 Good evening everyone. My name is Sarah Freeman. I am the public education manager at Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and Welcome to the Cooper Hewitt Design Center. We opened this space in May 2012 to house all of our education activities while the museum on Fifth Avenue and 91st Street is closed for renovation. We're going to reopen in October 2014 with 60% more gallery space, better circulation of public and back-of-house space and a whole new visitor experience, and we hope that you'll all come and visit us. We'd like to thank Target for making Cooper Hewitt Design Center a reality and also we'd love to encourage you to check our website, CooperHewitt.org, to learn about more events here at the Design Center. Tonight's event with artist Shanique Smith is being webcast live at CooperHewitt.org slash live and will be available on our website. To lead tonight's talk is John Reddick, a longtime resident of Harlem, who's active in architectural preservation. He has written extensively on Harlem's architectural and cultural history and has recently been awarded a position as one of Harlem's community scholars by Columbia University. Please join me in welcoming John Reddick. Well, thank you for coming. This is the last for this year of a series of it's been about nine presentations and it's been very well received and then each topic sort of looks at some other aspect of either projects in Harlem or artists in Harlem and Shanique Smith's work, I had first seen it at the studio museum in Harlem and it was very inspiring, very sort of looking at the aspects of the culture and sort of picking those up almost like a tornado would pick up pieces and artistically kind of incorporate them and something that shows both a painterly style and figurative. It was just really, really wonderful and I was lucky enough to be on the panel with the MTA's Arts and Transit when we were making the selection and the bus station was a real issue in Harlem. It was a sizable facility in a period where they were looking at a lot of the mayor and the city in general looking at a lot of these facilities and saying well some neighborhoods were getting more than others and what's the fair way to sort of distribute these facilities around the city. So even though they're enlarging the facility, there's a real dialogue with the community about the physical building and bringing it into it aspects of a sort of a green environment. It's going to have a green roof. It has a lot of plantings and looking to bring a lot of greenery in terms of the physical environment and making it a special place for the neighbors and residents there. But I think as much as the building is unique in this technology, I think Shanique brought some really interesting and engaging elements to the building. So I'm glad to welcome here tonight Shanique Smith to join us and talk. Now the facility is at 145th and Lenox Avenue. It's near Esplanade Gardens which is a major housing facility in Harlem. Really sort of targeted middle-class housing in the period where there's sort of flight from Harlem in the 50s and early 60s. These were sort of very solid middle-class buildings at the end of sort of the end of Lenox Avenue there. So the neighbors were really engaged. Community Board 10, I think it was 10 is the community board for that. So there was a real engagement back and forth to kind of figure out what the facility was going to be. And some of you might not remember, but her mother, Clara Hale, was a significant figure in Harlem during the crack epidemic. And one of the things that was a real problem for children of crack-addicted mothers is that they also acquired the same addiction. So a lot of the times, even though the mother wanted to care for it, there was a real rejecting quality of the mother because they were so hyperactive. And mother Hale just decided to take in these children where the mothers felt they couldn't deal with them or she had been a nurse. And so a lot of people from Yoko Ono to Donald Trump supported her effort. And she really went to battle and kind of really defined this whole issue around childcare and caring with very limited resources in the beginning to do something really unique and special. So she was a special, she holds a special place in the hearts of people in Harlem. So all this was part of, you know, so think of mother Hale and that story and then a transit bus terminal. And so how are you going to make those two things have some sort of dialogue with one another. And I think we'll see as you start to talk about the imagery, but you'll see that there was a real significant kind of reaching out to the community in the imagery. Yeah, and being invited to make a proposal for the work I did consider mother Clara Hale. And as she was like a mother to a lot of people in the neighborhood and taking in families to and helping broken families and taking in children with AIDS and not long prior to that, my grandmother had passed away. And so I saw a sort of affinity as I was making the work. And it was springtime. For my proposal, I started out and with just site visits. The building wasn't even built yet. It was just a big hole. At 145th and Lenox, a very big hole, like a really big hole that was covered up by boards. And so I started out by going to the mother Clara Hale house where she was taking in children and walking the walk between there on 122nd and to the bus depot site and experiencing that particular part of the neighborhood. And also gathering materials, scraps of paper and things like that. Because if you don't know my work, I use objects and materials like clothing, fabric, paper and the things that we cast off or leave behind that are part of our everyday lives and try to bind that in with either rope or calligraphy. So that's where I begun, you know, collecting like I would for any other piece. And in the process of that, I found this children's drawing. Because there is an elementary school currently right next to where mother Clara Hale's house was or is, but it's not really functional. And I found this drawing. And, you know, it just kind of clicked for me. You know, I'm thinking about kids thinking about her life thinking about that neighborhood which is very like that little corner is very brick, you know, like straight up and down brick buildings. And also the nature of what the bus depot was going to be using reclaimed water to wash buses, you know, more energy efficient in the green roof. And so like with the recycling of my work and the children's drawing, it kind of clicked for me. And so I use this drawing. See, it is a bus stop. I think you were saying maybe it was a basketball hoop, but that's like a little bus there as inspiration for color. And I just started sketching. And so and it just jumps to this. I don't normally use figurative elements in my work, but I don't like to make up rules that I can't break. And so I felt like I needed to have something figure ish a mother type of figure in this work. So that's kind of the central and there's a childlike figure there and then using materials found in the neighborhood mixed together to create a kind of idea of a garden, an abstract garden of, you know, unwanted materials kind of like collecting. I saw it as collecting things like she kind of collected people and making, you know, bringing out the grace in sparse situations. So this is the actual artwork for my proposal. I could do nothing else but create paintings because that's how I work. Do you do the calligraphy first and sort of apply the material so go back and forth? It goes back and forth. And, you know, this has a kind of because of the nature of the where the art was going to go on the building. It had a narrative sort of flow. So it's kind of a broken choppy pieces move around. And so that's where we started there. And then, you know, we presented, I presented the idea and I was chosen to do the project and in working with Arts for Transit, Arts and Transit, and getting the actual dimensions for the building because this is my first public project. So forgive me if I don't talk about it like a savvy designer. I had to expand the scale of the artwork that I made by double to fit this box here, this rectangle on the front of the building. And so, yeah, these are some digital renderings of the work and the building, which is not yet open. My artwork is completed, but the building is still in progress. And this is the MTA question. Do we know about what time the building is going to open roughly? Anybody? No, they don't dare say in public, that's okay. But we're shooting like a spring, late spring summer. Beginning of 2014. Beginning of 2014, yeah, somewhere around then. Yeah, it's simulcast so we can't say. So after a long process of talking about things materially and how the work would be fabricated to be, because this is 120 feet by 20 feet and it's like 20 feet in the air roughly. And the piece that you showed us in the exhibition for the commission, the piece was in the room, so it's a small size. Yeah, the original artworks are about 28 inches high. So it had to be photographed and then taken digitally. And we created it into Mosaic. This is a bit of a sample that was one of the samples that were presented. And working with fabricators, you know, because my work is very much about my hands, you know, I make it by myself. And having to create like a large scale piece and working with fabricators is a different process for me. So in the choosing and working with fabricators, the processes are all done by hand. But other hands, like each piece of mosaic and glass was cut by hand and put together and then installed onto the building. And it's great if you get to go through some of the MTA stations, the evolution of the ability to transfer to mosaic from drawings. So if you look at some of the early, particularly in some of the Harlem Stations along the Lenox slide, you see the early ones are much cruder in terms of trying to get the detail, because they really are just like hand done. Whereas with the computer, they can really cut precision-wise to whatever the piece was. Well, I mean, they're all cut by hand. Right, this image is me at the Mosaic studio and they have a digital version over there. Right, and then this is the original artwork that we're looking at and choosing materials. Some of the tiles are handmade and given the same texture as, like say, there's handmade paper in the piece, tie dyed. You know, there are different tiles chosen for different aspects of the work to capture the spirit of it. And so there are some images of how it's put together, cut by hand. I think it's how meticulous. Yeah, I forget how many tiles. How many tiles? It's like a million tiles. But then, you know, so I worked with them closely and going to the studio and, you know, like this particular image. I know we changed this before we installed it and bumped up the color, things like that, different choices. I think we're like photographic images originally in your collage. Yeah, there are bits from, like say, ads from magazines. There's flattened cans found on the ground, like wrappers and posters from the neighborhood and bits of fabric. I got some items from the Goodwill that I think is around the 30s. And then mixed it, blended it with other things because I hoard paper and fabric in my studio. So these are some of the elements that were three inches in the original that were blown up to three feet in the finished product. I like this piece in particular because this fabric and the stitching that they were able to make happen in the mosaic. That's the can. So that's the digital, you see the original can and the digital rendering and then the handmade clay tile. Do you have any questions? This set up, so it's a repeat of each section? It had to be created in sections and then carried around the studio in sections and then studio is kind of small so they stack them up and worked on top of them. So it comes in 10 panels, each one is like 20 by something big. And those individual panels as they were installed, they were divided like this for transport and storage. So now the surface that we're looking at now is, this is the base image and the tile would be laid. No, that is the tile. Those are the sections. I'm so painterly. Yeah, I think they did a really good job. It looks like my hand. The thing that I liked about this fabricators, they also thought about the materials giving a translucent nature to the calligraphic marks and where things layered. So I mean, Arts for Transit and the panel and the MTA wanted to create something special. And for me, it's super special because getting started as an artist moving to New York in 2003, the studio museum in Harlem was the most supportive of me and helped propel me on this road of being professional artists. And I've spent a lot of time in Harlem so to be able to do a project that's permanent there in a special place through special processes is like a dream for me that is still a gift. When we were having the panel, I mean, the community, lots of times people really want a figurative piece because we want to see an image of Mother Hale. So this was kind of a departure from what they would have ordinarily done to sort of hire. But they really felt the spirit in terms of looking at the image and feeling she really, there was this kind of abrasive feel with the figure and all of that. So that's what I was hoping for and tried to and be the work with an energy and create movement and a lightness that was like the sky amidst the buildings. And I guess personally I was kind of nervous about not making something that was concrete and depicting, but everyone's been so supportive of the process. Did you talk to several fabricators or did you settle on one or there was one pretty much right off the bat? We talked to a couple and I was able to make those connections. And there was one that stood out for me right off the bat and they create different processes for every project. And you have artists, I know if you go to the talics and all that, a lot of the foundry places, all that they engage other artists. Yeah, well and the people who run the company are artists as well. Who was the company? Mosaic. Mosaic design, I didn't know if I could plug them, but they're really awesome. Small business. So this is their crew installing the piece. It took from the time we did the panel and the proposal, a year, right? Was it a year? I'm sorry, things fly by and it's been two years since that initial meeting. So this was completed in July in the summer because it's important to have good weather to install mosaics on the building. Make a real sense of the scale now with the people next to it. Yeah, and through rain and heat, being up there, they did this all by hand. So now how would you supervise this? Would you come out periodically? They would do a section? Yeah, well we communicated when I wasn't in the studio and images were sent and we looked over things. Because they can get up really high and take pictures like this one that I took. This is how they work on it on the floor and we made corrections. And then after that there's approval. And in the installation process I visited the site and the panels were delivered slowly over time. Because to store them they might get damaged and things like that. So they were fixing things or making changes on the last panels and communicating with me while they were installing the beginning of the piece. And then we found out this wonderful phenomenon that happens at a certain point in the day. Reflection of the other buildings. Yeah, this little sparkly thing happens. So light shifts the piece because there's glass elements and some things are iridescent and those things were taken into consideration. And if it was lower on the ground you would see that there's different texture and raised bits to it. Now also there were, as she was looking at this there were also windows to do. And so to sort of transfer from the idea of doing mosaic which is this sort of non-translucent which you're trying to create a translucent feel. Now in the windows you have the opposite in a way. So along the sides of the building are these columns of glass windows and created from details of the front. I put together a design for the windows and I think they're relative even though it seems like the mosaic is very concrete. A lot of those bits are glass as well and react to light just in a different way. So this is kind of the schematic architectural drawing with the designs. How tall are they roughly? The panel of windows is about 9 feet. I'm sorry, I keep referring to you. So they look like 9 feet each, 9 times 1, 2, 6. 6 by 6 feet, that's what I was talking about. So like 30 feet high and it starts I think like 15 feet off the ground. You'll see. There you go. So the glass had been installed before the mosaic and I worked with a different fabricator for that who also did the work by hand in Germany. Oh really? Yeah. It's called Peter's Glass. And there were several fabricators that were presented for that as well and I chose this one because of the hand processes. It's basically this one main guy, young kid who was completely confident and would just go out and paint like the calligraphy, like I would, is very confident. So here you see that drawing again. And at this stage in our development of the project, it made sense. This idea came to me about that school and the windows and the community and wanting to include children's drawings from the community in with the work. And so with assistance from Arts and Transit, we did a workshop at PS 242. I think it was 242. And which is the school where I found the drawing in front of my mother Hale's house. And so right down here, you see one of the kids drawings because I thought it would, you know, when some people live in a neighborhood their whole lives and, you know, the representation of Mother Clara that it would be cool to or more meaningful for me interactively for people in the neighborhood to have children's drawings be part of the piece permanently. So I did a workshop for one day with two classes and we drew flowers together and talked about what, you know, how to observe things with and draw from life. So, and they did some really great drawings. And I took those, not all of them, but some of these drawings here, like I love that one. And the names of the child who made it and incorporate it into the design for the Anton windows. Have they been by to see it yet? Not yet. Not that I'm aware of. Because some of them might still be covered by blankets. I'm not sure I haven't visited the site, but some were obscured for a while. But when all things are complete with the building, we're hoping to do, you know, at least I would like to go back and engage. And also there's a senior center across the street and I promise to come do our project with them. So there are some of the drawings. And we worked on choosing colors for the paint and thinking a lot about how light would interact from the outside and from the inside. Because people work in the building and how the light would affect them. And so it's kind of always shifting. Like at night it would glow from behind and during the day you could see. And what level of transparency and how that might cast a line of calligraphy within the building. So here we're choosing glass paint colors. And there's that guy I was talking about. So they used airbrush and then hand painting. And during the process of this, some colors can't go next to each other unless it's been fired. Because the glass gets baked in a big oven and the paint becomes permanent part of the glass. So some of these would have multiple firings. And they would mask parts off. So there's a white section up in the top that would be one of them. There were some bare parts in the... It might be really light blue in the original. So yeah, like that's white part that hasn't been rendered yet. So in the studio there they hang the glass up to see how things are working with light. And they take them outside and things like that. So this is what in the process I could see in the beginning samples. And then when we translate, we're communicating in between. I would get images like every other day. Was that it? Sorry guys, maybe that was the end. I don't know what happened. Usually you can just back up. I don't want to go by. So the flower there, is that a photographic image or is it all brush stroke in? I think it's a combination... It's not photographic, nothing is. It's a combination of airbrushing where the main part had been masked out and then the lines brought in, some by brush, some by airbrush. Yeah, that was the last image. Thank you. Now we take questions. Anyone have any questions while we're here? No, in the process of the glasswork, if you're not, you said it was in Germany. So all the back and forth was through photographs? Did you get to see any of it before it was shipped? Yeah, I visited that studio twice and worked there. And again, part of the reason why they were chosen was the hand process that they could demonstrate. So they wanted to see me work and I worked on painting glass with them so that they could understand my hand. And I went back again. And then at the end, or in between it was drop box, hundreds of photos of every little step. He really does get your gesture, your hand gesture. For the scale, I mean, it's like you said, ten times larger or more. The largest work I've been a part of in the main. We have a microphone. Oh, okay. No, I just had a question about the maintenance that this piece is going to need and how long it will last before pieces start to fall off and things like that. Pieces will never fall off. No, and it needs minimal maintenance. If you go into subway arts and transit, for the most part, they're all in pretty good shape. I mean, one of the smart things when New York started to relook at the subways and turn them around, when I first came to New York, a lot of the tile work was the square bathroom tiles that you see in your house. And they decided they were going to look at the old subway system. If they were going to bring in art, the tradition in the subway was tile. And the whole brick tile that we see now in every store, that portion tile that's shaped like a brick, that did not exist when the MTA first did stations. They had to get people, artisans to do that. But there was such a volume after that. Well, MTA created subway tiles. Basically. So that whole portion, that proportion that came back that Martha Stewart uses and all of that, you see it everywhere. Now, I mean, when the first stations they did, they had to hire an artisan to actually make that proportion tile because it didn't exist in terms of a fabricator. So the volume of what they do and how they look at it, they really have mastered that particularly from the use of tile and sense of maintenance. And for this particular piece, since it is outdoor and exposed to the elements, there are a lot of regulations and things that were considered in installing it and preparing the building for the installation. It has to be frost proof. It can't freeze. It's sturdy. And I've seen stuff like get thrown on it and stuff like that, but because it's also outdoors, the next time it rains, it's completely clean again. And with the glass on the sides, that's sandwiched in between layers of glass. So the art itself isn't exposed to the elements at all. So it's sturdy. The John in the back of the question. Can I make one more comment? I'm sorry. But that's part of also why we chose to do the mosaic on the outside of the building, that large scale for that material because it was low maintenance. It didn't require separate lighting or maintenance. Have the fabricator that you chose for this piece done subway mosaics before? Yeah, the mosaic people had. Not to my knowledge, outdoors and to that scale. So it was, you know, a stretch for them and they learned as they went. And I think that's part of their process, is creating new ways to make their own tiles and put things together. Thank you so much for your presentation. I really enjoyed it. You spoke about the challenges of taking your work that was smaller scale into a larger scale. And I was wondering if you could talk a little more just about the decision to pursue public art and to even imagine your work at a larger scale than it was originally. Well, you know, I hadn't thought about it until this. And I had done some murals that are permanent where I hand painted them myself. But the opportunity to work on the scale and stretch myself was appealing to me. And I had some trepidation, but like I said, because at first I couldn't wrap my mind around certain things because I'm very kind of like a caveman in a sense because it's very basic. I write, I tie things up, I work basically alone. And, you know, the mathematics and the architecture and how things would work together and scale up, you know, confounded me at first. But then people around me were really helpful in figuring some of that out and finding the right fabricator to work with. It's a huge difference. I mean, a lot of these shops, they really are, they're other artists who really look at it the way they would want to see it done themselves, the quality, and they really put a lot into it. And they've worked in other fields. Like you say, they've had some other things, maybe a large scale or whatever. So they can start to tell you, here's how we did this and show you other examples and all of that. It's a great learning experience. And the MTAs, I mean, they have such great history over time of the projects that they've done and they've built relationships with a lot of these fabricators as well. I mean, it's a lot about rapport and people understanding how you work. And, you know, honestly, I like the original that I made, but when you, you know, to be confronted by that kind of scale, it's beyond, you know, what I made in a way. But I made it anyway. Which had a wonderful piece at the Studio Museum. How long ago was that? I want to say 2009. And it was very painterly with the fabric and the string. And this piece still feels like that. When you go by the station and everything, you still, even though it's done in another medium, you still feel the energy that's in the original work. Yeah, and I think working with Mosaic is kind of addictive. I really want to do it again like right now. I do, you know, I haven't actively sought out things, but there is a project that I'm working with right now. So we'll see how that goes. That involves some interaction with the hospital and patients and art. So we'll see how that goes. But it's a wonderful thing in the neighborhood. I do feel like when you talk about the Harlem Renaissance, and people want to sort of bring back to Harlem the new Renaissance, or is it, or isn't, I always felt the energy of the Renaissance was the potential to move forward. You know, so African Americans felt they had to be here as a gateway to go forward. I feel like the Studio Museum has been a real sort of Harriet Tubman, you know, in terms of artists, and moving them forward seeing the opportunity. And the MTA is to be applauded in the effort to sort of really look at artists that speak to the community. I mean, we had a range of artists, but all of them had a certain compassion and passion for Harlem. I think it really starts to show up in the work when that added dimension is there. So you should be applauded. I think it came up really well. Oh, thanks. And, yeah, thanks to Harlem and Arts for Transit for letting me do it. Anyone else? Well, thank you all. You're welcome to some more postcards of some of the image of the tile work. And we're going to have one more session, I think, in the spring in February. But I thank you all for some of your repeaters. So I thank you for the support over the series. And you can go online and see all the past this one. They're all simulcasts. And then you can go to the Cooper Hewitt site and see some of the other talks. You'll see there's a really diverse look at the artists and the work that's going on in the community. So I thank the Cooper Hewitt for the opportunity. It's been a great time. Thank you. Thank you.