Today we’d like to introduce you to Emma Quintana.
Hi Emma, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
After graduating with my MFA in sculpture, I moved to Portland, and I wanted to continue working in a studio environment, but I wanted to branch out from fine arts. Before graduate school, I worked as a contemporary ornamental ironworker. I loved the mixture of functional and aesthetic design. Creating metal pieces that could withstand everyday use and that were often integrated into existing architecture made me consider how manufactured spaces change the way we live. It’s also a different way of creating that draws on physics, functionality, and even building codes. I gained a lot from working with “blue-collar” workers who would not characterize themselves as creatives but, in fact, created beautiful environments.
So in Portland, I searched for space with engineers, construction workers, plumbers, architects, artists, naturalists, you name it, working and learning together. This led me to a collaborative studio/shop space called ADX (Art Design Portland), which worked like a gym for makers. People would pay for a membership, giving them access to woodworking, metalworking, printmaking, and digital fabrication tools (to name a few). I loved this concept because makers are typically stuck to their isolated home garages and rarely branch out of their area of expertise. Also, this type of making is often constricted to those whose income level allows them space and money to amass expensive tools. Neither of which I had as a recent graduate.
At ADX, I taught furniture fabrication and metalworking. While teaching, I learned I had a passion for empowering womxn (and alliterations) in the shop environment. I would teach Women Welding Wednesdays and Laser Ladies exclusively to address the lack of womxn within our studios and address what I call “Tool Trauma”. Culturally, it is unacceptable for women to be interested in tool environments and computer science. We don’t support young girls in these areas, and our society reinforces the idea of women’s work from an early age. That is why we lack women in professional fields like engineering, architecture, and computer technology. I’d say that Digital Fabrication is the combination of traditional studio environments with computer-aided design, and I rarely found any women creating and making with these methods.
I am the Fabrication Lab (FabLab) Coordinator at the University of Tampa, serving the entire campus. On any given day, I could be helping a student in digital printmaking, a nursing student to 3D print a visualization of something invisible, to an entrepreneurial student prototyping a product for a new business. I enjoy the collaborative environment, the mixing of backgrounds and interests, and the design challenge. I think a passion for teaching, bringing accessibility to all types of students and the multidisciplinary aspects of Digital Fabrication got me interested in these environments. I enjoy working with many different materials and helping students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines execute their projects.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Anyone working in an environment as a minority feels a fair bit of imposter syndrome and general friction from being the only (fill in the blank) in the room. I’ve had too many situations to enumerate where I’ve had to explain my presence or consciously demonstrate my knowledge in my field to be taken seriously. When I see ambassador animals at the Zoo, I always laugh that I’m like an ambassador animal within some circles. I’d actually say space I dread going to the most is a hardware store or a specialty materials store (lumber, metal, etc.). They always think I’m picking something up for some male maker that I’m running errands for. It’s constant and disheartening. But I try to bring that frustration into the classroom when I confront someone who believes they can’t use tools because that’s what they’ve been told.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
As you can tell from my professional background, I’m acutely aware of how gender issues impact our society. These artificial roles affect our community members’ ability to access and learn from entire branches of knowledge and make some environments off-limits. My artwork deals with communication, gender, sexuality, and space. Our society consciously and unconsciously creates very rigid dichotomies of what is acceptable and what is not. What is desirable given your appearance and background and what is not.
My artwork reflects my own pushback and the problematic realities these social dichotomies create. Since becoming a parent, I’ve thought about these issues more and more as I’ve tried to shelter my daughter from gender stereotyping, but it is ingrained in how we act, the way we dress and present ourselves in public, even the way we stand and move. My artwork always reflected how I’m synthesizing our culture and now I’m looking at it through her experiences. We think our society has changed and corrected itself, but we need to constantly analyze and question.
Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
Being from Atlanta, I was surrounded by fantastic storytellers. My mother tells a story in a very uniquely southern gothic style that is beautiful and funny and tragic and honest and often out of nowhere and you have to keep up. I think this mixture is essentially in all things. I don’t think my mother or older relatives minced realities for me growing up, and I appreciate that even as I’m growing older and looking back. Everything is layered and can be funny as well as damaging. But I think this teaches an empathy that many realities are happening at once.
Contact Info:
- Email: equintana@ut.edu
- Website: emmaquintana.com
