I Rarely Saw People Who Looked Like Me: Norman Teague on Community, Chicago, and Creating with Your Hands

Jan 9, 2024

Walker Publishing Filed to Design · Part of Houses of Ideas

Artist-Designer Norman Teague in Chicago studio, 2023. Photo by Kameron Herndon. Courtesy Walker Art Center.

A love of working with his hands led Chicago-born and -based designer Norman Teague from architecture training to industrial design. Drawing equally from iconic designers as well as from undercelebrated Black design pioneers, Teague has forged a style all his own. Between studio work and teaching at the University of Illinois, Chicago, he blends a passion for handmade design with community to discover new forms for objects and collaborations alike. With his work included in Idea House 3 at the Walker Art Center, Teague described his journey from trade school to the Venice Biennale and why Chicago is the city.

Jake Yuzna

What part of Chicago did you grow up in?

Norman Teague

I grew up on the south side of Chicago. Moved away for maybe three or four years, but all my life pretty much south side.

JY

What brought you back after you moved away?

NT

I was just missing the family. My family’s on the south side. That kind of closeness made it a much richer reason for coming back.

JY

What led you to becoming a designer?

NT

I was introduced to drafting at an early age. Drafting led me to Harold Washington College, where I switched from mechanical engineering to architecture. After that, I studied at Columbia College, where I discovered product design and the woodshop. Those had instant gratification for me, unlike architecture, where you do a bunch of straight-line drawings with the hopes that eventually you will actually get to step foot into the building. Not to mention that in architecture at the time, I worked in a bunch of firms where I was the only person of color, and nine times out of 10 not at the forefront of the design process. Instead, I was asked to make drawings and then update them based on notes.

Product design was a place where I had a little more control; it felt like power to some extent. The process of designing objects, taking those designs directly to a woodshop, and building them excited me. That was my thing. I wanted to be in a shop. In fact, before I graduated, I had my own shop.

In my shop, I was making things that didn’t quite make sense, but I delivered them to restaurants. I worked for a lot of retail spaces until I realized that I could use this direction to really tell stories. And that’s kind of what got me moving more toward a design studio where I had full control.

Being in the woodshop was my place of comfort. Even today, I’m still in the woodshop and loving every minute of it. Today, my objects seem to grow quite a bit and are getting bigger.

JY

What led you to learn about drafting at such an early age?

NT

Back when I was young, drafting was a common thing to vocational schools. I went to Tilden Tech, which was a technical school on the south side of Chicago, where we had an auto mechanic shop, woodshop, and we may have even had plumbing classes. These schools focused on learning trades, like carpentry, so that after you graduated you could go straight into a career path. There was so much industry in Chicago at the time that I went on to work in a couple of drafting firms shortly after I graduated.

JY

Were you still making works with your hands at that time?

NT

Yeah. Back then, I was really impressed with the Eameses. Bending wood was this amazing thing to me, and I made an eight-foot-long bed using a bending-wood technique. I was trying out interesting things with all the capabilities I had available to me. I had lots of ideas, but no access to the tools to make them.

Starting out I was impressed by the early icons, but it wasn’t too soon after that I started to search out design icons that looked like me. I also started to seek out ways in which I could tell a story through my designs—stories from the places and communities I come from. People like Chuck Harrison, who I was lucky to spend some time with when he was a teacher at Columbia.

I also looked more into contemporary artists, like Stephen Burks, who had such a colorful start. He came out the gate doing really cool stuff. I was highly enamored that he was doing such a great job at showing out what a product designer looks like at such a young age. I also started to find Faye Wilson, Thomas Day, and Elijah McCoy, and other people who had made great strides, but never got the recognition for it. I was always looking at the importance of the work they had done and the little recognition they got for that.

I grew up in a neighborhood where paths were shallow. There was not a lot of options. You could shoot ball; you could sell rocks. This made me think, “What would it be like if a school like Columbia College was on 51st and Halsted?” How could it become more common or easily accessible for students of color to learn design?

JY

Is this what led you to teaching?

NT

I always saw it as a way to give back. But in addition to a lack of designers of color in the field, I also felt like there was the lack of faculty of color in the field. This seemed particularly apparent after I went through two design schools. I rarely saw a person of color at the front of the classroom. My start in teaching was teaching architecture at Roberto Clemente High School. It was really great! All these kids came to me five years later and would say, “I just got my degree in urban planning” or “I just got my degree.” For me, that is the greatest prize.

JY

Your work always has a sense of fun, joy, and play. Is that by design?

NT

Without a doubt. I try not to make my work too serious because I think there’s enough serious shit in the world already. But I also make sure there is something that is just different. For instance, the Sinmi Stool makes you sit in a different way. I was asked, “How do you make it memorable? How do you add a story to it?”

JY

You mentioned using design to tell stories. Share some of the stories you’re looking to tell with your work.

NT

I believe that we can either transform materials to actually help us tell that story, or we can take the stories that are embedded in those materials to tell stories. For me, the past I grew up in plays a large role. I look to infuse moments of memory that might be common to somebody else into the work.

For instance, my Self Portrait [sculptural bookcase], which is the big wheel that has a stem sticking out of the back of it, talks about past, present, future. The stem representing this set of colonialized style—columns—which I learned in architecture. The wheel itself, though, comes from the hood. The work has a traditional element of columns mixed with car rims. Those rims were some of the earliest desires for design. We would sit on the porch and see cars coming by and be excited by their rims, without necessarily thinking about it as design, even though it is. Those elements, combined with the books, which is representative of this academic me, tells the story of past, present, and future Norman.

JY

Does this storytelling transfer to your other works, like your vessels?

NT

In a way it does, but my love for vessels started when I was studying at the Art Institute [of Chicago]. I wanted to play in slip-casting and was interested in the ability to replicate an object a number of times while playing with finishes as much as I’d like to. For example, Simple Vessel 01 is one I made in the shop here in Chicago. I was looking at simplicity and thinking about shared moments. Often these works start with finding old objects and collaging them together to come up with something that feels like a vessel. After that, I cast the combination and replicate it. I’ve been playing with it for quite some time. I was thinking of maybe putting something special on this group of vessels that I’ll be sending to Idea House 3. We’ll see. [Editor’s note: He did! See them here.]

JY

What keeps you in Chicago?

NT

Oh, I’m going to say it’s soul. We have so much great history here, and I think people are adamant about living up to that history and making better strides than what was made in the past. Do you realize most of the jazz that kicked off came from right here in Chicago? House music, too. I look at the 55 years I’ve been here, how much my city has changed. I’ve been able to watch that. It’s the history. It’s the soul. It’s the closeness. I think particularly in the Black community, the arts circle, it’s really not that big. Although it has grown in the last 10 years, but I think that that core group sticks together.

There’s a certain level of comfort in this community that I’m never going to be ready to give up. I do love my city, the people here. I think that’s what it comes down to for me. There’s just a strong-knit family here, be it my close friends or my kids. This is home. It’s a great city.

JY

What are you working on now?

NT

A lot of the work that I’m excited about now is scaling up. It is scary to say because I don’t want a bigger shop. (laughs) But at the same time, I’m really interested in doing slightly bigger things that might not make it to the furniture arena.

I’ve also been working in plastics in new ways. I currently am in residency right now at M4 Factory, a plastics manufacturer with a really great deal of attention to innovating plastics and recycling. The opportunity to play at M4 Factory has been wonderful. Prior to that, the work I did for the Venice Biennale, I worked with Cody Norman, who is a local designer and expert on using these big industrial tools in new ways. He especially knows a lot about the robots and machinery used to extrude plastics.

Cody was our instructor throughout the process, starting with how to use plastic extruders and then how to work with particular forms that needed to come outside of the form once it was done. It’s not like we had pre-made a tool we were working with. Our tools were objects that we made with the hopes to get a particular form out of it. My direction was really thinking about African basketry and some of the mouths and vessels that one might see, then trying to mimic that with this recycled plastic material. Those works were created for the Venice Architecture Biennale, which was an amazing experience.

This has led me to playing with plastics, to think about how to merge plastic with the wood processes I already do. I’ve played with some metal last year, so I’m getting a little more comfortable in this design position. At my ripe old 55 years old. (laughs) I’m finally feeling comfortable to try new shit, and it’s going really well. I’ve had some wins and some lessons. I have a lot of really great collaborations coming up, so I’m really happy.▪︎

Experience and shop for Norman's work in Idea House 3, located within the Walker Art Center. Open during regular museum hours, by appointment, or anytime on shop.walkerart.org.

Want to learn more about Idea House and the designer's involved? Discover the rest of the series Houses of Ideas on the Walker Reader.