the study, and their names are etched into the floor of the center.
During the installation of the exhibit updates, a family had driven from North Carolina to see the monument. I happened to be outside at the time, and the mother told me that she’d brought her children to see their family member’s name on the monument. The museum was closed for renovations, but naturally, the staff let them in. It was a deeply moving experience.
In the poem, I’m considering the dark legacy of racism in the American south. The line about trees is a reference to the poem (and Billie Holiday song) “Strange Fruit” by Abel Meeropol. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 3,446 Black Americans were lynched between 1888 and 1986. I was thinking about how monuments are often erected in the places where atrocities occurred, and how many of the trees used in lynchings that took place in the south are still standing. If those trees were personified, the bending of their branches might indicate a kind of shame for unwittingly playing a role in someone’s death.
I remember walking around downtown Tuskegee during that trip, thinking how it was so peaceful, and bucolic in a way that old southern cities are. Beyond the downtown areas, though, where there’s less investment, the environmental shift reminds you of the sometimes dark history that exists in places. The shift is an economic one, indicative of income equality and the lack of resources in the outlying areas, but it’s impossible to not consider it through the lens of history, particularly when that history is there.
At the same time, there are families living there that go back generations. What some of us have learned about in history books is family history to them. The places we’ve read about are their homes. The line about those who “tend the gardens” is about that idea. They survive, they tend the gardens.
I feel it’s important to state here that I’m not a historian. There are people better credentialed to speak on this stuff than I am. My point of view is that of a poet, and to some degree, an outsider. I guess that sort of speaks to your point about private experiences becoming collective exchange, doesn’t it?
Savich: Absolutely. And I appreciate how that "private experience" is of the place, of its people, and of the one considering the history. It's not a single privacy but, perhaps, a compounded one. And from that, shared experiences emerge, in and out of our privacies. Anyway, I keep thinking about your idea of "trying to tease out the most distilled form of a message or story, usually to provoke an action." A distillation is an essence. But it sounds like you're interested not only in delivering the essence—here is the thing, the concentrated thing—but in what it can cause. How do you think about this dance between preserving/transmitting and inviting original response?
Woolcock: The first thing that comes to mind is how we present historic artifacts. Depending on the object, it’s going to be presented a certain way. For instance, something like James Brown’s cape would be treated a bit differently than a handwritten note by James Baldwin. The cape, you can imagine, is likely to be displayed in a big case, and lit in a way that allows visitors to imagine themselves seeing James Brown in concert. The letter, on the other hand, might be displayed in a small case, in a room with soft lighting that evokes the feeling of being in a parlor space, or bedroom.
Another example is that of the T. rex fossil at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. Up until the early 1990s, they’d been displaying their T. rex in an upright position, which was historically inaccurate. When they renovated their dinosaur galleries (a project that predates me), the curators chose to display the T. rex in motion, as if it was stalking prey. That decision is not only more accurate, it also provokes an entirely different response and understanding of the T.rex as an apex predator. How cool is that?
Savich: I wonder if we could end with vision. I'm thinking of a poem you recently shared, full of seeing. What are some things you've seen (in poems, in museums, in the world) that have affected you in ways that are comparable to how you hope your work might affect others?
Woolcock: Wow. Great question! In poetry, what has affected me most is how a poet uses language to make me see what they see. The image that comes to mind is that of Sparrowhead, the young mage in Ursula K. Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea novel(s). Each poet has their own unique special power and I love when those powers are on full display in their work. The poet Kevin Young, who’s also director of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, and whose book Blue Laws I happen to be reading right now, is able to conjure time, place, and mood with his poetry in such an incredible way. Two excerpts in Blue Laws are from his books Black Maria and Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels. The way he employs language in both of these sections completely blows me away. One takes you on this wild film noir ride and the other is a historic account in which the progression of language moves the narrative forward. Highly recommend.
With my own poetry, I move between wanting to document language/experience and wanting to straight up just sing. I hope readers leave my work feeling a little more connected to other people, that they not only have a space where they belong, but that space is full of other people. I think a lot about how using certain words, phrases, or slang is meant to convey a sense of kinship. I like that language has that power. I hope that my poetry is able to tap into that.
As far as design, it always goes back to communication, even within an experience.
Tishon Woolcock is a poet, designer, and maker of things. He is Art Director for Social Projects at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the world’s largest museum planning and design firm. In 2014, Tishon was named a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow. His most recent chapbook Type Something was released in January 2022. More about him at tishon.com.