I’ve been working on a wall installation to represent the pay discrimination I uncovered at Apple, along with the EEOC's utter failure to enforce relevant law. I wanted to create an art piece that represented my experience at the intersection of these institutional betrayals. While there is so much to write about the topic, my aim with this work is to engage people’s curiosity by presenting the story visually and viscerally.
The wall hanging, roughly eight feet tall and six feet wide, is a grouping of nine clouds, suspended with strings of precipitation. The number of raindrops falling from each cloud varies. Most have between twenty and forty, while one has close to ninety, and another—at the center of the scene—has none.
The outer clouds represent my eight male coworkers who shared their compensation details with me, and the central cloud represents me. Each raindrop illustrates $1000 that Apple paid that man, beyond what they paid me. The gaps ranged from $10,000 to $84,000 in annual base pay, and no man made less than me. To visualize the collective data, I’d need about 260 drops. The words “evidence acquired does not establish that you were paid less” are quoted from the EEOC's findings about whether this pay gap was appropriate.
During my time at Apple, I watched man after man shine the light of his personal interests through his prism of wealth. Whether my teammate's pursuit was flying first class to Europe to visit Napoleonic battle sites, buying a beachfront home, or hiring a racecar driving coach—all actual things these guys did—he had abundant resources to achieve his goals. Not to mention the long term benefits of larger company 401k matches and social security earnings, or time in the market on investments he could make that year that I could not. The stark contrast in our compensation created class differences in the present, and set the stage for a lifelong wealth gap that no future raise or promotion could ever close.
Money isn't that fascinating to own, it becomes compelling through use—how you spend or grow it, or what happens when you can't. So the idea came to me to illuminate the way the company selectively poured financial agency and security into men’s lives in a vivid downpour of color.
I thought you might enjoy hearing some of the artistic and technical decisions I’ve made in bringing this project to life. In a series of posts, I’ll write about the process of making the raindrops, making the clouds, and assembling it all together.
If you're a fellow potter, I hope that following along will help to demystify some of the practical details of working with clay and making activist art. Because I deeply understand the importance of financial transparency, I'm also showing the costs of my tools and materials along the way. Making art takes money—not just labor and creativity, but cold hard cash. It takes the exact resource that Apple prevented me from accruing at the same rate as my peers.
Let's get into it! The first problem I had to tackle with this piece was how to transform neutral, earthy clay into a vibrant rainbow of colors, so that's what I'll share in the next post.