 I'm fine, thank you, I'm sad, you're in order, senior, senior, I'm excited, good morning everyone. My name is Kalolo Luckett, founder of Bione means contemporary art series. I am happy, I'm just so happy to be co-presenting this inaugural symposium with Jessica Lynn, art critic and co-founder of art stop black. Bione means is made possible with the generous support of the advancing black arts in Pittsburgh program, a partnership of the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Heinz endowments. I'd also like to thank Dawn and Chris Fleischner, Peter and Annette Berger, Yona Harvey and Terrence Hayes, Joanne Barbera and Patrick Kane, Kenneth Sprule and Laura Washington and many private individuals. I would like to thank give thanks to the Carnegie Museum of Art and Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh for providing this wonderful gathering space. Arts stop black for shining light to this important work. Chris Ivy for videotaping the symposium and John Barbera for all of your wonderful assistants. A very big thank you to Lucy Steward and Diana Fersen for preparing this venue and making special accommodations for us. By any means seeks to address black artistic invisibility through a strategic convening of arts leaders of color that will spark debate, big debate, constructive dialogue and positive growth to cultural institutions throughout the Pittsburgh regions and visual arts community nationally and globally. The ensuing panel discussions and audience Q&A will create space for the sharing of resources and knowledge and establish new connections and networks with the larger visual arts ecology. Please remember to use hashtag by any means in your tweets and other social media platforms during this symposium. Now I'd like to introduce one of our dear supporters, Don Fleischner, who will share a few remarks. Thanks Don. Good morning. I'm Don. My husband Chris and I are very pleased to support today's program and I'm speaking for both of us today. He does get credit for writing most of this. Professionally we own an educator placement firm. We recruit teachers and administrators for private and independent schools on the West Coast. Diversity is a top priority for our schools, racial and ethnic, sexual orientation and gender identity plus neurodiversity too. It's really important for schools to have role models who inspire them, who can relate to them and who might look like them. Working closely with over 150 schools gives us a first-hand glimpse into the importance of a robust and diverse learning community. Ask me about my pin later, please. Chris and I began collecting art over 20 years ago. We started small, $150 photograph. It was a big ticket item for us a few years out of college. You don't need a lot of money to start collecting art, but you do need a curiosity to explore a willingness to ask questions and openness to stretch one's comfort zone and a commitment to learning. We visit museums and galleries both in our cities where we live and where we travel. In 2009, we moved from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh. As we began visiting the Carnegie Museum of Arts and the Warhol and other spots in town, we realized how accessible and approachable many of the staff are at these institutions and the local galleries. We became acquainted with the curators and got involved with the Carnegie International and other exhibitions. We met Cololo at a launch party for CSAPGH, a community- supported arts initiative she helped create. The New York Times wrote a wonderful article about CSAPGH and its ability to generate a deeper connection between people who make things and the people who buy them. That first meeting led to a warm friendship with Cololo and her husband John and to further open our eyes to what is happening in and around Pittsburgh. Chris is a native Pittsburgh who lived in California 19 years before returning. Spending time away from the city gave him a deeper understanding for both its strengths and blind spots. I am born and raised in Southern California. I found Pittsburgh welcoming and inclusive, but for many who grew up here or who move here, their experiences are different. In the fall of 2015, Pittsburgh today partnered with the Vibrant Pittsburgh to create the Regional Workplace Diversity Study. They found a stark difference between the perceptions of Caucasians and other racial and ethnic groups. The section on community was particularly telling for three statistics. Quoting from the report, 70% of white residents say they feel very welcome in Southwestern Pennsylvania compared to 36% of minorities. More than 70% of white residents say Southwestern Pennsylvania is more welcoming than other places they have lived. Fewer than 40% of minorities agree. 79% of whites feel the region embraces racial and ethnic minorities, but only 41% of minorities feel Southwestern Pennsylvania is the place that embraces them. Reading the survey results, we were saddened, but not surprised because we had heard similar comments from friends. They tell us of difficulties finding jobs, experiencing subtle racism or overt microaggressions displayed against them. When I think about today's symposium, by any means, I'm encouraged for what conversations and connections will be sparked. Too many voices are missing, stories untold or achieving only a limited reach. African Americans have a strong role in our history, culture and contemporary arts that is underrepresented in Pittsburgh. BAM is setting out with ambitious goals and it can achieve them through the addition of your voices. Art inspires and gives us hope. It's a vibrant commitment to human ingenuity, creativity and aspiration. Great art can transcend labels and generate new levels of awareness. Art plays such an important role in closing the distance between people, bringing them together for dialogue, shared experience and a sense of wonder. Words matter and actions matter too. Let's plan to have lively conversations today. Let's identify the gaps and distances that exist in our community and let's take steps to close them. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you very much, Dawn and Chris. Next person I would like to introduce is my by any means co-presenter and moderator of the artist panel, Jessica Lynn. Good morning. I'm a little tall so I'm going to raise this. I'm really happy to be here with you all this morning. Today I have the pleasure of moderating the panel Black Art-Making in the 21st Century. This panel aims to facilitate a discussion about the ways in which engagements with myth, ritual and memory becomes a means through which we might understand conditions of blacknesses in this contemporary moment. Some questions that will be explored. How do artists reckon with ephemeral as materiality and form? How do digital tools, the internet and technology enhance and or support this reckoning? What new opportunities present themselves as a result? As BAM intends to provoke and broaden understandings of contemporary art influenced by black culture, this panel brings together four dynamic and amazing practitioners working in various media who might help us think through the relationships between making identity, history and our social and cultural climate. Today you will have the honor of hearing from Thaddeus Mosley, sculptor, filmmaker and video artist Tiana McClodden, Nathaniel Diney, interdisciplinary artist, and Alicia B. Wormsley also an interdisciplinary artist. We'll start with these presentations and then we'll move into what I hope to be a fantastic facilitated dialogue and then in the effort to make sure that you two are also a part of what's happening and have the opportunity to respond will open up for an audience Q&A. So in that note, I'm going to step aside and let Thaddeus begin his presentation. Good morning. When it comes to technology, most of you will find I'm still in the Stone Age. And what I do is mostly hand-coloured sculpture. And again, it's pretty in the past. Some years ago, not too long, I did a residency at Memphis College of Art. And no one there had ever seen anyone carve. Every one was doing things by computers and assemblies is what is being done. And they thought I was a magician. Plus a Superman being able to do a physical work. And I will say that years ago, when I first started by wood from a particular dealer near Union Town, he told me recently says there were about 12 people doing buying wood for me. So now you're the only one. I said, Yeah, they all got smart. So I'm going to talk about mostly what's on here. This was a sculpture that Carnegie Museum of Art purchased when I guess in 79. This is called Georgia Gate. And it's called Georgia Gate because I was very much inspired by the graveyards in Sumner, Georgia, where they had these very fantastic sculptures that reminded me of Brancusi. Of course, Brancusi didn't know these people. And most of them had never heard of anyone named Brancusi because they were Afro Americans working on plantations in Georgia, but they made these beautiful sculptures. And this is sort of a tribute to that idea. This is a piece that I'm also used to when I was a lot younger and stronger. I'll soon be 90 so I don't lift these marble stones anymore. But this is owned by the Washington family. And it's called a tribute to the likes and us, I've known rivers. And again, most of my things for the art students, this is called weight and space. You'll find that most of my work, the things are levitated and and they seem to be floating. This is sort of cleaned up now because it's in the Washington home. Now it was an outdoor piece, but they moved into an apartment. So I refurbished the sculpture and with a couple other strong young men, I was able to stand it up. This was a piece that was done for my last show at the Carnegie. I've done two first one in the 60s and this was in the 90s. Then I'm not going to dwell along on these. Again, you get hopefully the idea of weight and space. This in the I guess, early 2000s when the convention center was going to they had I guess a competition for work and there was five locals. And I did this what I called the Three Rivers Bench. It's about 18 foot long. And I had some very good advice. I had the Dara Aramata, who is a Baptist woodworker, who then we had a hard Glen Gardner to do the metal joints. Because when we first did this, there were supports across and had to try to figure a way where kids wouldn't trip over top of it getting in and out. So the night and so there was an argument rather this would hold up but we did and fortunately it's one of the few things that they haven't had to do anything to we support it. So it's very stable and it's not a utilitarian piece but I think an interesting functional structure. I think you're good on time. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Thad. This little pinwheel thing settles down. Hi, my name is Tiana McClodden. I'm coming to you all from North Philadelphia. Very, very excited to be here to talk through this ramble of a presentation I'm about to do on black iconoclasm and the spaces in between. What I was thinking about in reading the prompts that Jessica and Keelolo formatted for us to consider was how to bring this into an approach, bring this in a space where I would be able to kind of use it as a prompt to really explore how myth, ritual, and memory work within my own practice in a different way than I've actually thought about it. So I'm going to just do a brief presentation on some of those thoughts that came up for me. So I'm going to open with a quote from Prince 19. Let's clap for Prince. I was dreaming when I wrote this. Forgive me if it goes astray. That's pretty much what happened with this. And I think it sets the tone for concepts and ideas around memory and production. As it relates to my practice. So I don't really do the definitions, but I think it's cool because I'm kind of trying to also get these things to stick in my head as well in a certain kind of way, but also want people to feel like they have an entry to some of the things I want to talk about. So in thinking about iconoclasm, I was thinking about the kind of black historical figures that I'm interested in, the way that I try to move within my own practice and the work that I present. And so it landed me in this, you know, looking at iconoclasm or iconoclasts, which are, you know, folks who really challenge, like, you know, the status quo, challenge these, like, you know, long cold cherished traditions of, you know, upper society, et cetera, et cetera. So of course that brings me to Prince. We're going to come back to him for a second. Because Prince for me is the earlier influence with Purple Rain. Purple Rain, the film was a big deal to see someone kind of embody their own narrative and exhibit all these things. And one of the things I have featured on here is a tweet that Prince tweeted from his account on March 25, 2016. And it says, if you like music, art, theater, sex, spirituality, literature, love, humor, philosophy, or culture, you should see at Prince in concert, hashtag wow. And I'm like, you know, that's kind of like, you know, I think a little bit about something that I kind of aspire to be to deal with all these various aspects of blackness and kind of present them, you know, confidently in this way. So it brings me to it's, there's a couple of things that I kind of work from within my own practice, these kind of like obstructions that I've set for my body of work until I figure out how to move past them. One of the concepts, remembering, the act of remembering a memory, or remembering is when a memory is revisited, whether physically or mentally, is something that I use to kind of impact my own biography as I explore it within my artistic practice. Another obstruction that kind of playing or concept that I explore within my work is biomethography, that we've been together of myth, history, and biography, and epic form in there, in epic narrative form. So I'm a filmmaker and video, video maker and do some object installation stuff now. And I really kind of, I like to look at these as starting points so that I don't go too far from where I really wanted to start. And so one of the things that I want to do with unpacking these two ideas or concepts is to kind of juxtapose Prince and Audre Lorde for a second. So I'm going to, one of the things that I do when I talk about biomethography is of course cite the, you know, the owner of that name or that concept, which is Audre Lorde. She presented her, you know, work, Xamy, a new spelling of my name, which is a book. Whereas my first access to what could be considered a biomethography of sorts is Purple Rain by Prince. So I saw Purple Rain when I was a kid, and it blew my mind. I thought, I was just like, this is a God. I'd never seen anything like Prince to this day. I really haven't seen anyone like Prince. But when I got older, I started to realize that a lot of the subject matter that was featured within Purple Rain was actually real things that related to Prince's life. So usually when I do talk about biomethography, I talk about this Jackie Robinson film, where Jackie Robinson played himself and throughout his life, and it's kind of like he's, it's kind of really bad acting. So it's really funny to watch somebody act poorly about themselves. But then it challenges the way that we think and create icons or, you know, bigger presentations or ideas around folks in relation to some of the mundane extravagant things that they do. So this is a slide that just kind of gives you a kind of brief presentation of what my work looks like. And all these works start from a couple of, I think, another, like a couple of frames that I kind of try to unpack before I create these works. So of course they range in videos, objects, and things of that nature, objects up here, objects down here with stills, and then mostly moving things. But one of the things that I kind of work through to kind of, I think, try to explicate a different form of rigor with like research and relationship to blackness and some of the cultural and historical elements. Or these three, like sociological and almost even anthropological facets, artifacts, sociofacts, and minifacts. In my artist statements, I talk, in my artist statement, and it's been several, so I should say artist statements. I talk a lot about black meant-of-fact, which is something I'm very much interested in. So artifacts are tools that things that people create, sociofacts, you know, customs and traditions, and meant-of-facts are ideas and concepts behind those. So I'm very much interested in kind of like mining black meant-of-fact and figuring out how to put those within objects and films and things of that nature. So this project that I'm just going to highlight is something that really, really challenged me in thinking about that. This is my first commission from a museum that took place last year from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. And I was, you know, kind of approached to think about what I could do to create this online work in honor or recognition of World AIDS Day, which takes place on December 1st every year. And they have a series of work that's produced under that day that's called like Day Without Art, which is to honor folks who have died and have been lost to the AIDS epidemic. And so one of the things that was really difficult for me was how to think about the internet as a form, because I don't really consider myself like an internet artist or even really a digital artist. And so I almost kind of resisted taking on this project, but then I had to challenge myself and think about a couple of other things that put me in a mindset of how I really want my work to be accessible to an audience. And it made me think a lot about black bodies in museums and how the resistance of going into those spaces sometimes, you know, wanting to engage with work, but not wanting to be looked at in a certain way. And I knew that I had to do this because it would allow one of the first moments of that I would could, you know, really benefit from where people have full access to the work in the privacy of their home. And I chose to do the work, the project, on Essex Hemphill, a poet, writer, artist, spoken word artist, just phenomenal, phenomenal iconoclast, who actually died in Philadelphia, spent most of his life in D.C., Maryland, but, you know, spent the end of his life and died in Philadelphia while producing some work. So in thinking about doing this project with Essex, you know, and if you kind of remember some of the frames that I put for myself, thinking about objects and talking to people about their customs and thinking about Black Mentefact, one of the things that I needed to do with this presentation was to figure out how to create something that allowed for multiple subjectivities of him so that I could challenge or destroy like the monolith that people have for him because he's revered in a very specific way, but I needed to create something that would kind of present him in new eyes before the people that even know him. And so what I did was challenge myself to get out of the archive and really get into the streets and talk to his loved ones, the, you know, folks who, who survive him and see what they had of his, to get closer to this idea of what the artifact could be from relationships or looking at relationships as a portrait within itself. So I traveled and spoke to some of his closest friends and in here you could see some of the materials that I got, books, audio tapes and things of that nature. And then I ended up creating a project that was framed around a statement that he presented during a lecture of his where he was actually negotiating his body or identity within cyberspace and which was so fitting because it's like cyberspace and then now it's the internet nobody says cyberspace anymore. But it was cool because with thinking about black historical iconoclast figures of mine, I always try to look for something that would give me quote-unquote permission to move forward or gives me get me get me closer to a place of thinking of how they may think of the thing that I'm trying to do so that can kind of be bound by a little bit of what they're leading with. And with this quote I'm going to read it to you very briefly and you know show you a little bit about the project. The quote is I was counting T sales on the shores of cyberspace and filling some despair. I have misiginated and mutated, tolerated and assimilated and yet I remain the same in the eyes of those who would fear and despise me. I stand at the threshold of cyberspace and wonder is it possible that I'm unwelcome here too? This is my time so I can watch myself. Will I be allowed to construct a virtual reality that empowers me? Can invisible men see their own reflections? I'm carrying trauma into cyberspace, violent gestures, a fracture of soul, short fuses, dreams of revenge. My primary public characteristics continue to be defined by dreads of me, myths about me and plain old homegrown contempt. All of this confusion is accompanying me into cyberspace, every indignity and humiliation, every anger and suspicion. And so Essex presented this during the last year of his life, a couple of months before he died, at a conference called Black Nations Coronations that convene a lot of Black queer scholars to talk about identity and what we know now to be intersectional politics. So the project that I decided to create, and if you look at this, it's written in my hand, this is how I write actually. And I want to do that to get to challenge the way that the form of the internet, you know, typing is a form of like kind of a prosthetic, it kind of erases the human out of it. And I also want to kind of think about subversion of the text that I was using. You can't copy and paste this, so it could kind of like create the, you know, challenge the ideas around the transmission of the art, which is what a museum actually kind of presents is that you have to go to see the art. So in this case you have to come to see this. And, you know, kind of thinking about the idea of ritual and bringing the ritual process and how you navigate this work as a ritual. So you actually have to go in order, movement one through four clockwise. Once you complete each one, or once each one is presented to you, you cannot go back, it disappears. So thinking about like a tension between accessibility and also like forcing people to kind of think about what you want them to think about was really important to me. And this is online, so after I go breeze through this you can check it out, it's like 100% free to see. And so you go to movement one and it opens with a video that I'm not going to play just for the sake of time. And the first picture, you know, an image that you see and the words that you hear are from Essex's mouth. And the first words that you hear from him are Argyllord's words. The next movement deals with his text. I basically chose about 20 of his excerpts from his body of work that a lot of the work I was able to see for the first time through his peers because most of them are out of print and very, very rare. So as you click on the different pieces here, a poem or excerpt of something comes up and it answers the question of his thoughts on virtual reality. And I want to kind of approach writers as the first purveyors of virtual reality. Third movement features a video, a brand new video that I created that deals with more of the Mentifac element, my read of his work and certain elements that I wanted to kind of create visuals for. And then lastly, the last movement features what I was talking about in regards to like a relationship as a portrait or audio portrait. So I actually went and sat with all these folks and recorded them talking about Essex and also used some of the cassette tapes that I sourced to get audio from like Sonia Sanchez, get audio from a woman who passed that he lived with before he died and that's how you close it out. And that's pretty much it. And like I said, you can go check it out it's on my website. And thank you for your time and I just want to shout out Prince one more time for this, for giving me the inspiration. Good morning. Okay. I'm a visitor here. My name is Nathania Doné and I'm coming from Houston, Texas and I am very happy to be here. So I want to get that out the way. When I was introduced as an interdisciplinary artist, which I'm fine with that description, I think it's a it's a limited description. And over over time, I would I would say like 2012, I started considering myself, well, I came up with the term dark imagination practitioner. And that term is a term that I use to talk about non limitations, talk about blurring lines and talk about inside and outside high and low, which when you think about the art world is kind of how it's described. And I really, I guess I'm not I'm not into the high exclusivity of the art world. And so I try to blur that. And when I do that I use I'm more interested in bringing work to the public. Now it may sound hypocritical when I had I show work in our spaces and museums and whatnot, but I also try to counter that by connecting with everyday people, everyday materials, right? So this is this is where this is going to go. Okay, so this is, I usually go, I'm from a neighborhood called Third Ward. And if you're familiar with Project Row Houses, that's where it is. And Rick Lowe came to Pittsburgh before and maybe spoke to you about that. So one of the things I do is I go around and take photographs of just areas and things and objects. And I usually try to tamper with the object. So for example, this piece right here, this photograph, this image, the wood on the right was actually further to the left. And so I felt just a small gesture would kind of change or alter the space. And it's a very subtle, subtle kind of way of connecting with the community but also changing like how the community see things, right? And then I just kind of document these things. These images also are inspirations for other works that I do that you would consider quote unquote art or whatever. So these are some of my drawings. I do drawings on paper bags pretty much on a lot of different materials. But this series of works were drawings on paper bags. And it started out from having an interest in the conversation between, not between, but the conversation about the paper bag test which is basically about intra-racism or colorism within the black community. However, it does exist in other cultures as well. In India, for example, there's like hierarchies, stratas of light to dark in terms of who's most important, who's valued, who's not. And so I use that as the ground for these for these drawings and make some kind of commentary. If you see in the left corner there's that's the silhouette image of Rodney King being beaten. And so this guy's on a telephone pole and the question that was raised was who policed the police. And how do you do it with a certain limited resources and funds? And so what you have is a guy somehow got on top of a telephone pole but he used like basically a cardboard box and stole a security camera and used the security camera to police the police. Another drawing is basically that that image in the mirror is a work by Alma Thomas, the black artist, woman abstract expressionist. So I'm just kind of thinking about the absence of black women in the so-called art canon. Now these these works is an extension from the paperback drawings where I created this installation and participatory piece where I wanted the audience or the viewers to take a test and playing off the idea of paperback tests. This multiple question tests were all about things that were in black pop culture that I knew the general viewership in these museums who are not black would not be able to answer. And so that was basically turning things around when we talk about standardized testing turning things around when we talk about education and the value of formal and informal education and what I came backwards with was is that a lot of people were really stunned and it touched a lot of people and it kind of exposed their own biases about certain things. So those are the you know test things there and then this was at another exhibition where I had the kids do the same thing. So going back to this if you look here this for me is an external type of view of how I saw a black body okay. This is the internal side of it and so I wanted to expand that plastic that I used for the head was just basically an absence or invisibility or maybe mirroring what you perceive of yourself. I wanted to start looking into the inside and as a good example. So these these abstractions are basically just a view of what I consider or an expansion of what I consider of the black body. Now talking about inside and outside. So these this piece is called a hairline fracture and I gathered hair from different local barbershops and coincidentally a couple of the barbershops the owners were like painters hobby painters and I thought that was interesting and so I gathered that hair and then also when it got some synthetic synthetic hair and for me this was more of like a collaboration and what I was trying to say here in this piece is that there's been lots of conversations about black professionals in the art world or the lack of the voice and there's also been conversations about what black means in terms of abstraction because when the when we talking about art and blackness the idea is usually blackness is associated with social political work specifically and there's a framework where black artists may want to step outside of those those parameters. It's also a conversation where um there is basically only the only representation of I'm not going to say the only one but it's like this conversation about what is what is black art and what is not black art and when we have those conversations or those divides it usually leads to a figurative concept a figurative conversation or a conversation about representation and so I really wanted to kind of even though I dealt with both I wanted to kind of break that down a little bit and talk about what figure what figurative can mean in a non-figurative way and so figurative for me could also be the the hair right that is a person in a sense and there are people and those are spirits if you look at if you think about West African concepts you know there's a spiritual quality to that and I wanted to bring that back and we're talking about spirituality many people have been saying that um and minimalism and also the museum is like a spiritual space but not necessarily for black people and so I wanted to challenge that idea as well so moving out of the white cube I wanted to go into back into the neighborhood so I started inserting hair in different homes that were either dilapidated or were about to be torn down or spaces that were about to be built and so I wanted to play around with that so coming from a hip hop perspective in generation for me this is also a legal way to tag buildings so yeah so this is also a third ward and so there's a there's an idea about being very uh the questions about being subtle you know you know I I enjoy and I understand nuance and subtlety and I think these works are subtle but also from other aspects I think being bold and being in your face is also something to think about and not shy away from I think we should also like delve into all of these ideas and not just be specific and when I when I talk about that dark imaginary into something Tiana kind of talked about is like going to all multifaceted ways of looking at work and thinking about it holistically right so yeah okay so here we go so these the the next two images are are going to be from project Row houses and I'm going to be making an exit off the stage so this is the deal I was interested this is called the greatest store that never sold and I was interested in exchange but and and and and cultural a cultural capital is not called cultural value and education and literacy and what I asked I wanted to set the installation up as a store and I'm not going to all the details of all the stuff but it's it's a store but it's also an idea of the mind and the mind of the exchange of information going in filtering going back out then you know connecting with other people and so forth and so on and so I asked the viewer to bring a book on the left side you'll see how it started I asked and I asked the viewer to bring a book that inspired them as a teenager of middle school age right and on the left you see better consume but these were these sculptures I made I made out of resin and fabric and I called them I cans and so basically when the when the viewer would come and bring a book they were allowed to take an icon as an exchange and the books as a result would go to this middle school that was in the neighborhood call Ryan middle school who didn't really have a library and so the idea was to use these books and take these books and kind of rebuild or restore their library right so you know to basically my deal was basically how the question was how can you use an art gesture to inform the visitor of the space and simultaneously have some type of impact which will work in the real world right and not necessarily know where it would head but like a small impact so the books were taken to the schools and hopefully that that idea you know these kids read these books that were basically given to them by their own community would basically have some kind of impact long-term now I don't know if that happened that's what I'm hoping that happened but you know sometimes works you know it's just open-ended and you never know just like I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow you know I might become a millionaire and you guys won't even hear from you know it just might go down like that or it just might not okay so here's another view and so these so if you look in the corners you'll see like these bags these plastic bags with objects in them that I collected from around the neighborhood and for me those was just like the the remnants of that neighborhood you know when I say they I mean it was my neighbor too so and it was like basically like neurotransmitters memory you know these type of things and so these are another image of something that inspired me to do this and this piece is called the Offcenter of Invisibility and it's and it's basically a couple of things when you talk about displacement space there's a here I guess he's a psychologist but I think he also dealt in philosophy his name is Greg Madison and he came up with this term existential migration and existential migration is basically when someone leaves a place to become a foreigner and for me that's very interesting like you leave somewhere but I wanted to even play more with that idea and say when you re-imagine a place that you never been or you would like to be and so for me I was making two connections of black people romanticizing going to anywhere in Africa right as a place that they've never been because of the history and also the connection with someone in West Africa coming to America as a way of success and all the different things that the media portray America to be and finding a different reality and with those two those two separations there has been tension between these two communities right and so I was trying to connect those communities also was interested in how interested in the vernacular architecture and what art exists prior to it being considered art and something Bill Hooks has talked about about her family by being poor when you are not exposed to certain things you think you lose the act or the notion of being creative or imaginative because a society has told you you can't afford to be that you the art world is only for those who can have the leisure so I wanted to show in this in this installation that that's not true and so I used all of these things that I saw in neighborhoods which I thought was art art making creative imaginative and all those things so we all we all recognize seeing windows with you know fall on it for heat and all those things and I wanted to use gold just to kind of you know throw a little so-called art in it and to kind of give this this idea of portrayed this piece as a painting versus just a window right because of the act of the intent to change what it was in the beginning of all I'm always fascinated by how how brilliant and functional things are for people who are homeless you know you know I hate that that situation is that way but when you see what they do with the materials that they have you know I'm very inspired by that as opposed to say being inspired by someone in the art world so these are like things that inspired me or I'm interested in and so this is basically a sculpture right or what else okay so this is the last thing I guess I wanted to spend a little time waiting that that'll be it um this is at the show that Kalola curated at a 709 gallery this is one of the pieces and it's uh it's basically a job application um a photograph and gold leafing and what I did was I asked some of my friends and you can consider this like a them posing for a portrait I asked them to fill out this information with their own hand writing so that it would be authentic but I asked them to fill out it with certain information that I gave right and so the address so it's basically a commentary on the black so-called black ghetto names that have been um talked about and studied where interview well people were not able to access like interviews or get house rentals because their names were like black and ghetto so I really wanted to talk about that but not from a victimization perspective more from like imaginative and creative perspective so I would ask the participant or you know a friend or whatever to um fill it out and I would get a name like for example like someone who was a historic uh like Malcolm X or somebody who actually was an activist and I would mix their names up with the names of the person who would participate and come up with like this so-called black ghetto name right and then uh make the copy and and make the act of throwing away as if I was throwing away if I was an interviewer I was throwing the application away like it wasn't a value you know so um yeah and so to me talking about space this is more of a um psychological space in terms of accessing or resisting a certain kind of Western or European perception or thought about what's the standard make sense okay thanks I made a video because there's something about PowerPoint that hurts my soul so so I'm just gonna play it and talk and um that's me and okay so there are so many experiences and ideas that contribute to what you do in this realm of time and space right and then but for me there's one particular thing that really set off what I do and how I work and like a jump off and for me that is Zora Niel Hurston's book called Sanctified Church uh Zora Niel Hurston was a artist anthropologist through the 20s 20s through 60s and she did a study um that's in this book of um places of worship in the south rural south so um I'm gonna pop it so in the book she started doing these recordings of um you know spiritual ceremonies and she found like listening to those recordings she found that there were when people would reach this Titan level of worship they would speak in tongues and that's speaking a language that is unknown to you and she found um traces of African dialect in that so for me that idea like just that idea right there was total magic right the fact that you could be taken into this new world with a new language and a new god and still that your subconscious would retain like your ancestral place of origin is kind of the basis of all the things I obsessed over when I was in high school um which were which was science fiction right so I was a super nerd science fiction nerd and watched everything that had to do with the future with space and time and so um thinking about like time travel super superhuman ability past lives cross cultural phenomenon it's all kind of in that idea that Zornal Hurston came across so then I started um you know it really like brought the fifth dimension into place for me which is past present and future all happening at the same time um so I'm going to talk about three projects that I have been working on most currently and the first is there are black people in the future which um started from a film series that I'm going to talk about after this but uh it really was a lot of ideas I kind of was just uh talking to my partner about uh different things and you know and then I was like I mean you know we're talking about how there weren't a lot of representations of people of color in science fiction when I was growing up you know there's Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney and um you know Star Trek and Brother From Another Planet you know so it's like um so it's like well you know there are black people in the future right so it's kind of a kind of me you know joking around and then this phrase and I was like wait that's a good phrase so I just started thinking about like all in all the ways that that meant so I had a residency with the Warhol in Homewood and I'm in this space where um you know that that's you know that term blighted and but this is a place where this amazing legacy of humanity was art and culture and so I just started archiving and collecting objects and printing there are black people in the future on them and encasing them in resin and um just just does like a way to represent the past present and future and then I'm gonna pause this I worked with a sound artist who is my partner um and had him collect sounds where I found some of these objects and so this is and then created these like sound pieces with the objects so it's like little clips that's there are black people in the future and so the whole um idea of that came from working on this series of films called Children of Man um Children of Man is a sci-fi film series highly inspired by a film called Le Jetty by Chris Marker where it's all he makes a film a sci-fi film all from stills and it's in France and so this film is um there's a glitch here too but um this film is about an apocalypse that happens and there and apocalypse that happens you know unknown apocalypse and the only two groups that are left on the planet are white men and black women and so then it turns out that these two groups have been warring since the beginning of human civilization and that you know the um this group of black women these queens these like mothers of the earth uh one of them gave birth to a um light-skinned male child and then he was kind of pushed out cast out very inspired by Francis Dr. Francis Chris Welting and um so then they began this kind of war right so then after you know flash thousands of years forward we're in our present day there's an apocalypse and these are the only two groups left so he kidnaps one of the queens makes these experiments and the story is about the experiments so um just thinking about like also computer language zeros and ones are you know like the beginning and end of the universe all that and this is just some of the clips from there um while I'm working on this I decided to make some commercials uh oh actually this is um I filmed a lot of the series in Homewood this is a dancer Jasmine her and she is like the embodiment of time travel so when the experiments those are the um biracial characters that you saw earlier when they see her they know that it's time for them to work to a different um time and so this is in Homewood and everything is like you know past present future all happening simultaneously so this is just you know like you can see the cars going but um so it just like kind of brings all of this together this is a commercial where um when I was in West Africa they you know you take a tour of the slave dungeons and they talk about how there was church upstairs and the kids would be upstairs playing while the slaves were in the dungeons below and so I just thought about um just this idea I started thinking about these ideas of privilege and uh I juxtaposed the audio of the slave dungeon tour with this um kind of uh old commercial kids playing just like you know thinking about that um and you can hear it the audio is in the actual clip but um so let me just so like just thinking about those those this commercial kind of led me to this project also an experience this body this work is called extinction that you're about to see right now so I was in Whole Foods I actually just made that commercial I went to Whole Foods and I was there and within like 10 minutes I ran into like three different people and they all kind of told me about different things that were going extinct that aren't really going to think bees redheads and bananas right so I'm in Whole Foods like okay you know this is kind of random that three different people would tell me three different things that are going extinct and then I go to uh Homewood where I'm teaching and one of my students brothers had been killed so then I was just thinking about like this privilege of extinction right so I made this film of redhead eating banana and so and bees buzzing and then I started to put these names of people who have been killed who you know there is like this idea there's kind of and then I added this sorry this is really loud I added um these mantras I'm really into kind of ritual and um counter acting what is happening I think you know we all have this power to create our existence so I had um you know male female saying these mantras I am I have eyes I can see I am not afraid saying these things over and over and spinning in this 360 degrees and so in the bottom you can't really see it but the times on the top right of all the boxes are the times that these young men have been killed and then the bottom the bottom just says like it's very kind of anthropological study of like you know um African American woman visible European descent uh extinction rate and the percentage of extinction rate and then black male and his extinction rate is in the bottom so that is my three bodies for work and I just have to plug two two things that I'm doing I have a film series called afro not it's experimental film series and we um are actually collecting phones to create a dvd magazine in the start of fourth season And then I always have to talk about the Homewood Artist Residency, which Clolo and I do, which we're working to do art programming, bring artists, and create projects in Homewood. Thank you. Can you guys hear me? Okay. So I just like to dive right in for the sake of time and also because I think there's a lot to touch on. And before we get into the nitty-gritty, I'm a person who believes that to the extent that it's possible, you should try and name the thing. And this panel is entitled Black Art-Making in the 21st Century, but you all are working with and coming from different points or different positions within the conversation of blackness. So I like to start there. If you can, how do you understand that phrase? How have you defined blackness or how do you define, try to do such both from a personal level and maybe an artistic level? It's a large question, but I think it's a good question. Yeah, it's a good question. Because I mean, some of the things that I think about now is I'm at the place where I'm interested. And I mean, I think talking about the iconic class was very timely for me because I'm looking for people who even challenge ideas around blackness right now to kind of challenge that monolith within itself. And then challenging form as a Black contemporary artist, I think a lot of my work, I take a very confrontational stance with whatever form or medium that I'm working with to try to create a new invocation of it or fracture it in a way that bends towards what I'm trying to do. Because a lot of, especially being a filmmaker, working in a system that is very colonial, that isn't exactly made for the black body or black skin. It's how to kind of create hackings or these tamperings with the form itself to create something new that's very inherent to the blackness that I'm trying to portray. Well, for me, I guess the idea of black art making, I still, I think it's kind of conflicting to me because there is a conversation between the black art or just art for art's sake or whatever. And I think that as long as there's going to be, I guess we react to society and I think as long as society have these particular issues with blackness, then I guess we'll continue to be making so-called black art or whatever. Yeah, to me, it's this conflict and I think my work is just from the experience. And I think different people have different experiences, but for me, my experience is a black experience and it's just basically responding to my environment. I am interested in, like Tiana was saying, I am interested in challenging that idea though and not, I guess, conforming to the expectations of what that statement means and trying to, I guess, incorporate the different views or different ideas of what black could be or not be. So I guess my question for myself is like what are those different things and how does that look and what does that sound like? And yeah, that's my perspective. Well, it's funny too because when you Google black arts, Harry Potter comes up. So I think about that a lot, like this, you know, like what it does. Probably not if you Google black art, but if you had S, Harry Potter comes up. So I always think about that as, you know, it always makes me laugh, but I think, you know, there's like this, you know, black art making is a kind of framework of a structure that we live in, right, in this American structure to say black art. I mean, we make art about what we're in, like, you know, like I put my people in what I do because they're the people around me. So, you know, in the stories and the things, they all directly relate to my experience. So, you know, I think about that a lot. And, you know, also thinking about how you see things kind of challenging that idea, like with the video extinction, you see redhead eating bananas for a really long time before anything else happens. So you have to, like, sit there, and you're like, what does this have to do with anything? Like, why would she make this? You know, like, there's a, before, you know, you start seeing names like Shawn Bell, Trayvon Martin, all that, and then, you know, and then you see, you know, then you have to watch that for a long period of time before these mantras start happening. So there's this kind of, like, push of thinking about why we create what we create. I think that's really important. And so, like, little by little, if we just kind of make what's important to us, then those phrases or boxes, you know, disappear for us, then that's all that matters. I guess I have it. You have to look at things in the historical concept, I suppose. At one time, black art, if I'm going back to the 60s, meant a lot different what it means now. And there was a big argument among black artists at that time. And so I just came up with the idea, of course, black art is made by anyone of color. And I think that regardless of what your aim or purpose is, your influences, like mine are Bankuzi, Noguchi, and African travel art. Those are my main. And then you'll find that Bankuzi and people like that were very influenced by African travel art. So an African travel art set the pattern for all Western contemporary art. So you can't really escape it. And if you love anything, it shows up in your work, whether it's women, food, or whatnot. And so I don't labor on those things. My energy is needed for trying to do some decent work. Thank you. What's interesting about all of your presentations and bodies of work is that in some respects, in specific contexts, you both all use the word revisit or return to, thinking particularly about history. So I'd like to pose a two-part question. One, why does the return to that which has already occurred matter to you in your making practice? And then I think part two is what is your relationship to the dream as a production site? I think I'm interested in the return for the different perspective. I'm primarily thinking about framing some things within my practice, exploring my own biography. I think this goes into the second question you posed as well. The dreams, I think of dreams as something that's falling apart. So I think I'm interested in the dream in terms of its ephemerality. And then the nostalgia of it, I think the forcing... I'm thinking about right now in the space that we have in terms of technology, and the fact that you can scan photos, digitize videos, and look at them in these certain kinds of ways. They become an artifact that you can examine in a different way and also take a different stance on it. So I'm interested in that and that becomes part of where I find my agency within my own narrative. Being someone who's like... My experience in relationship to being a southerner, growing up in South Carolina, and having a very reactive place of working from, and trying to find a generative art practice as a black art is very important to me. To kind of get in the space to be able to look at things within a subjective place, but try to find objectivity within that. So I think I'm interested in the tension of that and the fragility of it. For me, the dreams and history are the same thing almost, because I look at the dream as basically a collection of the subconscious, which has already happened. I like to look at it as a nonlinear kind of way. Me going back is a way for me to go forward, because looking back is always blind spots that people probably won't touch or don't touch for whatever reasons, or my own interpretation is on my own interpretation of that, and that's something specific. It may be similar, but it's not identical. So I think for me to look back on things is really trying to figure out what's going on now. Again, I don't necessarily like to predict futures and everything. I'm more interested in letting these things happen, but I like to think about putting my hand in it, having some kind of connection or inserting myself in it in some way. So I feel like with my work, I think by just shifting just a little has impacted everybody in this room, just because why did he shift? And then those internal dialogues start to happen individually, and as time goes on, that has some impact and that impacts someone else. In terms of dreams, I'm really, really interested in the moment the dream ends and the reality wakes up. Well, I didn't say it. When the dream ends and you wake up, in that space where the things you wake up when you wake up, you forget the dream, if you're able to capture whatever that is in terms of what it meant, what it looked like, how it made you feel, those are the invisible moments that some people don't think about, and we overlook. And so that's kind of what I like to do. And sometimes I'm not successful because things can really tick me off and I'm not worried about a silent moment. I'm worried about a moment with a megaphone. And so that's my take on it. I keep thinking I need to pass. So I guess with that, the return is not, for me, I think about if the past, present, and future is happening simultaneously, it's not a return, but it's just a continuation. And then, which also is this dream idea where if a dream is kind of this, I think about collective consciousness. It's like these visions of collective consciousness. And I just watched this film called Embrace the Surfeit and there's a line in it that says, and it's in Columbia and Amazon, and there's a white man that goes into this tribe and he's dying in some way and I don't want to ruin the film for you, but there's one line where one of the elders says, if white men don't learn how to dream, it'll be the end of us. So I think about that where it's like this kind of dream is the collective consciousness and where it's the separation of the individual. So we have this very kind of Western individualized idea where we have this kind of Jesus figure or these figures who do everything, just one person kind of handles everything. And really, reality and past, present, and future is a collective, but there's a collective consciousness. So that's kind of where I try to come from or what I think of when you ask that and what I think of when I think of dreaming. Well, of course, I spend a lot of time looking at everything historically but when you reach advanced age, you think a lot about when you were a teenager or able to jump six feet and all that type of thing. But the main thing I do art-wise is look at what everyone has done in the past as much as I can and I think even if I go to a museum, I was in Buffalo recently and I think I spent more time in the old wing than I did in the new wing simply because I'm a manufacturer. I mean, that is doing things by hand and the high-tech stuff didn't interest me as much. But when it comes to dreaming, you know, I don't connect much of that with my real life. But when I try to see, looking at, it's what the young people are doing, the people are saying now, this is, I have a wide stretch of children. My oldest son will be 69 and my youngest one is 40. So I wasn't married for a space of time. But anyhow, so you get my oldest grandson is in his 50s and my youngest one is four years old. So you get a big, a long perspective, a long view, which is sort of like a dream to me what they think about, what they talk about, you talk to one's 50, you talk to one who just got out of college, you talk to one's 70, you talk to one's four. And you see the minds of these people and I would advise as many people as you can, you know, to be able to communicate with people who are like me, 90, people who are 60, because what I knew and felt about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and people like that, Aranga, Baraka and these people that I ran into, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlin and all these people I talked to, the younger people I don't know as much. But I think this is the spectrum. This gives you, if you want to say a circular view and to me, and people think things are going out in the future, but they're more or less over it, you know. And you see those same young people with ideas that you had when you was at that age. Thank you. Even those ideas can be like, you have an idea in one part of the country. I needed a mic. So what I was responding to Mr. Mosley's comment was when he was talking about in terms of generational, I was thinking about in terms of geographical, like you can have, one person can have an idea, let's say in Houston. And you're like, oh, I got the greatest idea ever happened. And then you go to New York and someone is working on the same, maybe not the exact same thing, but it's similar. And I'm just kind of responding to what he was saying. Those things, that point I'm making is further pushes his point of the collapse of the differences. I don't even know if I was just referring. The thermotropes, which is like that spinning, how we get films was invented in two different places in the same time, same year. Sorry. So I was just vibing off when Nathaniel said of like, you know, you think about inventions or even like the moving image was invented, the thermotropes, that spinning thing was invented in two different places in the same time. And who knows? That was probably invented in ancient civilization, 3,000. You know what I mean? Exactly, there's the whole gods and chariots vibe. But it's definitely thinking about geographical, generational. And what Mr. Mosley said about talking to his children and grandchildren from the beginning to the end, that's like total. If you ever watch this video on YouTube about the dimensions, it's totally like seeing yourself as an older man, as a young adult and as a baby, it's like all one dimension, it's the fifth dimension. So it's awesome to hear him say that. I'd actually like to spend a little bit more time there, because I think it's a point that's extremely poignant. Like what we learn from using time as a type of material that you spoke about kind of the cipher and the cyclical nature of it. But I'd be interested in hearing more from you guys specifically. Because time and memory, they're such fragile, intimate spaces, what are you learning as you kind of grapple with them? In a very, to me, concrete way, though it differs across your practices. But yeah, what's surprising you? What are you discovering? I mean, Nathaniel, you have dark imaginarians. Tiana, you have black men's effect. There's a lot that's going on there. And you're responding to time in, I think, dynamic manners. But are there things that take you back once you kind of put a product out into the world, you put an art form into the world, and you're like, well, I need to readjust. I need to pivot. Could you talk a bit about that? Definitely. I think the whole coming into this trying to explore, push, engage with the concept of black men to fact came from the mundane aspect of research that puts you in rooms. And I like read all the time, like books, articles, all that. And it pulls you further and further away from people and people who are alive. So I think one of the things that I wanted to do was kind of like mirrors my spiritual practice, which is very much an orally sustained practice. So there was something that I need to do that put me in a place of conversation and talking and submission with individuals who don't come from the areas of what I do and who aren't exactly trained in that, but hold key information. So my engagement is extraordinarily intergenerational now in the ways that I approach the foundation of how I move forward on work. One of the things that I do, and books and all that stuff is still very much a core of my prep process and also even afterwards, there's things that'll come up. But I try to not do anything that someone can't talk to me about, which puts me in a certain kind of place of tension, even if it's like a young recollection of that, just to keep me bound to how people process the work that I'm trying to do and to keep it realistic so that I don't go into this way that's what... Like at the core of it, it's about thinking about how I approach that and working that way is something that changes my control of time. To sit and engage with someone and let them talk to you, it changes the way that you can control your time as opposed to picking up a book and going to the library and saying that this is my hourly day thing. But it also puts me... I wanted something also that could keep me very much mindful of colonialist structures as it relates to my research and thinking further like maybe helpful... I think something to create a structure that would be helpful to me and my goal of defying white legibility when it comes to some of my work, which I can say that it's a severe confrontational stance that I take, meaning that I want there to be an inherent black gaze ownership of whatever I'm doing. And to do that, it's like I have to start from the voice of lived experience of black people that isn't documented, the archive is not made for black folks. In regards to the way it's accessed and the things that you have to go through that is like just... There's social economic things that are just not working. So yeah, and that came up for me, I think a good example of that manifesting, which is why I shared the Essex project of all the projects that I could have shared, was me seeing it work, seeing it at work, seeing me do something that I was very afraid of because I had no... It was in a path and it was... The other hand was that there was an immense emotional investment that I wasn't exactly prepared for, but was necessary because I think you have to have things that... To truly experience true time is to be changed and experience the epiphanies of how other people can shape you so it can get away from that sterilization. So those are just some of the things that I think I have dealt with. So I will say that project was for me really thinking about this concept that I was interested in actually working. Yeah. I think I'm going to sound hypocritical at this point, but I'm not sure. I'm making slide through without it being noticed. I don't know. So I don't know if time is something I think exists outside of us being authoritative on it, trying to claim it. However, in my work that I did show, except for the drawings, those things would be, I guess, considered time-based. And for me, I guess I'm interested in how things move along. Things that I do, things that I do, I'm not so much concerned with if it's successful or not or if it even makes sense or not. It's even like sometimes I try to go to the point of absurdity and because I think what time does when we think of time as in this context, I think time is limiting. It's a limitation and a restriction. So I try not to consider time in this context. The only time I'm worried about is like sleep if I can get it or I need to be somewhere. But outside of that, I don't think about time in that way. I think about creating something and that's it. Now, on the other hand, I am thinking about how, and this is where hypocrisy may come in, how long it takes for people to get it. You know what I mean? And I had to realize, you know, because time I think also is about self-awareness if we're talking about it in this context. I have to consider that everyone's not on my time and all things is relative, right? And so I guess what makes me feel that to create work that has something, I don't want to be tropish, but has something to say or something that I want to say or voice. I hope that people, it impacts them in some form. And it doesn't have to be in the form that the outcome or whatever I'm interested in or how I want them to do that. And I'm trying personally to release myself from even having expectations about it. There's something else I want to say, but I knew I was going to leave it. So if I can think about it, can we come back? Yeah, we can. Okay, because I forgot it. Sorry. Go on ahead. And everybody has prints on their mind. People keep saying time. I'm thinking about Morse Day and the Time, which is like the best name of a band ever. And that's pretty much it for that. But yeah, I don't know if I think about time, like it holds you down or you have nothing but time, or you know, there's all these, I mean, time is hypocritical. The way we define it, think about it, it definitely goes back and forth. I'm not so sure. And I think that's what I love about it, is that it can be anything and everything. We have this kind of open, because we talk about it in such different ways, and it's something that kind of, I think, is meant in a way to control us, but we kind of take control of it. So I don't know. This is just things I'm thinking about. I'm not exactly sure even what the original question was, but fine, just rip it on time. So that's not your fault. You took up too much time. But I think, yeah, if I, you know, if you're just thinking about time as something that is expansive and not controlling, that's what I like to think about it in that realm. Like if we think about all of the lives, the kind of collective consciousness, this thing of, you know, retaining information from 30,000 years ago, or in 30,000, you know, like we can just like, or what even is that number, and how people are going to see what we're doing at some point in the future, or in the past, or if this is just repeating itself over and over again. Those are all ways that I like to think about time. And if you think about all of that yourself to a place where it doesn't even matter, right? That's all. Time, for me, is mainly about getting to work and how long it takes to do something and, of course, when I go to bed at night, I'm always thinking about what I'm going to do in the next day in the studio. So basically, that's all. But mainly time means to me unless I have a social commitment. Time is a real thing today. So I'm going to text it to you. I'd like to close with kind of getting a response to this and then we'll open the floor. In an interview with Doreen St. Felix for a linear letter, Kimberly Drew puts forth the idea that blackness itself is a technology and it would be irresponsible to talk about making in the 21st century without talking about technology. And as much as we consider the internet to be an outside force, Drew puts forth the notion that blackness itself is a matter, is a material, is something that is consistently evolving and shaping the world and habits. And I think this is especially poignant as we celebrate the life of Prince, who himself is a matter, right? And I think someone who ardently advocated creatively for the understanding of blackness as such. So I'd just like to close with getting your response to maybe that concept, blackness as a technology, how that sits with you, and then we can open the floor for a few questions. I think before answering the question, I always want to acknowledge the fact that black body has been used as a technology, and how to look at the space in between this place of then looking at blackness as a technology, which is extraordinarily important in the historical, you know, advancements of black folks in this country. And I think it employs a certain kind of agency which is like super, super, super necessary to say then to look in this subjective, the space between subjectivity and objectivity to say blackness as a technology. Whether a co-opted technology, how it functions within commercialism, capitalism, but then also like us as artists, producers of different forms of interpretations or extensions of blackness. So I think of my art making in itself as a technology, which is why I think I try to take such a rigorous approach to the foundation of it, because if it is to be looked at in any way, I would like for it to be looked at as a mode of production. And part of my references, which I have in my Be Alarm project, I do a lot of work that's in serial form, like I'm interested in seriality. And what I look at is early productions of like black technologies, like Negro spirituals that double as maps, the ways that we navigate the landscapes and the ways that they are. So I think it's like super important. I think what Kim was talking about was so timely to say that even as someone who's a purveyor of blackness in that form and leading like a leader in that form is just like so dope. So yeah, I'm definitely glad to think of myself as a part of that community that is for once reclaiming and taking hold of my blackness as a technology. So I think there's an interesting that you say that because as a last question, I think that's the last question. I think there's interesting why, why, why. Because for me, when Brother Mosley was talking about time and circular and all those things, that technology has a couple of meanings. I think for me, technology is basically this modernism, something, a continuum of something or extension of something that's happened. Now if you're talking about like computer technology or something, so one of the things that I have, well, no, let me start, let me start. Okay, we talked about black technology. I was also thinking about the humanness in black because that conversation comes up about humanity, right? In black humanity and technology. The idea of technology being a thing that can be used for good or in positive ways. And then on the other hand, it could be used in bad ways or it's been used in bad ways because technology has, like Tiana was mentioning earlier, technology has removed a lot of people from a lot of social interaction, right? And so what it advanced us in different things and making things more easier to do or whatever. And those two polar positions to me and that stuff in between those polar positions to me is equivalent of humanity. So that means it's humanity then. There's an idea of blackness being that. And I'm also thinking that how blackness itself, as a political word, as a color, as a sociological term, moves and lives according to how we make it move and live. Okay, so that's that. And my own interaction with technology is that, you know, like you guys, art's not black. I have the website for artists to write or writing, experimental writing. And I don't need to plug it, but the thing is that it is a website for art. But my part in it is that it's my idea of having multiple voices to have a platform. And for me, that's blackness. There's always been ways for black people to figure out and strategize whether it's been music, whether it's been language, whether it's been fashion, whether it's been ways to code and even reading when those things wouldn't have that access to read. We found ways to do it. We found ways to turn dance into language and to self-defense mechanisms and to ways to move about and navigate through society. And we're still doing it now. So to me, that is a black technology. I just think about technology, like the definition is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry. I just looked that up. But just thinking about what Mr. Rosely said about how he was inspired by artists that were inspired by African art. So being the origin of humanity, the beginning is a natural trendsetter. Like African Americans are trendsetters. That's technology. So I think about things in terms of that. And then also the cyclical way of things. And then also thinking about, as this application of scientific knowledge, if we think about, you know, it's always going back. If you think about like Dogen Tribe, this is how the way people have been thinking about the stars for thousands of years, the way people have been thinking about things, just came into a new box. It's like a new set of time and space that we, new headline subjects, new ways, language to talk about things that have already existed. And I just think that that happens like repeatedly over and over as different groups of people kind of dominate language and text. And you know, because if you go, you know, I spent time in Timbuktu and Mali, and they're like the oldest libraries there. And so just like being in this place where you can see that there's evidence, all of this exists, all of the things that we think is like advanced technology happening now already existed. So in that way, I think blackness is technology. I mean, that's pretty, yeah. Done. I'm gonna move my long legs a little closer to the table. But I'm gonna go back before the time people used to kid you to say, the dog ate my homework. Way back, I would go around to schools like Fifth Avenue High School, which was 99 and 7th, 8th Afro-American. And I would ask always, like I say on my kids, do you have physics or you have a chemistry? Well, back in those days, there was a protest among kids, very popular to protest anything that was white. So that's all white stuff. I says, what are you talking about? Oh, math is white stuff. No, I says technology doesn't have any color. I says, you take this knowledge and you can make it anything you want. You can make it black farming. You can do like George Washington Carver. You can become a black inventor. But technology has no color. We are the ones that supply whatever the product turns out to be. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. So Keelolo is in the audience with a mic and we'll take a few questions. I would ask out of respect for time that you try to keep them two questions and as succinctly as possible. Thank you. All right, we're going to start here with Ru. Hi, thank you guys. I have a question about, when we talk about blackness in the U.S., we're talking about the U.S. But the reality is that actually most people of African descent in the world don't live in the U.S. And so I'm just curious about your thoughts on how we account for that reality, which doesn't take away from our reality here, but I think it's disingenuous and irresponsible in some ways to act as if we are the only ones. Yeah. I just want to make a point. When I talk about blackness, I talk about diasporic blackness, because as I mentioned, my spiritual practice puts me always every day in the mindset of that. And I practice the African-based religion and I've traveled to a lot of the countries that influence my spiritual practice. So, and a lot of my work is about fleshing out and dealing with the... from points of syncretism to even modes and iconism that's related to survival and retention of like those narratives that connect all those things. So it's something that I think about all the time and I do think that a lot of folks who talk about blackness in America think about that. They speak from this very insider thing. But it's part of my thing now and really what really pushed me towards this like thinking about a form of black mental fact is really to get back to oral tradition and placing that in the same regard as like a defiance. We're not a defiance but the critique of structures of information as they relate within America and how we get that information but realizing that I had a lack of like the oral narrative and listening and had developed a kind of lacking and skill of having to listen and learning how to retain information in that way. And it goes back to like, you know, I think it's my spiritual practice in that conversation that happens within that and also, you know, thinking about how to forge those kinds of relationships and connections and speak to the biggest audience, multiple audiences at once. So I am very much into agency with my audience so I do a lot of like intellectual rigor behind like what I call black intellectual rigor put it within my work that is really rooted on my familiar experiences and, you know, with the knowledge that I carry and that's always, you know, advancing daily, I think. But then there's something where there's a relinquishing of that and I didn't challenge myself to become informed by what my audience takes from that. And I do have an audience at this point that is reflective of my personal interest in the diaspora. And it always, you know, puts me at a place to understand limitations on language, limitations on accessibility, limitations on, you know, space and even time, you know, like thinking about all these things. So I'm, you know, constantly very much critiquing myself to try to figure out how to make the blackness that I carry more malleable, if that makes any sense to my own fellow, like, you know, diasporans. For the sake of time, I would like to say I agree with Tiana. But no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no shade, no shade thrown, no shade thrown. But I guess it is just to add, you know, just to add real quick. Yeah, I'm guilty and growing and innocent as well, so I've made it, you know, the self-criticism is right on point, because I did get checked by a curator friend of mine, because I was thinking, oh, you're thinking too, within, and it's a very American thing to do. You're not, well, United States thing to do. And so that piece that was in Roe House was like one of my ways to extend myself out, because what I didn't mention for the sake of time was that I interviewed black American and woman, and Nigerian woman, and you know, I connected both of those conversations together to speak on that, which you're saying, and also tell, you know, tell myself I need to, you know, expand my thoughts, even though I have those conversations, but sometimes we fall back into the familiar, you know, and so you have to keep, you know, pushing and pulling. Some, some, Tiana, but yeah, okay. Should we take another question? Absolutely, any other? Don has a question, okay. Well, let me just, yeah, microphone. So I'm thinking about art collection in our home, because we enrich our lives, and where we spend a lot of our time at home, and we derive a lot of influence and inspiration from having artwork in our house, and I'm wondering how, if it does at all, our collectors influences any of the work that you do. Our collectors? No. I don't, I can't do that. I also have a lot of art in my house, and I feel the exact same way you do, like it enriches who I am in my family, and I was, you know, kind of raised in that way, where you have art around, but as far as art collectors, that it's kind of an afterthought. It's kind of like, you know, for, I feel like for artists, it's more of like, the art collector comes in for us, and how we sustain our ability to make art in a way, like, because I'm just through money, you know, and just to be completely honest, you know, where, what I think about in that way, but, you know, I don't know if I think about, I think art making is, you know, pretty selfish in its origin, because we, you know, it's such a personal place, it's like our experience into, like, into the world, and it starts there, it starts from our experiences, and who we are, and what we do, and then kind of starts adding these layers out, out, out, and out. That's just my personal, unless it's commissions, it's kind of a different story. Well, I think you're a different type of art collector, because first thing is people who make art for collection, they're more or less business people. By that, they may have 10 or 12 or 100 people working for them, and everything they make, they have it out for the market, but people like me that work in the cellar by themselves, they're making stuff just mainly for themselves, and if someone comes along that likes it, that's fine, that the other people on the panel that are more socially oriented, their art is, then they're making, they're educating in the public, and they're trying to change things socially and monetarily, trying to make an impact on society, but people who make things, mainly the cell, they're like Jeff Coons and people like that. I mean, there's another thing that I wouldn't say on that, is like, because that called it, it's like an adverse reaction, I'm like, no. But then there's the other aspect of what the challenge, I think, this is like, if you collect art, you can do whatever you want to with your art collection. There are moments where I've been privy to art collections that have shifted me in a way that reminds me of how vast a black art collection, or to see art that is a reflection of a portrait of the person, or a reflection of someone's taste, or a particular thing that I wouldn't exactly see in a museum, because some art collectors, in some ways, they curate their art, so they have ways that can be situated. I will say there was one art collection that I did get to see, I won't name the artist because it's too ill, but this particular artist, a set of artists, had a collection of the earlier works of a lot of artists, black artists that I knew, and that work looked nothing like what their work was now, and it was very, very important for me to see that as someone who is always trying to kind of reinvent, not even purposely, just based off of my emotions, and when I feel the feet okay, with like advancing forward, but then there's the other element in thinking about art collecting that took place when I saw the Basquiat show at the Gagazian, and that was my first time seeing a lot of his works outside of books, and the biggest thing with that presentation was that it was a great feat on the curator to get all these collectors to loan those works in one place at one time, because collectors make their money and appreciate work based off of keeping it hidden, and so for me, that was a really, really big moment for me on various levels, and I thought it would be a good moment for our collectors who have these works that they're just holding for 20-plus years to think about how that work being able to be seen or being able to be accessed could potentially influence folks, because I thought I was pretty well versed in Basquiat, but then I saw works that were myths, I didn't even know it was real, and I got to see his footprint, it was just really shaped, it challenged a lot of this stuff, and so I just wanted to set that there and pushing myself to think a little bit harder about that question. I think there is a potential for art collectors to allow access that could potentially influence artists based on their generosity, and examining what is their investment. Is it business, monetary value, legacy value versus a true investment in art and culture? And we'll take just one more question. If anyone else has something burning on their chest. So you had a question about collectors. I wonder what messages, if any, you would give to cultural institutions and to funders of art about how they can address some of the issues that you've talked about today. Folks with money. I think that you, I think you have to do two fold. If you think about locally, there's two things that need to occur, the sustainability of the artist that exists there, but also an encouragement for artists who are not from there to come in and dialogue with those artists to create, I think, a good balance of what's going on, but also critique from the outside so that you don't get caught up in this like, you know, it's like, if you're too isolated, and I'm saying this as someone who works in North Philadelphia, right? So it's something I have to challenge myself to. I go to New York, like, well, right now for a fellowship three times a week, but I always went to New York to see things so that I didn't get it twisted and just kind of miss out or minimize my work in the relationship to everything else. So I think about, like, funders and organizations and their flexibility. There's a lot of organizations that have this, like, you know, they have mission statements and they just do the same thing every year. I'm interested in, like, creative collaboration where you maybe do partner with folks to think about what is of the time and bend a little bit to the time and think about that as a place of culture production of a little bit more flexibility and, you know, to encourage, like, new ideas and new thoughts. Like, a new organization that's been existent since the 80s should be still funding on those same principles. Things have changed. And the ways that people produce their work has changed. Their needs have changed. To think about, like, Philadelphia in conversation with Pittsburgh, the sustainability of the black artists has changed. If you want to retain your artists, you have to make those changes to, you know, keep and create a community to, therefore, create a reflection, a different kind of portrait of your city. And on that note, I'd like to thank you all for coming. We're going to break for lunch and we will see you at the next panel. Which is at one o'clock. Thank you everybody and we'll reconvene at one o'clock.