ANJULIE RAO

Anjulie Rao is a Chicago-based journalist and Editor of Chicago Architect magazine. As a writer, she focuses on livable built environments, equitable design, architecture criticism, and radical urbanism. With an academic background in art history, she enjoys intersections between art, infrastructure, and political narratives. She completed her Masters in New Arts Journalism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and her bylines can be found in Curbed, The Architects Newspaper, Metropolis, American Craft Magazine, Chicago Magazine, Artsy, and the Chicago Reader, among others.

Writing: An Eternal Act of Liberation

What inspired you to study Art History?

I wish I had a good answer for this! I was 18 and was suddenly in charge of making decisions for myself.

I loved history, but there was this burning creative part of myself I couldn’t ignore. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, the undergrad fine art/art history pathway is very much a Bauhaus model, so I was attracted to the idea of trying out making ‘stuff’ while studying the fundamentals of art history. Things just spiraled from there, and Art History was perfect because I could explore intersections between art, political science, and anthropology—the latter two being contextual to artistic production, but really satisfied my hunger for creative/political research. The field moved me further away from art, and closer toward an interest in systems (political, social) that artists respond to. I became interested in architecture because in many ways buildings and public spaces are responses to social systems, and are often products of systems of oppression.

How did your background in Art History introduce you to New Arts Journalism?

I decided that I didn’t want to do a PhD in art history. I spent a lot of time thinking I wanted to be a curator, but the overwhelming whiteness of the profession—combined with racism and classism I experienced in museum internships and at a part-time front desk job at an art museum—turned me off. But this was also 2009-11, right in the heart of the Great Recession and there weren’t any jobs.

I decided, ultimately, that my interest was writing about art for the public. Writing is a skill and a tool, and I didn’t want to expend my skills and abilities to use this tool to forward institutions that caused harm to myself and other People of Color. It was a very specific turning point in my life—I remember it clearly—and so I applied to grad programs in art journalism.
Recently I’ve veered away from art writing; when I do write about art it’s about design/architecture operating in a visual art environment. But the rules still apply—I try to focus my work on the political and social systems that produce the built environment, and highlight design projects that make people proud, safe, and welcome in their own communities.

How do you hope to bring awareness and demand change for a more just and equitable design and profession?

I try to point out the truth within the profession: That there are only 500 licensed Black women architects in the field. That women are frequently ‘pinched’ out of the profession at specific points in their careers. That architecture—like many other industries—has a pipeline problem.

Those failures within the profession have radiated outward into communities: the way design processes are conducted significantly harm communities of color; that in order to change anything about the built environment, one has to be clued into legal and design and financial processes that allow them to live healthfully and affordably and prosperously. I focus less on the profession and more on the effects, generally, but I always hope that the message comes across to those doing the design work as much as it does to the general public.

What is your favorite memory as a writer? Why?

When I published my first long-form criticism piece in the Chicago Reader about the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The biennial’s theme was about “making new history” and engaged very little with contested histories, Black history, or the history of the city’s deep, ingrained racism, segregation, and policing that in many ways define Chicago’s contemporary built environment. It was my first real opportunity to ask questions about how a city biennial should operate—for whomst, as they say—and it was a little bit scary!
Putting your ideas into the world, especially when you’re a woman, and doubly as a woman of color, can feel dangerous. Especially when you’re questioning the genuineness or innocence of institutions that are claiming to tell a city’s story through design, there is a real power imbalance in this work that can be personally quite frightening. I was proud of the piece that came out, but that fear is still there.

Name a woman who most influenced you as an emerging professional? How?

Linda Keane taught the first class I took at SAIC’s AIADO program; it was a class about writing about architecture. Linda isn’t a writer (she’s an architect and amazing educator), so it was interesting to me to be instructed in this really freeway; she gave us key readings—you know, the Seven Lamps and Learning from Pop, and all— and we would discuss them. What we liked, what resonated, what we hated. She sort of let us find our own voices, focus on what we cared about. It was the first time I felt like someone wasn’t trying to make me write for a professor. I could write for an audience in my mind, and that really helped me find my voice.

Now I teach writing at SAIC. And my first lesson in all my classes is to teach what voice and tone are, and how students can decide who they want to be on the page and how they can use language and punctuation and structure and rhetorical devices (see what I did there?) to make their readers feel something, feel connected to them as authors. And, that it can change as they change: writing is an eternal act of liberation because you can use language to write yourself into existence. Linda taught me that, maybe indirectly, but that was her doing.

Are there any organizations that helped you grow as a writer? How did they help you grow?

This is a difficult question to answer, but generally: Not really. This isn’t to say that there aren’t organizations out there that have straightforward missions to help cultivate authors’ voices and provide resources to develop portfolios, create strong networks, and more. I haven’t been fortunate enough to intersect with them! Those organizations exist! I would love to be a part of an organization that does such things! Please call me if you are one of them!

In my experience, employment at organizations, in general, doesn’t always foster writerly growth. Your editors will definitely make you a better writer. Your friends, who read your work or talk with you through your wild ideas, who put up with you while you cry about feeling stuck or lost in a piece; your mentors who help you create a path for yourself—they are all part of the process. Those individuals have helped me grow infinitely.

As you reflect on the past year, what did you discover as your biggest strengths?

You mean this past hellish year? Well, I discovered that my biggest strength is my team—my friends and colleagues. They kept me alive in so many different ways and I owe them everything.

I’ve spent much of my life living up to blurry expectations set by racist and classist leadership—expectations that produced what I once thought was ‘imposter syndrome’ but is actually a reality that I am not welcome in the white, tight circles of architecture writing. But this year I found little places where I can exist and publish and express ideas—again, due to the persistence and generosity of friends and colleagues who reached out and asked me to pitch or emailed opportunities. In those small spaces, I’ve been able to expand where needed, feel excited about being edited, and build collective strength with those who have encountered similar environments in their careers.

So maybe that’s not a great answer, but my strength comes from my team. I’m at this really interesting point now where I’d like to be a better teammate to other people, as the recipient of such generosity myself.

If you were able to talk to your younger self, what would you say?

I’d say so, so many things. But I’d focus on dismantling the idea of the lone genius; the belief that all you have is a few friends and the depth of your own mind. The structure of art/architecture criticism has traditionally been of one individual who writes alone, maintains few relationships within their field of criticism, and rarely works alongside other writers. In that structure I wouldn’t have friends who are also designers, I wouldn’t have a crew of other writers and critics talking to each other (because instead, they’re competing with each other). Loneliness, ultimately, about killed me when I was in grad school in my 20s.

I read a lot of Dave Hickey (the art critic). I loved his “Wild West” brutality; his descriptions of Las Vegas diners; his rejection of haughty blah-ness of the art world. I loved him because, to me, he was the Lone Genius, and I wanted to be like that. The last time I remember being so affected by him was in an interview with Cmagazine, where he said, “I’ll be dead before you do anything good. Everybody older than you is trying to squash you. Everybody younger is trying to neuter you. All you have is your peers, and there is a way out. For me, it’s over, as it should be, but my advice is to forget about community; it’s a weird German idea anyway. Shoot the wounded and save yourself. If you think they’re vulnerable, kill ’em. If you think there’s bad art out there, blow it up. Clear the field. Art is not a care-giving profession.” I felt like he was speaking to me directly.

To my younger self, I’d say, “Stop believing Dave Hickey.”

What would you want to say to the next generation of aspiring women in the architecture world?

Generally, I’d say to find your team. Unlike Hickey’s belief that community isn’t your “way out,” I’d argue that it is, very much, your way through. Most professions are generally not ‘caregiving’—heck even those who work in the literal caregiving industry are often heavily exploited and abused. How do we not only create professions of care but entire ecosystems around it?

In my mind, the way you do that is by working with people toward that position of care. I think often of Design as Protest, for example, that works to organize designers and institutions to dismantle systems of privilege that weaponize architecture against marginalized peoples. They have a specific mission, but they also produce an ethos of community care.

Collective power isn’t only about lobbying to make your job more habitable. If that were the case, we’d be forever reciting the words DIVERSITY EQUITY INCLUSION until they became meaningless. What collective power—what your team—does do, is that it establishes spaces and baselines for deep empathy, rest, conversation, togetherness. Those are spaces where care happens.

We’ve seen what happens when care is an afterthought in design: Women leave, Black and brown workers are hesitant to express ideas or are overlooked entirely. Burnout, exhaustion, abuse. Who’s to say how much of that ends up being translated into design? Probably more than we’d like to think. So, find your people. Get in with them. Create your environment of care because your profession isn’t going to do it for you.

ANJULIE RAO

Writing: An Eternal Act of Liberation

AAYUSHI JOSHI

DIKSHA JAIN