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Newsweek
25-04-2025
- Automotive
- Newsweek
Women Are Running America's New Electric Vehicle Company
Chris Barman is one of the very few automaker chief executive officers. Barman leads Slate, the new electric vehicle startup that debuted its first model, a truck that can be turned into an SUV, yesterday. Tisha Johnson,Slate's head of design, is one of a handful of women to lead a car company's design department. Together, they are vital parts of Slate's story. Chris Barman, CEO of Slate. Chris Barman, CEO of Slate. Slate Both women drove a long and winding road to get to where they are today. Johnson told Newsweek that she started sketching in elementary school. "I've been designing cars for family and friends since I was in at least the fifth grade," she said. That passion led her to the Art Center College of Design, where her senior project focused on "bringing good design to people [where it] could have the most impact." She specifically designed a vehicle for the profile of a person who needed reliable transportation as a single parent on a tight budget. That idea targets the type of customer Slate is going after with its new model. Barman had a different path but with similar interests. "I had a very interesting career at a large original equipment manufacturer ... When I was an intern, I worked on the original Viper as a trainee. I worked on the Prowler as a vehicle line executive. I worked on helping to bring the second-generation 300, Charger and Challenger back... very exciting programs," she said. The CEO reflected: "The first car I drove was the old Ford Ranger. That was the farm truck, but the first car that was really mine was a Sundance America. The situation was that I had finished my freshman year at Purdue University in engineering. I had gotten an internship, and my parents didn't want me driving a used car. They wanted something reliable. "So, we went out, we cross-shopped, and the Plymouth Sundance had a version called the America, which was like a low budget version ... six-speed manual [transmission], no A/C and no FM radio. But hey, it fit our budget. I loved that car for the freedom it gave me, for the security it gave me. It was a new car. "When I thought about Slate and I reflected back, and I was like, 'Okay, the brand Plymouth is gone. The brand Pontiac is gone. The brand Saturn is gone. Like, where do people go? If you know, if I were to go back to that day, like, what would I be looking for? What would I be able to afford?'" Before she took her role at Slate, Johnson had stepped back from the automotive world. But, after a discussion with Barman, she was hooked on the concept. "I was at a moment where I felt like I really want to be part of this change. I got far enough away that I'd stepped out of the auto industry, but I really felt like this is where my calling is. This is where my passion is," she said. Johnson is doing more at Slate than just designing a truck and SUV. She got involved with the company very early on and has been able to design the model, work on branding and influence the DNA of the company. "It could not be more exciting to me," she said. "Tisha and Chris bring the ideal experience and leadership for Slate to deliver radically affordable, personalizable and reliable electric vehicles," said Slate CCO Jeremy Snyder. "Varying perspectives across genders are absolutely critical to defining the best possible product. Johnson was candid: "Women look at vehicles differently than men." She points to the views of aesthetics and functionality of a vehicle as varying depending on who you ask. "I find a lot of times, even as much of a gearhead as I am, when I sit in the car with one of my male colleagues, I'm looking at things differently. I'm looking at them from a mother perspective or stepmother perspective. Or, we just have different priorities when we get in the car." She can point to specific bits of the Slate model that were directly influenced by her personal experiences. "We have a very low console, and we created a really nice, big open space to accommodate a handbag. It's a nice place to put a purse that you've invested a few dollars into. You care about it. You want to keep it secure, but you also want to make sure that it stays clean. This is a thing that women know and talk about so we have this open tray, which also works for a computer bag." She also designed the vehicle to have a low load height, a "nice low step" into the bed, to accommodate the heights of a wide swath of people. Slate is targeting reaching up to the 95th percentile rather than at the 95th percentile, which is how she describes the industry as traditionally creating models. "We really want to make sure that we have women in the mix that are part of the development process, because we will naturally infuse our experiences into the conversation and into the outcomes. We find that when we do that, when we have attributes in the car that meet the needs of women, as a natural outcome we meet the needs of our family members. Women will be thinking about the experience for the child getting in and out of the car. They will be thinking about what other members of their household may need. And so just as a natural outcome, we're able to support a broader ecosystem of use," Johnson said. Barman agrees that women need to be involved in the development process for autos. She said: "I think it's important that there are more female leaders within the industry. Seventy to 80 percent of all purchase decisions are either made by or heavily influenced by women, and women need to be part of the process of designing such a complex consumer good as a vehicle. And, make sure that their perspective on how it's being used, how it should be designed, what the different use cases considered [are explored]. What resonates? What do women want to know about a vehicle? What's being provided to them? That's important. And the more women that we have in the industry and seating at the table where these discussions are happening, the better product we'll have to be able to provide to the consumer."
Los Angeles Times
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In the documentary ‘Art for Everybody,' the dark side of a ‘Painter of Light' is exposed
If you think you've never seen a painting by Thomas Kinkade, think again. The late artist, who is said to have sold more canvases than any painter in history, created a cottage industry (pun intended) of ubiquitous, mass-produced art with his blissful landscapes, idyllic street scenes and cozy cottage tableaus. But the beatific, charismatic painter, who developed a rock-star following, was not all that he seemed. Miranda Yousef, in her feature directing debut, deftly takes on Kinkade's timely and intriguing story in the documentary 'Art for Everybody,' an absorbing, smartly assembled portrait of the mega rise and tragic fall of the Jekyll-and-Hyde-like artist. Kinkade's enormous 1990s-era success, which saw his work reproduced on everything from collectible plates to La-Z-Boy loungers, dovetailed with the period's culture war against the sexualization of art. The born-again Kinkade stepped into that breach, doubled down on the family values bit and became known as a creator of images that the Christian community, among other groups, could embrace. But how much of this was opportunism and how much was true belief? Yousef, who also edited the film, vividly dissects the artist's complicated life with the help of strong archival and personal footage as well as candid interviews with family members, colleagues and a solid array of art-world figures. She first tracks Kinkade from his impoverished Placerville, Calif., youth to his late-1970s days as a bohemian art student at UC Berkeley and Pasadena's ArtCenter College of Design, followed by his work as a background artist for Ralph Bakshi's 1983 animated fantasy 'Fire and Ice.' (Bakshi, now 86, enthuses here about Kinkade's talent and work ethic.) Kinkade's nascent pieces were often dark and provocative. But it was his move into painting — specifically his signature bucolic pastels with their near-heavenly lighted windows and skies — that would lead him and business partner Ken Raasch to create an art empire that, at its peak, reportedly brought in more than $100 million in annual sales. Kinkade's eponymous mall stores and QVC appearances were among his many lucrative outlets. He was dubbed the 'Painter of Light,' even though British artist J.M.W. Turner first claimed that title in the early 1800s. But from a sheer artistic point of view, was Kinkade's work any good? Or was it simply middlebrow kitsch? Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, who offers several unvarnished opinions here, asserts that Kinkade 'had a quite outsized cultural impact with really bad art.' Of his famed cottage paintings, Knight calls them 'a cliché piled upon a fantasy piled upon a bad idea. That cottage is where the Wicked Witch lives… I'm not going in there.' Journalist and author Susan Orlean ('The Orchid Thief'), who profiled Kinkade for a 2001 New Yorker article that lends this documentary its title, considers his output 'very sentimental, a little garish and kind of twee,' despite its admittedly broad appeal. Yet Kinkade, often seen in the film's clips as confident and ebullient with a kind of evangelist's fervor, pushes back against the naysayers by contending, 'All great art is not about art — all great art is about life.' And he took that belief to the bank, literally. But it's recent interviews with Kinkade's wife, Nanette (they married in 1982), and their four millennial daughters — Merritt, Chandler, Winsor and Everett — that provide the doc's emotional heft and shed valuable light on the tumultuous man behind the serene paintings. Yousef masterfully carries us along from the women's happier memories of Kinkade as a devoted family man to someone whose work and fame began to supplant the needs of his wife and kids. His family says he could be 'manic' and 'hard to connect with' and, from a few behind-the-scenes clips of Kinkade at promotional events, he seemed to treat his then-small daughters like props for the cameras. In addition, the artist comes off as smarmy and contentious at times, belying his 'holy man' persona and populist vibe. From around 2006 to 2010, a series of major business downturns, including a bankruptcy filing and several key lawsuits, led Kinkade into a downward spiral of troubling public behavior and substance abuse. (Footage showing Kinkade's compulsive need for booze is unsettling.) His family, angry and fearful, even staged an intervention to force the former teetotaler into rehab. Though he reluctantly went, the therapy didn't take. He died in 2012, at age 54, from an accidental overdose of alcohol and Valium. Ultimately, the centerpiece of the film is the Kinkade daughters' posthumous discovery of a vault that houses a trove of their father's unseen, artistically challenging work, much of which shows an underside that few people knew — or could have ever imagined. The women's reexamination of their complex dad's demons and flaws, vis-à-vis these unearthed creations, proves illuminating and poignant. Among the doc's other interview subjects are former Times investigative reporter Kim Christensen, who wrote several articles about Kinkade's legal troubles, which included art gallery fraud; Kinkade's college girlfriend, who recalls his sometimes hostile, dualistic nature; and artist Jeffrey Vallance, who curated the only major survey exhibition of Kinkade's work, held in 2004 at Cal State Fullerton's Grand Central Art Center.
