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Transcript
My name is Denise Tucker. I had a very interesting childhood. I was a gifted child and my mother always knew but in the 4th grade I went to Frick, I drew something and my teacher brought me to the art teacher and I was put into programs for gifted children. I’ve been drawing and painting since I was a child. You know how they say August Wilson used to listen to all the children and write it down. The children would be playing. I was a child who would be drawing murals with chalk or crayons or whatever I could possibly find pencil and drawing all the children and all the people in the neighborhood.
I kind of knew exactly what I was going to do when I was like 7 years old. My artistic gifts got better and better because as I got older, more mentors attached themselves to me and I learned how to do things, how to present my work, how to make a portfolio, how to exhibit my work and I was reading books and going to the museums, and I had already decided where I was going to go. I was in high school. They asked me, Denise, what are you going to be when you grow up? I said I’m going to be an international artist and they said, ha, ha ha laughing at me. You don’t even have enough money to go to Oakland, I said. All right, OK. Four years after that, I was in Europe, I repeat myself to you girls, don’t pay any attention to anything that anybody says negative about you because it’s not about you, really. It’s mostly about them and it wasn’t that difficult for me to make the choice to pick up my portfolio and leave the country. If I’m going to be a designer, I have to go where they design and I just decided, OK, find out where they are and I went with my portfolio and knocked on their doors when I got to Paris.
When I left the country, I went to university in France and to a Academy in Holland and I went to school in Belgium as well. After I started working for Che Won Che the metric system is what the rest of the world used and America uses the imperial system of which I had learned, it doesn’t work in Europe and the fashion industry, your clothes don’t work unless it’s the metric system. I learned how to make patterns and it just doesn’t work, so I had to go back to school to learn the metric system. So I just went to the Fashion Academy. I also taught school at the Fashion Academy, years later.
I retired. I left Europe to come to Pittsburgh because Pittsburgh is my home. My intention was not to retire, but my girlfriend worked in one of these residential areas for older people and these were older English speaking women. They worked from Australia, from England, from America, and they had come there as young nurses or young something, after the war, at that time they must have been about 80 years old, or 90 years old, some of them were, but as they started getting older, this is not called dementia. When you started getting older, you start, remembering things that happen in your youth and they were talking about things like Covenant Garden, Phipps Conservatory, baseball, basketball, all sorts of things and I realized this could be me because they had incorporated their whole life with husbands and children and grandchildren and great children, great grandchildren and that’s when I realized I think I should go home and I started thinking about my life because that could be me. So I started preparing and I came back to Pittsburgh because that is the is the place I love. I have lived all over the world. I speak several languages, but my home and my love is the Hill District Pittsburgh, and I decided if I’m going to be vintage, well, let’s not say old. Let’s say vintage. If I’m going to be vintage, I’m going to be vintage on Webster Ave. I’ve been home like about four years now. In the beginning it was kind of difficult because Pittsburgh people speak a kind of slang. In the very beginning, I hadn’t spoke English for years, so I had to acclimatize myself like a tourist in my own hometown, and I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on but mostly I figured it out, and there’s lots of people who just look at me and shake their heads, cause this girl come from the Hill District and she don’t even know what hump day is. Ohh, it’s because I haven’t been here. When I think about my experience, I get people like they’re like and all you did this. Everybody can do this because I come from over here in the corner, over here on the Hill District. All you need to do is just know what you have and you filter out all the noise people telling you you’re ugly. You’re too black. You’re too dish. You’re too stupid. You’re too that. All of these kind of things. It doesn’t matter if you have a gift, it’s your gift. You don’t listen to anybody else. You do what you have to do, and you just keep goinging like a horse with blinders on it and pay no attention to anybody. Just shake off the dust and remember where you come from. You come from the Hill, that makes you strong.