Video: James Victore – Create, create, create!

Thirteen years. That is how long it had been since James Victore last stood on the beyond tellerrand stage in Düsseldorf and told a room full of people that their work is a gift. Some of them quit their jobs afterwards. I still hear about that talk today.

He told us, that this yea, when he walked into the empty venue the day before the event, he said the whole thing came back to him at once. The lobby, the room, the audience from 2013.

First, Everybody Stands Up

James got 500 people out of their chairs, shook them out, made them wave their arms and started singing Purple Rain until the whole room joined in. Only afterwards did he explain what had just happened: a test of your ego, your creativity and your willingness to simply play.

Create, Create, Create

The title, he told us, was not his. He found it in the programme and decided to live up to it anyway.

His argument: creating is not a job description, it is the primal drive of every living thing on the planet. The grass, the squirrels, the birds. Us. Then he did something he admitted he rarely does. He went back and looked at his own work.

There is the 1992 poster that made his reputation and, as he put it, shot him in the foot professionally at the same time. Because choosing a path means un-choosing everything else. There are the posters about the death penalty, about genocide, about racism, which he does not consider pretty and never designed to hang above your couch. Art and design as the spoonful of sugar that lets you talk about difficult things.

And there is the work that is just play. The lettering people compliment him on is finger painting. Blown up big, it looks sexy. That is the whole trick.

A Letter for his Mom

The MoMA story is worth the watch on its own. They took ten of his posters for the collection. He asked for a gala. No. A plaque. No. A letter on that gold MoMA letterhead. No.

So he asked if they would write one to his mother instead. A week and a half later, it arrived.

Ask for what you want. The universe will provide.

The Department of Probation

The section on his work for the New York City Department of Probation is a series of posters built as an answer to those awful motivational posters with the eagle on them.

Not “hang in there”, because telling probationers to hang in there is the wrong message. Instead: let go. Ask for help. Improve yourself, change the world, start here. Start small. And a line about perspective that lands harder the longer you sit with it, about how your worst enemy is trying to teach you something about yourself.

The Things That Made You Weird as a Kid

His first visual memory is a pool of melted crayons on a hot cement porch in New Mexico. Colour, beauty, and, as he found out years later when he asked his mother about it, a good deal of parental annoyance baked into the same moment.

Every book cover he designs still reaches for that. He did not know it until he went looking.

Which leads to his kids, Wyatt and Nova, who he calls his teachers. They tug at him while he is doing the dishes and he refuses to shut them down the way he was shut down. Because what they are actually saying is the thing we have all become terrible at:

Look at me. Look what I can do.

On Ai and What Comes After

He did not want to say it and then he said it anyway. He spent months trying to learn the thing, started accepting its answers and then spent a week at a time sanding those answers back into something that sounded like him. His brain, in his words, started going to mush.

His worry is not the tool. It is that we are learning not to trust ourselves.

What he is building towards instead: community, craft, skill and pride in the making. Handmade things given to each other. Underneath all of it, the same message he brought in 2013, which has not aged a day:

Your work is a gift.

Thank you, James. It was power- and wonderful, exactly as expected.

Links

→ James Victore's speaker profile
→ The speaker introduction from before the event
→ His 2013 talk “Your Work Is a Gift”
→ jamesvictore.com

---