Dawn Figueroa Oral History Interview, February 15, 2019

ANNA ROTH: Okay, so if you could just state who you are and where you are and the date.

DAWN FIGUEROA: I'm Dawn Figueroa. I'm, wait I didn't hear-I'm sorry, I'm already messing up.

AR: Where you are today and then today's date.

DF: Okay, I'm at the Valley Library in the Barnard classroom and doing an oral interview story. I'm the collection curator of historic and cultural, textile, and apparel collection here at OSU.

AR: Awesome. Backing up a bit, can you talk a little bit about where you grew up and what led you to go to Kean University and a little bit about your degree.

DF: Okay, so I tell people when they ask me when did I know that I wanted to be an artist, and I was in pre-school and the teacher gave everyone this project to do a snow scene, and I saw everybody just taking the white crayons and banging 00:01:00them down over their pictures and I wanted my snow to be different, to look like it was really alive. So, I took glue and I put tiny dots so it would look like it was snowing over the picture. The teacher saw it and she got very upset with me that I was wasting glue. I thought when she gave me the attention that she was going to tell me what a great job I was doing, but she didn't. I once read later on that sometimes bad memories stick in your mind more than good memories. I look back on that as a good memory because it made me realize that I was talented and I wanted to be an artist.

AR: Wonderful.

DF: That's when I first knew I wanted to be-I just always wanted to be an artist. I knew what I wanted to do and I grew up moving around a lot, going to a lot of different schools, sometimes changing in the middle of the school, so I 00:02:00grew up mostly along the East Coast and mostly in Virginia and New Jersey but moving around within those places also. When I was approaching graduation of high school I thought I'm not prepared to go out in the world. I knew I wanted to go to school for art, and I knew I wanted to be artist, but I also felt like if I just went to art school I wasn't going to be smart enough to make it in the world. I just knew in my mind I needed more school. My parents at the time in many ways they were like, you can get married so why don't you take some time off and see what you want to do. You don't have to go to college right away. I just thought I have to go. I'm just not-I have to do this. My principal was very encouraging and got me brochures and helped me and I went to Kean, I looked at a 00:03:00few schools, but I chose Kean because they had a really good visual communications program and I liked that idea of communicating things through my art because I was a thoughtful person. I wanted to learn illustration. They had a great illustration program there too. Should I keep going?

AR: Yes. Of course.

DF: Okay. I got into Kean and I had grants that pretty much paid of all of my college because my parents at the time were making below the poverty level. I got grants to go to school. My uncle helped with my first term before that kicked in. I started out in advertising. I thought I wanted to go into advertising. One day I was sitting in the class and the teacher said, if you 00:04:00have an ethical problem with, and she was saying this not just to me but to all the students, she said if you have an ethical problem with manipulating people and trying to influence them in ways that might sometimes not even be in their best interest, but it's in the company's best interest or your best interest, then this class may not be for you. I just thought at the very same time I was taking that class I was taking a philosophy class that focused on ethics and I just thought I can't do this. I stayed in the class, and I decided, and in some ways I felt like part of me just walked out but I decided to stay in and finish the class. I asked one of the people that worked in advertising is it really like that? Do you have to do that? What if I worked in doing advertising for environmental companies and stuff like that.

He said, well, really it just didn't, it's not that easy and you probably would 00:05:00have to do a lot of things that you didn't feel comfortable with before you got to that place. So, I was like, okay no. Then I went into graphic design. I just felt like it was too simplified. I had a hard time simplifying my ideas into one kind of logo. The next class I took was a drawing class and I just, I found what I wanted to do. I loved it. I went all the way up into the high level illustration classes where we were doing realism and all my projects I got A's and my teacher, we were close, and he was a great mentor for me. I think he still works there, and they call him Jedi Master Jochnowitz, or whatever. He was 00:06:00a great mentor. He told me that I should either marry a wealthy man and be supported so someone could support me and I just do my art, or I should get my masters. At that point I just felt like, I was living on my own. My parents had moved to Florida when I was a junior and I was still in New Jersey. I was living independently and it was a real struggle and I just thought I can't keep going to school I got to get out and get a job. My roommate and I decided to rent a place together in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, and she was my roommate in college and we both got a job at a school.

It was a private school at the time and it was boys with disabilities, 00:07:00neurological disabilities. Some were just struggling in school. They weren't able to make it in the public school atmosphere, so they went to this private school. I came in, they didn't have an art teacher, so I got to teach art, but I taught other things, whatever they needed. History, or science or whatever they needed I would teach. When I began to teach history was when I first got to really love and be interested in it. I didn't like history when I was in high school. I did well in it when I was in college but it wasn't until I started to teach it myself that I really thought I really like this. I had also double majored when I was in college in philosophy, because I loved the first philosophy class that I ever took, which I mentioned, ethics. I liked it so much 00:08:00that I decided I wanted to double major in it with that and fine art. I didn't realize at the time but it's actually, for a person that does illustration where you're conveying ideas. Philosophy was a great kind of marriage to that endeavor, because I just had this, I would push myself mentally to go into greater depth of what I wanted to express and then push myself artistically to express that. It just I think really helped my art to grow. I worked at this school. I thought at first it was going to be such a great job because the days were shorter to do what was best for the kids. I had all that time after work. I got off at like 2:30 and I had that time to focus on my art. But these kids 00:09:00were, there were some that had abusive situations and it was, just they were under a lot of stress and there was a lot of-I thought it would be more teaching but it was a lot of managing behavior. At that time I was not a parent. I was a young, free-spirited and that was not my forte I thought. But I did love the students. They were great. I got better at it, I think. But I realized I needed, if I was going to focus on my art, I needed something different to do. Around that time, while I was working there, I met the man that I'm married to today.

He was working at a private home for kids that were in between foster homes. It 00:10:00wasn't really a foster home. It was like this in-between stage with these kids. These kids had severe abuse issues and some of them were drug dealing at five years old and there were all kinds of abuse. My husband and I would come home and we'd have an hour of conference time of just talking through everything and then we'd get to make art together or go for a walk or something like that. At that same time, he was a philosophy major. We went to nearby colleges. He wanted to get his masters and get his Ph.D. and be a philosophy professor. He went on the market looking for a school to go to and he decided to go to CU of Boulder. 00:11:00I always wanted to move out west. I never liked New Jersey. I loved my friends there, but I didn't like the place, very overcrowded. I liked nature. I like hiking and the woods. We had only been together 8 months, but I just was like I want to go with you and he's like I want you to come with me. He had a Geo Metro, a tiny car, we packed everything that we could fit in it and we just got rid of the rest of the stuff, or left it in his mother's attic and we just moved out there. Had a couple thousand dollars in savings. We got a place. We had to get a job within one week so we could afford our rent and he went to CU and I got a job then at a bead shop and I liked it, being surrounded by art and 00:12:00helping people to do art and then I still did my art on my own on the side. I started getting tables at shows and I made jewelry and made my drawings into cards and made my larger drawings into calendars and I got these tables and showed the work. Then I worked there for a long time, pretty much making minimum wage and at that time I think maybe about the time I left there I was making $6.75 an hour working full-time, struggling to pay our bills and my husband had to work, was really working while he was doing his master's to make that extra income so we could pay our rent and everything. I ended up-so at one point I 00:13:00just said I don't want to be here anymore. I need to leave this position. I put an ultimatum with my boss, and she said I can't pay you anymore. I'm like well, alright, I'm going to leave. I went to another store in town. They sold Buddhist practice items and carpets from all over the world and other historic pieces, jewelry and artifacts and they had beads in the other half of the store. This man was a wonderful person to work for. He said I'll let you-you can sell your art in here and I won't take a percentage. If you want to do other business within the story I won't take any commission of it, that's to help you to grow in your art. It'll be this win-win situation for both of us and that really 00:14:00helped me to get some clientele and make money doing my own art and that went really great and I was really happy there and I was beginning to be recognized in Boulder as an artist, which was a great thing. We lived there about 9 years and then, I'm trying to thing-I think the first job was that my husband got was in Missouri. So, we moved to Missouri. He had never lived in the south, which they kind of say, oh it's not really the south. He always lived in New Jersey and maybe spent summers in Puerto Rico sometimes.

His father lived in Puerto Rico. It just didn't, I don't know, we weren't very happy. I felt like all of my artwork was looking like depressed and we just, I worked in a-I took a job in a framing shop and an art supply store just to have some work, but it was hard to rebuild everything. Because I was an established artist in Boulder and then to go there and have to rebuild all of that. It just was not working. We literally got there the day before he started. We got our apartment. He left the very last day of teaching. He got off of teaching. He got home. We packed the truck. He had already been on the market. He got a job at Colgate University in upstate New York. That was when I first, we got up there 00:16:00and I worked for the first year doing freelance. I had a private person who was commissioning me to do work and they had Saturday market and I sold my art there. I worked at home. I didn't even take a job outside of the home. Eventually I just felt like I needed to do something out in the world. I thought this was going to be my dream come true. I'm living at home, working, and doing my art. I thought that would be everything that I wanted to do, but it wasn't. I just felt like I needed to be out in the world helping people or doing something. I was telling a friend of mine that and she said you know there's a museum on the campus. It's a fine art, works on paper, and paintings and 00:17:00sculpture. They're looking for a preparator. I went and I applied for it and I got an interview and I said I've been working as an artist on my own for years. I hang all my own shows. I matte and frame all my own work. I brought in something to show him and he was very impressed with it, the director, so I got the job.

That was a great experience. I got to work around art and in a real museum and they had a Picasso there. It was a university museum but they had a great collection. I didn't expect to fall in love with the work so much, but I fell in love with it and I stopped doing my own art. I just all of a sudden didn't want 00:18:00to do my own art for a while because I was so interested in learning on other people's work and focusing on other people's work. It was a nice relief. I didn't have to sell anything. It was all about education, taking people on tours and talking about the pieces and learning about them and the director, he was from Harvard, he was just so smart and the kids at the school, a lot of them had very high IQs, it's almost an ivy league school, so I had students that worked with me and it was just fantastic to be around all of that and while I was there mostly I was unpacking and shipping art. I was matting and framing and then installing the exhibitions and that took up most of my work, but one thing that 00:19:00also happened there was that I had never worked a job where I used a computer. My director found out about that. I told him, I said I know how to turn it on and that's pretty much all I know how to do. He said well I want you to come in for a half hour every morning and just sit there and play with it. Go to websites, search things, open some of the things that are on there and explore them. If you have any questions let me know. I did. It got more and more comfortable all the time with the computer and then about the same time we got the museum system, which is a database, to catalogue and photograph artwork on. We just had gotten that and we were just starting to digitize and catalogue the collection.

I learned that just being there and helping people and the whole time I worked 00:20:00there if somebody was maybe going on a study abroad or teaching abroad I would say, hey, the docent is not working. Can I help? Can I do some tours? Our curator left at one point and I said hey can I curate an exhibition? I just kept-every time there was a need I stepped up and said can I help? Can I learn that? My director was very pleased with having the extra help and my enthusiasm and he just taught me so much. He took time to in a way like take me under his wing and just helped me to learn and actualize what he saw was a potential and/or just being interested. We lived there for about 8 years and I loved it. 00:21:00It was a beautiful place and it was a very nice community and the job was great but it was 8 months of winter. I mean, it starts snowing in November and it snows until like June. It's so cold, like 20 below some days, 10 below some days. I never liked the winter there. It was such a difference between Boulder. Boulder brags to have 320 sunny days a year but New York is like that amount of cloudy days. My husband went on the market again and he got a job offer at UNT at Texas, the University of North Texas. We moved there and I was looking for 00:22:00work and applying for jobs and he saw, because it was at the university, that there was a job at a fashion collection and I read the description and they were getting ready to digitize their collection also. So, they were interested in having somebody with museum experience and experience with the database, but I didn't have really any fashion experience besides reading Vogue or something like that, you know? I loved fashion. I crocheted, I grew up with a mother who had a sewing machine and my grandmother sewed and made clothes. I was close enough to that generation that I knew how to sew and I crocheted and knitted and made things.

But I went to the interview and I think there were, I said, I love fashion. I 00:23:00got to be honest I don't have experience in it but I love it and I'm very interested in learning it and I do have museum experience and she was from, the director was from New York also, so she liked having what they call Yankee, some people refer in Texas if you're from New York they think of you, oh you're a Yankee. That became my next job and I was pretty much her assistant. I was collection manager, curator. I got to learn a lot more about the grant writing and having dinners with donors and doing the other aspects of museum work. I worked there for 5 years and I just thought it was one of the best jobs I had 00:24:00ever had. It was working with all these beautiful clothing and getting to do fashion exhibits. I learned so much, even through the art, but I feel like especially when I started to do the work at the fashion collection. I never knew so much about history. I never understood it. History, the timeline of history, and I mean 20th century, 19th and 20th century history, I never, I felt like it was always jumbled. Okay, I know World War II. I understand a little bit about World War I, the Civil War. I knew the timeline of these things but to bring them together and to have this long cohesion of history, I didn't know that until I started working.

I needed a visual aid, I think. And having the clothing and the stories that the 00:25:00clothing would tell, and the accessories and all of that, it really, it's different from fine art where the artist paints a picture they can impose a lot of their own ideas onto it, you know? If they draw somebody in a royal family and they make them look more perfect or beautiful than they are. Or sometimes they may even try to bring out things about their personality that's ugly. You see this in paintings, like if you really examine them you can see that the artist takes a certain license to make certain things happen like that. But clothing it's harder to separate from because it has to be on this person, you know? It's like even body types or the amount of food that we have access to now 00:26:00that we didn't have in the 18th and 19th century and you see clothing that's so tiny. Everybody had these tinier, not everybody, but there were a lot more tinier bodies. You can't separate-it tells you something about people and something about society that's harder to separate I think than paintings. I learned a lot about all that working there and especially doing exhibitions because you have to explain the story, you have to teach it. That brings me, moving forward, then my husband just decided that he didn't want to die in Texas. He loves being outdoors. He loves the ocean. He's like it's too hot here. 00:27:00Every summer it's 90 degrees every day. You have to wake up some days in the summer I would wake up at 5:30 to go walking with my neighbors to get some exercise and then it would be 90 degrees by 6:30 or 7:00. Biking and hiking and everything you have to wait until it's the evening. Everybody has swimming pools there because that's your exercise. That's the only way to stay outside unless you really like the heat. He decided and I said I was fine with that but it had to be some place that I really wanted to go too.

He went on the market and he found this job at OSU and I think someone had actually invited him to apply a year or two before that to an opening. He had an 00:28:00interest in this program. He saw the job and he applied for it and it was all looking good and they said we're going to fly you out there and it was April when they flew us out and we came out to look at it, to decide if we wanted to live here, and it was, as you know, April's maybe going to be rainy. You can't always plan for a perfect day, but the whole time we were here the weather was perfect. It was like 75 and sunny, or 70 and sunny. It was gorgeous and we went to Newport to check out the beach and even the people we were walking around the town and they said this is very unusual. It's not like this, because we were just talking it up and talking about how beautiful it was and how great it was and how much we loved it and they were like it's not usually like this but we 00:29:00were just yes we want to move here. Oh my gosh, this is great. We also wanted a place, you know a different community for our children. We liked the schools here. We liked the people that we met. We just went back and I said this is my last move, too. I'm not moving anymore. I had grown up-this was about my 40th move in my life. I always thought after I settled down and got married that I wouldn't have the life I had growing up but then marrying a professor that just sometimes professors end up having lives where they're moving around. But I told him, I said, I'll move one more time, but this is it. We're staying in Oregon. I love the atmosphere. I bike to work or take the free bus and I go hiking up in Bald Hill and we just explore the area and go to the beach.

This is a beautiful place to live and the community is really great. That brings me to here. I think it was on our visit here, actually, it was that we were visiting the area but my husband was giving a talk while we were visiting here at the school so the students could meet him and the professors could see what he does and everything. I came up to the building with him and I said well I'm just going to take a walk around the campus and walk around the building and explore a little. I walked past, I was in Milam Hall on the second floor and I saw this display of historic clothing and it had a sign and it said this is part of the design of human environment and it's this collection of historic textiles 00:31:00and apparel and accessories. I looked online to see if it had been digitized, if it was part of the Valley Library or what was happening with it and I didn't really find very much. I just thought, well, maybe since I have been working in museums for all these years and I have all this experience, maybe I could just write up a proposal to the dean or the person that's in charge of the collection and share with them my experience of working with collections and you know just say, hey look I can I can do this. I can do this. Could you use me? Could I help here? I wrote up a proposal of, well I wrote a cover letter of my experience. There weren't any jobs available with it but I just was like that's what I want to do. I wrote this proposal. I wrote a cover letter explaining my experience. I 00:32:00wrote down a 10-point paragraphs of what I could do to help the collection, to make it more visible, to digitize it, to catalogue it, and do more with it. I sent it to the woman who was in charge of the collection, a former professor here, and I didn't hear from her right away, but then I talked to, my husband talked to his dean and he contacted the associate dean at the time of the design in human environment and said, hey look we have this person and do you want to meet with her and maybe see what she can do for the collection? I met with her 00:33:00and she was thrilled. She was like it would be great to have this collection photographed and digitized. She said let me give you a tour and let me show you the collection because I think she thought I might run away after I saw it.

It was not completely organized. The thing that was the best about it was that it had been very well persevered and cared for in the perseveration sense, but the cataloguing was done in five different methods so there was no cohesion there and there were pieces that didn't have any records or just had a record that said "red dress." I've actually just always liked organizing things and I'm kind of a detail oriented person and I'm not afraid of a big mess kind of a job. I said it's fine with me and I'll just come in, I'll open one of the drawers. 00:34:00I'll go through it all, photograph it, catalogue it, renumber it if I have to and I'll just go through it one piece at a time. Again, I felt like this job is even better than my other job. It's so wonderful to just go into work and learn something new every day and get to be around something that somebody created and to have this visual piece of history, material history, to get to know. When I came in with the job I started in the room with the apparel and accessories because that's what I was most comfortable with because I had done that at University of North Texas, but the other room had textiles going back from like Coptic Egypt in 15th century and 16th century.

I knew very little about that part of history or those kinds of artifacts. But I just dug in anyway and learned it and I'm still working in that room to finish that part of the process.

AR: Wonderful. How do you see historic apparel collection and vintage clothing in general affecting or helping the present or future?

DF: Well, I think as I said before that it tells a story and the more closer you get to it and the more that you look at it more critically, the larger the story has to tell. Some people look at vintage clothing or historical garments and they just see something pretty, which I think's fine too. It's art and some 00:36:00people look at art more deeply than others but I think we all like looking at it and these fashion exhibits, I'm trying to think of what the-some of these exhibits, even when they're done at like the MET in New York, they get the best and most turnout of any other exhibit in their museum. Dallas had an exhibit of I think it was Jean Paul Gaultier, and they did a couple of different ones, but those exhibits had the most amount of turnout, more so than the other parts of the collection. I think it's because we all wear clothes. We all relate to it. Not everybody is an art collector or is interested in having art in their home, but everybody wears clothes and I think that speaks to more people. I think as 00:37:00women we particularly like it but then it took a while getting my husband in there to bring to some of these things and then he looking at it up close, he's like I'm amazed. I never realized how much was going on or the detail of the workmanship.

I think sometimes the students, apparent design students, don't get the recognition they deserve as artists, because you're making a sculpture and you're making a work of art and it has to fit a moving person. That's so many different design elements. Making a sculpture, a plain sculpture, that doesn't 00:38:00have to be worn and doesn't have to move and doesn't have to look pretty but still go through the washing machine or the dry cleaner or whatever. I think it doesn't get as much recognition as it deserves because there are so many things that are going into that that make it spectacular. One of the other things I like about fashion and apparel design is seeing all the intersections of how art influences it, how even someone will make a sweater and it'll have a modern art print or in the 1920s with art nuevo patterns and pieces and different cultures we get inspired by when we first started opening trade with Japan and China and 00:39:00those started to influence the way that American and Europeans designed and made clothing. I think those intersections are very interesting. How we feel in society when androgyny in the '70s started to influence fashion. Now we have even more. I see my daughter's a big Instagram fan and she's always showing me these pictures of these makeup artists and fashion designers that have so many intersections of the way that they are portraying themselves. It's an art style, the art of style. I think all that is fascinating.

AR: Wonderful. You've also have ran a couple workshops on campus as well at the cultural centers. How did you get involved with that?

DF: I have to credit-I have a supervisor in the college of business who went to an event at the Pacific Asian Center and she met someone there and she met someone there and said hey you might be interested, let me introduce you to Dawn. I think you'd be interested in her and what she's doing. We have in the collection here at the College of Business, we have an amazing collection from China and Japan and the South Pacific Islands because Ava Milam actually lived in China for a while doing the land grant work that she was doing and she was able to collect some pieces that are unlike anything I've seen, really remarkable pieces. We have a nice collection and so we were going to do a show 00:41:00and tell of these South Pacific Island pieces but we ended up giving a talk on appropriation, because a lot of South Pacific Island and Asian pieces are appropriated by westerners used for different things. I did a display for Chinese New Year and one of the students mentioned all the swastikas that are in the Chinese works that were from the King Dynasty, so the pre-1900. Then Hitler appropriated that symbol and turned it into something else, but before that it was a symbol that was often used as balance and harmony. That's an example of appropriation.

AR: Cool. I saw that you did some other talks with activism. How do you see this part playing into your life?

DF: I guess I just look for sometimes, I just look for the story that the clothing has to tell and I think in my own art, too, I think it's a missed opportunity if I just draw a pretty picture. I'm missing an opportunity to do something more with it. I did a lot of, for a while I was really in my illustration always trying to convey ideas, to convey some meaning of something, 00:43:00to tell a story with it and also give somebody something interesting to look at. I like to solve problems and so to me the more problems I can solve in a picture the better.

AR: What gets you most excited about all this work that you do through art and collections and writing, everything.

DF: I think getting to learn something new every day and to share ideas. Even when I've-I think when I was in fourth grade the teacher gave out superlative awards to everybody, and my award was best attitude. I didn't even realize that. I'm like really, I have a good attitude? I didn't even recognize it. I always 00:44:00think back to that. I'm like that's a good-I'm always trying to look ahead and take opportunities to problem solve and think positively about them. If my kids have a problem, I'm like how can we solve this problem? But how can we do it in the best way? How can we not only solve this problem but maybe you can learn something and maybe we can go on a field trip, you know, just build upon those things and illustration and writing and working with these collections it gives me a greater palette to do those kinds of things. Every time I learn about a new textile, a new weaving technique, or why people in that, why did these nomadic people wear those clothes so differently from the people that lived too that weren't nomadic.

Once I answer that question and learn why, I have that information. It becomes 00:45:00part of my palette to create things and I enjoy that.

AR: Wonderful. Going back to the collection a little bit. How has it changed? You talked about you're cataloging things and digitizing them, but how has it changed and evolved since 2014?

DF: Well, I think I've been able to bring-I especially thing professors these days, there's so much changing all the time, like I have to do everything on Canvas. You have to learn Canvas and you have to upload all the information and there's also a lot of pressure for professors, and I'm not a professor myself but I see it, where they have to do more service and get involved in other 00:46:00things and they're busy. For them to be able to say oh let me just go open the drawers and look and see what's in this collection. It's difficult for them to find the time to do something like that. Making the collection accessible allows them to actually have access to this resource that they didn't really have much of an access before. Only the few professors that used it and worked in it were able to take advantage of it, but even Professor Peterson who worked with the collection before me, she said she never felt like she had the time to photograph everything or catalogue it all. It was like if she was teaching a class where she was using a certain thing or she was working with a student she 00:47:00would send them in to do what they could. She focused a great deal on the preservation, which is very important because pieces won't last if they're not well-preserved. I think getting the collection on the digital image library on Oregon Digital is one of the best things, having it photographed and having it catalogued and just making it more user-friendly. Doing the displays. I do displays in and around the building in Milam so people can get a sense of what's in there, because otherwise they wouldn't know really what was in there.

AR: Yeah. Do you have any future plans for the collection in terms of displays or any sort of research?

DF: Well, I'm kind of getting close to finishing the cataloguing, like actually 00:48:00having gone through everything and photographed everything. I've got over 2,000 pieces photographed and catalogued and I think there's about 500 more. It's getting closer to being more accessible and then I think just doing more of outreach and getting more displays and getting more, once it's in that place, then people can come in and use it themselves. A professor can look on Oregon Digital, get the information they need, and come in to the collection and decide for themselves if they want to bring something into a class or something like that. I think, yeah, getting it out, showing people more, continuing-I sort of do that on the side while I'm cataloguing, and supervising students who want 00:49:00real work experience. A lot of students are interested in learning more about apparel history or getting experience because they might want to work in a museum, so I supervise independent studies, at least one a term, where students are coming into the collection and getting that hands-on work and training.

AR: When you're making these displays, how do you start this whole process and start the research for it?

DF: Usually I just, as I'm cataloguing I have an idea. Sometimes there's professors will say I want to bring a class by and I'd like you to show them some pieces. Recently a philosophy of art class came by.

They wanted to see some pieces where the relationship between art and craft, and 00:50:00so I started with the aesthetic period between 1870 and 1895 where there was a resistance to the flourishing industrialization that was going on, so people were starting to do very arts and crafts kinds of things, like handmade things and there was more of a focus on it. Function was not as important as doing this handmade craft thing. I started with that and I started to look at other things in that relation. I thought of hats, how hats were a lot of designers would say I love making hats more than anything because I can be as creative as I want, because it's a hat and you don't have to solve all those problems of wearing and 00:51:00moving and everything. It's more of a sculpture. It's not as costly to make. I think probably Chanel started making hats because she didn't need to buy as much supplies and fabric to make that, and then as I answer those questions I just see more and more. It sort of evolves in my mind and I just bring it all together.

AR: I know curating can be a little bit different from making your own art, like you were talking about, but do you ever go back a little bit and create your own stuff still?

DF: My own art?

AR: Yes.

DF: Yeah, actually, so I don't know how-I think how it happened is both my kids are now at an age where, I mean, part of why I gave up doing my own art for a 00:52:00while was because my children-I was raising them and working and I thought when I do my art I go into the zone and everything else disappears around me. I've always been that way and I realized I can't do that with the kids. I'll be ignoring them and they need me. But now they're both artists and so we have turned our kitchen table, we kind of have a relatively small place, and we just turned our kitchen table into an art table. We just have our art out there all the time. I think because they were making art so much and I was training them and helping them with it. I just was like I'm going to do my art now, and I come home from work and sit at the table and do my art and they're doing art and we're all getting to see what each other's creating and so it's a good, it's 00:53:00kind of a great family thing.

AR: Awesome. Sorry I lost my place.

DF: That's okay.

AR: Going back a little bit, well, actually no, this is current, with gallery showings, did you show some work, like your own illustrations in galleries and how did that work happen?

DF: Mm-hmm. Great, I did one that was, and I just happened to open-I don't read OSU Today everyday but I just happened this one day to open up OSU Today and I 00:54:00saw that there was a call for artists at the art center and the title was "Art Saves Lives." I read about it and read about it and I think it was only like 3 pieces per artist or something. I had art that I felt like really expressed the mission of the exhibit and I just went home and scanned the work and sent it in and I got in the exhibit. It was a great experience. It was a great experience to have my work in there and to be able to, because I'm an illustrator, tell the story through the work but also just to see what other artists were doing. That really powerful exhibit was amazing.

I really saw when I'm applying and looking at my own work and trying to describe 00:55:00it, I'm not thinking about what other people are going to do, but then going to the exhibit and seeing what other people were doing, I really felt like it was an amazing exhibit. It was a pop-up exhibit, so it only went on for a few days, but I wished it had been up longer so more people could get a chance to see it and see people with different mental health issues go through and how art allows them to express themselves. I look at my art, because I'm in illustration, and it's very detailed. To me it's the way that I meditate. I realize when I'm doing my art, I'm always feeling better. I'm always more centered because I'm in that space of meditation and in the end of it something beautiful comes out.

AR: Do you get a similar sense with curating pieces, with apparel and textiles, the sense of meditation?

DF: I don't know. That's a good question. Probably a little bit. I love the process of just continually stepping back and looking like is this as beautiful as I want it to be? Is this really conveying the message that I want to convey? I think there's a lot of that back and forth. It's a little bit different, though, I think. When I illustrate it is more of me going into a zone and staying there for longer.

AR: Where do you see yourself going from now through working with a collection and working with your art and your kids, where do you see yourself going?

DF: I recently joined an art co-op, so I really am trying to... I did a lot of 00:57:00artwork in 2018, I got a lot pieces accomplished. I was selling, sold a couple of prints and originals and I make calendars and greeting cards. I feel like I'm getting back to that place I was in Boulder where I'm becoming an artist in the community and it feels really good. Also I feel like I can help my kids because they both are very talented and very artistic. My son especially. He's on the autism spectrum and he also has that ability to zone in and everything else goes away and he creates. He's been doing art, he probably spends two to five hours a 00:58:00day making art and he's only 15 and he's been doing it maybe since he was 8 or 9 diligently making art and everything he does-if he takes a class in the community the things that he produces are just outstanding. Everybody wants to work with him, because it's so fun having somebody create. He's also got a very unique style, and so I feel like I'll be able to help him. There were so many mistakes I made. I didn't have anybody guiding me. I had to learn the hard way to really get my art going and promote it and all that kind of stuff and I'm happy that I can help my kids if they want a career in art to help them move 00:59:00forward, and especially now getting to know people and becoming a part of the co-op and I'm looking out now, because I have a body of recent work that I can show, I'm looking now for places to show it. I have enough work. That was part of the thing is that, I'm like even when I did the art saves lives, all the work I showed was work that I did ten years ago. Now that I'm actively making art again when I'm showing now I can show recent work, which is good.

AR: Has Oregon and the Oregon State community has that influenced, or have you adjusted-in terms of your art and your work, has that helped evolve your work in any way?

DF: I absolutely think so.

This is a nice community and there's a lot of art. I see a lot of artists in the 01:00:00community. I think people generally. I've lived, I don't know how many different states I've lived in and people are different everywhere. I tell people New Jersey it's like a different culture there. The south is a different culture. I think people in Oregon just seem so generally nice. Even going into the grocery store-and my parents came to visit recently and they said the same thing. They said wow the people are so friendly and they just seem so genuinely like they want to help you. I feel like there's no competitiveness with artists here. People are really genuinely interested in helping each other and wanting to work with other artists and help other artists and I don't know, I just-I feel like 01:01:00because there's enough art in the community it's made kind of easy. Even the farmers market they have the section on the other side of the farmer's market, which I haven't done yet, but I looked into getting a table there and it's like $20 or $25 for a table, which is an amazing price. In Boulder it would have been like $300 for a table or more. I feel like that is a way of helping community of artists, of promoting art by even having art co-ops, where you don't have to pay a huge commission for if you sell a work and then you end up not being able to support even your endeavors. I think it's a great community for being an artist.

AR: For sure. For final thoughts, how have you seen the OSU community change 01:02:00since you've been here and what do you like most about the community?

DF: Well, I think in my own department I started out in design in human environment, was our department. I felt like there was more of a comradery and maybe I don't know-it seemed like more of a comradery. Then we came under the College of Business, which I think in a way, if you're a designer chances are you're going to start your own business or you're going to work in a business. Having those business skills I think it made sense. The apparel design department that I worked in in Texas they were surprised. They were like why are you guys in the College of Business? It didn't make as much sense to them. They 01:03:00were more in the college of arts. I saw that, but I feel like there's a distance between, there's still a distance between in the college. I don't feel like there's as much of a comradery. I still like working in Milam Hall and the professors that I work with and the students that I work with. I think it's great. The students that I've had, like Meegan, it's just been wonderful to get to know them. I think the students that I've had that I've worked with are hardworking and they're genuinely interested in learning. They never miss a day. I don't think I've ever had a student miss a day, maybe one time of sickness or something, but they're always on time and they're enthusiastic about learning 01:04:00and they're a great help and I think this is one of the most beautiful campuses I've ever been on: when the flowers bloom in the spring, it's beautiful. I feel like when I've worked at the other centers around campus or if I reach out to a professor, they're always friendly and enthusiastic about learning and interested in doing collaborations and stuff. Does that answer your question?

AR: Yeah. Do you have anything else you want to share? Just about your work or the different hats you juggle, just moving here, adapting to the rainy climate? Anything?

DF: Moving has been a big part of my life story because I've moved so much, and 01:05:00I think one of the things that happens with moving is that you're always kind of an outsider. I always feel like I'm a visitor whenever I got someplace, but I look at the place from that perspective. I look at it and see it in a different way. In some ways it's kind of a nice experience to get to know a place that I have that kind of outsider's experience with. I thought the rain would be difficult because I like the sun, but I feel like the rain here doesn't bother me. If it's really pouring I have my umbrella and I don't go out very much. I'm not as active in the winter, but it's usually a misty rain that you can still go for walks and hikes and I really like it. I think the hardest thing about moving 01:06:00around and being out here is I miss all my friends that are all over the country. I'm happy about Facebook to keep in touch with them, but it's hard, having moved around so much and know so many people I can't just go visit when I want to and family, too. My family lives from Maine to Florida all along the east coast pretty much. That's a difficult thing. I've met a lot of wonderful people here and friendships are always building and growing and my children are very happy here. My husband's happy here, so I think it was a really good move to get everybody happy about it. The dogs love it, too. Two dogs and they don't mind the rain and they love going for walks around the neighborhood and we live 01:07:00near Willamette Park, so the kids play at the park and ride their bikes and I love the free bus that we can go anywhere we want around time and my kids can hop on the bus and go to the library by themselves. It's a pretty great town to raise a family in.

AR: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

DF: You're welcome.

AR: That's all I got.

DF: Okay.