 Good afternoon. My name is Johnetta Betch Cole. I have the extraordinary honor and joy of serving as the director of the National Museum of African Art here at the Smithsonian. So I want to begin by greeting you all as my fellow Africans. There have been points of disagreement. Healthy intellectual debate. Beginning with this morning's panel, but on this I trust we can agree. If we can just go back far enough, we're all Africans. And I kind of figure the sooner white folk claim that the better the world is gonna be. So as you know today, this symposium has been about some pretty fundamental questions. Who are you? Who am I? Who is everybody? And I use those questions because I'm really inspired by an African expression that says I am because you are. And you are because I am. So today's symposium is about identity. It is about memory. It is about connectedness among us, and it is about too many divisions separating us. It's also been about and will continue through the rest of the day. It's about what we can learn from human biology, from genetics, from the health sciences, from history, from anthropology. What we can learn about ourselves as a single bunch of folk? But especially today, we've been interested in what these fields can teach us about African-Americans and about people of the African diaspora. I think the symposium is also about how we humans misunderstand and misuse and purposefully wield so-called race in acts of bigotry, racism and oppression. So what's all of this got to do with the visual, with music, with the spoken word, with dance, with theater? Well, not to worry, we have a panel to wrestle with that question. What I've asked of these extraordinary folk, three amazing and grace-filled women and one righteous man, what I've asked is that each would in fact begin to wrestle with these questions by introducing herself or himself through their own work. And so we will first have Dr. Cheryl Finley, Associate Professor and Director of Visual Studies in the Department of History and Art at Cornell University. Cheryl's research interests are extremely wide and deep. She is interested in African-American and African diasporic art history and visual culture. She's interested in cultural memory. She's interested in African architecture. She's interested in so many questions. But I'll tell you what I'm interested in and I just asked her. I'm interested in knowing when her work on the iconic slave ship will be published. And she said it's a coming. Following Cheryl Finley, we have asked Carla Williams to wrestle with some questions by sharing a bit from her work. Assistant Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. Cheryl is a writer and editor or photographer. For many of us, we just cannot stop associating her. And we never will with that path breaking work that she did with Deborah Willis, the black female body of photographic history. And then we will hear from Dr. Mindy Lewis. Dr. Mindy Lewis Obadikay. Excuse me, Obadikay. Now I'm not going to resist. I'm going to say it. She's a Spellman graduate. But Mindy went on from Spellman. She is now Associate Professor in Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt University. Someone said Mindy makes literature, art and music. And then Keith Obadikay. The first African-American to earn an MFA in sound design from Yale. He currently teaches in the College of Arts and Communications at William Paterson University. Keith and Mindy together make conceptual Internet art and sound art. Works. So what's art? Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. What's it all got to do with the major topics of this symposia? Sister Dr. Cheryl, would you begin?