creativity now (women later?)
i was talking to a friend yesterday about the upcoming tokion creativity now conference. i'm a big fan of the conference and the idea of getting together so many inspirational people and listening to them talk about art, design, music and business [well done, tokion]. however, we both noticed that this year, out of 19 speakers, there were no women on the list. we were both saddened by the speaker offerings and wondered what had happened. while googling around for some information or perhaps another confused soul i came across jen bekman's blog (formerly of unbeige) and it seems she also found this upsetting. however, she actually got ken of tokion to respond. ken explained that they invited a very long list of women to attend but they had all either decline or had been unable to attend. jen found this answer unacceptable and i'll have to say i also wondered why they didn't just ask a few more. so i thought i'd open this up to the design community. in hopes of generating a list of people (like jen's) that perhaps a lowly design fan like myself could submit to tokion next year for consideration- which women would you want to see speak at the tokion creativity now conference? my hope is to build up a list like jen's and hopefully by next year they can invite enough women that at least a handful will be able to attend and speak. i love matmos and wondershowzen as much as the next gal but i'd love to see some women on the panel next year. please leave your votes below, thanks.
[there's a very interesting discussion taking place between jen and ken from tokion right here. ken states that they've always represented women in the magazine...is that really something to tout this day and age? i highly suggest joining in the discussion on jen's site as well if you're interested]
Labels: miscellaneous
posted by design*sponge @ 8.10.06
48 Comments:
I know a lot of people at Tokion and you weren't the only one who was upset about the lack of women. But in the interest of less complaining and more "doing" here is my list. [Sam, NYC]
Zaha Hadid
Allison Arieff
Angela Adams
Sarah Silverman
Sarah Cihat
Rima Suqi of New York Magazine
Patricia Urquiola
Alice Roy
Paola Antonelli
Jen made a pretty decent list but I'd add some more business women to the list. I don't think Martha Stewart is appropriate but aren't there some more gallery owners, shop owners, anything that would be appropriate? What about Jen herself?
Annie
I love me some momentum!
Thanks Grace, and yes, I totally agree Sam - less complainng, more doing.
I started a list on Personism last night and have already gotten some awesome additions You can go here to check it out:
A List, To Start.
Debbie Stoller from Bust and Stitch n Bitch fame
Amy Schroeder from Venus
Jenny Hart of Sublime Stitching and the Austin Craft Mafia
I'll think of more later...
Amy Arbus
Lauren Greenfield
Mary Ellen Mark
Sarah Vowell
A.M. Homes
Zadie Smith
Julie Snyder (This American Life)
Cat Power
Jenny Lewis
Joanna Newsome
etc etc etc
Right on, Grace. This issue is quite disconcerting.
I agree with you and Jen that it's unacceptable of Tokion to settle with all men after inviting a long list of women who were unable or declined to attend. If that is the case, you damn well keep trying. As is evident by the lists that are popping up all over the internet as a result of yours and Jen Bekman's blogs, there is no shortage of creative women to invite. And the presence of women on those panels does matter.
It matters to the psyche of a 15 year-old future-artist in Topeka, Kansas reading about this event in the news, with no explanation offered as to why there are no women present. It matters to the any number of women (and men) attending this event, just starting out in the creative world, looking for inspiration and direction, and hearing only a male perspective (which is going to be different from that of a female, no matter how much we would like to think otherwise). And It even matters to all the established women in the creative sector who at this point should be able to put aside gender disparity to focus solely on their work, but every once in a while hears about something like this, and suddenly finds herself spending the next hour (or however long) revisiting an old topic which she had long ago hoped to put to rest.
I think that if you are the organizers behind a public event like this you have an absolute responsibility to accurately present the true state of creativity in today's world, and that includes women. It doesn't matter that Tokion tried to bring women onto the panels, because no one will no that. It matters that they are not there. It may not matter in a big screaming public outrage kind of way, but it does matter in even the tiniest, irksome irritation in the back of the mind kind of way, that overtime, unchecked, can be come a monster.
I apologize for taking up so much space here and that being said, here are my recommendations to the fantastic lists already out there:
Neisha Crosland
Mary Gehlhar (Fashion Director of Gen Art)
Bobbi Brown
Hella Jongerius
Regina Spektor
Orla Kiely
Katrina Markoff (Vosges Haut-Chocolat)
Natalie Chanin (Project Alabama)
Jenny Holzer
Question: What is the racial/ethnic make up of the 19 men? If it's all white men, that raises another flag...
WOW. Mr. Tokion is digging himself a ditch. Everyone's at Freize?? Yeah, um, sure.
Cal
I'm glad I logged on today. As a student at Pratt I'm often discussing this issue with my friends. I feel like we get left out of conferences, lectures and discussions- and in an industry that's pretty open minded it's sad. I appreciate that they invited a long list of women but couldn't they have tried a little bit harder? I can't wait to see Matmos but I'd love to see some other talented women, too.
What about Paola Antonelli? What about Zaha Hadid. What about local artists, photographers and writers. I can't believe they'd all say NO.
I'm voting for
Zaha Hadid
Tina Fey
Hella Jongerius
Christy Turlington (to talk about Nuala)
Donna Karan
Trisha :)
Laura from Craftster
The ladies of BUST
Neko Case
Regina Spektor
Portia Wells
Camilla Engman
Karin Eriksson
Lorena Barrezueta
Sarah Cihat
Lindsey Adelman
Lindy Roy
To add some names I haven's seen yet:
Christina Kubisch (great sound installation at The Kitchen right now!)
Debi Greenberg (president/buyer for Louis Boston)
M.I.A.
Yuko Nexus6 (japanese musician/sound artist)
Fe-Mail (noise musicians from...Denmark?)
Wendy Mullin
Sue Lindstrom (owner of Paper Source)
I just saw this at the other girl's blog from the Tokion editor. They invited (but got "no's") from:
yoko ono
cindy sherman
sofia coppola
sam taylor wood
nikki s lee
cecilia dean
nicole phelps
hope atherton
miranda july
dana schutz
valerie faris
amy larocca
elizabeth peyton
vivienne westwood
luella bartley
stella mccartney
lance still
sally mann
cecily brown
swoon
That seems like an awfully short list. I just saw that he invited 10 more people. So that makes 30 people. Doesn't seem like that many to invite for such a well known festival. Maybe they could have called a few more?
What about directors, playwrights, actors? Eve Ensler, Mary Louise Parker?
Mary
The Wooster Collective also took issue with the lack of women on a so called representative panel of who's shaping the world. They have done the same thing, making list of women and an open letter to Tokion.
Thank you Grace for asking -- and drawing attention to this important "oversight".. It seems to be a reaccuring theme in some circles and it is disturbing. I agree wholeheartedly to most of what has been already said, especially - the second paragraph of Stephanies comment. Considering where the event is being held - the idea of disucssing the lack of women being represented on the panel is completely contradictory to the history of the building's rather heroic past ... i.e. women's sufferage movement, NAACP, etc.
here are a few more additions to the already spectacular list above:
Marie Sester
Emma Gardner
Keri Smith
Penelope Dullaghan
Alex Beauchamp
just to add to the list...
Wow, people have gotten all bunged up over something that seems like an honest, unintentional organizational disaster.
While I admit that many of the names floating around on these 'you could have invited' lists are unknown to me, I have seen the speaker's list posted on the Tokion site, and I have seen the list of women they invited who were unable to participate, and I wonder if it wasn't a question of...professional equality. Although I've read the bios, I don't know the 'stature' and 'importance' of the confirmed speakers (nor of those men who declined), but many of the names on the Tokion list of invited women seem to be of different 'grist' than those speakers who confirmed. If you're going to seek out an Oscar-winning producer, or a fashion icon designer, but the rest of your panel doesn't have those credentials, then maybe those 'super stars' should be your headliners (or keynote speakers) and not panel participants. Unless you know that those invitees are happy participating at the panel level in these types of conferences.
I don't agree that it's inappropriate to have a "women's only" (or women's focused) conference in this day and age. You can learn from almost any exchange of ideas, and if the topic is what women have learned, or women's perspectives, who else would you invite? The exact same reason that many people who have responded to this post are interested in having women on the Tokion panels is the exact same reason that would justify a women's focused conference... You're either interested in women's perspectives, or you're not, I don't think that folding women into a bigger conference makes it any more or less 'politically correct', which is what it seems like people are trying to get at.
That said and without beating anybody up, everyone knows there are countless numbers of women who have the same strength of CV as the confirmed speakers on the list, and I'm sure that's not the issue for Tokion.
From the outside, it seems like it really boils down to conference organization, and how the invitation process was managed. Rather than say 'get more women next year', it might be better to say 'get someone who knows how to organize a conference'...With all due respect of course...
Oh, and for the record, I have the same question as Laurie, but considered that another story for a different day... If we had to get into *that* discussion...
just want to say thank you to grace for opening this discussion!
i also want to add KARA WALKER to the list of inspiring women. i think she's one of the most interesting artists working right now, male or female, black or white. i would love to hear her speak.
here's a link to a shpw of her's at the met:
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId=%7BE4F51062-8A08-4593-8273-8807B8201F95%7D
Why is a "women-only" conference most often considered "empowering", bu a "men-only" conference considered discriminatory, especially in this instance where the result is not by design.
I am certainly tired of this double standard and constant need for quotas.
How many Armenians were spaking at the conference? Double amputees? Transsexuals?
I look forward to your criticisms of future "women-only" events in the design world. If they are ever made, I will hear about such criticisms second-hand, as this whininess remakes what once was a great blog into yet another cry for entitlements and strict quotas - two tired plaints heard all to often in the US.
WoosterCollective has already started a petition list of names being sent too, I belive.
Thelma Golden at Studio Museum in Harlem is an excellent person, one of the most influential curators in America, if and only if we're talking about influential and intelligent professionals who have experience and insight to share. But I somehow don't have the impression that Tokion is interested in the Thelma Golden types. Their loss.
in this day and age, it's hardly an impossible feat to get ONE talented woman to agree to speak at a conference.
when i read ken's note to readers (on tokion's website), i was actually a little irked. the tone of that letter didn't seem completely sincere: the whole "we don't put together lists based on gender only" and "we invite people based solely on creative merit". duh! of course, you wouldn't pick someone on gender alone. but, there are women (as well as folks of other ethnicities, religions, sexual pref, etc) that are equally, if not more creatively meritorious that could've been included. ken seems to boil down the issue to filling a spot with a token x-person--which it isn't. it's about accurately portraying the creative world and getting representation from a variety of perspectives. isn't that the point of putting together a panel?
and if tokion can get a diverse group of people to feature and contribute to their magazine, it shouldn't be a stretch to expect the same diversity in their conference. they can say that it's hard to nail down busy creatives and plan a conference--but i'm sure it can't be harder than putting together a magazine! and couldn't tokion tap into their own creative pool to fill the void and ask deanne cheuk? i'd like to hear her speak.
here are more names to add (though they may be on the list already): amy sedaris, robert le heros (yes they're women), susan sellers & georgianna stout (2x4), liselotte watkins, hella jongerius, tara subkoff.
like ken said, it isn't hard to come up with a list of talented women...
D*S isn't calling for an all-women conference you dope. Is this really how far behind our society's come? When you call for equality people get all uppity about "all-women"? I'm sure someone's gonna drop "femi-nazi" by the end of the day. Grow up, people.
Trish
what a disappointment. i doubt the reverse would ever happen.
here's a few i'd like to hear from:
sharon werner (werner design werks)
deborah needleman (domino magazine)
chee pearlman (director of chee company, formerly, ID magazine)
haley johnson (haley johnson design)
gaby brink (templin brink design)
bjork
thelma golden (curator, studio museum)
amy franceschini (futurefarmers)
angela adams
AND grace bonney (yes, i'd love to hear you speak!)
--lourdes
an all-women conference would be considered empowering when women are historically underrepresented in certain fields...like say, architecture and industrial design. i mean, wouldn't it be great if there were more zaha hadids? when i was in high school in the early 90s (which was not that long ago)--my counselor discouraged me from being an architect because it was a male dominated field.
as for your double amputee example. if the magazine had a readership that was 50% double amputees, and there was a large pool of talented double amputee designers. then i think it would only be prudent to include at least one on the panel. only prudent.
(i need to sleep!)
this is very disappointing. much sentiment has been said how i feel. and for talented women...i would definitely agree on a lot of the names already listed and most especially sharon werner and for a canadian, keri smith comes to mind.
thanks grace for bringing up this important issue.
Here are a few more talented creatives, who happen to be women...my apologies for any duplication (and I'm heavily focused on furniture/product/architecture, so my list is as well).
Georgie Stout and Susan Sellers (2x4)
Chicks on Speed
Suzanne Trocme (Wallpaper* and Bernhardt)
Libby Sellers (London Design Museum)
Ruby Metzner (hivemindesign)
Lara Hedburg Deam (founder of Dwell)
Amanda Levete (Future Systems)
Barbara Bloemink (Cooper-Hewitt Natl Design Museum)
And the list goes on...
I think that the readers need to leave Tokion alone. They obviously did their homework by inviting many female participants.
Is it Tokions' fault that female designers didn't step up to plate? If you're upset, fine, but remember who said "NO, I WON'T" in the first place.
It's so upsetting that in this day and age that men don't understand that this is upsetting. I can't imagine they couldn't have called a few more women...
It's sad. I thought we were further along than this.
Amanda
My wife (a graphic designer) and myself (an architect) both noticed the general trend toward male designers in Tokion regularly. I’m glad to see that people are taking up the issue with them and support the effort being made.
To be honest, the problem may be with the larger editorial structure of the magazine. We have also noticed a series of obvious spelling and grammatical errors in the magazine. Is anyone there proofing, let alone reading the magazine?
It makes me wonder why I would bother to read Tokion in the first place. I’m not calling for a boycott, but after all, do we just want cool graphics and nice covers?
If the content doesn’t matter is it still good design?
-Mike
What about the hordes of talented women who are already in NY? Photographers, editors, graphic designers, anything...
Meg
What a coincidence.
This weekend I attended a conference on Christian leadership in Atlanta called Catalyst. (stay with me...) And I was discouraged and then angry at the complete lack of women represented as speakers, panelists or performers. To think I wrote it off as a symptom of Southern religious chauvinism! Turns out, my progressive icons in the design world are no better.
Conference coordinators should insist on diversity not out of any lofty sense of equality, but because IT MAKES A BETTER CONFERENCE. And they have an obligation to consider the interests of 50% of their audience. If Tokion or Catalyst’s organizers happened to wind up with all female speakers, they wouldn’t tolerate the imbalance. They’d keep trying!
oh and duh, deanne cheuk. she's tokion's creative director, so maybe there's an issue of nepotism, but who cares? i would love to hear her speak.
also, Wynne, of Tracy and The Plastics
(i'm just going to keep adding til we have the most amazing and undeniable resource list EVER)
Thanks for all this guys- I'm really exicted to see everyone respond to this. It will be great to deliver this list to Tokion next year. I think it's a positive way to deal with an issue that can get a little negative and well, touchy. I think providing a long list of women will make sure that women are fairly represented at the conference next year. :)
d*s
Well, I think "irksome" and "upsetting" and all of these whiny words are a bit... blowing things out of proportion. You'd think this was a discussion over the President's next cabinet...
But I also think whoever the semi-illiterate person was who spoke about amputees took the discussion to a ridiculous extreme. There's always got to be one bozo who weighs in, and I bet I know who he is...
I think to continue to propose names of people isn't the issue, no one denied that there are talented women, no one said that they are hard to find. They just said that 99% of the ones they invited couldn't make it.
And apparently that's where Tokion left it. People who are bothered by that shouldn't go. But unless any of you who are the most vocal have an economic stake in Tokion or the conference, the best thing to do is just vote with your readership/wallet (i.e. stop reading the magazine). When they do their research, they'll find out that their demographics have shifted.
Also, someone said it earlier, but I don't see anyone championing diversity in any way except for female/male ratio. That says a bit about ALL of you 'whiners' who think that the only diversity which matters is the sex gene.
The squeaky wheel doesn't always get the grease, sometimes it gets replaced...
signed
another anonymous
Wow, whiners? Someone's really enlightened, Anon.
I think the point of this list is to make sure that Tokion has NO excuse for not having women in the conference next year. They claim that they all said NO but they only invited 30 women and stopped with that. Read the original post at Jen Bekman's Personism and you'll see the facts. Maybe then you'll see why we're upset. Not whining.
Claire
perhaps i missed the point. i thought the conference was about talent and creative design......not gender. too bad people are so hung up on gender. it detracts from the point of events like this.
Heya,
This is Ken from Tokion...
I wanted to say that I'm super-appreciative of the debate everyone is having about this year's conference. It's actually profoundly flattering to think that anyone cares this much about what we do. I'm not kidding when I say that.
I think the list everyone is generating is a great resource. To me, the ONLY solution to this debate is to invite a ton of women to speak at the conference.
But we can't force anyone to participate who turns us down, and we have limited resources and time to put the conference together. So if we invite 60 panelists, pretty evenly split between men and women, and 19 men and 0 women say yes, well, what should we do? Force the female invitees to change their mind? Invite panelists just based on their gender? Disinvite panelists who have confirmed?
I will freely admit that I feel defensive on this point, because I know the perception is that we didn't invite a balanced roster of speakers, and that the reality is that our invite list was very fair. I also know that a couple of female panelists have confirmed over the weekend, and I would absolutely hate it if anyone thought they had been invited because of their gender, rather than because of their personal accomplishments.
Thanks,
Ken
Thanks for joining the conversation, Ken. I'll admit I was a little put off by your comments on Jen's site, and I understand you feeling defensive. However, I really appreciate you joining the discussion and giving us your side of the story. I can't speak for anyone but myself but I'd like to say that I'm glad to hear that you invited equal numbers of women and men, but I hoped that perhaps when none of them (when this discussion started) gave a "yes" that perhaps you'd invite a few more. There certainly isn't a shortage of women to invite and I don't think we're asking you to invite 80 more, but perhaps call a few more when it became clear that there wouldn't be any. It certainly would be representative of the current arts industry to have a few women in there.
In the interests of trying to keep things positive, I hope this discussion is helpful in compiling a huge list of women to consider next year. Perhaps then not all of the women will be "busy" and we can listen to a few talented women alongside the talented men.
*Quick question: did any of the women invited know that there were no other women speaking?
Grace
Why does Ken keep saying that they feature women in the magazine (see Personism)? That doesn't count as anything, really. You should feature women because they're a part of the arts community, you don't get bonus points for supporting them in them in the magazine. Check out the Lauren Graham remark. I just don't think he gets it.
If anyone else from Tokion is reading can you please get someone else to comment so we can get some sort of valid explanation for why they didn't call like 5 more women??
Candice
Alright guys, let's considered a number of these points already made:
-We hoped there were more women speaking
-We hoped they might have called a few more women when none RSVPd
-Some of don't think it's an excuse to say that Tokion supports women in the magazine
I don't want this to turn into anyone attacking Tokion or Ken. I'd like to keep this positive. We're hoping to provide a great resource list for Tokion so that next year we can listen to talented women and men...
D*S
I'd like to know whom exactly they invited to speak. Please note that he said they invited a "long list of women to ATTEND", not speak. Interesting distinction / clever wording?
ken clarifies his list of invitees on jen's site. they did invite a list of women...i just wish they'd called a few more.
d*s
I certaily agree with everyone. I know how it feels. I attended the opening show of an art exhibition at a small, but prestigious New York Museum. It was an open call for entries and out of the 35 artists selected to exhibit, only one was a man.
A note on conferences and inviting speakers: I worked on a small one focusing on design/art/sustainability in college. It was much more work than you might expect, it was often hard to track down and then pin down speakers, and yes, there was a gender imbalance in the panels. There wer simply too many slots and more male professionals and academics that we knew of that we could get ahold of. However, we had a strict policy of gender balance in the 4 keynote speakers. It was more difficult, yes, but making it easy would mean that we'd always end up with most or all men. Forcing ourselves to find more women speakers meant that we looked farther and brought in some people that weren't so well known but had been doing very interesting and excellent work.
How much of not being able to find women to be published, speak at conferences, etc. is due to their already limited exposure? How much do male editors, etc. specifically keep up with the work of women creators? It looks like most of the excellent lists provided here were put together by women.
How strange and ironic that we women would be sounding off about a "male-dominated conference" on a blog that is most entirley populated with female designers. Just an observation.
anne
the blog actually isn't entirely populated with female designers. i just did a quick scan and there are 18 posts from just this month that are by or include men. i can't speak for anyone but myself when i say that i don't want any conference to be entirely one way or another, i just hope that we can balance things out some.
i don't seen any irony at all in trying to provide a place for women in design to be celebrated when they don't always get equal coverage in national and international publications. what angered me so much about the tokion issue was that they acted like including or inviting more women would be about inviting "token" women when in fact there are more (as this blog and the numerous tokion/women lists prove) who deserve to be invited or included based on talent alone.
d*s
Dear D*S,
I couldn't agree with you more. Talent shopuld be the only thing that matters.
i know this is a very VERY late comment, but on a positive note 'curvy' (http://www.yenmag.net/article.php?iss=26&art=321) is a brilliant annual publication that specifically supports female graphic designers and illustrators.
it's brimming with work by creative women in design from around the world (upcoming and established); I honestly don't think I've gone a week without looking through it at least once. so hopefully tokion will keep an eye out for potential female speakers published in this year's curvy 3 as well as 1 & 2... ;}
and good luck to tokion for next year, hopefully they'll be able to compile a group of diverse speakers to cater to their diverse audience! :}
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