Taking a Leave of Absence

Context, I would be a rising third year in the dual degree program with Tufts and the SMFA at Tufts. This program means I commute between Tufts’ main campus in Medford, where I am studying Performance Studies with some fantastic mentors, and the SMFA in Boston Fenway, where I studied studio art. Due to the pandemic, I will be taking a leave of absence for the academic year 2020-2021. I plan to spend the year falling in love with design, learning new software, and exploring what study means outside of the university (thinking alongside Moten and Harney). The university controls the diameter of my thinking and thus determines the circumference of my knowledge. I am spending the year expanding my borders. Yes, I will miss my community and the place I call home, though, I am proud of my ability to keep up with my friends over facetime. I am excited to have a break from the neoliberal place of capitol we call the university. It is exhausting being a person of color in a predominantly white institution. Especially in art school, I am tired of having my work critiqued through my idenity. I fell into art because I felt limited by language. Words felt incomplete, sometimes confining, and not enough for expression. When I felt out of control, art was my sanctuary. I made art to heal, endure, and survive. Now art is not the only way I can survive, I have found other ways to breathe, and I want to help others feel seen, heard, and felt. Yet my time in art school has made me fall out of love with art because I am expected to create work that is legible and digestible for a white viewer, and if I am not doing that, then I am using the wrong materials. How we treat each other is how we practice our politics every day. And I am tired of microaggressions from white professors that stab me deeper than simple ignorance. I am tired of professors who think they see me yet do not understand inclusion is an empty promise if we do not abolish systems of injustice, violence, and oppression. I have spent my first two years of college looking for institutional validation. This was pointless because the institution will never be a space of healing. My fine arts background has given me the skills of self-starting, self-advocacy, and aesthetics rooted in research. I want to merge these skills with design. My positionally as someone who holds multiple oppressed identities gives me the superpower of patience and care work. I can empathize with many users and broaden the audience to consider who is missing from user experience design.