 We're going to start by saying how happy we are to be here. We appreciate all of our fellow panelists and moderator, whom we've known since we were about 16 years old, as well as the organizers of the conference. So we're going to talk today about a recent project. We're going to talk today about a recent project entitled American Cipher. And this project looks at American stories about DNA and identity. But we got to this project through some earlier works that looked at data around black bodies. So in 2007, we did a piece called Big House Disclosure that was commissioned by Northwestern University. And that project explored reparations, among other things. And we did a number of interviews about the city of Chicago's slavery-era disclosure ordinance. The city has a policy where if you're a corporation that wants a city contract, you have to disclose whether you benefit it from the slave trade. Or whether you've descended from another business that benefited from the slave trade. And so they didn't have to do anything besides do the research and disclose it. But there was a lot of resistance to this policy. So we collected a number of interviews with citizens in the city of Chicago. And we asked people about their family history, how they came to this country. And we also asked them what they thought about this city policy. And the result of that is that we made a sort of long form sort of sound installation, a kind of 200-hour-long house song that played in public spaces in the city of Chicago. You could also hear this piece online. And so through thinking about history in that way, that led us to this project. And so this was a 2011-2012 commission from Buckdale University originally. And Buckdale asked us to think about the sort of relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. And so in doing a lot of research about Hemings and the Jefferson family, we became really interested in the way that the story about the DNA that linked them told us how that changed the way that people talked about the story. Not everybody changed their minds about the story, but it made different kinds of questions come about. So we became really interested in the stories about DNA and how that told us how we were related to each other, what was passed down, and what people thought DNA could do, what kind of information that did. So I'm sure all of you know the sort of research that was published in the late 90s sort of linking the Hemings and Jefferson families. That led us to looking at other American stories about race, identity, and DNA. And so we collected a number of popular stories. Some of these stories are referenced earlier. And we made a number of things from these stories. So we created a book that responds to things like Oprah Winfrey's claim that she's a Zulu, or stories about President Obama's lineage. Other stories that we collected? James Watson, who is credited along with Crick of discovering the Helix form and his statement about African intelligence. Yeah, in 2007, sorry. Go ahead and say. In 2007, Watson made statements implying that Africans were genetically inferior. And then later it sort of came out that Watson had a great deal of African ancestry himself. And so we just couldn't resist that. And then the other stories we look at are two men who have sort of different relationships to the criminal justice system. One person is James Bain, who was freed by the Innocence Project after serving 34, 35 years in prison. And then another person is Lottie Franklin, also known as a grim sleeper, who is a serial killer who was in prison, who was captured because he showed up in a familial database, DNA database. So the image that you see here is actually a bell that belonged to Sally Hemings. And this object functioned at the center of our project. It was sort of a stand-in. We needed a kind of physical object that would stand in for DNA for us. And this is her last remaining possession. It's owned by Howard University, but it lives in Monticello. We thought that was interesting. And so we took this bell and we asked. Well, the bell also was given to her by Thomas Jefferson's wife, who was also her half-sister. And when we did the research and found out about the bell, we didn't really know what we'd find. We didn't realize until we saw it that it was clearly a service bell. But that was an interesting thing to pass on. So we were really fascinated by the bell. So we make a lot of musical pieces, sound pieces. So we asked everybody if we could ring this bell. And we guessed because it was such an odd request, they said, OK. So they let us ring the bell. We recorded it, and we made a sound installation from it. So the first version of the project was a sound piece that played on the campus of Bucknell University. And so we made a kind of double helix, a kind of sort of sound pattern that played in the student center, using moving speakers inside the student center. We later took this project and expanded on it some at the Studio Museum in Harlem. And so what you see here is a version of the sort of sound installation with the video piece. And there are some prints that go along with this at the Studio Museum in Harlem. And this was up from March to June of this year. And now it's moving to another space. So there are a couple of things that you see here. The image here is still of some animation that goes on. And this is actually information from the Jefferson and Hemings family. And we use that as a score to sort of generate the musical information in the piece. So we also had a number of poems about our five stories and parables. And we're going to read a few of those briefly. Sally Hemings in the Helix. How short the violets are. How the eyelids droop. What sorrows the skin protects. The moon shape of the cells. How likely we are to deteriorate. Who the father is. If there are dimples. Everything the genes could reveal has already been said by a woman, Oprah as a Zulu. What a sorrowful dream it would be to carry a Zulu across the continent to the Western coast. Just to be stolen. Perhaps she dreams there was a slave castle at Africa's glorious southern cape. Or does she imagine this ancestor knew no chains. Was propelled for some odd purpose to these unlikely shores. An immigrant astonishingly free. But in the end is lost to us as all the ordinary others. So the last piece that we're going to read here is a parable. And this is called One Drop for James Watson. An architect dreamed of drawing a portrait of our origins. First he drew a ladder, next a zipper. He finally landed on the shape of a double stair. Winding steps met in the center and continued to twist. What did it cost the man to fathom this design? Nothing but the study of flight. He built a platform in the center of town and began to speak. At first the people applauded. For decades the man continued to speak. Poison began to pour from his mouth. It stained the portrait and tainted the air. The people ran for cover. The man stayed on the platform whispering apologies to no one. Sometimes we picture the sketchbook, the so many pages of errors. Bits of eraser still stuck in the pages. Sometimes it is the moment a friend enters the studio we imagine. She leans over the draft and points. Sometimes it's the tilted head of the man who drew the shape or the moment he looks at the page and thinks something's not right. Forget the figure. Though it's true you don't know much about a thing before you know its shape. The man who drew the helix after so many tries smeared his master work with one gesture. We lament the drunken stroke. The shoddy annex throw it before a crowd. We sing a song for the thoughtful designer ever aware of the feet on the stairs. So we'll stop there. Thank you. When you have the privilege of working with four artists, you dare not do something in an ordinary way. And so what I would suggest that we do now in the very few minutes that we have left is rather than having the moderator pose questions to the panelists, we're going to have the panelists pose questions to each other. You like that? So good Dr. Cheryl, what would you like to ask of your colleagues? Thank you, Dr. Cole. I posed a question earlier, so we're a little bit primed. But I think it's one that we could all have something to say about. And the question is, what is the role of memory in your work? How does it affect and or influence or shape your aesthetic choices? And so when I think about the work that you just showed Keith and Mindy, they're central figures, but you also are trained as sound artists and as writers and as visual and performance artists. So you might think of, in that answer, the way that you chose the particular kinds of aesthetic elements to interpret the stories, the narratives that you shared with us. And then Carla, with your work, you talked about photography and the science of photography in particular to shed light on familial narratives. And then in the last blurry shot, I couldn't figure out when I looked at it. Every time I'm like, OK, I don't have my glasses on. What's going on? But when I looked at it, I wondered why it was blurry, not just because of, we know how hard it is to take pictures in museums. But there was something really, I think, even more intentional in that. Because you could have gotten a clear shot if you wanted to. We all know that. Oh, I can't take your picture. Yeah, and I think part of the question to when I say memory, I think I want to kind of say writ large. I think I might be talking also about history or historical memory. And we could maybe even bring that back to what the project is here at hand for us today and in this panel. So that's my one big question. Great. Go ahead. I think with our project, part of what we're looking at and part of what we're inspired by was this kind of dance between whatever the current science said about, let's say, the Hemmings family, as that brushed against sort of the Hemmings family own stories about who they were and how that got adjusted sort of every few years based on whatever stories showed up in the media, whatever films are made about this controversy. And we were also kind of interested in how these very popular stories, let's say about Oprah or Watts and how these things might show up later, 20 years from now, 30 years from now. So we're kind of interested in this sort of larger public memory about these really important people. I will also say that, in general, I think part of our job as artists is to add value. And I think when you ask the question about memory, I think, well, one of the things that we want to do is to add value to the memory of our experience as black people, as Americans, as humans. So our work rubbed up against other things. Things we imagine, things we imagine in the future, things we imagine in parallel universes and also memories. In my work, I think I'm always, and I mentioned it in my presentation, I'm always a little bit confounded by this notion that people look at photographs and they associate them with memories. Because I think, in reality, very infrequently, do we photograph the things that we remember? They're generally two separate things. For me, though, what's, and so when I look at family photographs or I use family photographs and I'm aware of narratives that have been told to me or in which I participated, I just take them as fiction because they change every year or they change by the teller. But the more significant thing for me is the collective memory that my work often triggers, especially all the women in my family piece. The responses I generally get are, that could be my family or I should do this with my family so that the specificity of any one memory is subordinate to the way in which photographs, and I guess, in that instance, a certain presentation of photographs will prompt people to go somewhere else, to go someplace beyond those likenesses. Mindy, I think you had a question that you might want to ask of a photographer. Yes. So one of our questions was about the idea of photography. You had said in our earlier conversation that you were going to show work about family photographs. And I think our initial response was about what I thought, and I think Keith also thought, oh, OK, so genetics, family photographs, we're going to see the face and think about, we're going to see the relationship in the face. But it's interesting, like looking at these photographs and also thinking about what photography does and also thinking about all the things that the genetic code can express. In our conversation, we begin to think a lot about what else happens in a photograph. And then looking at these photographs, it seems like it's trying to say there's more than the surface here. Do you think about the relationship between the photograph and the interior or the photograph and that, which is not generally thought of as visual? I do, and in fact, that's also something I can't make up my mind about, because I think as a photo historian, I know better. I think they're just pieces of paper. But as a creative person, I refuse to let go of the idea that I can read something into a picture that's undeniable. And I think a lot of people do that. We do that on a daily basis. So she looks happy. He looks angry. He looks sad. We do it automatically. And so I still sit with that, because I know that everyone does it. And so I know that's how photographs communicate, even though objectively, they're just split-second chemical renderings of something that have a whole lot of choices made to get to that point. And I think you can't, without that photography, doesn't really exist. I think that's what we bring to it is what we project onto it. What it looks like is inconsequential, ultimately. Shale, did you want to weigh in on this? I was just going to add to the end of what you're saying. It's because what we project onto it and how they help us to tell stories, to create narratives. And if you talk about the really wonderful large piece that you ended with, it's a self-portrait. It's meant to be a self-portrait, but it's a series of, I don't know, how many portraits of people whom, for you, make up who you are. And so it's that very large tableau of a narrative that we can tell with a series of photographs. And we could talk about even what I love about how you show those images of your oneself is that they're there. And as the viewer, one can choose to go in a number of different places. But if those images were in, say, a book, it would be a completely different narrative because they would be, you would sequence them for us because you're very decisive. And so we would have to read them in that way, whatever that way would be. And it's true, the way that piece gets installed is that wherever I send it, all the pictures just go in an envelope and wherever I send it, they can make their own stacks. They just have to keep my same holes because that will deteriorate really quickly, but that's their only rule. You know, I think we've got to share the time and given that it is a matter of a few minutes before we must end, why don't we open up and say to our folk who have been so good to hang here all day long, Ustedes Tienin La Palabra, you have the floor. And so if there is a question or two, we'd love to hear them. With my students, one of the things that I've done since I was at Howard was, in fact, began collecting photographs, family photographs. And my grandmother stands really big because I grew up with her and she died in 1995. And she had this really fascinating sort of background whether they taught that she was, at least I grew up, hearing that she was caribbed and then I find out it's really not carib, it's rarely the fulani and white. So one of the things that I'm trying to shape this, so I remember taking out a picture of my grandmother that she was going through dementia at the time and I had moved from Grenada to Trinidad and I remember going back and I was just in my late teens, early 20s. And I remember when I went to her, she seemed to recognize me but couldn't articulate it and she touched my face and then pointed because I know I went back to Trinidad to go to high school and I think she was remembering that. Anyhow, I captured that picture. Recently I sent that picture, a cousin of mine got a hold of the picture and in the series of emails, it said like Linda took this picture and I got this really angry note from him through the family circuit saying you never took that picture, I took that picture when I was a teenager and we got into this kind of a family, kind of an ownership of Gran and it was kind of, I didn't know how to really deal with it so I said I'm not gonna even send back an email to him because I didn't wanna get into an argument and it was the cousin who then reaffirmed that yes, Linda did take that picture. He hasn't responded so I'm saying did you have any sort of tension with what you mentioned about some that your mother didn't wanna share that? So I was very fascinated that you were able to get all of these and made what you did out of it. It took many years to get them all. My mother gave them up first, my grandmother last. No tension from that, the only tension I ever got from family was how I represented them in the photographs I took. They never thought they were flattering enough. But never what I did with the existing pictures. Can we come to this side please? I've enjoyed this and my question to you is as you've listened today to the various panels and the conversation that's gone on today, how do you see some of the conversation from the scientists and from the anthropologists that came before you today may influence some of your future work? Excellent question. I have to say, and the scientists probably won't appreciate this. But I sat in the audience thinking for scientists they certainly don't have all the answers. And I think coming from the arts you're sort of, you're led to believe that you're the soft disciplines in the academy and there's nothing conclusive and you're totally happy sitting with that. But it was really reassuring to me to sort of watch scientists after scientists to present inconclusive evidence. From my perspective, I mean they may have different perspectives on their work. And so for me the takeaway is that that I'm not wrong in thinking there's not a whole lot of difference between science and art. You just apply your knowledge differently. I think for us, I mean we were really sort of inspired by how ambiguous some of the science was or how inconclusive it was. I mean, you know, artists we thrive in ambiguity. You know, it's like when all the answers aren't there. You can really generate something. So, you know, in that way the kind of early stages that the work is in is really energizing for us. You know, we don't know how you feel about it to scientists, but for us, you know, it's a gold mine. I would also say that we do a lot of talking about narratives. A lot of our projects are about the kinds of narratives we have specifically about American history. And so in this project we were getting to narratives around science. But a lot of our research had been around the things that we had read that had been interpreted by other people. And it's really interesting to see the place that narrative has in the discussion of what's happening scientifically. I mean, people talked about narratives today. And that I didn't realize that that was gonna happen. I thought that was what people from outside fields were bringing to the science. And so it's interesting to me to see the way that that works. So I don't know if that is gonna have a different relationship at all. I think it's gonna, you know, contribute to the same kind of working relationship that we had. And I would echo that in saying that I like the way that some of those narratives that were based initially perhaps purely on science, that they needed a little bit of help from history or perhaps from art to finally come to a particular place where if it's doing a DNA search or trying to help someone find their roots that in the end it's gonna be a little bit of science, it's gonna be a little bit of history, it's gonna be a little bit of soul searching, a little bit of physically maybe getting on a plane or on a boat and going somewhere to actually touch the soil or meet someone or really make the connection that it may not just be one science or art but that it's gonna be the union, I think. And that's, if I'm visually visualizing the cover or rather the artwork of the program, it's kind of that plus, right? That it's going to be ancestry, plus culture, plus science, plus art, plus history. So, yeah. We can take only one more question. I'll be brief, I'll be very brief. I want to thank you all for the presentation, it has been a great eye opener for me. What I think you have a responsibility is to continue to have people begin to think out of the box, have people begin to think how art relates to everything. They change the core now for reading and when our kids start thinking, you can develop any kind of questions at the higher levels that you want, especially the analysis of different pictures. You can tie in science, you can tie in art, music with anything that you do. And I would suggest that you try to come up with ways that you can make the schools aware of how beneficial your art is to every avenue that they need to learn, writing all of it. Well, I want to thank you as a museum director for making that point. And I want to bring closure now because we must, out of respect for the last panel, by creating two images. One is what we think about when we keep hearing over and over and over and over again about STEM. And we certainly want to put all of our force behind this notion of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, whereas we've added here in this symposium certainly genetics. But we also have to keep an image of steam. We gotta get the A in there. And steam, it seems to me, throughout today and certainly with this extraordinarily gifted panel tells us that there's some motion there. There's some power in art to push science where we need to go. Would you thank this panel?