Erin Taj

Erin Taj is the art director at MEL magazine & Dollar Shave Club, with 10-plus years of experience in the brand, marketing and media industries.

Elizabeth Bayne: In ArtCenter’s 90-year history, there have only been 300 black alumni — how does that make you feel?

Erin Taj (BFA 12 Illustration and Graphic Design): When we were here, there were only like six of us on campus, so it makes sense. Not in a good way, but just in a not surprising way.

EB: Why do we need more Black students coming to ArtCenter?

ET: We’re all so creative. We should definitely be coming here and getting these skills and being in those positions professionally. I'm still the only Black woman in my department, and I've been in this industry for almost 10 years. It’s kind of sad, I want there to be more Black people around me.

EB: You oversee artwork for a publication, in terms of the content that comes out, why does that matter?

ET: You need diversity, period, to get multiple angles on things. You can't just have a team of straight white dudes making the art. In my position, I'm able to search for people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people and bring them into the circle, and also pay them a fair rate, which is important. We get paid.

EB: How do you look for diversity?

ET: If people on my team come to me and say, "This freelancer's cool," it's like, "Yeah, their work's cool. What's their background?" We need to start switching this up, doing more research. That's what Instagram, the internet is for, going down wormholes and finding new shit, right? Hire more people of color, diverse people with diverse perspectives. It's not that hard to do.

EB: Was it a difficult decision to become a creative?

ET: No, my grandfather was a painter; my dad's a mechanical engineer. It just trickles down in my family. I grew up with art around me, so it was a natural transition for me.

EB: When did you first learn about ArtCenter?

ET: My mom actually, because I grew up in Pasadena, she got a bunch of brochures when I was in my junior year of high school. She was like, "It's really expensive. You have to apply for hella scholarships and grants."

EB: What made you decide that was the school you wanted to go to?

ET: I graduated high school at 16. I was really young. I didn't know what graphic design was. I had no real view into any of that stuff until I came here. I was like, "Oh, this is awesome." Figure drawing, color theory, design theory, art history — it was adding structure, giving the fleshy, vague idea of what an artist can be, some bones and some muscle.

EB: Were their other Black people in your department?

ET: Not a lot, I think there were four of us in the illustration department proper.

EB: What do we do to fix that?

ET: There needs to be more outreach for sure. I think part of preparing for graduation should be doing something philanthropic or going out and being a mentor. If you want to enter into a work space, you're going to have to be mentored by whoever you work with or start to mentor other people. I think that you should start cultivating that as soon as possible and it should be a part of the curriculum, absolutely.

EB: What was the worst grade or project review you got here?

ET: I don't think I got any bad grades. There were difficult projects. We were supposed to read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and do a hundred still frames a night for an animation. I just could not keep up; I dropped out of the class in the third week. I was like, "This is not what I'm doing for my career.” But I respected it, and I loved the book.