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In contemporary globalized design practice,
the concept of
bridging cultures is commonplace. Few designers have done as much
as Samina Quraeshi to integrate design, education, research,
cultural ambassadorship and authorship to help communities express
their unique cultural voices. With special attention to places and
how social and cultural factors shape identity, her
multidisciplinary practice has stretched from South Asia to South
Florida, working directly with local citizens, institutions and
corporations to create positive change that is lasting and
concrete.
Yet despite her devotion to
this multilevel altruism, she has
retained a personal creative vision that abides by an ethic of
cultural communication, tirelessly articulating her personal
heritage to a global audience. Samina Quraeshi was born to a Muslim
family in Bombay (now Mumbai) during the turbulent years of the
partition of India. The Quraeshi family was part of Bombay's
professional class of doctors and lawyers, and therefore was
reluctant to embrace her pursuit of art and design. "I received
condolences daily," she says, acknowledging that this family
pressure formed her ambition to excel in her studies and achieve
the numerous titles and awards that characterize her career. Her
family relocated to Karachi, Pakistan, in 1948; in secondary school
she joined a student exchange program through the American Field
Service and studied for a year in Manhattan, Kansas. She returned
to study in Karachi, but eventually came back to the Kansas City
Art Institute (KCAI) to complete her university studies.
Quraeshi's distinguished design career,
which was shaped early
on by some of the great figures in modern design, almost did not
materialize. She studied fine art at KCAI, but just before her
thesis exhibition, a major fire destroyed part of the art
building—including all her paintings. The devastating loss left her
sapped of inspiration, until she met the charismatic typographer
and historian Rob Roy Kelly and decided to study with him. "He
fired my imagination," recalls Quraeshi. She changed her focus to
design, excited to discover its potential for positive social
change. "Design offered photography, new ways of understanding
signs and symbols, and new techniques of image making," she says,
noting her plans to return eventually to Pakistan with these tools
at her disposal. "Creative people have the gift of seeing with
feeling. It is the path with heart. We see what is missing; we
sense what will work, what will make life flow. I knew this to be a
great value, and I wanted to find ways to share it with others, to
help communities heal through self-expression."
On becoming a designer:
I felt that human imagination, art and design, and certainly my
career must move out from the studio, the agency, the company and
university, and into the community. I felt it was needed to help
bring people together, warm things up, make life livable.
Quraeshi pursued her master's studies at
Yale, where Paul Rand's
incisive critiques and inspiration pushed her toward a rigorous
professional route. In 1970 she moved to London, where she found
her first job, working with Colin Forbes at Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes,
later Pentagram. There were less glamorous encounters with
greatness as well; Quraeshi recounts a summer job during her Yale
studies as "pencil sharpener" with Vignelli Associates. This sounds
like a euphemism for the thankless tasks that designers must do
when starting out, but quite literally it was Quraeshi's tactic to
get the most out of her experience there. "Massimo sketched with a
6B pencil and he was always looking for one when he came by our
desks to see what we were doing. Having several sharp 6B pencils on
hand ensured that he spent time with me, so it was my lure to
him!"
Quraeshi went back to Pakistan
in 1972 and art directed a new
quarterly journal for the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation,
Focus on Pakistan, for which she traveled the country,
taking pictures and working with writers and other artists. She
enacted her trademark practice of fusing the local tradition with a
plan of practical self-sufficiency when she launched a women's
cooperative for textile arts, which went on to export their work
globally. Around that time she also produced her first book,
Legacy of the Indus: A Discovery of Pakistan.
The struggle for identity and faith has been
central to
Quraeshi's work, and books have been a primary medium towards
addressing it. They are the main exponent in exploring and sharing
her devotion to the Indus Valley region, the cradle of South Asian
culture and now the dividing line between Pakistan and western
India. Through her books she aims to bridge segmented and even
antagonistic populations. Her 1988 book Lahore: The City
Within has received numerous design awards for its illustrative
depiction of the ancient city and will soon be republished due to
continuing interest.
On
the importance of design:
It is imperative, now more than ever, that we design a better
world, one in which we act thoughtfully, with greater love and
compassion, and work for an end to violence so that we can have
what all people desire: a sense of achievement, solidarity,
participation, justice and equity.
Quraeshi's fifth book, Sacred Spaces: A
Journey with the
Sufis of the Indus, has been her most ambitious and personal,
highlighting the ecstatic practice of Sufism. A heterogeneous
belief system within Islam, Sufism is a mystical strain whose
tenets of love and tolerance counter what Quraeshi views as the
troubling connotations of violence and radicalism that have become
broadly associated with the Muslim world. Sufism also has a strong
numerological and geometrical tradition that can be found in its
architecture and integrated tilework and calligraphy. She was
inspired by these graphic and calligraphic traditions to create
contemplative mixed-media art, which was exhibited at Harvard's
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in late 2009 and will
travel to Islamabad's Lok Virsa national folk heritage museum in
fall 2010.
In continuation of her Sacred
Spaces work, Quraeshi is
using the power of film—along with photography and print—to
document the stories of women in Pakistan. Voices of the
Shadows is both personal and political for Quraeshi, who plans
to unveil the project in spring 2011. By capturing the "little
understood" feminine perspective, she is turning "the lens of art
and culture against terrorism" to explore what other possibilities
there are for her homeland.
Back in
her other home, the United States, Quraeshi operates S/Q
Design Associates with her husband and partner Richard Shepard, an
architect known for doing socially responsible work aimed at
alleviating poverty. The pair met at Yale and established their
multidisciplinary practice in 1981. With offices in South
Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and Miami, S/Q Design integrates
Quraeshi's graphic and identity work with Shepard's architecture,
environmental planning and wayfinding expertise. They have executed
several planning projects on the municipal level in California,
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Utah, Colorado and Florida. Essential
to their approach is the synthesis of cultural and location-based
research to effect changes in zoning, traffic flow and public space
allocation to benefit the local community. These planning efforts
customarily involve design charettes with the local community and
enlist student and faculty research and outreach.
On multidisciplinary practice:
What is our obligation as members of the design profession? There
is no single answer, but among the greatest skills that designers
bring to all communities in this country and in the world, is the
power to envision ideas from different perspectives while drawing
inspiration from multiple disciplines.
The most successful and long-lived of these
is an initiative for
West Coconut Grove, one of Miami's oldest and most economically
challenged neighborhoods. With its proximity to the University of
Miami, it became a focus of Shepard's attention in the 1990s, when
he was director of the Center for Urban and Community Design (CUCD)
at the university's School of Architecture. Under Shepard and
Quraeshi's oversight, the project brought together hundreds of
students and dozens of faculty members from across numerous
departments and disciplines to propose and implement projects from
affordable housing to establishing a community medical clinic.
For Quraeshi, design is the guiding
instrument to analyze and
resolve large, systemic issues, fulfilling her belief in the value
of a "holistic" practice. "These works are part of an effort to
build bridges of understanding between cultures, to celebrate our
common humanity," she says.
Though
this approach reflects her regard for the personal,
cultural and spiritual qualities that in combination create the
profile of a community, the increasingly complex cultural dynamic
in the wake of globalization will only make Samina Quraeshi's
multifaceted practice an exemplary model for the future.
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