 Hello, everyone. My name is Jess Wilcox. I'm the Programs Coordinator here at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Earth. I want to thank everyone for coming today to this soon-to-be-fabulous panel titled The Future is History, Feminism, Languages, and Contemporary Art, which I think is quite aptly titled, since this is the sixth annual panel discussion collaboratively organized by AIR Gallery and the Institute of Women and Art and Brokers. So we're building our own little legacy here, which is very exciting. I want to thank Daria Duroche and Leah Devon for doing such an excellent job putting this panel together. I'm not one for making long introductions, so I will have you note that all the bios of our panelists are here on this handout, which you can find. There were some up here, but perhaps in the back as well. But as I said, I'm not one for long introductions, and I know we have a lot to talk about, so I am just going to hand it over. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to our discussion, and thank you for coming out tonight. My name is Daria Duroche. I'm an artist and a co-founding member of AIR Gallery. I am also a current member of that gallery, and I also teach fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. When Leah and I began to talk about this panel, we thought that the best place to start would be from a beginner's eye to look at legacy freshly, since not the models really seem to be working for us. So we looked at questions like, well, what is legacy, and why should we care? OK, so this is my kind of legacy. And I'm in trouble in the best terms, and I think we can do it because we always have, right? OK. Now, the format tonight is that we only have about seven minutes a piece to talk. And then we'll have a discussion between us and then with all of you, so I will just go right along with the next slide. This slide takes us back to the early 70s when women got together and started their own organizations. At that time, just to say it briefly, the main goal was to get equal representation in an art world that didn't want us. So here we are, 42 years later. We're looking at a poster by the Grilla Girls. And we can decide, have we gotten anywhere? Well, a little bit. We are in some galleries and some museums. The art world has been blown open by the inclusion of women. But I'm afraid that I don't have much faith in this model. And the reason is that I think gender equality will destroy the art world. Matter of fact, I think the art world and the larger world is so much a two-way system that is in either or a world that will not work for the future for anybody. And when you read a book like The Third Industrial Revolution by Econos Gerald and Jeremy Rifkin, you will see that he's pointing to the new model being this model, a collaborative, cooperative model, a nonprofit model, networks getting together, and people having fun and being creative. That's the new model that the economists are talking about. But we have some other issues to address. This is a photograph of 11 of the AR members in 1978. And as I look through my file, the three of them are no longer with us. Anna Mendieta, Nancy Sparrow, Rachel Bosco-Hain. We've lost these artists. And at the gallery, what we will try to do is to start a legacy project and take them back into the gallery after they've gone in some way, even if it's just on our website. And the big question for my generation of artists is, hmm, it's going to be dumpster or archive. We don't know yet. Well, why should we care about a legacy? I think because there are still questions that we have not even looked at. You know, my generation of artists, many who are sitting in this audience, we live through that transition from analog to digital. We're the only ones who know what really happened. And it's buried in our work. If you looked at our work and if you analyze our work, you would see what happened. A few of the things that happened is that the minimalist grid turned into a pixel grid. Another thing that happened is that art has gotten ephemeral. The whole culture has become ephemeral. Time has been flattened. We've seen the changes, and we can talk about them if there is a legacy. This is a little proposal that I did in the 80s for a show called The Homeless at Home when artists were being kicked out of their lofts. And I think the audience here will know that real estate is at the heart of many of our issues. And this was a project proposing artist lofts between commercial buildings. Well, why not? We have a studio that would gem-like beautiful things, so that's what we do. Put them between buildings. Another question that's been bothering me and I've been talking to my friends about is what do artists want? What do women artists want? That's a really tough one to answer because if in your mind you say, I want the old world of galleries, museums, the blue-chip system, I don't know if that's gonna be available if there's too many of us, even for good artists. So what do artists want? What do women artists want? Needs a lot of conversations to come between all of you, actually, all of us. Ah, my favorite question for myself, actually. I've been bothered by where does art belong? I'm looking at the demise of the middle class, which I never thought would happen my entire life. These are the people we distance in the 60s and 70s. And now I feel fondly because they're going away. So is the notion of property. We're losing things that we thought would be here forever. We're losing our walls. And what's coming in this place? It's something that you have right now. I bet every single one of you has this in your pocket. It's your cell phone. If you notice things are landing on our body, it's cell phones, it's nanotechnology, it's, in my readings, there is a microbiological world that is being built as we sleep that wants your body. Well, this is a good place for women. Women know a lot about the body. So where does art belong? This is one of my answers to myself. My last exhibition was soft, cuddly, semi-sexual toys for grown-ups. They were portable sculptures that you could take anywhere in fondle, play with, and have as a companion to get you through your hard day. They're little. And I just somehow want to compete with that cell phone. You know, like, how did it get so close to us? Why can't art get that close? This is not fair. Okay, last slide. I noticed when I was doing some research that something had really blew me away. Text, which is our narrative culture right now, textile, which is all our weaving, sewing, constructing right now, and technology, which is living right on your body right now and getting it to be into your body, they all come from the same root. What does that mean? I have no idea. But it means something. How could they all be together when we never noticed? So I think women have a lot to offer to that discussion. And with that last note, I pass this over to my colleague, Leah Dillon. So as a historian and an artist who works with historical subjects, I want to spend just a few minutes thinking about what possibilities might exist in revisiting history artistically and what kind of connections we might meet between generations of feminists, particularly outside the spheres of academia or arts institutions in places where we think of history as being generated. I want to frame my comments by talking about through the lens of a project that I've been doing on women's lands, and through it, to talk about the way of this project. Legacy is for me a part of artistic practice, a part of activism, and kind of a part of inquiring into what feminism is, so women's lands. For those of you guys who don't know, women's lands are all female communes. They're usually, oh, can you not hear me? Okay, it's like, you have to get really close, all right. Women's lands are these communes, they're mostly in rural areas, and a lot of them date back to the 1970s, and I'll just run through a couple pictures here. And these are, they're built at a time when people went back to the land, as many of you guys know, trying to come up with communities that rejected patriarchy and capitalism. But what a lot of people aren't aware of is that a lot of women's lands are still in existence, and they're places where mostly living spaces for older lesbians, and also places where women can travel to. And there's even like a she-goals directory to women's lands, this is kind of like the lonely planet for women's lands, if you want to go visiting them across the country. So one of my long-term projects has been about asking what feminist space is, what it was, or what's lost or gained by building it, and this kind of snowballed into an interest in feminist collectives and a road trip across the country to a bunch of women's lands in the South. So I wanted to document the lands as they were, but also I was interested in creating these kind of break performances of scenes, historical scenes that took place on the land, with the idea that this would help me and the people involved in the project to engage with history in kind of a more embodied, experiential way, not history like you read, but history, something about doing history that by doing something with ourselves, we preserve history, but also we kind of transform it by our participation. So this ended up culminating in a bunch of performances in the photographs. But to do this project, I ended up having to have, I wanted to have a bunch of conversations with like a bunch of dykes in their 60s and 70s. And for me, that was like a really transformative experience because those were voices that hadn't heard much before from and because it kind of overturned a lot of assumptions that I had about what older generations of feminists think about a lot of things. So I just want to touch on just a couple of concerns that I think are, or things to think about with respect to art that engages historically in memory and it was my art and maybe other artists working in the same vein. And the first is the issue of nostalgia, which I think is kind of like an occupational hazard. I think if you're making work that's kind of about like feminism in the 1970s, there's this tendency, I mean, to kind of maybe a critical celebration of these past moments of feminism and some of the objects or material remains that come from feminism. I don't know if you guys can see it, but that's a photograph of a tie and the pattern on the tie is like thumbs up for women's lib. And I can't help but kind of love that. And so I think that some of this kind of like feeling of like love of archival items is part of the power of work like this, but also something that we need to question. But I think on that flip side, a sort of like a rejection of nostalgia or being too critical of nostalgia can lead us to a place where we might make the assumption that younger generations of feminists don't have that much to learn from older feminists because their politics are too problematic or they may differ from younger feminists in their position on debates as they've evolved over decades. And you know, feminism doesn't have problems with social justice, racial justice, trans misogyny, but also I think that what might be implicit in that stance is that those are problems of past feminism. And we need to keep a recognition that these problems continue into kind of contemporary feminists in queer communities. A lot of the conversations, I probably don't have to tell you that feminists were having in the 1970s specifically around women's lands, what feminist space is, you know, who could or should occupy a women's space or even what it means to be a woman. I mean, these are obviously conversations we're still having and ones that are deeply inflected by this history, whether or not younger generations of feminists know about that or not. So the last thing I just want to say is, you know, I think the women's lands often are something that people think about as being like part of the past that's over. You know, maybe that's something that is so relevant now to the moment that we're having. But I don't know about you guys, but I can't go through like a day in New York City without hearing people complain about gentrification or we're all gonna talk about real estate. We can't get away from that people. You know, more community sustainability, all those kinds of things. And I've been hearing more and more people trying to solve these problems, putting together maybe collectives or trying to pool their money to buy like a building and put it in a land trust and try to like rest some tiny piece of the city away from this market economy. And I think that this is a place where the strategies that feminists in previous generations might resonate with or come together with things that people are thinking about like really urgently right now. And I just want to say that the land dice, the people who live on the women's lands, they kind of have a reputation for being sort of isolationist, not really like that involved. You know, the politics of the moment or the outside world. But in the travels and conversations that I've had with these women, I was so struck by how eager they were to have conversations like this, to talk to people who are of a younger generation of feminism, to share knowledge that they said have been passed on to them by their predecessors, their older generations of women to them. And these were things that have to do with politics and memory, but also things like how to run a chainsaw. I mean, if you're a women's lit, you really do need to know how to run a chainsaw. Something that I did not learn how to do in my life. But I think that these are points of contact that we might find an opportunity to build alternative lineages. Lineages that are based outside of those of family or those outside of academia, maybe places where people are often looking for mentorship or points of intergenerational contact that I mean, let's face it, more and more aren't available or aren't working for a lot of people in our communities. So maybe building, and I'm gonna say maybe even building with chainsaws, I like to think kind of noisy, a little scary, isn't an image that I wanna end with. So I'd like to think of those kinds of expansive ways of creating histories, places where like doing something together physically, and the way that that might create alternative histories, histories like what might have been versus what did happen and what might still happen, extending that past into the future. I'd like to thank you all for coming out tonight and to say I'm extremely heartened to see such a large audience for this panel. Wendaria had asked me to participate. I was a little surprised, although I'm an art historian with an advanced degree in theory and I have written on feminist artists. The idea of legacy in relation to feminism while intriguing to me was an issue that I had not thought about. However, as we age, this idea of legacy while not clearly articulated or addressed for us becomes more important as we assess our lives and the quality of what's going to remain once they end. This is not a morbid preoccupation, but rather I think everyone, if given the leisure of time and a certain thoughtful temperament, reflects on your achievements or your lack thereof with a mixture of pleasure and regret. However, Dairie specifically asked me to speak on the idea of legacy because for the last year or so I've been working on a project that's focused on the preservation of legacy of historic buildings in New York City, trying to raise the awareness of the importance of what some preservationists call and our rich architectural legacy. With this in mind, I'm going to leave together a number of themes and probably raise some questions and I'll answer. Before we decide what a feminist legacy might be, it seems that some clarification is in order. For preservationists, I think for most of us, legacy encompasses material objects, buildings with aesthetic, cultural, social value, the piece of gold jewelry or a silver tees set that your grandmother may have left you, a valuable object. And generally, legacy is a material object. It's something that has monetary value. And when we think of our architectural legacy in New York City, real estate, it does have a great deal of monetary value. From more than the last three centuries, since the arrival of European colonial powers, the real estate market has assigned monetary value to building stock and sites throughout New York City. But the idea of legacy that is an object with value and that value accessible only through a market and preservation together is almost paradoxical. That is while some thinkers may link preservation to gentrification and that's another topic for another panel. Increasingly, that's a topic, a tactic, excuse me, used by developers to align their interests with progressive politics. And we're seeing that in the idea of linking development to affordable housing today in New York City. Preservationists want to ensure that what they see as our architectural legacy is not monetized. Or at least that the market forces of monetization are held in check by the aesthetic, cultural value of the object that's going to be preserved. Certainly over the last 50 years, the real estate market's made some accommodations with this idea of historic preservation and they now use the idea of the landmark or architectural legacy as a way to assign additional value to its product. So they burnish the luster of the object through this idea of the landmark or the aesthetic value of the object. But this tension is continuing through monetization and preservation between these two as any reader of the daily papers and logs can attest. So this example of architectural legacy that I'm putting out tonight suggests that the monetary value of the object defines in part the market value of the object. But it also suggests that the value of legacy is not as an object only, its value has an aesthetic, social or cultural aspect, the art object. Unlike the current protections afforded the legacy of architecture in New York City, and many would say those are insufficient. Through the offices of the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, there is no artist preservation commission. There's no government agency that's charged with protecting the artistic legacy of New York. And that leaves us with the problem of how an artist conveys their legacy to the generations after them. At this point in the early 21st century, the primary mechanism that we can identify is the art market. This system of galleries and museums determines that objects are reviewed for their aesthetic and cultural value. And then they're winnowed out by the impartial, supposedly impartial hand of market forces to separate the wheat from the chaff and to determine what's to be preserved. In fact, we can say that the role of the art market is to ensure the survival of objects that have value, that is, that have monetary value in which the market has invested. That's not to say that these objects do not have cultural, social value, but simply that without an assigned monetary value, art objects are unlikely to survive as a legacy. This suggests that if we rely on the art market as it's currently structured to ensure our legacy or any legacy, we can only be sure that the objects that survive will be those that have monetary value in our current or near future market. Another way to think about the question of legacy and survival is to ask the question, if art created by women is given the same monetary value as that created by men, have we achieved a feminist breakthrough? If we want to preserve a feminist legacy, is this feminism, or is this the idea of letting market forces determine value and insufficient solution to ensuring a feminist legacy? Some would say that we need to preserve the art of women in the same way that we preserve the art of men. I would agree. Holding fiercely onto the image of the heroic artist, we would like to valorize women in the same way to raise them up as models for emulation and admiration. This type of legacy would be in line with the creation of artist foundations that have as their mission the promotion and preservation of the work of an individual female artist. And these foundations, too, help. They help younger artists see that success, as success is defined in our society, that is money, power, and fame can be grasped by women. And we can see that there's value in that effort. There's value in younger artists having role models. Similarly, other organizations have as their mission the identification and preservation of artwork by women. They serve a similar function to ensure that parity is achieved within the history of art, which is the history looked to by artists and art historians and eventually by the market. They preserve a legacy of women artists preserving the works made by women through documentation and restoration. This is not to say that the establishment of the parallel discourse of the female heroic artist like the male heroic artist who breaks through mediocrity to create a reputation of valued work has not been an important step in feminism. Nor is it to say that we have passed that point in history the work of the guerrilla girls is as relevant today as it was 30 years ago. And if parity is our goal, we are far from finding any equality or balance of male and female artists represented in galleries and museums. But this brings me to the crux of the matter. Are women who make art necessarily maybe a feminist art? Or is feminist artwork and its legacy more particular, more specific rather than gender driven? Can men make feminist art? Can men participate in the feminist legacy? That will depend on how we define that legacy, but I would hazard a yes rather than a no. If we conflate women and feminism, if biology is again destiny, we are ultimately stating that the only beneficiaries of feminism are female. But can we continue to automatically link feminism to gender, are only women feminists? Do we have to retain that term for ourselves? Or given the very thorough analysis of the construction of personal identity played out from Lacanian, Locoian and other French theorists, after 30 plus years of thinking about how we become who we are, can we still link feminism, femininity, and even femaleness to our biology? I think we would have to say that. That's a question someone else might want to take on. So another question might be posed, is this market model of legacy, the model on which we as feminists want to rely? Or on which we can rely? This market model, while the reality, or I can say one of the realities within which we operate and will probably continue to operate, says that parity is possible that with equal access to a market, we will achieve equality. Whether that is true is questionable. But let us say for the sake of argument that it is true. We need to think about whether we are looking for parity within an existing system. Or will feminist legacy require a change in the market system? Can artists operate productively outside of this market? Theoretical discourse of the 1980s and 90s suggested that there were alternatives, that we could explore the margins and edges between different discourses. But as a historian, I wonder if there haven't always been, say, marginal, marginalized artists, men and women who worked outside of the primary discourse of the market and museum. These individuals men and women who sow the interesting seeds of discontent while working on a more granular level to create their own particular realities. How is that legacy conveying? Are we forced in each generation to reinvent at the end alternatives other ways of working? Or can we grasp the past to make our reality new? At this point in time, we have to acknowledge the fact that in our technologically sophisticated world, we may have the best chance for establishing a cultural legacy in a virtual world. While most of the artists that I know still create objects, on the internet, you can be anyone. It may be that this is an illusion of parity, but certainly anyone with the time and access to the internet can create a space for their work online much more readily than they can access a way in which to share their work in real time and space. And that's particularly in New York City. I wonder if the virtual world may serve the same function for younger artists, a place where different realities can be shared and explored, and I'd like to hear from the other panelists on this topic. But back to what is the feminist legacy? I think we need to look at the idea of legacy in another way. If we link it to the object only, we will by necessity be forced to value ourselves as we are valued by the market to let the judgment of buying and selling determine the value of our thought processes, actions, and finally the objects we create. If instead we look at artistic practice as response to the demands of particular conditions and situations, we can start to think about legacy as an activity rather than as a series of objects that require preservation. As one writer has suggested, it does not seem enough to tell different stories and create multiple feminisms. Instead, she suggests that we need to tell stories differently. That may mean on some deeper level abandoning an object-based practice that focuses on the final product. That in tandem with our efforts for parity and equality, we need to create spaces where we have the freedom to explore, and so I want to finish with a series of questions. Could a feminist legacy be the gift of seeing artistic practice the multiple acts of creation rather than the object itself as the focus of our artistic endeavor? Can we even momentarily escape the tyranny of the object and instead see artistic practice as a method of creating new narratives, rather than creating compelling objects? So my name is Rana Gasset and I'm preparing for talking about feminist legacies. I was thinking a lot about Sylvia Rivera and I love this definition that you gave Daria of legacy means making trouble after your death. I think of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson and an entire community of trans women of color who were alive in New York City and rebelled at Stonewall and continued to build with each other and also challenge feminist space and challenge it against biologically notions determined biologically determined notions of gender and also challenge it with their bodies and interrupt another kind of feminist legacy. So I'm thinking this is a painting by Rachel Warner of Sylvia Rivera in 1973 at Washington Square Park. We'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. But I'm thinking about feminist legacies. I think what resonates deeply with me are a group of people who are trans and not conforming, who have consistently pushed against feminist practices that have not made room for trans and not conforming people who have been for a very long time at the forefront of change of social justice, whether it was at Stonewall or whether it was organizing with people who are incarcerated or whether it was around sex work and sex workers rights. I think about that as a kind of legacy and a group of people who are really making trouble while after they have died. So I wanted to talk a little bit about why that's something that resonates with me and some of the people I share community with. So I think a lot of people in this room have heard of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, but Sylvia Rivera was a Latina trans woman who was born in the 50s and one of the first people to rebel at Stonewall against the police and against the policing of gender and gender-magnifying people here in New York and queer people. She also helped to organize the Gay Liberation March, which is now known as Gay Pride, and which the first one started outside of the Women's House of Detention Center with a chant for yourselves, for your sisters in order to intentionally connect the lives of people who are currently incarcerated to the people on the outside who were navigating the policing of their gender and to break down that binary or the idea that some people are inside and some people are outside and a lot of people who are trans and gender-magnifying are constantly going through barriers of criminalization and institutions. But then in 1973, only four years after Stonewall, Sylvia Rivera had to take the stage at the fourth anniversary of Christopher Street Liberation Day March to remind the movement that the lives of people who are incarcerated and people who are trans and gender-conforming were actually vital to a vibrant movement for feminism and for queer liberation, queer and trans liberation. Unfortunately, this was also a moment when feminists were organizing together to push out trans people from the movement. I often play a clip of a lesbian feminist liberation leader, Gino Leary, taking the stage, specifically talking about how trans people mock women and specifically talking about sex workers and people who do performance. So anyone doing it for profit. So trans people who are out there doing sex work for profit. And I think about that, those two things, about sex work and about performance being two things that really riled up the lesbian feminist liberation because those are two ways that trans and gender-conforming people have been able to access any kind of income when we're shut out of formal economies. And so that's a kind of legacy that I'm gonna be talking a little bit about tonight. So in 2011, jumping forward, 39 years, at a time when black and Latina trans women have the highest documented murder rate ever, a woman named Cece McDonald in Minneapolis defended herself against a white supremacist in transphobic attack and was arrested for it and ended up serving 19 months in prison. And a group of friends, some of them are here tonight, friends and family, we wanted to make a connection between the work that Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, street transvestite action revolutionaries were doing to connect their lives with the lives of people who are constantly navigating criminalization and then interrupt a movement that had moved away from that, that had driven a push for assimilation. And so we did a performance with partnering with Occupy Wall Street's Illumination Band where we went throughout the city on the 2012 gay pride and illuminated the message of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson and tried to interrupt the silences about how some people have been exiled from feminist space under this drive for assimilation. And so we made a short little video that we put all over the city that talked about the origins of Stonewall and then also talked about safety and how when we're thinking about safety it's not actually something that we can get from police or prisons, actually police and prisons are one of our primary predators. So we went throughout New York on specific places that were sites of violence for trans and gender and non-conforming people of color. This is Sylvia Rivera speaking in 1973. We played this clip of Sylvia on top of Stonewall and people actually surprisingly really loved it. They came out of the building and they were cheering for Sylvia, which I think also was really an important part of the practice that I want to engage, which is the past, I firmly believe that the past and the present and the future are all engaged in our current political movement and that's what I think about when I think about lineage. And so I think about Sylvia Rivera making trouble and still doing it today, but also pushing for room for all of us to be able to survive. And so we hope to engage that legacy of Sylvia and also publicize and illuminate the case of C.C. McDonald. And we did it also in sites of violence where trans and gender non-conforming people, particularly black and Latina trans women, were experienced forms of violence. So this is the Washington Square Park Arch, which is where Sylvia Rivera was speaking underneath to where we projected our free C.C. film. And then we also kind of went throughout the city talking about pride being a day that's become really corporatized now, but it was started by people like C.C. McDonald. And this is a line that I really love. We cannot live without our lives, which is permanent home, but also is a way that people organized in Boston in the 80s when after 12 black women were found in murder and the Kumbahi River Collective came together and folks marched under a banner of we cannot live without our lives. I think that's a really strong part of the legacy that people who are a challenging feminist space to not erase particular histories needs to, we need to constantly talk about. And we ended on 14th Street and 8th Avenue right near what used to be Star House. So Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson and Bambi and Moran and Doran, these people who were from the Stonewall veterans organized a collective house together to house other trans and gender-mocular people. And we thought it would be really powerful to stop at our school. I think, yeah, that's mostly what I wanted to share was an engagement in the form of practice that pushes us to remember that transphobia and gender biologically determined notions of gender are part of colonialism, right? So they're part of identities that were imposed on people since the Dutch landed in Manhattan and started the practice of building a wall to keep indigenous people out and started bringing forth ideologies of the gender binary. And I think it's really important to hold conversations of colonialism within conversations about feminist practice and feminist art as a way to ensure that we're not, I think we had a really great point about these practices are still with us. It's like, we can imagine that the 1970s was a more transphobic time, but actually our movements are continue to be haunted by transphobia and on the flip side, our movements continue to be, our movements continue to be bolstered by people who, because we can't just talk about the ban, right? I think it's really important to not disabilify people and not just say that people are victims, right? But our movements continue to be bolstered by people who are engaging legacies of gender self-determination and trans-liberation, whether it's in feminist space or in gender self-determining art space. So, thank you. It deals with notions of legacy. What it was really start by, when it was decided to participate in the men used, the word legacy, I really retracted from the word and that kind of retraction is actually extremely interesting to me. I started to poke around the word legacy looking at the etymology and the root of the word, and sure enough, it exposed some of the sort of patriarchal core that I really resist. The root of the word leg actually means law. So, legacy sits next to words like legal, lawful, legislative, legalize, legible, legislative, delegate, legitimate, and even the word privilege. So, I sort of started to go down a rabbit hole of kind of law, money, and religion and the way we create standards and regulations through which to manage the past and move it forward and how often those standards are premised around a base of finance and the kind of value structures that are at play. And in my hunting, I came across leger, which is the present infinitive of lego, which shares kind of a common etymology, etymological origin with the word legacy, and the directives are, one, I choose select a point, two, I collect, gather, bring together, three, I tape, steal, four, I traverse, pass through, five, I read, recite. And this was actually sort of the first opening for me into the word and sort of kind of an unfolding the skin of the word, this was sort of the first time where I felt like I had an access point to even registering that route within my own practice. Like other people on the panel have suggested, I'm interested in new models, new formations of language, but more specifically how to invest kind of new meaning for pre-existing words as a way to offer kind of a shift, which feels kind of more into a sort of social learning or social meaning. I'm interested in horizontality and notions of nearness and the language of proximity as something that we can develop and engage as a way to begin to start to talk about some of the issues that everybody is sort of touching on. I'm actually going to locate my position directly in my own work and the slides that are coming up because I kind of believe in totality and in the decision making process that artists go through as like a very rigorous materialized way of kind of embodiment. So this first slide is from a performance called A Thing and Its Thingness. It's all just now as an adjectives video which was performed this last October at the Museum of Art and Design. The performance is based on Derwald, which is an opera composed by Apple Smith in the late 1800s and Derwald was the first and only opera composed by a woman to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1903, but the opera has never been recorded. A Thing and Its Thingness as a performance is sort of a deconstructed operatic response to historical invisibility. I want to read a quote by Peggy Phelan from her book on Mark that I think is really relevant for kind of couching this performance. How can one invent a pedagogy for disappearance and loss and not for acquisition and control? How can one teach the generative power of misunderstanding in a way they will almost understand? Light is a really important material in my practice. I use it to frame space and to create interest and to engage looking as an active activity. I use light to make space for a sort of photographic and image-based attention. I'm interested in staging a space for an image and the kind of anticipation or disappointments that get played out through engaging the making of a photographic image, slowing down the moment of making the image. In this performance specifically, the lights were used and mediated by my body and strapped on sort of like bright appendages or slowly taken off and placed to sort of exaggerate the drama of the forest. I often use my hands to sort of feather and shape and soften the light in an image. The piece also heavily engages text. There was approximately about 40 minutes of reading in the piece. It was loosely kind of a topographical combination of all the texts that I encountered while researching Ample Smith. The opera had never been recorded so my only access to the sense of the sound of the piece was through the various criticisms, the music criticisms that had been written after the performance in 1903. So this was combined with text from the actual libretto of the opera as well as my own accounts of digging up weeds in the industrial pockets of mass pep queens where my studio is located. In researching Ethel, I discovered that the New York Public Library housed 88 folders of letters that had been written from Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smith but because they were housed in the Woolf archive, none of the return correspondence from Smith had been included. So this became another example of how we are left to look at something by looking around it and by looking at everything else that looked at it. And that feels quite particular to me. There was kind of a very fixed attention for movement in the piece as a migration. Reading and writing was sort of my primary focus throughout the performance and both were done simultaneously with a mic and multiple pages of text and writing equipment. So kind of making for inevitable interruptions in the work. This is Molly Narnel, a performance artist who I invited to be the feminist in my piece and thankfully she agreed and with no direction for me she engaged her body in sort of a slow migration across the stage, shifting plants and the shadows projected from them as she went. I like to invite people to play roles in my work that are the roles they play in life without making any distinction. And I don't really like to tell people what to do or ask them to do anything specific. I also sort of also invite myself to participate in my own work by the same terms and this has to do with some belief that form is content and the way that we form ourselves is sort of representative of our ideology. And this is Mia Hernandez, she's a somatic body worker who I invited to be in the piece with me. My prompt to her was to treat the audience as a singular body and to starting at the front of the front of the seating with myself to kind of snake her way through the audience and to do approximately like a minute of body work on each person as she went. I'm also gonna talk about a collaborative practice that I have with my partner, A.K. Burns. This, the first project I'm gonna present rather quickly is called The Brown Bear and neither particular nor general. It's work that we installed in this base called Recess in 2010 in New York. The Brown Bear is sort of the intentional completion of a hair and art salon and it was used as sort of a site for public engagement so we offered free haircuts in tandem without the aid of mirrors or visual references throughout the two month residency and we engaged in discussions about preferences, desires and aesthetic choices in relation to public and private socialized bodies. The Brown Bear was an exploration of being and how it has formed, affirmed and develops into cultural signifiers. So there were slotted shelves that we made to house archival material that we collected from LGBTQ and Q archives across the country. We had been engaging the archive almost in a familiar way. It's really rare that queers have people within their biological families that they can look to and identify with. So the archive sort of starts to operate like an extended family. You may not have met but there's a sense of belonging and the material that gets donated and held in the archive also plays off of this sentiment because it's often incredibly personal material. We kind of built out the entire space as a triangulated room and in the farthest wedge of the room we placed a Xerox machine and the Brown Bear sort of operated like an exploded zine. People were invited to copy anything from the space that they wanted to take with them and they were also invited to contribute anything they wanted to Xerox and leave behind. Simultaneously, we've often been told by people that it's such a really fractured experience for people to have forehands on use simultaneously and it's actually something neither one of us has ever experienced because we are always engaged in the haircutting and that idea of sort of storytelling is something that really played out in the entirety of the project and in the space. The haircutting also became about touching and about the relevance and importance of touch in sort of a recognition that there's not enough of that and that it generates an energy between people and the haircutting sort of offered a new space for people to actually feel each other in ways that we don't often engage. This was what two months of accumulated hair looks like. We also invited different artists to participate with us on a weekly basis and specifically invited artists whose work don't privilege sight. This is their detention pen who uses the internal mechanism of speakers that vibrate in order to sort of have like a vibrational massage. The sound massage. And lastly, this is sort of a piece that's unfinished and we're still working on. Title to familiarity with today is the best preparation for the future, a fitting title for this presentation. So this is a work in progress. It's a three channel video installation. The content is a nonlinear confluence of documentary archival and lived footage including a performance inspired by shaving fetish imagery from the 1970s, interviews with four older women as well as archival footage from the 1939 and 1964 New York World's Fair in Corona Park today. This is an installation shot actually from the Brooklyn Museum where we installed the piece for a one day event in conjunction with the High Seek exhibit. The piece starts with a pointing finger locating sights on the panorama of the city of New York which is the title for the massive three-dimensional floor map of New York conceived by Robert Moses to celebrate the city's infrastructure in 1964 and it's housed at the Queens Museum. I like pointing because I think it's a way of presenting something as an interest and not as a fact. The piece employs a particular strategy of mimicry. We've been introduced archival footage shot by lesbians in 1964 at the World's Fair and we wanted to return to Corona Park and re-film the same footage. The piece consists of many pairings of the same forms but basically shot 48 odd years later allowing for a real shift in focus in terms of what has stayed the same or what has changed. This one specifically is archival footage of the fountain from the World's Fair combined with what's kind of there today which is mosaic work on the ground representing the fountains from that fair. I'm really interested in looking at archives and again this sort of pairing of images is about building transparency into the work. You see that we are looking at archival footage on a TV screen on the right and then you see our attention has paused on a woman of interest on the left and the voiceover makes it clear that the footage is shot by lesbians not of lesbians inherently so it brings attention to the kind of focus, framing and decision making that's evident in some of these film work. And I'm like I said really interested in notions of proximity. This is and how this kind of footage this is a woman named Karen Song on the far right and on the left is sort of a vacation footage that I shot of A.K. at the lobster pound in Maine and in the center is a beach shot from Fire Island in New York and Karen is explaining her relationship to women's liberation and having lost her kids and job for being exposed as homosexual. And again these pairings present a sort of forced simultaneity where we can ask what comes of these relationships and what kind of privileges do we have today due to the years of work done by previous generations? The image on the left is from a shaving performance shot by myself and A.K. at the end of our residency at recess and it was inspired by archival shaving footage shown on the right from a 1970s dungeon scene in San Francisco and we're really inspired by the images and interested in kind of limitations around the pleasure that feel tied to history and in this case the complications around feeling really attached body hair. There's a lot of walking in the piece so kind of tides moving in and out and all of this sense of rhythm that's in tune with a human pace. This is set against the kind of sped up narrative of time that happens when someone is telling their story. This is Ivory Fredon on the far left talking about her experiences in Fire Island over the past 40 years in combination with the shaving footage and also kind of house footage at a residency that we were at in Fire Island. At moments the work breaks into a space where three screens activate the same space and time simultaneously. Here we have three boardwalks and all three are shot while we were walking so the three screens sort of awkwardly awkwardly just in an arid McWay to each other and the piece ends in a culmination of sort of discolored shot in Fire Island and layered with the same sound and the piece as a whole sort of operates in many ways as sort of an exploded disco where there's a lot of, there's sort of a fracturing of one's ability to focus because of the simultaneity that's presented between the three screens. Good evening, thank you. Thank you everyone for being so attentive to the issue of legacy both on this side of the table and on the other side of the table. It's really a very important one and in the context of this panel Daria asked me to speak as both a mid-career artist and as an art historian. I'm the director of the Nancy Graves Foundation which is dedicated to preserving and enhancing the legacy of a trailblazing female artist from previous generation and as such Daria asked me to speak more specifically and perhaps more concretely to legacy issues with regard to more standard and more traditional not-for-profit artist endowed foundations that are the typical model used by many artists to continue their legacy. And as we shall see, you know, this issue is of particular urgency for feminists or artists. It also requires a great deal of thought now while we are still alive and active. This is the best time to found a foundation as it were to investigate innovative and perhaps hitherto unexplored formats, something we've all been discussing amongst ourselves and in the panel in order for our art and our legacy individually and collectively to avoid being devoured by either dumpsters or real estate taxes, I'm sure. I'm nice, there we go. What's that? And this is the actual topic here is death defying art, avoiding the dumpster and the IRS. So the twin evils. Okay, but before I start it, I wanted to just do a very, very brief presentation of three examples of my more recent work, this Rosarium collage which is a kind of commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Twin Tower collapse is made of 99 cent store roses that I have covered with metal leaf and gold leaf and adhered to a canvas background. And this is an installation from last year. The little one is just to show the scale. So it's a 40 foot high textile, a silk textile called Green Falls and it documents the fall of the textile, the local textile industry was installed in the former textile factories in the city of Patterson and it also documents the fall of labor rights that accompanied the many early labor protests around World War I. And then here another piece and a performance that I did in a piece of land art that I did called the Laurentian labyrinth and this was Ariadne's red thread performance using shiny red danger tape that you would buy in a hardware store which looked like a glistening trail of blood. So you can see that these three images just show examples of my work in various scales and also from a range of periods. So I made both transitory installations and actual objects and all of my work originates within the concepts and techniques of collage and they combine very different materials with fragments of history and personal significance. But I really wanted to speak much more to legacy issues and introduce very briefly Nancy Graves who was an American artist who lived from 1939 to 1995. She's probably best known for the trio of camels which was a conceptual sculpture. It was an assemblage of very lifelike looking camels at the Whitney Museum and the bottom side I just thought I would throw in because she had a massive sculpture retrospective here at the Brooklyn Museum, in case that doorway looks familiar to anyone. She, this is her wonderful portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe and she was also a filmmaker, a printmaker and designed sets and costumes for ballets. And she did her MFA in non-painting at Yale and was also a wonderful painter. So what is legacy with regard to non-for-profit artist endowed foundations? That's a massive helpful. And most importantly, how can this traditional legacy format be adapted to serve the legacy of feminist art? So most artists, even best selling artists tend to have and make much more art than they sell in their lifetimes. And this is much more obvious in the case for artists that make objects, paintings and sculptures. And what happens to all of this art in your death? And what is it worth to the next generation? And what part of it is worthwhile to the next generation? So if the IRS is asked, that work will be worth a tremendous, stupendous amount once it passes down to your designated heirs. Not when it passes laterally to a spouse, but when it goes down to the next generation. And this evaluation arises not because the IRS is full of art lovers, but so that huge estate taxes can be collected based on a high assessment of this art's potential value. So tax exempt foundations are formed in part to protect your designated heirs from these huge estate and inheritance taxes, especially in case your heirs cannot afford to pay them. Because if your heirs cannot afford to pay them, tragically, the inability to pay these taxes is what sends untold quantities of artwork into the dumpster. Or if you are really lucky, it ends up at the local thrift shop. So foundations can be family run or board run. You may not have heirs, you may also have heirs that are not interested in running an art foundation or that you don't trust with running your art foundation. So as is the case for all, not for profits, organizations, any kind of foundation must also offer a public benefit such as an educational mission which is often the case for art foundations or a mission to support the arts and artists beyond what is known as the self-serving function of legacy enhancement. That's not enough. So not wanting to spend the whole night talking with the heirs, that would be really helpful. So the primary reason, however, that art foundations are established is because historically this is the format that has assured artists the greatest possible control over their legacy, over their work and their life's intent and output so that they can continue to make trouble after they die, as Dorian said, which when you think about it might be a very good form of public good and qualify as a charitable organization. So one of the myths, the great pervasive myths is that an artist's work is worth more after they are dead. Now this myth endures in the popular imagination in countless books and movie and play plots and even more insidiously in many artists' minds but nothing could be further from the truth. Unless your art, and here we are back in the marketplace, unless your art has acquired high actual market value during your own lifetime, while you yourself were promoting it and exhibiting it, your work will not instantly gain added value just because you want. Quite the opposite is sadly true and many artists do not realize this when thinking about issues of legacy. Somebody or some organization needs to continue to do all of that promoting and exhibition organizing and sending out of images and writing of texts in your stead for your work to continue to be given consideration and forward to have meaning for influence and thus value after you're gone. And basically that's what legacy is. So when thinking of legacy, foundations as diverse as the Warhol Foundation, the Paul and Krasner Foundation, the Joe Mitchell Foundation or the Gottling Foundation immediately come to mind and you in fact may have applied for funding from some of these foundations which is their charitable mission and gives them among other things the tax exempt status. So this is definitely not the forum to describe even briefly the complexities of setting up and administrating an artist's foundation or a fulfilling its mission. But the basic requirement for setting up this type of foundation is simply money. And creating a legacy by establishing a foundation requires an unfathomable amount of funding to set up followed by continual financial resources to support it over time. And the list on the screen goes on and on and on and on and that's why I just let him trail off like that. And one of the issues that is extremely relevant to the establishment of a legacy for feminist artists and women artists is just looking at art market pricing. So art market pricing leaves even very successful women artists very far behind. You can see from these graphs, so these are the top female artists between 2008 and 2013. So if you look at the asterisks for Joe Mitchell, you can see that she has the highest, she has the world record for the greatest amount of money ever paid for a single work by a woman artist. And that's 9.3 million something dollars. You can see that even that high record from 2011 is a couple of not just million dollars but a couple of decimal points different from the highest paid price for male artists. So that fact alone, the financial requirements alone that are impacted by the market value of the art produced by women will negatively impact all individual artists who did not achieve this top tier level on the marketplace that'll have a particularly negative impact on the future of feminist art as a whole as well as individually and on the entire artistic legacy of feminist arts. So women artists, feminist or not, as the girl or girl still need to demonstrate, continue to remain vastly underrepresented and outsold by male artists in galleries and auction houses. So as a result, though they might be very famous, many women not risk not having sufficient assets such as basic cash savings or highly market valued and saleable artwork of real estate, for example, to establish a financially viable foundation at the end of their critically acclaimed lives. So feminist artists, though recognized as continuing to drive so much of contemporary art, risk not having a future history unless we develop some new models now to preserve and activate that legacy. And I just have one more slide to show here that again looking at this image of the leap into a void that there are really no immediate solutions but together we really have to explore a number of ideas as to continue this absolute necessity to archive fiercely in order to leave a tangible trace of one's lifetime project and contributions. So if we still remember Eve Klein's leap into the void, it's because he documented the event photographically then published the photo himself in a pseudo newspaper, a special Sunday edition that he printed and distributed to kiosks throughout Paris and then further documented that distribution so that the fact of the event, this performative event, which was kind of a fake anyway, continues to exist and have any kind of value for the future. So these are the kind of possible starting points to open up such a discussion. So thank you very much. Analysts, we are sharing your points of view and what you've experienced in the realm of the legacy. I hope we didn't scare you to have to death just now by Christine's presentation. It does sound pretty hopeless, but then we don't have to be Nancy Graves, right? We can be whoever we want to be. So we've opened up this topic from many different points of view with some common threads running through them. Some of them may have been marketplace, some of them may have been a very wonderful idea from Raina that being transgender, nonconforming and queer are anti-capitalist acts. So we've got real estate in there, we've got anti-market, anti-capitalist ideas. But I wonder if, first, if the panelists have any questions for each other or want to bring anything else up before we throw this open to the audience, anybody? Well, I think we've talked long enough and want to hear from you now. So was there anything that was said that you would like to have looked at a little more deeply or if you'd like to work here in the microphone, Jesse will give you the microphone, actually, and you could add your thoughts to what we've opened up tonight. As you're sitting in shock here from listening about the bad news, think about the good news, that the questions might open, that we need to tell our stories differently. How can we tell our stories differently? Oh, we have a volunteer, hopefully they're Jesse. Yes, good. When you talk, please give us your name because we'd like to get back to you later. My name is Joan Orrider, thank you for your program. Did you say that the fact that Joan Mitchell earned nine million plus dollars on your painting has in fact negatively impacted the problems we would have with the IRS as an artist? I don't, she did not earn nine million dollars. The painting's sold for nine million dollars. No, but does the IRS not now think that this artwork is worth more than it used to be? Yeah, obviously, but it's still, yeah, absolutely. So there's an ironing there, a big one. Yeah, but I guess the point I was trying to make was that the gap is still enormous and wide. Christina, you were trying to point out that it's much more difficult for women to take on this idea of the foundation anyway as individuals because they just simply don't have the resources, that's what you were pointing to, and that it's necessary to be more creative and to also think about things perhaps as a group rather than as individuals because you can't simply finance it on your own, which briefs us back to maybe some of Leah's ideas about what happened in the 70s. Yeah, I think so, and I think in the way that sort of leaving, getting off the grid or finding a different kind of model. I mean, certainly, there you have a lot of experience with setting up collectives, and of course it's difficult. There's always a lot of politics everywhere in a situation like that, but certainly groups of like-minded artists pooling their resources, pooling their assets, having one storage facility, having one database, having one insurance policy, one, you know, a workplace compensation policy, one heating system, you know, one art handler. I mean, certainly that is a way to reduce a lot of the cost, and there are just incredible storage, insurance, and administrative costs involved in setting up, and especially maintaining a foundation, especially if you have a foundation where the sale of each work generates $50,000, where you have a company, your computer breaks down, you sell something for, I mean, $50 million, you've got $50 million extra, but that is not often the case for artists, all artists, especially women artists whose individual works simply aren't valued on the marketplace at that level, but you do need those funds. It really comes down to funding rather than ideas or creativity in order to set up this type of foundation, sadly, yeah, so you understood that, right? Well, you know, I have to say that AIR is a very simple model. I think the way to go is cheap and simple, and, you know, something that is commensurate with your wallet, basically. When you get a group of people together, you can do an awful lot. And so, you know, we're looking at models that were so-called too big to fail. I mean, that's the mantra for a lot of things today, big eats, a lot of money. We don't have that money, but we don't have to be big. So you can look at groups that are very inexpensive that are driving the whole show, like Facebook and Etsy. These are big models with a lot of people in them, basically, and that's the systems that are living and breathing today. So, group projects, any way you can think of it, is the way to go, and these models are not hard to follow. And I think this community is creative enough, certainly brave enough to ask these very varied questions tonight about their particular constituency and what they know about life and where they live and see, that we have to come up with something, even if it's co-ops of the day, we have to think of something creative to continue our work, to preserve the people that we value, and to give something over to the next generation as material to work with. Because, you know, my generation, we still had real estate options. Yours doesn't, for the younger ones here, it's all been closed up. But we have that now, you know, we didn't expect to have it. I mean, we have nothing over your age either. But, now that we have it, we can do something with it. We might be able to support a few young artistorials with it, or something. You know, we'll have to think of some way to do it. One of the conversations that Daria and I have had is in comparing things that were going on when she was a young artist and some things that are a part of my community, we realized how many similarities there were that we weren't aware of. And I felt like people around me are so often kind of reinventing the wheel, trying to kind of look at solutions. And we realized that if there was more dialogue between people of different generations, we might be able to be able to tap into some of these resources that Daria's talking about. And we were also hoping that getting a big group of people together like this, representing so many different ages and different practices, that we might be able to facilitate some conversations and some meetings that might not happen otherwise. Ah, now we have a question. Yes, Lauren. I wanted to throw out another image. What's your name? Sorry, my name is Michael Moser. And picking up on Leah's image of the Jeanson, which brought to my mind the videos that were going around of the feminine women from Ukraine, the, for those of you who may not know, they're sex workers from Eastern Europe who tend to take off their clothes and throw themselves at police officers. They're incredibly brave. And they shout things like, we are poor because of you. And there was a recent action that they did where they took a Jeanson and a woman had, she had no top on and she Jeanson down this huge important monument in, I think, the Ukraine and was arrested for it. They get arrested all the time. And to me, that represents all kinds of ideas of propagation, activism, and also legacy, the utilization of online resources. And they're also a commune. Or if not a commune, they're a cooperative art group. Interesting, very interesting. Is someone else over here? My name's Evelyn Honigand. This is so simplistic. I think there's a difference between generations. And I think that solutions, and I'm talking now, and I'll read this, solutions for the younger generation might easily be able to go virtual, meaning the work that I'm looking at from, I don't know how, I mean, I hold, okay, maybe half my age, seems more about installations. And that can be housed or can be saved or can be relished now for future generations through photography and through the internet. I think people like Nancy Graves, who I mean the one, right? And that's where the problem comes in. And so I have written this, and I'm not sure, I mean, all of you, there's a whole generation of you sitting up there that went to colleges that had gave a maze and master's degrees. And so you speak in a way that I don't even understand, okay, I'm 80 years old. And so when I went to college, there were very few places that had art departments, maybe three, as a matter of fact. I'm listening to, with two different ears, so there's the Christina Stolli, she's dealing with an artist who has real stuff, okay, in the art market, and gets valued in one way, and on my way, this has nothing to do with being female. I think it's in general, I live with a man who has a studio full of work where he, we don't know what's going to happen to him. He's a brilliant photographer. He's Japanese-American, and he's terribly shy, and he would have probably a few breakdowns if he had to be involved in the art market. So I wrote this out. After having the conversation with Christina Stolli about this symposium tonight, I worked the following morning with her about what I'm proposing will be a rather difficult undertaking, and may not be possible at all. It speaks to your idea of communion. The idea would be to find spaces, maybe Stoll lines, you know, the Nazis did that. I mean, they had art from the Nazis, or places somewhere in America to houseworks by deceased artists. Imagine the tail foundation of state in Hudson, New York, or perhaps many more repositories on a grand scale for unknown art. Since I couldn't envision more, I started to think of foundation needs, and since it's such a serious subject, I decided to have some fun. I hope you don't find the same. I'm going to interrupt you because, what? To give a nod to the younger audience, they're kind of faster than we are, so I want to make sure they have time to also voice their opinions. So if you could just get to, I don't want to miss any of your good points, but if you get to your main point, there are some people who might want to. My point would be that, but there might be, if we might be able to set up spaces or foundations that would house paintings and sculpture and photography installations represented by photography. And that, especially for artists who have never really been, whose works have never been seen, or even famous artists who have never been seen, it's totally, I was playing around with great art, art collection, dead art society. Well, it all makes a lot of sense because we are looking for different solutions, but what you're bringing up is a very important idea of having conversations, having five people get together for a glass of wine and throwing this kind of thing around and seeing what the value is. Oh, you understand me. I feel like I've said something wrong, no, you haven't. No, but it's just a time thing to move on to a little bit of a switch. Hi, my name is MPA. I might be the one that's gonna throw a wrench into the panel, but I think that what I'm doing sitting right here is what are the shared politics, maybe between members on the panel, and I see a lot of ideas being tossed around and maybe we've not even arrived yet on a table of possibly shared terms of what we feel around capitalism and legacy. A few people on the panel, Debra, Raina, Katie, were bringing up even possibly the contamination in the assumptions of legacy and feminist legacy and that contamination is influenced by colonizing and capitalist practices that are part of our present. So from that point of view, I'm wondering maybe from the panelists if they wanna talk about other personal politics that can begin to inform and redefine feminism. I personally don't know if feminism is a term I've allowed myself since Occupy Wall Street to really tagline because Occupy Wall Street in New York reopened the table for politics and myself identifying with particular ones. In terms of practical strategies, if we wanna turn to Jack Smith or the Communist Party in New York in the turn of the century, there were rent strikes that did happen here in our city and there seems to be a lot of discussion around real estate but on the table and that's also being threatened and connected to our property and maybe if we begin to link those struggles we also earn another vision for feminism right now. Anybody here wanna address that question? That's Sterling, thank you. That's a massive question. Yes. I think it's a massive question. It was so processing. But thank you so much for linking the notions of real estate, money, capitalism, politics, personal politics, the current political situation and parallels to other decades in the past and no doubt things we need to anticipate as well for the future but those are huge and obviously really, really maybe not so obviously interrelated threats that will impact any kind of historic legacy that is going to be left for the next generation. Yeah and I don't think we're trying to suggest that we have the answers up here and we're hoping that people in the audience might be able to respond to each other as well so we hope this will be a dialogue and not just a presentation. Or even just a catalyst for dialogue. Definitely. I don't have the answers but what's new about tonight's session for me at least is I'm hearing from constituencies that I've never ever run into. I think that's wonderful. I'm hearing things like, well maybe the next step in 70s feminism is not to get labeled at all. If they can't label you, they can't put you down. Maybe we have to run away from labels. We might also turn the heads on capitalism instead of rejecting it or while we document our work with photographs and do some kind of archiving as the last speaker spoke about, previous speaker, we might also think about the fact that the younger generation needs jobs and money which are also going by the wayside. How are they going to afford their life for the next 50, 60, 70 years? Well maybe our generation could leave something for them to work with. Maybe we have something we could pass on to them. Maybe we can be their medium. If we leave them some money or a way to live, why can't this community support itself? So that's some of the questions I think about. Do I have the nerve to do that? I think there was a question over here too. Yes. Hi, Susan, the question. I'm Rachel Brenneke. I'm a Donna Buyer's granddaughter. She's one of the early members of AIR. And so I'm currently in the process of trying to archive, help my grandmother archive her entire body of work. So I'm very sympathetic to this issue. And I think that we have a collective here of women who would be willing to meet once a month and start the discussion. So my proposition is to even ask the Brooklyn Museum if we can meet here at the same time next month and just let the women start showing up and have an organized system for being able to express what we need to talk about. Say again? I mean, doesn't necessarily have to be women. Feminists. That's what I meant. Sorry, feminists. I mean, my suggestion is to get together with people that have anything invested in the feminist issue. Let's just make it a big blanket term and say that we can meet once a month and start with one meeting, get together, and see what happens. I'm not saying that you can't talk about what you want to talk about or just different people aren't allowed in. I was with Jensen and I'm with the TARC collective. We're nomadic. We don't have a space. And there's like four of us. But just two quick, we're here tonight. Two quick points. One, directly that I can see in terms of everything that's been talking about is for example, in a couple of months there'll be a big open engagement conference that takes place at the Queens Museum, which is about artists working with communities making and making things happen. And I cannot see that taking place without feminism having proceeded. It's just like there are these historical links and they're moving. It's the move and they keep changing and the communities within communities. And so then the second point I wanted to make is to solve so all these then communities that keep on expanding. I mean, are asexual as a part of the queer community, how do we begin to even think about the approaching the body and the body in the work? And that's something I was wondering if any of you have thought about, or maybe other people are doing it. Yeah, I'll just throw out questions. You could take them home in your mind and work on them in the sleep. So, the best time. Hi, good evening. I was also inspired by the last speaker here. My name is Patty Jordan and I'm with the Women's Caucus for Art from the New York chapter. And I was very taken, particularly by Katherine Hubbard's work in doing that collective space gathering, where you actually kind of take over a space and you create a performance. But you've also documented it for us all to see. And we're very interested also in finding alternative spaces. But I'm curious too, you documented it. And something that was also mentioned, this ability for us to potentially use the internet to sort of be proactive with our work as a space to then talk about it, write about it, chat about it, or give the internet and also do you invite writers to come to your shows and write about it? I can thread a couple of things together that have been brought up. In terms of putting my work on the internet, I don't have a website. So, if things appear online, it's only because other people have opted to put them there. But I'm also not on Facebook and I'm not on Twitter. And I don't use social media in any way intentionally. Although I find out at a later date, I might have, there might be a personality out there somewhere that people will affiliate with me. So they, and also I think I consider myself to be primarily a photographer, but I'm incredibly particular about when and how I employ photography. So it's true that in the case of documentation, I go to great lengths to take as much of what gets created in the real time physical kind of sculptural capacity and take that with me to kind of have as a reference or reader points. But I'm also really interested in the idea of image production and in the role of photography. And so a lot of the performance work that uses light is sort of about asking questions about how photography operates and functions for us. It's not inherently always about making photographs. I'm very concerned with documenting what happens in that space, but in the case of the performance I'm much more interested in holding a space with light that's about how image production is operating for us in a contemporary social sphere. And the question about if I invite writers is really interesting because maybe this links back to some of what MP was bringing up, which for me somehow what everybody is bringing up I simultaneously love all of the suggestions and then I have like a really intense cringe factor. And I think that there's something important about kind of affiliation or association that's kind of a question in all of these groups, these kinds of ways that we ask like how do we come together and how do we group? And I think it's, there's something about like a very sort of loose kind of associative structure that brings like-minded people together and starts to kind of act as what we recognize as community. And in terms of writers, in the case of the round here we didn't invite writers to perform in the space with us and to make work, to make kind of, to bring their writing practice into the space as a performance, as an engagement with performance. But I also happen to be very close friends with writers and if they come to my performances and if they do or don't opt to write about something it's purely out of their own volition. And, but the question of kind of affiliation I think comes up because it sort of begs like where in the minds you position yourself next to and who are the minds that you sort of want to be doing this thinking with and those are the people you should be spending your time with. Because for me like the everything is generative towards the kind of principles that start to be shared within the group and really start to negate some of these ideas around ownership and I think collaboration is a really important strategy for starting to restructure some of the thinking. I know Janina's. Had I known that was your question I would have known. I think I was gonna have conversations about real estate that don't come with acknowledgement that were on colonized land. I feel and that were like a lot of these institutions were built with labor that was never compensated vis-a-vis the transatlantic slave trade and reparations. I think about that when I think about Fire Island because Fire Island was a place for people who were black who were being held before they were brought to New York through the transatlantic slave trade and also on top of that being an incredible place for where people inhabit their bodies in the practice of queer liberation and feminism. But I think for me it's essential. One of the reasons why we didn't share so it was my partner Liz and a few people over here we came together to do the CeCe McDonald illumination project and one of the reasons that we didn't share it online I think was thinking about intentionality and thinking about for me it's capitalism so quickly as co-ops what you put out there. So I remember being at a speech where Angela Davis was talking about how she was riding around in the 60s and she saw a cigarette ad with someone rocking a dice sheet which is like part of black nationalist culture that was firmly against capitalism. So for me I think it's really in these conversations it's really essential to think about how even resistance to capitalism has been pushing back against like for example how it's really important for me to be like well feminist space we have to have some conversations about transphobia like even that push back is one that can be cocky and thinking about the market and you know just having a wanting to trouble this like ideas that unheardful market complicated way to share your work so I think that's some of the stuff that I know. I think on that note it's getting to that out of where we should say thank you to everyone. Julio do you have any closing words? I just want to say thank you to all of you for coming and I hope that we can continue this conversation in some capacity one way or another we hope that this is the start of something. Yeah let me see if it's open for another hour.