 People of color or black folks, we feel like, well, we know what's going on with us. And far too often, we don't take the time to really discuss it and see how it impacts us, look at areas of where we can have growth as a community and really make some transformation. With this exhibition, I'd like to thank Thomas for another opportunity to work with him and bring artists that I know, A, should have worked seen by a lot of people in the city via it being in the library, B, who have something to say and something to offer in every conversation they step in with their art and also just having a relationship that continues to grow with an institution that carries what one might say is a dying part of our culture, reading, paper, all of that. And so libraries are amongst my favorite places to be in structurally, architecturally they're beautiful and there's so much history and I think that it's fitting for us to be talking about black matters in a space that holds history and we're all about archiving and so these voices need to be heard in their particular generosity in sharing your work and your stories in each piece. I'll take that as a lead to say let's give the artists a round of applause for the work and I'm not sure if you had an opportunity to go to the third floor and visit the African-American Center and really just take in the work that's there. You'll see a lot of it behind us and we wanted you to be able to just see it while we're discussing and hopefully you'll have an opportunity to point out the pieces that are yours. So I want to just introduce Arrington West, Christine Mays, Janet Shirt and Lorraine Bonner to jump into the dialogue. So let's welcome them again. I'll start with Black Matters and I'll start with the question around each of you sharing two things briefly. One, when you first heard Black Matters and the opportunity to share work, what came up for you? And two, select a piece in the show that you can speak to that represents your sense of what Black Matters are. We can start with you, Arrington. Hey. All right. I'm really slow. Can you say the question again? What came up for you when you heard Black Matters? What was the first thing that you thought? Obviously just point blank because you're talking about art. It was representation. So that's the first thing that came to mind. And then diversity as well. Yeah, exactly that. And then select a piece that you put in the show and kind of just give us a sense of what you felt that contributed to Black Matters. Well, I'm an illustrator, painter, muralist. In this show I put a few of my illustrations in. And when we get there. All right, so, yeah, this one's a... All right, that was it. And you don't have to pick one that we'll get to. But it's like the kind of cartoony, rounded shaped drawings are mine. Black Matters, what it means to me in regards to my artwork is the fact that I had to deal with my own artistic growth about what is being an artist or what is being a Black artist mean to me. Growing up, I just saw a lot of African art and African-American art in the context of how it reflected our history. And it almost felt that while growing up I had to also adhere to those same design motifs and that the art that I was attracted to didn't fit into that, it didn't fit. But as I got older, and I went to HBCU, these right here, I went to HBCU and that was kind of like the biggest topic or the biggest conflict I had in between myself. And so basically with these pieces, it was just the fact that each artist chooses and defines how they want to represent themselves. And in context of being an artist or a Black artist, that also power is what we decide. So for me, it's characters, cartoons, graffiti. I believe graffiti is kind of like one of the purest art forms out there. It's pure expression, raw expression, a little unrefined, but all passion, all intention. But when you add that intention with cartoons, then you get my work, which is bubbly, but it also has themes of encouragement, positivity, and, yeah, upliftment. So that's what my art is about and that's what the context of my art and the show. Thank you. Christine. Can you hear me? I don't know if I'm close enough. When I thought of Black Matters, really the first thing that came to mind was Black Lives Matter just because that's been what's going on here in this cycle of the state of the world at this moment. And at the time, I was creating a group of work that was centered around Black Lives Matter and was sort of a, in a way, a different avenue of the work that I normally do. I always do work that I feel like captures the soul and the spirit of a person. I do three-dimensional wire sculptures and this group of work that I did was different in that it was male-oriented, whereas I usually create garments that are usually women's dresses and the spirit of women. But this work was a little different because it had males involved in it and I think the piece that stood out that I'd like to talk about is a piece that is pretty iconic right now because it's the hands up. And I titled the piece Surrender because when I showed it to people after I first made it, half the people I showed it to said, oh, they're praising God. So it was, you know, there would be like two drastic responses to it. It'd either be like, oh, praise God, or it would be like, oh, you know, hands up, don't shoot. And when I really thought about it, it's indicative of our culture, that we are a culture of black people who most of the time have some sort of church background or some sort of foundation of prayer. And this whole idea of surrender, I titled it Surrender with a question mark because it's a question of like, by saying hands up, are we really surrendering or are we just, you know, making that plea for our lives? And, you know, if it's a gesture of praise, it's the same thing of surrendering control and asking for assistance with our spirits. So there's that kind of juxtaposition there. And so I really, to me, that's one of the pieces that I felt was very appropriate for this time and particularly for this event. Yeah, thank you, thank you. Janet? I'm Janet Sherd, and I'm a... So a little closer to the microphone. And I'm a freelance photographer, a documentary photographer. I like to document people's lives. I've documented artists working in studios. That's one of my main ones. But the images that I have in the exhibition, two of them are a friend of mine that was in hospice. And hospice is something that we don't talk about. So I thought about hospice being fleeting, temporary, infimeral, and it all turns out to be impermanence. Everything is impermanent in our lives. The image that I chose for hospice was a friend of mine and I did it in honor of her because every exhibition that I had in Chicago, she always came to it with her oxygen tank and her children. And then she had her children to write about the exhibitions in schools, in their classrooms. So I called her family and I told her, guess what? The pictures of Ethel, her name is Ethel Robinson, I have an exhibition to let them know that I still honored her and she would come to my exhibitions because I taught her son in fourth grade. And so he now is 40 years old and he has twins. And so I had the images in honor of her because it's something that we as people don't talk about death in permanence of life. So that's my contribution to our culture. Thank you, Lorraine. Well, thank you. I want to say thank you, first of all, to being selected to be in this show. I think it's a really amazing show and I'm glad to be part of it. And I want to thank the library for hosting us and Afrosolo for obviously doing this for 20, would you say 27 years? When I first heard the Black Matters, I've been thinking a lot about black and white for a really, really long time. And when I started doing art, it was basically in order to deal with some traumatic experiences that were coming into my consciousness from my childhood. And the clay, I started using clay. I have no real artistic training. I don't really know how to draw. But somebody gave me some clay and it just kind of, stuff just started coming out of my fingers and hands. And after a while, I realized that I was using black clay to represent myself and white clay to represent those who had harmed me. And then gradually, the clay has been my teacher and I gradually started seeing, well, this is really not just me in my little life. This is really a much bigger problem that my personal experiences of trauma and domination were just a microcosm of the political situation and from everything from the way certain human beings treat the earth to the way men treat women to the way people who have less melanin treat people who have more melanin. And so for a long time, I did a series of works which I call the perpetrator series. And I defined perpetration as the act of violating a trust, betraying a trust. Anyone who betrays a trust is a perpetrator. And because to me, trust is the foundation of being social beings, and we need to be social beings in the same way that we need oxygen and water. We can't exist without a social context and the social context depends on trust. One of the things that I thought about when people were talking about, after 9-11, when everybody was all fridst up about the ships coming into the harbor, I live in Oakland, so the port of Oakland is a big deal. And they were trying to figure out how they were going to x-ray these big old cargo vessels, thousands of them a day. And I thought, how did we do it before? Oh, we kind of trusted that nobody was going to bomb us, you know? So many of these pieces, I think all of the pieces that are in this show right now are of the black and the white clay. And then what happened to me was that I would be going into the clay store to buy my clay, and I would be getting, you know, this black clay called Cassius basaltic and then some kind of porcelain to be the white clay. These are all just the straight clay colors. And then I would sort of see out of the corner of my eye, I would see the wall with all the different other clays and the clays were like brown. That's one of my pieces there. That's called privilege. It's an image of someone who isn't looking and isn't listening but is spewing out of their mouth this barbed wire language. And that's kind of the idea of... And this is a piece here called son of perpetration. He's looking in a mirror. He's got a gun in his mouth. He's shooting the person he sees in the mirror. And on his head he has a little do-rag that's filled with pictures of my little son when he was in elementary school. You know, the people bring the pony to school and they put the little kid on the pony with the little cowboy hat and they take the pony picture, a little five-year-old. That's what son of perpetration is wearing on his head. So I saw these other clays that have all these different colors and they look like human being colors. You know, browns and reds and light and dark. And I started thinking about what a denial it is for any of us to say, oh, I am black or I am white. I mean, this tablecloth is black. Nobody is that color, you know? It's like denying, it's like the first step of perpetration is to get you to deny the evidence of your senses. You know, everybody has a color. You know, it may be pinkish. It may be beige. It may be tan. It may be umber. And then I started thinking, well, if black and white is not really about people, what is it about? This is where I came to, looking at black and white more in terms of archetypes and the, like the yin-yang symbol. And then thinking about all of the kinds of things that are presented to us as dualities that really aren't, or that are dualities that are, they're dualities, but one is always favored over the other. You know, like we've got, you know, the gender continuum. You know, but, you know, it's really tilted towards one gender being on top. Even top and bottom is a continuum. You know, being alive and up on the planet is valued over being under the ground and contributing to the life of the plants. White obviously over black. And so what I, what my work now is about recognizing and celebrating the various human colors in the clay and at the same time lifting up the dark, the black, the night, the earth, and the other parts of the yin, the black part of that yin-yang thing. So that's where I'm with black. Thank you. We had another artist come through. Thank you so much, Bush Mama. If many of you got an opportunity to see the flyer, Bush Mama is the artist who created that beautiful piece. We should definitely give Bush a round of applause. It was just beautiful. And we would love to hear your feedback. The two things that we mentioned was when you first heard Black Matters, what came up for you? And then the other one is just selecting one of your pieces and kind of speaking to how it resonates to the Black Matters conversation. For me, Black Matters, there's so many. But I think the most pressing, oh, can you hear me? The most pressing thing is our lives, the ability to keep our lives and the fact that we are losing our lives. And what does that mean when our lives are lost, especially to systemic racism and violence? So that's a big one for me, and it is on the top of my list when I'm working creatively. How can I take the sadness and the pain of the loss and transform that into something beautiful? Make it to where it's something that inspires us and makes us feel great instead of sick and sad. And so my piece, the title piece, or I don't even want to call it the title piece, but the piece that was used for the flyer was the elevating egg on because I need, as a spiritualist, as a person who has a spiritual practice, one of the things we do is we constantly elevate the spirits of the dead, especially those who were taken away violently. Those bodies are now in purgatory or they haven't been crossed over properly because they didn't necessarily fulfill their destiny here on Earth. They were snatched before their time. There's rights for that. There's a way to process that death so that it crosses over into the ancestral realm in a good and clean and beautiful way. And when that doesn't happen, the spirits don't get to be an access to us in the way that we can call on them and access their power and their energy and to call on them for guidance. So we have to do some work in order for that to happen and that we elevate that spirit. We actually do a ritual called a nine-day elevation. We spend nine days elevating that spirit from the realm that it's in to the realm of the ancestors so that we can now call them in, call that energy in, call that power in, access their energy. And so with this piece, Elevating Agoon, I took an image of a woman with a crown of corn, an African woman, and the corn for me instantly reminded me of slave ships and each kernel of the corn was a body, was cargo, precious cargo that we've lost coming across the diaspora and even those that made it here that we lost due to their spirits being broken by the colonizer. And then what happens with those spirits? They need to be elevated and so this piece that I created, I called in each and every one of those bodies, each and every one of those bodies that were in the water, each one of those bodies that made it here on Earth, I called them in for each kernel of the corn in her hair. And then I took it a step further and actually implanted slave ships on certain pieces of the corn. And if you see the image, you'll be able to look and see the three slave ships that I put there. So to really just drive home the idea that I wanted those spirits to be lifted and I wanted them to be properly buried with all their rights so that we can access their energy and power. Thank you. I want to go back to some of the things that, or some of the points that I thought would really open up a bigger dialogue for us in the conversation. Arrington, you said we decide and I thought that was really powerful. And I'm not surprised that it comes from an artist who has a love and appreciation for graffiti because it is always like either you're doing it or you're not. And so what can you offer the space when you say we decide and thinking about that, that power even knowing what the world says about you. And let's just really take the time to learn from who you are in this space. You're the only male on the stage. And so I would love to highlight that and take some of your wisdom because while we talk about the lives that are lost, I think that there is a representation there for who you are right now and to say we decide in the midst of everything that's going on. It says you don't get to decide nothing. As a matter of fact, you ain't pooh! So how do you keep that for yourself and continue to create boldly and to take it a step further and have a group called Black Male Collective filled with brothers doing amazing art? How do y'all do that? For me and most of the guys and the collective would kind of agree with me. It's trust and collaboration. So what she said, perpetrator, denied trust. I wrote that down. I was like, yeah, that's a great word to just hone in and bring Drive Home because I think the biggest part of my artistry personally is the art of collaboration knowing that I might have the strength to believe that I have the power to design my own art to take control of how it looks and to be, you know, I put the purpose in it. I do it because I have something I want to say. But not every artist person feels that way. If artist is a reflection of life, there's a lot of people in life that also feel like I have to do a certain thing because that's how I survive or that's how I get by. So for the art, it's kind of like in this world where, you know, we're not supposed to only be artists. We have to have a job or two or three or four or five and do our art. You know, it's like you get pressured to not want to be yourself and so it's the trust and collaboration and the community of your peers that are artists but also just people that support you. That's where it comes from. Actually, like, you know, this world is harsh. People are mean. People are stupid. But like, people are good. Like, not everybody's going to do you right but like, I mean, everybody has a different background so it's like to overcome the perpetrator to overcome the feeling of not being able to trust does take time and different time for each person but it's just like, it's like it just, you know, it is that like once someone gets to a personal level where it's like they're able to trust again to believe in their fellow human being like that's the answer. It's love and it's coming through trust and collaborating with other people because like you said before, we're all in this world together. So it's like, yeah, there's people that are, you know, chose, stole, took, that have made it so where it's like they feel like they're more important, everybody knows like we're all just as important, you know. And if we don't know, it's a reminder and that's why it's like, you choose, you decide your artistry and you also choose how to define it because you might define it once when you're young you might think you're all, you're this but then when you get older you realize like I am that but I've grown and now I'm this. I might have little parts of that in my past but I've grown since then I was like so you literally do decide. So yeah, so it's like when you don't try to pigeonhole yourself or don't let others try to pigeonhole you with the power, that's it. Well one of the things that I heard in that and thank you for just really breaking that down, you spoke to dualities and I heard that in what you were saying Errington can you talk a little more about the dualities and how that plays into the work you create? Like how does your perception of the differences really beyond just the work is black and white? What is the mental part that you're dealing with in that? Well I guess it's almost to me it's like a reality of three-dimensional life that when there's a front there's a back and when there's a left there's a right and a top and a bottom and those kinds of dualities like black and white and male and female and of course the shades of the continuum in between there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. That's okay, that's real. But what happens is one gets valued over the other so if someone is building a building you know the person who maybe has the most knowledge who's not doing necessarily any more important work than the person who's hammering the nails ends up being more highly regarded and there's a whole system of hierarchy that I think has not always been true for us as human beings. I think that as we evolved in the earlier days my reading of anthropology and stuff is that people really pretty much practiced a very egalitarian way of life and I think we all feel that in ourselves and we notice when it's not happening there's this hierarchy that there's something wrong with that. It's like Arrington said, why should one person think they're better than the other person? So I think thinking of things in a circular way is a way of both recognizing and participating in life because there really is no end to life it just doesn't end. Even when whatever form you're in dies you still go into the earth and you become part of the cycle again. You can't only breathe in and not ever breathe out you've got to do both. So that feels like what's real to me. I love that you talked about the cycle of life and I was looking at Janet like I really want to talk about impermanence and I was like that's perfect. That there is this and I feel like deep down we know it even if we have certain beliefs like there is this continuum but there is also this thing that feels very finite on this earth that we get really related to but for someone who has spent time with a loved one in hospice what can you offer regarding that cycle and the way we deal with the pain of that cycle that going around. It's a very interesting and deep question. I think that we all think that we're going to live forever and we don't like to think about life changing but I've begun to think about that. I am 75 years old and the body wears out. You may not think it will. I went to the foot doctor yesterday and I said I have this callus. Why do I have it? Well he said you've aged and it's worn and now you have other issues that are coming too but when I was visiting with Ethel she was not sad because she was in hospice and I think that we think about it being a sad situation when it doesn't have to be. The day I stopped by was the day that her caregiver had just made her face up so she had nice eyelashes and it was a very beautiful visit that I had just happened to stop by. So I think about also I had a twin sister that was in hospice. I took care of her for 10 years but I still don't like thinking about being as old as I am. I'm coming near that I have less time to live than I lived so I'm trying to now think about doing things I've not done with my life and finding more joy in it and at the same time trying to be very thoughtful of other people and kind to them and helping them when I can without giving too much of myself up. I think that we can kind of get caught in that but the pictures that I chose with Ethel and hospice showed that how impermanent life is is just really and yet when you see her face there's no sadness in it at all and that's what I wanted to share. Did I...? You did. Did you have more that...? Yeah, you can say more. I just thought about... I wrote these words down for impermanence that being fleeting, temporary, ephemeral and it suggests that it's inevitably an ending or dying that we have. I mean you may have something now that you are working with but everything changes. Your weight, your thoughts, you know, so... That's all. When you think about the freedom it's almost like the freedom in letting go to get back like even if it's spiritual like if you can, you know, Melora and I... Not lost but our father passed in 2007 and we both had our own way of dealing with it and one of the things that I shared with Melora is the moment you truly accept is when they show up in another way and so there is something about that cycle of open and close and really having that be something that we don't have to believe but we know. You spoke about faith, Christine and how many of us as black folks, people of color have that as a baseline, culturally. You know, it's almost like your card you have to believe in something. You have to, like that's just kind of how we are. With that said, in your work what did you have to let go of to start to make these male bodies that represent not only bodies that you don't usually configure and make but now it's that body's in a state that you really wouldn't even want to be in in person. So what was that like for you as a creative to step into that space and make these men? I started out keeping it cute y'all but we had to circle back. It's been hard. I'm trying to express this without tearing up but it's going to happen if you take your time. This whole aspect of the way faith plays into my work is wild in the sense that I feel like I'm coming into a stage where I really, my work is growing stronger but it's in a way that I never expected and it's because I usually, as crazy as it sounds I usually wake up in the morning with some message for me as to what I should do. So I'm taking in just like everyone else here I'm taking in what's going on in the world and then on the news and trying to avoid it in some way which I still can't, I mean I don't think any of us can but I'll wake up with like where I'll hear you know you're going to make blah blah blah and it's clear as day like is there someone's in the room sometimes like what? No. And so there's been a few pieces that have come about where it's just you know this is what I want you to make and then there's that kind of like no no I don't want to make that but it nags at me to the point where I can't sleep so I know and then there's this urgency to just make it so once the idea comes I'm kind of frantically working on it mostly because there's no peace until it's out or until it's close to being completed because if I know that I have to do it and at the same time it's not comfortable so there's this feeling like as I'm working like I don't even want to show this like I don't, this isn't something I want to do but the flip side of that is there's always some other message that comes with the work like with the hands up don't shoot you know then it you know the way things played out it became this thing of surrender and faith and you know the bound piece was very disturbing to me it's the piece that I created with the man in handcuffs and but at the same but then I got this you know I'm like working on the piece and I get this message of like you should call it bound and then immediately this idea comes to mind about how bound has more than one definition like you can be tied up and bound or you can be bound and determined so you can you know so there's that hope there's the opposite side of the coin that there's you know as a people we are determined to to rise and to succeed to overcome and all of that stuff so there's always that I think that's the faith part too is there's always that flip side that comes in but right now I'm in a period of time where I love making work and I love what I do but it's a very vulnerable time because the work that's coming out is stuff that I would normally shy away from I mean and it connects it really connects with a lot of people in a great way but I know that it's that I'm being used as a tool in the big picture of things I mean that keeps me humble because I'm like I didn't want to make that but this is what I was told to make okay let's do this so that's kind of where faith comes into play Wow thank you and just thank you for your vulnerability and for just sharing what it really takes to create and I ask that question on purpose just to open it up for everyone who wants to share because one of the things that we take for granted with artists is that it takes something to generate that work it takes something to share it it takes something to deal with the issues within those pieces it's not just oh that is so cute and you really did it this time it's like let's really honor the medicine that artists bring let's really honor the work on the back end that has to be done and sometimes it's a lifetime of work before something comes out and so really just far too often artists aren't recognized as the expert they aren't recognized as the really and truly the people who know what's going on in the community who really know what our folks are dealing with because of those five jobs sometimes it's jobs working in communities working with age demographics that you don't get enough funding for that nobody wants to deal with and so it's like we really know how many of our children can really read or not how many of our children are suffering in school or not sometimes more than parents do and so there's a lot of emotional labor that goes into being an artist and certainly that is with artists who dare to really create work a reflection of what we're going through and what the earth is going through so I just want to acknowledge what it takes to create and do the work that you do does anyone want to share anything that I might not have asked before we open it up for the audience to make comments is anything good? did you want us to talk about our intention or were you just stating say what? what you just finished now that's what you get for talking way too much and long because I'm like I say that what did I say? you can certainly share about whatever's there for sure I'm like what did I say? before everyone else yeah I'll take that as a yes all the people say I'll be alright I disagree with what you said before artists are the we know a lot more than what I guess we perceived as actually I was going to say the creatives in any community across any place on the planet are the coolest people in that city, in that state we control the visual layout no I mean we control the visual layout aesthetically it gets stolen and taken into fashion taken into design and art but we are the designers we are the artists we are the ones that set the trends that's all I appreciate you for saying that because even if we don't get the credit we're still doing and so that gave something for me for someone who wants everyone to have equity in what they do that's kind of like my thing so I needed to hear that and I appreciate that question yes that's perfect because it gives us an opportunity to close this space and to go upstairs to take a look at the work on the third floor the library closes at 8 say we have an opportunity to take everyone upstairs so you can see it and take your photos and like mingle and speak to the artists directly so on behalf of myself and Thomas and the artists thank you all for being here let's give the artists a round of applause and I want to also just say thank you to the San Francisco Public Library and the staff and our cameraman and Katrina and Everett installation staff they are for a curator they're amongst the best and easiest group to work with word up okay fabulous let's give another hand for Melanie also during the discussion looking at some of the photos there are a couple that are presented as part of the festival one is of a sign that says stop killing people that's one that came as a result of the shooting in San Francisco in January of 2015 where four young men were killed I went to the vigil and at the vigil I like to take a photography they sort of captures a moment and for me the sign stop killing people in terms of black matters says a lot to me about us taking care of ourselves sometimes harming ourselves but that sign that's another one I took right there also and that's one just sort of the opposite of killing is one of coming together in love so capturing these moments of life is what I try to do and seeing those amongst these fabulous artists makes me feel good and I too would like to thank all of the artists for being here and participating in sharing your lives with us