When Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton entered the graduate design program at CalArts, she was the only Black student. Before grad school, at the National Organization for Graphic Arts Conference, she could count the number of Black attendees on one hand.
Looking around, she asked herself, “Where are the Black designers?”
Archeneaux-Sutton started by researching how Black culture had been misrepresented in visual media, from minstrelsy to caricatures such as the mammy and Sambo. As she connected those images to the history she had been taught, she asked a harder question: If she couldn’t name a Black designer who came before her, how many stories have gone untold?
Lecturing became her way of sharing her ideas and pushed her to keep searching for uncredited Black creatives. While preparing a lecture on Black publications and magazines, a research assistant asked if she had heard of Louise E. Jefferson. It was the first time she heard the name, and the encounter changed the direction of her work from that moment on.
“I was happy and sad at the same time,” Arceneaux-Sutton said. “How could this woman have been so prolific and yet I’ve never heard of her in art history or the design industry?”
Jefferson worked at Friendship Press for 25 years, becoming the first Black woman to work as an art director at a publishing house. Arceneaux-Sutton started documenting Jefferson’s book covers, her first step in uncovering the vast archive of her work in design.
Arceneaux-Sutton began lecturing about Jefferson, and her essay, “A Black Renaissance Woman: Louise E. Jefferson,” was published in Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History. After seeing one of her online lectures, Friendship Press contacted Arceneaux-Sutton, proposing she write a book on Jefferson’s life.
Renaissance Woman: The Creative Life of Louise E. Jefferson was presented as a biography of Jefferson’s life. As a designer, Arceneaux-Sutton’s instinct was to focus on Jefferson’s work and the ideas behind it. Grateful for the opportunity but intimidated by this change in approach, she took a step back to think about how to deconstruct her story in a way she had never written before.
“Although this book is focused on her life, she never married or had any kids, her work was her life,” Arceneaux-Sutton said. “There’s no way to talk about her without talking about her work.”
Arceneaux-Sutton’s research on Jefferson is part of her larger mission to give credit to Black designers left out of her field’s history and highlight their impact. She hopes the book inspires others to research stories that have yet to be told and to do the hard work to document them.
“Getting her story out there is my agenda. That’s what I do,” Arceneaux-Sutton said. “I’m going to do it until the day I’m no longer here.”
Renaissance Woman: The Creative Life of Louise E. Jefferson, by Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton is available now.