Aimee Mullins on Finding a World of Possibilities in Every Problem

05/04/22 • 50 min

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Aimee Mullins is a true polymath. Her passions and professional pursuits are as varied and boundless as the awards and groundbreaking strides she’s achieved within her many chosen fields. She broke new ground in athletics as the first amputee in history to compete against able-bodied athletes in the NCAA’s Division 1 track and field events. She went on to set records in the 100 and 200 meter races and the long jump.

Her poise and athleticism led to a career in fashion as a runway model for Alexander McQueen and as a global ambassador for L’Oreal. She then added acting to her portfolio with roles in wildly varied projects ranging from artist Matthew Barney’s Cremaster series to Netflix’s Stranger Things. Through it all, Aimee has continued to make sense of the many trails she’s blazed in a series of influential TED talks that have been viewed by millions and translated into 42 languages.

It was her paradigm-shifting talk on the “opportunity of adversity” that offered a veritable proof of concept for the ideas we're exploring in this season of Change Lab. Her powerful argument for the creative leaps that result only from the hurdles we face resonated deeply with the idea that the human imagination feeds on challenge and uncertainty – a familiar concept to regular listeners of this podcast.

Aimee contends that we meet and exceed our goals because of—not despite—each obstacle we encounter. An insight she’s earned the hard way navigating the world as a double amputee. Her insistence that “good enough” isn’t good enough has led to advances in prosthetic design that would never exist without her. In fact, Aimee contends that disability itself is a misnomer better attributed to a broken piece of machinery than a human being whose differences are the source of their strength. We all have much to learn from Aimee’s self-determination, curiosity and wonder.

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Previous Episode

Artist Lita Albuquerque on Regeneration After the Fire

We’re lucky as artists that we can recover much faster because we can express. Nature recovers and we recover.

Lita Albuquerque is an artist whose body of work has often defied the strictures of convention and, ultimately, canvas. Over the course of her celebrated career, her paintings and sculptures outgrew the traditional materials contained within her studio and expanded to inhabit the land and people around her.

To experience Lita’s large-scale installations (often tinged in an ultramarine blue pigment all her own) is to dance with dichotomies. At once grounded and transcendent, intimate and epic, earthly and celestial – Lita’s work, above all, is a celebration of how we connect to our environment.

It’s a creative worldview that was put to test in November of 2018 when the Woolsey Fire engulfed the hills around Malibu and destroyed her home and studio. Suddenly, the place in which she spent decades raising her kids and making her art was gone, along with a vast archive of completed works and works-in-progress.

It was a monumental loss that would have been devastating to any artist—and particularly so for Lita, whose creative imagination has always been intrinsically connected to her environment. But Lita could not let her grief paralyze her because she had to get to work on the long list of pieces previously commissioned by collectors. That backlog turned out to be her saving grace. Eventually she found that the process of creative expression had resurrected the parts of her she feared the fire had claimed forever.

Over the course of a Change Lab conversation alternately stirring and sublime, Lita generously retraces the harrowing path she’s walked to a place of recovery and renewal she simply describes as “back.”

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Next Episode

Jackie Amezquita on migration, memory and making art

When we first heard from Jackie Amezquita four years ago, she was an ArtCenter Fine Art student on the cusp of graduating. In a raw and revealing interview, she traced the arduous path she’d walked to find the stability she needed to risk everything for her art.

Her remarkable journey (captured in E14 of Change Lab) began in her native Guatemala, where surging violence and poverty had forced Jackie’s mother to migrate to the United States to provide for her family. At age seventeen, Jackie followed her mother’s footsteps to the US (quite literally), and barely survived a dangerous border crossing. After years spent working as an undocumented nanny to put herself through community college, Jackie eventually earned her Bachelor of Fine Art at ArtCenter. Her thesis project drew international media coverage when she bravely embarked on a second grueling walk from the Tijuana border all the way to Downtown Los Angeles.

The power of her resilience and grit continues to stand out as an example of a purpose-driven artist whose message brilliantly aligns with her chosen medium. We’ve held her story close to our hearts, and the hardships she’s transmuted into art resonated all the more this season as we explore the alchemy of creativity and adversity.

It’s for those reasons that We’ve asked Jackie to join us as Change Lab’s first returning guest, even as she puts the finishing touches on her MFA thesis at UCLA. We waned to know more about her investigation into grief and displacement, and we were fascinated by the bravery and creative energy it took to revisit her trauma and to give depth and dimension to a painful story that needed to be told.

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