 We're gonna go ahead and get started. Welcome this morning, everyone. Good morning from San Francisco Public Library. My name is Kelsey. I am a librarian here in the Magazines and Newspapers Center at the main branch in Civic Center, fifth floor. We're very happy to have our program today with Fahim Majid and Shola Jamal. Welcome to both of you. Thank you for joining us today. Before we get the program started, I am gonna go through a couple of announcements just to let you know what we're doing in the Magazines and Newspapers Center. So first of all, you'll be getting this link in the chat in a second, but this is our Magazines and Newspapers website through the SFPL website. So this is a great place to come to see what other programs we're gonna be offering in the future. So you can see here that in March, we're gonna have an online tutorial about using consumer reports. And also in March, we're gonna have a couple in-person workshops about women's magazines, basically 150 years of women's magazines. And then in April, we're gonna be doing a film, a showing of the film, The Dissident, which is a documentary about the killing of Khashoggi, who was a Washington Post journalist. So hopefully you can join us for one of those. Also on this website, you can get our link to our blog, the San Francisco Public Library, Magazines and Newspapers Center blog. So we put content up on here about once a week, if not more often. So you can come and check it and see what we're talking about. We have a post coming up pretty soon about new magazine archives that the library has acquired. So check back maybe Saturday or early next week for that. Now I'm gonna do our land acknowledgement for the San Francisco Public Library. Basically, we wanna acknowledge that we're broadcasting from the unceded territory of the Ramatujaloni. And I know that we might have people tuning in here from other places all around the country. So I encourage you to look up whose land you're living on. We're gonna put some links in the chat. You can use the website whose land or native land to see. So this is the unceded territory and we appreciate the opportunity to live, work and do educational activities on this land. Okay, so this program is being recorded. It's also being live streamed on YouTube. And at the end, we'll have about 15 minutes to do Q&A. So if you have any questions, you don't have to save them to the end. Feel free to put those in the chat or you can use the Q&A function of the webinar. All right, now for some introductions. Bahumajid is an artist, educator, curator and community facilitator. He blends his unique experience as a nonprofit administrator, curator and artist to create works that focus on institutional critique and exhibitions that leverage collaboration to engage his immediate community, as well as the broader community, a meaningful dialogue. He's the co-founder, co-director of the Arts Collective Floating Museum. Majid received BFA from Howard University and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Cholage Maul is currently a second year PhD student in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. She graduated from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2022, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Public Health with the highest distinction. Under the leadership and guidance of Bahumajid, Cholage has served as a research assistant on several interdisciplinary archival projects concerning Black American histories or stories in the arts and beyond. Okay, I'm gonna stop sharing, hand things over to our wonderful presenters and please take it away. Hi everyone, thank you so much for that wonderful invitation. I just, I wanted to thank everyone the libraries and staff and everyone for the invitation. It's very humbling actually to be doing this presentation. I feel like I'm going coast to coast from New York to California. So it's wonderful to be here. I thought what we could do, Cholage, that's okay, is actually treat this a little bit like a studio visit. A little more casual, a little more open to discourse. So I'll be checking, we will be checking questions as we go along as well. So we will have a Q and A section, but if there's something that jumps out and we're able to answer it, we can do that along the way. So unlike, I also, what I'm gonna do is actually share my screen on my laptop. I'm gonna give this a try because I don't actually trust PowerPoints. They always freeze on me. So I'm very much willing to show kind of the working behind the window. So I thought we'd start with a little bit of design inspirations of kind of like how I got to the project, what are some things that kind of stick out. And then we'll do a little bit of show and tell. And Cholage will talk about her role as a researcher and her experience. And then we'll look at some pretty pictures along the way. So if that's okay, we'll kind of get started. Let me share my screen. And I'll also give a little more of an introduction of who I am. So I'm an artist and although the work is in New York on a high line, by the way, I also wanna thank the High Line Melanie Kress who really was integral in making this project happen. But I was approached a little while ago to take part and create a proposal for the PLINTH project on the High Line. And as I tell all of my kind of artists, all of my students, cause I'm also a professor, is that you should always apply because you just never know who's watching. And sometimes many of my greatest kind of events or commissions or artworks actually have come from being in the room. So I applied, unfortunately, I was not selected. It was a very competitive public competition. I was one of 50. But then the High Line Melanie Kress specifically approached me about maybe thinking about another version. So the images that you're seeing here are actually of the original proposal. And I'll get a little bit into the inspirations a little later or very yet now. So what you're looking at is a much larger structure than what ended up landing. Let's slide a little over to some of the design ideas. Let's see here, here we go. So as I said, I'm actually, we're located, I'm in Chicago, I'm a Chicago based artist. A lot of my training comes from here. Specifically when I came here, I spent a lot of time at organization an 80 plus year old organization now called Southside Community Art Center came out of WPA. And while I was there, I was really inspired, and I'm still there, really inspired by the wall of respect. Wall of respect was kind of initiated by an artist named William Walker. And the reason why many of us have seen murals over the years, but this was kind of erected in 1967 as a part and became kind of the beginning of the community muralist movement, specifically Chicago murals movement. And this was a collection of numerous artists and poets and performers that kind of erected this kind of wall. I like to think about it almost like social media, the wall or the comment section in its design. And there were numerous, it was kind of a live painting. And the reason why this was kind of so unique was that it was kind of adopted by the community. So it was protected by local gangs that were there, poets will come, it was a safe space and actually eventually kind of was burned down to the ground. And there's a lot of, I encourage you to dig a little deeper around its impact and its history. And a lot of things kind of came out of this moment. It's 1967, so we're dealing with civil rights, we're dealing, you know, we're in a space where the nation of Islam is thriving. There's so much going on with this mural. But I like this idea of a community mural, a space where people join, a space where things are lives, a space where things are changing day to day as things come in. And that's kind of how it functioned in a space that at the time we didn't have a digital age. So there was no kind of updating, there was no social media, but this is a space where it happened. It started here and then it moved down the street across the street and there were many walls that kind of came off of this. So the spirit of this, the spirit of the newspaper really was inspiring. In regards to form, I was really interested into the Dogon architecture, specifically pill houses, thinking about this kind of handcrafted handmade, very African kind of inspired. And these are just some of the images I used in thinking about the design of the form, thinking about grids kind of in Dogon architecture as well. And then primarily where this came about was thinking also about outdated media sources. So it's called Freedom Stand. And it's really inspired by the first black newspaper in New York called Freedom's Journal in 1827, right? Shalad, did I get, I messed dates up. It's 1827, right? Did I get that right? I'm in the 1800s. It's 1800, 1827, we're almost 200 years later. So in context of design, I was thinking about newspaper stands and how kind of similar to kind of Dogon pill houses and things like that, there's a lot of I involved, like the hand is involved in functionality. So in Chicago, we have these kind of grandfathered in newspaper stands that still are erected. They don't really function usually like two old guys sitting out front with a cup of coffee and they become like these social spaces because people aren't buying newspapers from the corners anymore. But the role that the newspaper stand as a space of gathering, right? Dealing with the Great Migration, the Defender newspaper was integral in sending things with Pullman Porter down south, educating people on jobs in the North, how to transition and behave as they move North. The revolutionary kind of idea of a black newspaper and a black voice. So here's just some examples of those newspaper stands I talked about where it's really about functionality. And they were kind of our reminiscent of Shaxx and Shanti that come, that I think of when I go to South Africa and things. So I just kind of started there as some of the inspirations around these kind of newspaper stands that's gathering spaces, tiny, modular, or doga and architecture. And then in regards to process, I was, you know, this is an image I took while we were actually installing. I think about like wheat pasting, like the temporariness of wheat pasting, how there's always layers underneath. And I was really interested in this tuft underneath. And I was hoping to think about like a newspaper stand of the cosmos that was kind of putting headlines up from a 200 year kind of expanse, you know? And the idea of layering these newspapers. So each month I worked with the highlight of get wheat pasters to come in wheat paste content on top of content, on top of content. I gave them freedom to say, hey, if something's kind of spray painted over, ripped, blow the wind and just go right over that, just go right over that. It's actually the highlights of wind tunnel. And it was actually a very challenging thing to do. The whole thing was that it was supposed to be kind of like temporary and constantly evolving and moving. So those are some of the like content as well I want to get back into some of these images. So this is kind of what was proposed in the beginning. I worked with my partner, Floyd Museum Andrew Shackman to design some of the layout from the images they gave us for the plinth. But once that wasn't selected, Melanie Kress approached me and staff approached me about maybe coming up with a different version of smaller version, which actually connected more to its original inspirations of pill houses and newspaper stands. And here it's just kind of like how it evolves digitally and how we thought about the application. So there's a number of larger ones and smaller ones that alternately get rotated out each month. And Shilah and I, well Shilah primarily led in kind of finding archives and she's gonna talk about that a little later to kind of narrow down these newspaper stands. I mean, the real point is about voice and ownership of voice. So all of these are black-owned newspapers that were managed and run by African-Americans. Many of them don't exist anymore. Some of them still exist. And it's really this notion of world news through a black voice versus black news through a controlled voice. So many of the newspapers don't actually deal with black topics, they actually deal with world events because black news is world news. And it's just about control of voice, one's voice. Yeah, let's get to the fun stuff. I'll show a couple of images of the actual stand itself. It's actually very humbling being on a high line because when you go down, and as an artist, I get to sit. For those that are familiar with New York, it's right outside of the Shed Museum, they're the 30th, I think the 30th Street entrance. So the entrance is amazing. It sits right across from where the docents and the tour guides are. So I was able to talk to them and it's like almost having your own tour guy always set up outside. But this is when after we was installed and I came back, this was just a mother and a daughter who were just sitting out there and I got to kind of observe their kind of initial reaction to it. And I was just, we decided to take some pictures together and she was kind of walking through her knowledge of Booker T. Washington. And yeah, you know, and just watching kind of like international artists from all over the world coming and spending so much time with it. Very humbling and exciting. Here's just some images of the piece. And you can see the wood itself was actually pulled from former housing here in Chicago. Some of it was burned, some of it was edged, but it was aged to these large timbers. And there's kind of a greeting that happens inside. Once again, inspired by Dogon architecture, not a one-to-one. But the idea is that even beyond the board, you can see through and it creates shadows and lines within the actual structure itself. And yeah, those are kind of, we pasted up or plastered and stapled and then they kind of weather and alternate as time goes on. And it clashes. I think one of the reasons why it sticks out so much is it clashes with all kind of the new. There's a lot of investment in architecture and design in this area, really shiny, really big. And here's this kind of humbling, powerful kind of image-based architecture that's made of wood that is very different from its surroundings. And like I said, we can definitely come back later if there are other questions as we go along. I just, I think what I would like to do now is invite Shala maybe to introduce herself a little more and we're going to kind of, I told her we're going to do a little bit of show and tell to talk about our archive and process. Shala, would you be okay to come on and point A to point B? Talk about kooky Professor Faheem that just kind of came out of nowhere and just as always, like, figure it out and then we just do something. And I'm like, that's perfect. And you're like, really? Because you didn't tell me what to do. So yeah, maybe come on, come on and talk about our relationship a little bit. Sure. So my name is Shala. As I mentioned previously, I'm currently a PhD student at Northwestern. But my work with this project emerged while I was still in undergrad at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which is where Faheem also teaches. And we had been introduced a year or two prior to beginning work on this project. And I had done similar or analogous kind of researching archival work on a project centered on the Southside Community Arts Center. But this project emerged during my senior year, my final year of undergrad. And I just remember we were having a meeting about my honors thesis. And you mentioned this project and potentially wanting me to come on board and assist with the research process. And I was super interested and I think things just got started right after that. I think the initial prompt, I was given this website that had aggregated African-American newspapers by state. And it was just this long list of websites, some still functional, some not, but it was this really comprehensive list of names of African-American newspapers, which was especially useful because it was already kind of bifurcated by state. And my research began with this list, translating it from this website into a more operational Excel document. So that's, I guess, the newspapers that were selected for the purposes of this project, they all came from that list more or less. And in regards to the actual selection of the headlines, I remember we had another conversation thinking about best practices in regards to methodology. I want to know if there was any specific inclusion or exclusion criteria I should be looking for in terms of selecting from these newspapers because we had, I think the list was almost like 200, well, a little more than 200 newspapers was on that list that was translated to Excel. So it felt like a very kind of insurmountable task at first to decide what to select and what not to select. So we had this conversation and I proposed the idea of maybe making selections by a period of time. So the actual organization of the headlines in the kind of internal, I don't want to say database, but like the internal system, the internal filing system where they're stored is that they are organized by half centuries from beginning in 1800 and ending 2020 or 2021. I can't quite recall. So it was essentially five buckets of half centuries. And this number was proposed of trying to find like 300 to 350 headlines. So for each bucket there's like 70, 70 headline selections in each bucket. All right, so there's 200 newspapers in total from a range of like historical, well, 200 plus newspapers in total from a range of historical to contemporary, some not in existence, some still publishing regularly either online or in print. And from that 200 plus selection of newspapers, there's five buckets with 70 headlines in each bucket. So in total, there's just about 350, maybe even more, cause sometimes I would go overboard, 350 to 400 headlines perhaps that have been selected for the purposes of this work, but not necessarily installed in the actual material freedom stand project. And to talk about selection criteria in regards to how headlines were chosen, it wasn't, it was not a very scrupulous kind of didactic process. I remember in part of that conversation on how many headlines to select, there was also this conversation about how to make choices in regards to what to select. And Fahim didn't necessarily offer any kind of strict rigid guideline of things that he wanted to see. It was more so this kind of amorphous thing of grabbing headlines that were appealing to me individually because of the graphics, because of the historical material they're working through. So a lot of these selections are a matter of, I don't want to say my individual preference, but the kinds of things that were individually intriguing to my eye, but then there's another layer of oversight whereby like the actual headlines from that pool of 350 to 400, the actual headlines that were selected were determined by Fahim. And that's maybe like less than half of that number. Yeah, so. Yeah, I really needed, what I realized was it's kind of like the thing that is good enough because there's layers of design. The whole point, like you got to think about like what's the role of the newspaper and the role of the newspapers to inform, but also to sell newspapers. Like even understanding when we talked about how newspapers function in the 1800s, which is very different from how they function in contemporary times. I think we think about newspapers as like the spinning headlines kind of coming at you. That's not actually how any of that worked. Advertisement's working. That's not actually how any of that worked. Advertisement's were on the front pages because advertisements, like everything was different. The splash was different. They're actually, some of them were very boring in the front end. So the big splash didn't really work that way, but then you get kind of like, there's personalities in different newspapers, which I'm gonna show a little later. Like some of them are trying to suck you in almost like tabloid. So there's that too. So once again, it's like, but it's all designed. So someone spent time to design it. Someone spent time to make it available because they want just like a newspaper, they want people to see this work. They want it out there. So many of the things to your point, we're still building on this archive and this project a much larger, hopefully we can bring it to California. Little hint there, if there's anyone out there with some playing fair in a big truck. But we can do an infinite amount of these because every day there's like 400 black newspapers producing work every day. And all those things are designed. So they're screaming to be seen, they wanna be seen. So the generosity was that someone at RE, some archivist or some community member had already put it out there with the hope that someone like myself and Shilah will come along and talk about it. So we didn't have to do like, initially when I started this, I thought we're gonna have to go deep in the stacks. I thought, right, yeah, right. I thought we have to go deep in the stacks. I thought we have to go uncovering microfeetion, all these things. And I was like, oh, you know, quickly it became very, like it was a glut of newspapers that, so we had to find criteria to edit it down for one newspaper stand, even if we were putting up stuff every day, like we did every month, we alternated, but it was actually very hard because it's history over 200 years. It's fascinating to watch you lose yourself in this. I mean, any archivist in here understands that. Any librarian understands how you can get lost in a library. So quickly this became an issue. So having Shilah do a kind of a first phase, the challenge of kind of like building out the wall of parameters or what she won. And then I also had a studio assistant, Josh, who also helped me kind of narrow things down and scan things in and things that just didn't scan in well. Like we had to figure out ways of kind of editing out to get it down. And then we still went over our mark. To Shilah's point, we still had too many. So it was a very challenging, but also hopeful in thinking about a village of newspaper stands or a whole cityscape of newspaper stands could easily kind of happen. So it leaves hope. I'm excited about what happens when it comes down and we move on to the next couple phases of this project. But the black voice is not myopic, it's expansive and also conflicting. Like that's what's so exciting about this is that the assumption there's no, like there's some very conservative, very liberal, very like stravigate, homophobic. You know, I mean, just the expanse of this is really fascinating to think about when oftentimes where the black voice is pigeonholed and controlled. Anyway, I'm sorry to jump in. Shilah, do you wanna go through some of your best ofs? And I don't even know how you picked these. Sure, is this? I grouped the first couple ones are content-based and the other ones are visual. Okay. Okay, so I selected some headlines from our large, large pool of 300 plus that I found both either historically important or graphically appealing. And this one comes from the Denver Star. So a black newspaper in Colorado which I found historically important because as I was searching through some of these newspapers, particularly those that came from the like 19th and 20th century, I found it interesting which historical and political events were of importance or of interest to black Americans at the time compared to how they circulate in popular imaginary in our contemporary moment. So with this newspaper, the 50th anniversary of our freedom should interest all of us deeply. I found it particularly interesting that some of these more historical black newspapers were celebrating the 13th amendment or and or the emancipation proclamation. And I found that particularly interesting because of how discourses on Abraham Lincoln circulate now in our contemporary moment. People seem more readily available or readily knowledgeable to acknowledge the fact that Lincoln did not necessarily kind of abolish slavery because of his interest in disbanding it as a system but as a kind of tactical political move that was arguably acting in his own self-interest as a politician as opposed to any interest in the abolition of slavery for morality's sake. So I found it particularly interesting like with this example because of how Abraham Lincoln has been rearticulated at present to see truthfully that if you take it from a historical outlook that he was conceived of quite differently, the abolition of slavery and the political acts that most materially were involved in the abolition of slavery circulate much differently in this more historical context which really enriches understanding of I think this aspect of American history but I was particularly fascinated about the actual idea of celebrating these dates. I don't know, like I have no immediate recollection of when the 13th amendment was passed, when the emancipation proclamation was ratified. I have no idea of those dates but seeing in some of these historical newspapers how often like these anniversaries would be marked and celebrated as headlines sometimes. I found it super interesting and I think it's very historically important in considering the nature of American politics and the evolution of American politics. Here we go, this is a good one. This is, yeah, a graphically appealing selection but it also has important historical resonances but this is W.E. DuBois. And if you see it at the top, there's this tiny like the Negro exhibit at Paris. This was like a really important kind of expo that was done at the World's Fair in Paris. I think in 1900 which is both kind of historically important but I just think that this image is also incredibly eye catching because there are all these juxtapositions happening. There's the juxtaposition of actually the nomenclature by which we talk about black Americans, right? So a newspaper called The Colored American gesturing towards the time period in which this newspaper was produced but also this image of W.E.B. Well, it's just like the image of him juxtaposed by all these other photographs in the background. I think it's such an interesting contrast especially because of the magnitude of the images in comparison to him. He's a much smaller focal point in this image. And I even think like this as a headline challenges the dominant visual archive through which we conceive of newspaper headlines because the text on this page is quite minimal and it's really demanding that we engage the image and I think there's so much depth to the image that it's kind of left unknown or understated if you don't know what's happening here or who's in here or what this event is about. Right. And then also there's images of Booker T. Washington in the state which also kind of they were often played against each other in ways as rivals in some sort of way. Or that's how it's kind of sometimes preached the complexity of that relationship versus kind of dulled down. Let's keep moving here. I think if I told y'all we go deep like we ain't even got through two. We want the second image like we got 400 to go. Like so it's exciting but yeah, here we go. Yes, I chose this one. This is a more contemporary newspaper. Right, it comes from 1987. Public knowledge, public hypervisibility of HBCUs over the last few decades, I feel like has increased tenfold. You see how much kind of like, even just like Black History Month marketing how much HBCUs are involved in like the public circulation of images celebrating Black history at present in ways that it was not necessarily. I don't think that corporations were seeking out graduates from HBCUs decades and decades ago to help surmount to these marketing efforts. But I found this particular headline to be very historically interesting or important to me because right, Spelman College is in HBCU but it's like a gender exclusive HBCU, it's for all women. And I found it particularly interesting that 1987 was the year when Spelman welcomed its first Black woman president because it sort of invites the reader to consider the histories of HBCUs and their formations especially as kind of like land grant institutions. There are these assumptions of logics by which we might think that HBCUs are always already extending kind of leadership and administrative roles to Black Americans but that's not necessarily how they were initiated. In a historical sense, which has resonances for the types of things that they're able to do in more contemporary context, right? So Spelman, hmm, when was Spelman founded? It was a long time ago. So I don't know when it was founded but I know it was a long time ago. And I think- I think, yeah. I've seen it when I, I don't know why just, yeah, that is like it was based on Black women but 1987 is, so there is some irony a little bit in that. Once again, about even Black voice, like you think about in spaces that are considered or conceived as Black run, Black own, there's a complexity in that as well. Yeah, that's a good one. I mean, yeah, what do you wanna do? So we got, you know, oh, there it is. Thank you very much, 1881. So, you know, almost a little over a hundred years, while it takes. But, you know, it's complex. I'm sure we could spend all day just talking about that. So do you wanna, let's jump ahead because I think, yeah, I'm looking at this. We're coming up on 136. This one, yeah. So let's talk about this series that came up quite a bit. Yeah, so this is, there are several newspapers in our kind of aggregated lists that come from political organizations as opposed to these more journalistic-minded newspapers that have an interest in kind of reporting on news, newspapers that are interested or have a more conspicuous kind of political motivation, right? So this is from the Black Panther Party. They're kind of inter-communal news service. And I think that with these political types of newspapers, they tend to be much more subversive and attentive to graphics. So this is a headline that has a graphic appeal because it's about sickle cell anemia, which is, I mean, it's such an important kind of biomedical thing to be aware of and be thinking of, right? Lupus and sickle cell anemia as conditions that seem to disproportionately affect black people across the diaspora. But I think that the attentiveness of this political organization to a condition that's not necessarily or not as kind of explicitly mediated by politics is fascinating to me, right? So the Black Panther Party, the extent of its invocation of politics to consider the personal, the communal, the biomedical, the cultural. I found this particularly striking, both in its kind of the image that it imposes, but also the language, like the approach to language of these more political newspapers has a huge contrast to some of these, I don't know if I should say traditionalist, but newspapers that are more focused on something different. I'm gonna jump ahead a little bit and I didn't necessarily pull them out, but I'm gonna jump back into the studio. There were, to your point, I think it is important that we actually do look at the, these are the buckets that I was talking about, but this one is actually a little, you know, we're just gonna kind of do this here. This one here is actually a freedoms journal. This is like one of the first Black newspapers. And we didn't find, because we weren't digging deep, I'm sure if we went to the Library of Congress, we could pull some of these out, but even in kind of being a little more conservative, it's all text-driven. And to be honest, when you put this up, it was pretty much present in all, it's still up. So I always wanted to make sure there was a freedoms journal somewhere in the, but it's the one you don't see, right? And there's all types of reasons for that. Shala, we had this really great conversation we were interviewed by a Black newspaper that actually I think is in the collection, the, what was the name of the paper again? I'm blanking, my memory. Amsterdam News? The Amsterdam News, right? And they're still functioning. And we had a really great kind of covering of that. But in that conversation, one of the things that really jumped out to me about what Shala said was the, like if you think about 1829, this was 1828, access to reading and what it meant to read, especially in a Black community, right? So you think about literacy, you think about the ability to have money to spend on something like a newspaper. It was an extravagance. So things are often recycled. So it's like the Black, it's even more complex than it is now. There are even things that we take for granted in the sense of even be having access to education, right, access in wealth to get this. So this is a very niche, I would think a niche market, right? So as much as this is about, this is a Black voice, it's probably for white audiences. You know, it's like a way of kind of an eye in. And I'm just, I wasn't there, so I don't know, but you just think about the things that are going on in the current events and how people like also just like the danger of voice. And how it maybe goes against people's interests. So, you know, it's like, it's a very different thing. Like the freedom of the journal can't say Black genocide, you know, like, you know, they can't say, you know, it's fascinating, like there's just these things just that are really powerful when you put one thing. That's one thing I love is like putting this, like thinking about, so you can play it from 200 years ago, next to this one from, you know, you know, recently, which is really exciting. So this is in the archive. Another thing, maybe a little bit too, shall I, some of the things that just kind of popped up often. This one I really love down here, this series. I just, I loved it so much because of the color of American magazine. Once again, the one we looked at earlier, this is some of the other ones that really were designed beautifully. As well, some really wonderful kind of pieces, aesthetically. So some of the prompts were about content, but it's also about I, like, so, you know, I made sure, like, more, almost conservative to a certain extent, but oftentimes had really, yeah, great thing. Jumped through a couple of them because I'm on Q and A, and we can continue through Q and A if we want. Seems like once again, we need more time. The patterns, maybe, shall I talk a little bit about patterns? This is one that comes up a lot. Wars. The patterns, the wars, like... Like, so war, like lynching, like, if you think about things that pop up over 200 years, one of the ones that I really think is interesting is talking about anti-vaccine, one of the ones, but not from 2020, but 1920, right? So that was kind of an interesting one, like, the cyclicalness of things. It's interesting. Like, it's like, we're talking about Emmett Till, we're talking about George Floyd, we're talking about going to war in Desert Storm, we're talking about going to war in World War II. You know, it's like, these things that are impacting the Black community and the world in general, it's almost like if you just go through... This is just one type of lens on an archive. The repetitiveness, cyclical nature of it. It's, you know, I'm really into Marvel, so I just think about the time loops and the timelines and how it just feels like going back in time and doing the same things over and over and over. It can be just fascinating. I don't know if there are any others that you've noticed. Yeah, just to speak to the subject of war, it's reminding me that there are quite a few newspapers on the list that are coming from all Black infantries during various periods of wartime, which is also something interesting to consider in terms of why that specific subject reappears in addition to, you know, newspapers beyond the context of military. But in regards to themes or themat, I'm thinking specifically about the early to mid-20th century, just that time period of like 1900, like maybe 1950s or so, how so many of the newspaper headlines seem to revolve around like the totalizing conditions of segregation or negation, exclusion, denial, like the overlapping and compounded effects of racism, segregation, both de facto and du jour. I feel like it takes such a big or some more pronounced precedence during that specific time period than arguably both before and afterwards. I think the approach to the topic prior to the 1900s has to be more clandestine, has to approach it almost with circumlocution, like talking around it as opposed to talking about it. But then from like the 1900s to like late 1960s, early 1970s, the approach to these topics seems to be much more visceral. Like they're very descriptive in describing what precisely is happening in terms of articulating the black condition at present. That's both striking, but kind of disorienting because the way these things are talked about currently feels so different, feels less visceral, except for specific moments of rupture, like very big hyper-visible deaths, murders, what have you. And there's a way in which like during this period of like the 1900 to 1960s, late early 1970s, where this type of violence feels almost so quotidian and mundane that it appears like every newspaper, every other headline in this during this time period because there's a kind of naturalization of this violence that feels more spectacular at present, that when those newspapers are happening, like in the 21st century, it feels much different. It feels more anomalous, more irregular than how it was constructed during that time period. I think maybe that's like a theme that I noticed while I was pulling from those years. Yeah, I think we're at 148, and more than likely, I think we can maybe address some of the questions in the prompt. I'm going to shout out Nubian News, which my uncle, Kooji Chakalia, runs out of New Jersey, Trenton, New Jersey. I was able to slip in a couple of my family newspapers and Rolling Out magazine as well, which is my partner, Monson Steed Foundation that actually is also operating today, so yeah. That's awesome. I love the personal connection. That's great. Yeah, I'm just commenting that a lot of you have got newspaper people in your family. That's cool. So we do have a couple of questions that have come in. I have them here. So the first question was from Linda. She says, astounded by the number of Black-owned newspapers that existed, do you know how the earliest ones from the 1820s and 1830s were funded? I don't necessarily, I did read that. I don't have that at the top of head, but the Freedom Journal did not last very long and may wait for another newspaper, which I think might actually be the Amsterdam News if I'm not mistaken, but it had a very short life. And I'm not exact, you know, without actually saying, I think a lot of them might even been Quaker kind of initiatives as well, kind of that type of network of support. But a lot, yeah, there was an article that I was reading that talked a lot about like the origins of that and like some of the challenges as well. So I don't have a concrete, but hopefully in the next editions we'll have that. We have to get back on a lecture circuit. So we got to get out here in the world. I think it, yeah, it's maybe also important context that because some of these earlier newspapers are started by Friedman, they have the capacity to work in more professional settings and fund even if marginally these newspapers to a higher degree than say enslaved black Americans at the time. But I think Friedman often are working in religious positions, like ecclesiastical positions. So there is a kind of religious affiliation there. That was definitely the case for the first African-American paper in California called the Mirror of the Times. It was like very much connected to people who came out their businessmen, but also preachers. And so, and really connected to the colored conventions that were started to happen in California in like the early 1850s. And so it was like, yeah, but just as Faheen pointed out at the beginning, newspapers are supposed to be a business. So, you know, it was to spread the word about stuff, but also to make money, so. Right, exactly. And if you didn't do that, then you weren't gonna have a newspaper. It wasn't a service. It wasn't seen as a service, like a social service. It was a money-making generating. And so many of the early newspapers, they just like, yeah, one year, two years, then they're gone and they just cycled through. Like there's like so many newspapers that cycled through in their first like 15 years of California's history, for example. So, yeah, cool. Okay, so now we also have a question from Julia. Do you have a next site where the piece will go? So you're joking about bringing it out here to the West Coast, but do you have any plans for where it'll go next? I would love that. As I say, I'm open to suitors, but nothing concrete. I am working on something here in Chicago, a version of it, but also bringing it back in the studio. I do wanna continue working with Shala on some other like a series of work built off of this body of work, but this is kind of the public facing area, but then there's also kind of the research and then kind of the arc work that I would like to make off of this, collaborations and things like that. So nothing concrete as of yet, but there will be something probably in relationship to it. I'm still designing it here in Chicago in the next year or so. But yeah, if anyone has any kind of, I have my name around, but I'd love to come to that second work and do something there. Cool. You gotta tell yourself, Shala. You gotta get out here with your little sign and flip it and just tax time, tax season. You gotta get out here, we gotta get out here, we gotta sell. So we have a comment from Kimberly. She says, wonderful presentation, thank you. No, I have a question for my librarian hat and actually I love the way your presentation is. So I like seeing your archive there and your naming convention and how you've saved all of those images and everything. So I don't wanna geek out too hard on the librarian aspect, but at the same time, a couple of questions. Do you have any California newspapers in it? And also I'm just curious about, you said like there was a glut of newspapers. Like these images just kind of came to you and it was actually very easy to find it. And then in my experience, sometimes it's like I struggle so hard, just like the mirror of the times I was talking about from California. Like there's only one digitized issue of the newspaper, like available online really. And like I reached out to the California State Library and I'm like, can you send me a scan of this? And it was like this big thing, like am I gonna get this? So anyway, I guess just if you could talk a little bit more about yeah, that process of getting the images and compiling your archive. I got, yes. So I think at a certain point I realized, I had this idea of how it worked, right? And we did work with a librarian here at UIC. Initially we had a conversation about how to go about this. Like cause like once again, we had this idea of this kind of deep stacks research. And it was just like so all this that we've had so far is still just like literally just a little bitty scratch in the surface. And I think we might actually have some California newspapers but when we got too much resistance, cause like for instance, I don't have many defender newspapers in here from Chicago. You really can't talk about black newspapers without talking about the defender. But there's a challenge with, right now, them being in transition, access to archivists, it's just, it took like five steps to get there, right? But we did have five steps, time and, you know, so the understanding is this is just one in many. And like we will go back and get those things, but there was just so much low hanging fruit and someone had already done the work. So we were really building on the shoulders of the work that people had already kind of done. And this wasn't like an official, if I'm not mistaken, so it wasn't like an official library site, library of Congress. It was like someone literally like just went and just it was just hyperlinked. And then we go into the hyperlink and that hyperlink we link to another hyperlink. And some of them were like, like really low res and someone like fly res. And then you'll go into like 200 of one thing and then five of another. So yeah, we didn't even scratch the surface of the surface we scratched in this process. So it's a lot of information. It's not like a magazine. It's daily. There's a lot of days between over 200 years. But Shilah, she did a lot of the mining, so. Yeah. So I actually tried to strike a valence in terms of selecting newspapers by states. So each state is in fact represented in the larger pool of like 350-ish headlines. I think from California because it's a larger state and it was especially active during time periods in which black newspapers were not getting existence in some parts of the country. There was a significant number of newspapers that came from California. I think there was about like 20 or 25 in our spreadsheet. Yeah. But in regards to the selection of images from archives, I agree or I would concur with the kind of low hanging fruit sentiment. I think some of the images that ultimately ended up being installed in Freedom Stand came from the archives or online databases that were more robustly funded and operated. So I think the Library of Congress's Chronically America archive, it's publicly available. Like it's one of the archives that you can access just by searching the name of it on Google, whereas there are a lot of kind of paywalls. Even though I had access to both UIC and Northwestern Library's databases like two academic institutions, I would still confront significant difficulties in accessing certain kind of state archival databases that were hosting these newspapers. And I think that like the Library of Congress, like it was very recurrent in terms of some of the links that things were coming from, just because it seems to be interested in democratizing access to these historical records in a way that these other databases were not doing, even with the support of like very well-respected public and private institution databases. Like I was still confronting that issue of access. And then there's also like for the newspapers that are still in operation, sometimes they'd maintain their own kind of internal archive on their websites that you could pull from. Some of them would host, there's this like, I'm not quite sure how you pronounce it, but there's this website called Issue, I-S-S-U-U, that a lot of the more contemporary newspapers would also like post online versions of their entire newspapers that you could pull headlines from. So it was oftentimes like a balance between Library of Congress, I feel like that archive was especially enunciated in this work, newspapers own archives, and then other kind of like state archives centered around preserving historical memory. Like I know Arizona has like Arizona memory online database that I pulled some newspapers from, things like that, like state databases, interested in preserving a particular kind of historical memory. Yeah, I think that's kind of how the selection was happening across various different means. Yeah, you really distilled down the very complex information environment of newspapers, historical and contemporary, and that's what Christine and I deal with every day in the magazine, the newspaper center. The librarians understand, yeah, that's why I was so excited. I was like, oh my God, the librarians are reaching out to us, this is awesome, this is amazing. We did a thing, like the art, you know. Yeah, exactly. So we have a couple of comments, we're coming up on time, but I wanna put an audio to a couple comments from YouTube viewers. One person says, beautiful presentation, love how Fahima G can spontaneously share his rich knowledge and deeply felt enthusiasm for what he is doing while sharing his carefully planned talk and fantastic images. Then we have another comment from Leah and love learning how Shola worked together on this beautiful art installation. Would love to see it very tempting as a pilgrimage destination. So if you wanna do a pilgrimage, do it soon because we don't know exactly how much longer it's gonna be at least to the end of this month if not till March or April. Yeah, and then a heart from our colleague Anissa who's running the YouTube stream, so. Yeah, thank you, Anissa. And no, please go ahead. We're just gonna say we're at 12 noon, so I guess it's time to wrap up, but is there any last words that... First of all, we pause for awesome round of applause. We can hear our people out there. I'm sure they're clapping and cheering. So imagine all that great applause in the background. But do you have any last words or anything before we say goodbye? Just I wanna thank you for reaching out, Kristi Farita, to kind of initiating this. And then I wanna thank the Highline staff, curators for being such a wonderful host of this project and really walking it through, taking a chance on it as well and not editing any of the content. So that actually says a lot that there were no edits. There's some challenging things in the news and they never questioned anything no one ever did. Everyone was behind it 100%. So that takes a lot for an institution. So I can't speak enough about the Highline and their commitment to this project. So, and thank you to all the black newspapers that oftentimes are out there working, the black, trying to make black boys available, not heard, not appreciated, but we see you. So we appreciate it, keep it up. Yeah, awesome. Cool, well, thank you so much for the presentation. It's so inspiring and it's so awesome to see, yeah, information become art and then come back around to be information again. So we'll be in touch and have a great rest of your day, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.