2013 AIGA Medalist: Lucille Tenazas

No designer is purely the product of his or her aesthetic education, and while Tenazas’ experience at Cranbrook was fundamental to her development, her particular interpretation and application of various ideas was heavily influenced by her own personal history. A self-proclaimed “cultural nomad,” the bilingual Tenazas was born in the Philippines and raised in Manila. In postcolonial Philippine culture, Tagalog was reserved for personal and family communication, and English—a residue of colonial history—was the language of education and professionalism. Tenazas has characterized the English she learned in Manila as anachronistic and stilted, as a defense against any accusation of inferior or incorrect use.

When she first arrived in San Francisco from the Philippines in 1979 to study at CCA, Tenazas was startled by the casualness of her American classmates’ speech. The postmodern questioning of the authority of language and the relativity of meaning struck her as a way to both understand and liberate herself from the colonial nature of her own relationship to the English language: in effect, she could finally make it her own. The analytical side to her typographic experiments (where meaning is both broken down and reconstructed) was very appealing; she also took the sense of play to heart, as a way to assume power over a language. Thus her graphic design, where images and text interweave and bounce off one another, and where multiple readings are deliberately engineered, is not only beautiful, but also intellectual and heartfelt.

Tenazas’ work helped define the look of a new generation in the 1980s and ’90s. It displays a sensitive and legible delivery of meaning that betrays an attitude of generosity to the audience—and herself. As Tenazas once said, “You should never lose sight of the fact that you are solving somebody’s problems. At the same time, you should solve your own as well.” Her work exudes respect for the content, yet also embodies her own poetic project.

Throughout her career, Tenazas kept her firm, Tenazas Design, small, carefully choosing projects that she could realize without compromising the consistency of her methodology. Yet her impact is much greater than the sum of her individual accomplishments: frequent publications, a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1996 and the National Design Award for Communication Design from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in 2002. Tenazas also served on the boards of both the AIGA San Francisco and AIGA/NY chapters. In 1996, she became the first non-New York–based national president of AIGA; her presidency marked an important moment as the organization continued to grow into a larger network of chapters across the country.

Given Tenazas’ proclivity for such thoughtful and communicative work, it is no surprise that she was drawn to design education. She taught in the undergraduate program at CCA for 15 years, and founded its M.F.A. program in graphic design in 2000. Her original prospectus for the graduate program emphasized the principle that developing one’s ideas through design is as much a process of self-discovery as it is a path toward becoming a designer. Her approach was of a piece with other design educators’ turning—from the mid-’90s onward—to the development of “the designer’s voice” as an important aspect of design pedagogy. In Tenazas’ hands, this idea had a depth that reflected her own experience.

Far from being solipsistic, the self-examination that Tenazas sought occurred where the student brought him or herself into contact with the world, with points of view framed by experience, identity and politics. One cannot pursue that in the classroom without creating an atmosphere of trust, and generously assuming that there is no limit to the possibilities for students’ growth as designers and as citizens. Tenazas brings this optimism and openness to her current position as the Henry Wolf Professor in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design. And while the design issues that frame contemporary practice are not necessarily the ones that she grappled with as a student, the students themselves—so many of them “cultural nomads” like herself—face similar challenges to connect themselves to culture, and to make work with integrity and creativity.

Which brings me back to Lucille Tenazas’ “soft power”: the way that she approaches all of her activities with the same generous spirit and stubbornly ethical voice. First and foremost as a designer of skill and grace; as a collaborator with her husband (the photographer Richard Barnes) and a mother to two sons; as a design leader willing to point the way beyond business and toward culture; as a speaker of truth, not only for herself, but for her fellow designers; and finally, as a nurturer of the next generation. When I think of what gives Tenazas such power, it is her dedication to communication and design thinking—which she has bravely expanded beyond a methodology to be used simply for solving other people’s problems—as a path of self-knowledge and a frame with which to understand ourselves in the world.