Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“In a sunny, sleepy place halfway around the world in Siam, on the banks of a long brown river, there once lived a little boy whose name was Nu Dang.”
In the late 1950s, the Jamaican-American illustrator and designer Jacqueline Ayer (May 2, 1930–May 20, 2012) moved halfway around the world to present-day Thailand, then Siam, to expand her already pioneering creative career and start a family.
Ayer had grown up alongside the great graphic designer Milton Glaser at the “Coops” — the first interracial housing in the United States, a communist-inspired cooperative for garment workers in the Bronx. After graduating from Harlem’s iconic public High School of Music & Art, she attained a degree in fine art from Syracuse University and continued her studies in Paris, where her work attracted the attention of Christian Dior and got her editorial appointments for Vogue magazine. In Paris, she fell in love with a young American man who had just returned from Burma and who ignited in her a passion for the cultures of the Far East.
Not yet thirty, Ayer moved to Bangkok with her new husband, where they raised their two daughters and she launched a fashion company using traditional Thai craftsmanship to print her vibrant designs onto silk and cotton. Her fabrics made their way into New York and London’s glamorous department stores, and she went on to help Indira Gandhi’s government develop India’s traditional textile crafts.
Before the apogee of the civil rights movement, before the second wave of feminism, before globalization as we know it today, Jacqueline Ayer became a successful creative entrepreneur in a faraway land and a champion of the arts as a force of empowerment.
While living in Thailand, Ayer began writing and illustrating a series of children’s books celebrating the values and sensibilities of the local culture while exploring the most universal themes of human experience — heartbreak, hope, the power of the imagination to transform and redeem. These uncommonly poetic, stunningly illustrated treasures, The Paper-Flower Tree among them, earned Ayer the 1961 Gold Medal of the Society of Illustrators, considered the Academy Award of illustration — a landmark achievement for women and artists of color.
The series began with Nu Dang and His Kite (public library), originally published in 1959 and reissued for the first time nearly six decades later by Brooklyn-based independent powerhouse Enchanted Lion.
Ayer’s lovely, lyrical prose spills from her beautifully illustrated pages to the tell the transportive…
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