They had to learn how to read drawings upside down, because they weren't allowed to sit next to the white clients. So I was incorporating things like the half doorway to symbolize their struggle. The tower is a nod to five Black architects, trailblazers whose creations sometimes went unnoticed or overlooked.
The his­to­ry of sci­ence, like most every his­to­ry we learn, comes to us as a pro­ces­sion of great, almost exclu­sive­ly white, men, unbro­ken but for the occa­sion­al token woman-well-deserv­ing of her hon­ors but seem­ing­ly anom­alous nonethe­less. "If you believe the his­to­ry books," notes the Time­line series The Matil­da Effect, "sci­ence is a guy thing. Dis­cov­er­ies are made by men, which spur fur­ther inno­va­tion by men, fol­lowed by acclaim and prizes for men. But too often, there is an unsung woman genius who deserves just as much cred­it" and who has been over­shad­owed by male col­leagues who grabbed the glo­ry.