 Okay, I'm gonna start. My name is Matilda McQuade and I'm acting director of Curatorial here at the Cooper Hewitt and I'd like to welcome you all to our first program in the series Behind the Design. This lunchtime discussion is really an opportunity for our curators, our conservators, educators and other specialists to come together for conversations around our collection and exhibitions. And it will also be an opportunity for you, the audience to really ask questions in the chat which will be moderated today by Charlotte Gill. So thank you very much, Charlotte. And I wanna just let you know about our next program which will be April 13th at 12.30 called Take a Seat, a Mexican Chair and it's journey to Cooper Hewitt. So we will, those who are attending will receive, will send you a link to that registration but also check back on all the other events that virtual program events that we have at Cooper Hewitt. So the series would not have been possible without staff member Phoebe Moore who is definitely behind the scenes but a really important presence. And she was responsible for all of the seemingly simple technical aspects of the presentation. And I'm also incredibly grateful to the curatorial team who you will have the honor to hear from over the course of the year. We have a year long series planned. So I'd like to also thank, to extend my enormous gratitude also to Target Gucci, the Kobe Foundation and Keith Herring Foundation for making this event and the exhibition possible which you will hear about in just a moment. So and there will be a credit line in the, in the presentation and you can see the full, all the sponsors. So believe it or not, we are celebrating Willie Smith Day today. Alexandra Cunningham, Cameron and Darnell Jamal-Lisby will introduce us to this historic day. Alexandra is curator of contemporary design and the hence secretarial scholar and the curator of the Willie Smith street couture exhibition which is currently on view at Cooper Hewitt through mid-October. We have not reopened yet. We hope to in the very near future, but so please come back and check our page for when that reopening will be. Alexandra's been at the Cooper Hewitt for two and a half years and was formerly editor in chief of independent art journal, the Miami Rail and she's also been creative director of the design Miami fairs. Darnell was the project curatorial assistant for the Willie Smith exhibition and is currently an education associate working on virtual programming among many other things. He has a masters in fashion and textiles, history theory, museum practices from the fashion Institute of Technology. So I welcome you both and thank you for launching the first one this afternoon. Darnell and Alexandra, take it away. Thanks so much, Matilda. And thanks to everyone for joining. We really, we couldn't think of a better way to celebrate Black History Month at the museum than by sharing the origins of Willie Smith Day and also talking about Willie Smith as an advocate for diverse lives and diverse lifestyles. As Matilda mentioned, Darnell and I worked on the Willie Smith project together with Julie Pastor, an incredible team from the museum and also extremely importantly, Willie Smith's friends and family and contemporaries all of whom have contributed uniquely to the behind the scenes details of making the exhibition, the book and the community archive that you're going to hear about today. So we're excited to present a few projects that we think illustrate Willie Smith's activism. We'd love to hear your questions and comments. So feel free to drop them in the Q&A or make comments in the chat as we go along. If we can pick them up as we're speaking, we will. But otherwise we'll definitely address them at the end of the presentation. So thanks so much everyone for joining and Darnell, let's jump in and take it away. Absolutely. Thank you all so much. As Alexandra said, I mean, this has been such a labor of love from everyone involved. And so we really do. We thank you so much. And from, you know, as Matilda mentioned, you know, here we want to thank again, Target, Gucci, Kobe Foundation, Keith Herring Foundation, everyone who was involved in actually financing and helping us bring this into fruition. It's something that we are just so excited about. And for everyone to see, it's really kind of a bittersweet because almost a year and a few weeks, we had, we opened one day and then we closed and shut down. And, you know, so we're hoping that very soon that you all will get to see the work that we put in to this exhibition. But with that said, let's get into more Willie Smith, Willie Smith Day activities and understanding who he was, and the impact that he has on the fashion industry as a whole. So many people, you know, I'm sure Alexandra can attest to that, did not, you know, understand the gravity of how much of the impact of Willie Smith's life and career and not just within fashion design, but then all of the different artistic practices that he embarked on throughout his entire career. He was born in 1948 in Philadelphia. And we had a chance to speak to his family, his brother Norman, his aunt Doris, we were able to get a lot of firsthand accounts of the life that he lived along before he came to New York. He went to the Philadelphia College of Art, Philadelphia Museum College of Art and study design. And we also were able to, which you can also read in, which we'll talk about the archive, but also in the book, we have a recollection of his best friend, Alvin Bell, who was his ace, who they both started in fashion together and they moved to New York around the same time to start their careers in fashion. Alvin went a little more on the traditional conventional glamorous fashion route or designing more or less evening wear and things of that nature, whereas Willie went more or less into the more sportswear and street wear aspect. And that's really what we're going to get into those nuances today, but many people deem him his friends, his family as the king of street wear. And that was something that we were trying to understand what is street wear, because today it's really kind of evolved into its own category of clothing. And obviously there are pairs houses that sell quote unquote street wear category for like $2,000 a trouser or, you know, $1,000 for a sweater or something like that. But that wasn't really its nascent. And also there's this association to street wear to hip hop in the urban communities of which hip hop was adjacent to. And therefore, you know, we have kind of negated the fact that there is this other path to contemporary street wear. The path that Willie spent really was a trailblazer on, and it really exudes from traditional American sportswear. Willie, when he moved to New York around 1965, he went to Parsons and parted ways with Parsons in 1967 and went right into working at various, various Seventh Avenue labels like Glenora and Talbot and Bobby Brooks. Bobby Brooks is actually where Arthur McGee was stewarded and was the creative director over. And afterwards in 1969, Willie went to become, became the creative director for a newly formed Seventh Avenue label Digits, where that was really the ground and foundation of what we would be able to see when he eventually developed his own brand Willie Wear with his business partner and friend Lori Millay in 1976. And Willie through Willie Wear, he was able to really use that as a moment to show people all the different influences and inspiration that he was, that allowed him to touch people in the way that they wanted to be reached. You know, he was inspired by what people wore every day on the streets, how they styled their ensembles, the ease, the functionality of it. He was inspired by traditional work wear that was very much akin specifically to the American history of work wear and work wear uniforms dating back to the mid 19th century, looking at denim in the history of denim and integrating that within his entire lexicon. He was inspired by Southeast Asian Dress, even right before in South Asian Dress. And right before he started Willie Wear, he made contact, well, he was very much an arbiter of going to India quite a bit and traveling there and being inspired by the people and he set up his manufacturing for Willie Wear in India. And therefore, when it comes to South Asian, Southeast Asian Dress, that was not only inspired him by way of the aesthetic, but his entire total process, his total experience that he was creating from production to presentation. Furthermore, he was inspired by the AfroDiaspora, which we'll get into later on in this presentation as well, and he used Willie Wear as a breeding ground to really kind of fuse all of these different cultural exchanges to give people what they wanted and what they felt in this really time of liberation and freedom of the 1970s into the 1980s. Oh, and here we have a photo, I don't want to move on just yet, but this is a photo of actually Willie doing a campaign for his digits, for a digits collection, and to the right of him is his sister, Tukey, who was his muse. And you'll see Tukey show up in this presentation quite a bit, but she was really what, she was really the initial source of inspiration for Willie's career in aesthetic, even beyond Willie Wear, even before Willie Wear and the joy and the sass and the attitude, everything behind it was something that Willie wanted to invoke within his brand and his collections and pass that on in a more abstract way through the clothing. And this next video is which I'll show you in a second is actually a clip of the Spring 1985 sightseeing presentation that Willie did in his showroom. You'll see different inspirations, as I said, the AfroDiaspora dress related all over, particularly from West Africa. You'll see inspiration of Ivy style, athleisure and athletic wear. You'll see business and traditional, traditional office, office, office dress. And you'll see all of these things come together. And honestly, when you talk about contemporary fashion, a lot of these elements don't seem, we kind of take advantage of it. But during this time, this was very avant-garde to mix all of these different things together to present it in the way that he did. Willie Smith kicks off Spring with an all stops out presentation for Willie Wear. This year, he takes us on a sightseeing tour. Using a wild array of backdrops and props, first stop, Jamaica, a language setting for his casual sugar cane creations. Next, Metropolis with slick city suits. Then onto LA for wild gaudy prints. The country club scene is set with plaids in a garden of fresh colors, and the look just wouldn't be complete without white golfing shoes. Teeing off some of Spring's best looks are his color and pattern matches, like grass green and pink. They're very good looking. And Willie's signature t-shirt dresses down the new short skirt suit. Last, it's a Punch and Judy puppet show in clownish light layers of white, including the ever-present Duster coat. Willie Smith for Willie Wear in fine form for Spring 85 with young American looks. What's really amazing about that also, you see some familiar faces, like Alvin Chen and Iman Black Miles, who were really the leading faces of fashion during this time. I think that's really kind of like an underrated story that we need to celebrate a lot more of the way Black bodies really kind of gave life to clothing across the board, even beyond Willie's brand, but in fashion in general. Of course, you have the Battle of Versailles event that happened in 1973, which was a standout moment, but certainly Willie continued to capitalize off of that and build his brand around that aspect. And another quick point, was not just a fashion designer, he was an artist. His artist collaborations are what really gave him the, that allowed him to ascend into the place that he was to ascend to. He collaborated with site, the site architects to create the showrooms, to design the showrooms and the retail spaces that he worked out of and that he sold clothes out of and he worked with Christo and John Claude to create the workwear uniforms for several projects, including Surrounded Islands, Miami, as well as the Pont Neuf Wrapped Project. He worked with the myriad of the leading artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Keith Herring, Gilbert and George, so many of them, Barbara Krueger, to produce artist T-shirts, which he premiered at Art Mentor in 1984, which was this kind of fun total experience that he wanted to use to obviously extend the willy-ware brand, but then also to kind of break down in this abstract way how clothes are supposed to be bought and sold instead of a 3D, but in more of a 2D aspect. So this was really kind of all a part of his brand, but he thought about these ways in using these avant-garde mediums from digital media, which we'll get into in a little bit in various visual arts, to elicit the joy in his brand and the connectivity in his brand. Yeah. So much of what Willie Smith was trying to do also with Lori and relationship to the collaborations with artists and performers, architects and designers was really about trying to bring art into everyday life. And you can see that, you know, really clearly in the Christian and Joan Claude collaborations, but also so much in the t-shirts. And I love, Darnell, how you started by mentioning Alvin because I remember so clearly when we first started talking to Alvin and he mentioned that even as a teenager, Willie Smith was talking about how he wanted to be the people's designer, you know, how Alvin was looking at couture houses as inspiration and was interested in creating these finely wrought forms and, you know, designing more of a luxury driven fantasy idea of fashion. Whereas Willie Smith very early on was really thinking about how his designs could make a difference in the lives of people every day. Absolutely. And maybe just a little bit more about that, you know, really when we began researching Willie Smith we only had two primary streams of information. We had press clippings that really waned after his death in 1987 and pretty much stopped after Willie went bankrupt in 1990 and, you know, connecting back to Alvin, a really extensive network of his friends and collaborators who spend a lot of time with us, mining their memories to help illustrate Willie Smith as a person but also Willie Smith as a designer. We began collaborating really early on with our colleagues at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Elaine Nichols and Kelly Nielsen and Kelly Navies really encouraged us early on to emphasize Willie Smith's biography but to also organize oral histories which they also produce for us and have included in the archive. Bill T. Jones, Beth Ann Hardison and Willie Smith's partner Lori Mala were all interviewed and have been essential to helping us really understand where Willie Smith was coming from and what he was trying to accomplish with the brand. But, I mean, those incredible contributors are really just a small part of the deluge of stories that kept coming as we were introduced to more and more people. Kim Hastry to the founder of Paper Magazine Model Pat Cleveland, costume designer Ruth Carter who collaborated with Willie Smith on Spike Lee School Days was the first project as a costume designer. And in each of these conversations, we're not just sort of working to compound curatorial research. They unfolded completely new ways of understanding Willie Smith and they became eventually our main focus not just adding detail and vibrancy to collection reviews and period interviews, but they shaped eventually the idea of the exhibition which emphasized Willie Smith's collaborations with artists but also his broader social impact as a designer and the ethic of his brand. So you see a snapshot of the exhibition on the right here which is a constellation of garments, graphic design, video, and ephemera. Once you're all able to come and see the exhibition you'll see a lot more of that but we tried to construct these snapshots of all of the different creative influences that were involved in each of the collections and the collaborations. And on the left you see the cover of the book which is designed by Polymode which is sort of the first representation of how we began to imagine distilling the details from all of the stories that we were receiving into one new narrative about Willie Smith did not at all feel like an authentic reflection of the celebration of difference that he loved. And so we moved forward with these platforms for decentralized methods of sharing his history. So the book it publishes remembrances alongside new scholarship and perspectives from artists and historians, theorists, Dario Calmes, Brendan Fernandez, Jonathan Michael Square, Camille and Brewer is here in the talk also a contributor, 50 contributors in total came together to collage a portrait of Willie Smith and his legacy. Next, thanks so much. And of course the Willie Smith digital community archive which launched on March 13th, the day of the show and also the day that all museums closed in New York due to COVID-19 precautions but it collects recollections, images, clothing, ephemera, drawings and personal snapshots that really build on an understanding of how Willie Smith worked and lived who and what he loved. It's a place to fill in the blanks to say what hasn't been said to sketch out a more complete timeline of his life. And of course we published the essays and interviews from the books there so they're free and available. Myra Edmonds, who's an incredible member of our team has been translating and transcribing contributions from former Willie Wehr staff, icons like Shaila Edmonds, Carmen de Lavalade. She's processing new images of garments and objects that have come through the media links and museums info line, word of mouth. It's really incredible every time there's a story published somewhere it leads to some more information that is put onto the archive. And it's not just been a repository. I think it's also generated new research and contributed to the depths of understanding of Willie Smith as a complex persona. In some cases, things that we thought we knew were contradicted by another story. You see two people remembering the same event differently. And although publishing this type of discrepancy has been something that's unusual for most museums we felt that it honestly presents a more accurate picture of how histories are formed. I agree. And it's like, even to that point, you mentioned all of the amazing contributors that we thank so much for being a part of this project. This is a community archive. This entire project was inspired by the way Willie Smith worked. He worked within this community of artists and these community of designers and friends and family in order to produce one of the most successful brands owned by a black person in the 20th century up until I will say debatedly probably until like FUBU until like the turn of the 20th century. This was really not only just an extension of Willie, but all of the different people who wanted to, I guess, add their own flavor to Willie Smith's aesthetic. And that's something that we really wanted to do within all of these different aspects of the project, particularly the archive to show that everyone has a very different perspective in their own relationship with Willie Smith. And that story needs to be told instead of having a very thick, strict idea on a narrative that was created because I know Alexandra can also test that this entire, all the themes took like hard less in all complete terms from start to finish, even at the very last moment. But it's something that we're extremely proud of and that we do encourage you to see. And moving into that and speaking into that community aspect, of course, when to put on recognition the origins of Willie Smith Day, it was in, I guess, David Dinkins, the mayor of New York, the first African-American mayor of New York, but he was the mayor of New York. He appointed Willie Smith Day for February 23rd. I know Willie Smith's birthday is the 29th, but he appointed Willie Smith Day on the 23rd in 1988. And this was a day of two separate things. It was a day of honoring, of course, Willie Smith and having all of these different people cast the characters who knew Willie, who grew up with Willie, who were in line with Willie or an allegiance with Willie in terms of what they were doing in their own practices and admired him coming together to celebrate his life because Willie Smith, he died of AIDS. A lot of the sources say AIDS-related complications. It was a very new disease at the time and I don't see people, I'm not sure. I don't want to age anyone on that is viewing this presentation right now, but if you are around the time of the, in the 80s and 90s, you're fully aware that AIDS was a relatively new, was a new phenomenon that really ravished so many industries, particularly the fashion industry. There's so many designers from the industry that died of AIDS because of one thing or another, and don't want to get into that too much, and I don't want to be a victim of that. And through that lens, this was a moment to also, in addition to celebrating the life and legacy of Willie and all of the people that he inspired and the entire brand that he built, this was also a moment to bring awareness to this fairly new disease in the sphere of the world that everyone lived in. This was also used as a fundraiser for AIDS research as well. So money was actually raised. They had like a fashion show and I'm actually going to go to, I'm going to skip down. We have Christopher Walken to the right. He was involved in the fun fashion show. And then to the left, you have Tukey and Robert Daenerys who helped put the entire Willie Smith Day festivities every year on at, in the early part. And then to their flanking them, you have Asheret and Simpson, Mark Asheret and Valerie Simpson, the duo. So there were so many people that really were involved in this Willie Smith Day, Cicely Tyson Rest in Peace. She was also involved in Willie Smith Day, Willie and Cicely were two peas in a pod. With that said, you know, this was a moment to again celebrate Willie Smith's life and also bring awareness to AIDS and in a way that hadn't really been spotlighted at that time. And to say the least, again, to bring in that narrative of Tukey, Tukey was very integral in Willie Smith's career in life. And I don't think that should go upon, that should go falling upon years because at the end of the day, it is through Tukey's, you know, persistence to make sure that her brother received his just do is what inspired us to continue to continue that work with the exhibition and the archive. And even today honoring Willie Smith on Willie Smith Day, of course. Willie Smith Day was really about remembering Willie Smith through activism. And we wanted to draw the parallel to Willie Smith's own efforts during his life to use his platform, his voice is access to support creative visionaries who were also trying to undermine stereotypes, gender, class, race, and ultimately to promote free expression. You know, during the prime years of Willie, where the civil rights gains of the 60s and early 70s are really being pressured by movements towards fiscal and social conservatism. Dernal mentioned a little bit, you know, what was happening at the time of Willie Smith's deaths in 1987. You know, this was the first year that Ronald Reagan published publicly acknowledged the AIDS crisis. So to give a little bit of historical context. But, you know, in particular, Willie Smith's collaborations with dancers and choreographers are some of the best examples of how Willie Smith saw his work as a storyteller move beyond the runway. And in these collaborations, specifically with Giant McIntyre and also Bill T. Jones and Ernie Zane, show how Willie Smith was attempting to support the facilitation of narratives of African-American and also queer experience. We realized really early in our research how important Diane McIntyre was to Willie Smith and also how important Dan's was to Willie Smith. One of our colleagues, Julie Pastors, spent a great deal amount of time with Diane and even visited her storage in Cleveland where, you know, they dug through her entire archive to unearth the costumes that you see in the image here presented in the exhibition. And, yeah, Willie and Diane met very early in his career through Mutual Friend. He tried to get her to model for him. He often asked dancers to walk in his presentations. But Diane was shy and she declined. So he started designing costumes for her compositions for Salah Sun in 1973, which was right as Willie Smith was transitioning out of digits. And then, of course, the Deep South Suite, which was also performed as part of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Stucca Elitim Festival in 1976. So the costumes you see first, the first three on the left in the exhibition photo and then depicted on the right also. And finally, in 1984, he used Willie wear flight suits and ensembles to costume the dancers and take off from a force landing, which told the story of Diane's mother, who was one of the first female African-American pilots of her time and had to give up her dream of flying to raise her family. Next slide, please. Another prominent collaboration is Bill T. Jones' Arnie Zane Dance Company's production of Secret Pastors, which debuted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984. Willie Smith created the costumes, Keith Herring designed the sets. Peter Gordon created the score. He also created the score for Expedition, which Darnell will talk about in a minute. And Secret Pastors was phenomenal for the time, not just because of the weight of the artistic collaborations. Many of the artists involved were really looking at how to create a connection between avant-garde and the mainstream. But the performance explored politics, economics, race, sexuality, ignored traditional gender roles on stage, including men dancing with each other. It depicted interracial communities and anti-capitalist values. And the costumes that Willie Smith designed for the performance were also off the rock. Willie wear in most cases, they were unisex, interchangeable. And they really showed his interest in breaking down gender binaries, in particular his collections were the first to be shown both men's and women's on the same runway often with unisex interchangeable clothes. But also just shows how Willie Smith was interested in improving how well Willie wear garments were designed to move. And here's a short clip of part of the production courtesy of BAM. We had a pleasure of seeing the full in its fullness early on in the research phase. But it was so much fun to watch because there were moments in secret pastures that were really like fashion moments. And it's also something presented at an expedition where uniquely you see almost a fashion show happening while in the performance, like inadvertently, I don't think that was the intention, but that's what it almost came across as in certain points. And certainly expedition, there was like plain visual cues to like a fashion show happening. But certainly in that performance that in secret pastures you felt that in some points throughout the entire performance. And then to that point, you mentioned, Alexandra, about this idea of gender neutrality and unisex and really kind of defining those redefining these conventional aspects to these categories of fashion, which were certainly embedded in the fashion industry at that time. And even still today that we're really kind of breaking up and that I feel this is another aspect that we kind of take advantage of today in contemporary fashion that men wearing women's clothes, men women wearing men's clothes and that whole idea men and women don't really, like men's wear women's wear does is really kind of leaving our our sphere in in in favor for this world of in between and it's being celebrated but during its time it was certainly advanced it was avant-garde and and even to that effect, you know Paris there were Paris designers that were certainly bought that that were for creating men's wear and showing men's wear and so that and for Willie to do that and to separate himself from that world and to say that I'm going to make this bubble on my own and be successful at it is something to be commended in that vein. You know here we have with expedition and that was to show it was a film that he was also came in conjunction with the film that he produced in Dakar, Senegal to show his spring 1986 collection which entitled of course expedition everywhere the influences of this particular collection certainly resides in the West African context you know he really wanted to use this moment to publicly show his exploration of his blackness and in general creatives over time no matter you know the field whether it's fashion and entertainment and music what not artists like to explore their own heritage in various ways as we all know and particularly black ones do it black artists and black creatives like to do to do that in either subtle and overt ways and for Willie it was a it was an evolution because he was doing it in private and Alexander you spoke about this in your introduction text about you know his artwork connection to African art and black artists and really kind of integrating that in his private world but this was an opportunity that he had to continuously show it on a public mainstream I mean we think about today with like Beyonce and her Coachella performance and showing HBCU culture at the one of the biggest stages in the world you know this was and you can honestly I feel like you can talk about this in the same vein where this was really using a huge platform of film to show his blackness and to communicate his exploration of it by way of what he was selling and he did it in a way that wasn't so didactic he did it in a fun easy way a lot of the inspiration of it specifically we were looking at the Boga Lampini in the collection you'll see a lot of the garments with this specific print on the left hand side the print is very much a reminiscent of the Boga Lampini or mud cloth textile it's a dye resist technique that uses mud that uses mud and then the negative spaces that are left from the mud are left how can I communicate this the negative spaces on the mud are then seen are peered through amongst like the dark ground that's taken off towards the end of the process which takes weeks and weeks but this particular textile technique is very native to the Bumana people the Dogo people specifically that live in modern-day Mali the film was had well had a lot of people involved within and again speaking to that artist's collaboration aspect he had Max Badoekel produce the film and Mark Bozek of course was very much heavily involved in this production as well and Linda Mason who was involved as the makeup artist who was really ace woman working on many of Willie Ware productions over the course of the span of while Willie was alive to do the makeup for so this was certainly not new and yeah you had just the Casacara and Peter Gordon of course he was doing the music it was a silent film but it had music but it didn't have a script more or less and I believe I think Julie found the main character that if you watch we encourage you to go to this site on Instagram which has been such a connecting to so many people who were involved in Willie Ware projects I mean I know that we only have a couple of minutes left and the majority of the questions in the chat and in the Q & A are related to the most surprising things that we learned during Willie Smith research and I don't know what your most surprising moment is Darnell I know that you had some really exciting moments deep in the McCalls archive looking at patterns and also connecting with a lot of people who were integral into building the fashion industry American fashion industry particularly in the late 60s and early 70s after the elation of Battle of Versailles for me I was struck by how frequently we came back to Willie Smith when marking these like firsts like the first artist design mass produced t-shirt something that's so ubiquitous to fashion today you know it's like okay well here is the moment where this was first done you know and it's Willie Ware you know the first time that men's and women's collections were shown on the same runway goes back to Willie Ware you know the probably I would say the most established version of a collaboration between architects and a fashion brand to create showroom and boutique spaces that connect with the lifestyle ideals of the brand and are not just necessarily creating these luxury boxes for these brands to exist in but something that you know was intended to be about becoming and transformation and was an experience in his own right and multi uses what maybe just to wrap up is there anything else that you would add to that list of the of a surprise that really doing a research there were so many like fun stories that were like we were coming like full circle around we talked about Penny Payne shout out to Penny Payne from CSS Industries which owns McCalls and Butterrick and both patterns now and you know she's the archivist there and was helping us with her research and come to find out she was one of the models in the made in New York in the made in New York film and that Willie did to show the artist t-shirts and that whole moment and to see that you know she forgot at the end of the day I feel like moments like that bring you so much joy to know that people every day people that you might be walking through had so much contact and was inspired by this man Willie Smith and just to bring those stories to life make it more personal and I think that's something that I really really enjoyed about this entire project and bringing it to life I mean and even before that before I came on I think a big question that I also get is like how did this exhibition how did you start this journey because there's so many people that don't know about Willie Smith I mean I knew about because my mom is from Philadelphia so she reminds me all the time so that's not it was in my world but I know a lot of people don't know about his story also the fact that people like Virgil Abloh are inspired by you know Willie Smith and Willie where business like but at the same time there's this disconnect so I'm so I'm sure like everyone out there would love to know your journey um in the nascent of this exhibition I mean well I I was connected to Willie Smith through site through architecture you know digging in in the archive of site architects and coming across the project and just getting an inkling of you know how how of a collaboration you know between fashion and architecture in particular existed you know in the early 80s hearing the story told by James and then Alice in Sky you know who was also a collaborator of James founder of site and big part of that early early project um but but also you know listening to James talk about you know the broader influences of Willie Smith and some of the other artists like Diane Krueger Les Levine you know that Willie Smith collaborated with and this idea of you know Willie Smith catalyzing an artistic community that has such um has had such a broad influence on what's happened from that point today um and it's it's it's so obvious you know to see Willie Smith mirrored in the careers of fashion designers who are also trying to make a major difference in the industry and so I just posted here a link to expedition which is on the Willie Smith archive um it's definitely a good place to watch the film but to also dig much deeper into this constellation of perspectives on Willie Smith to understand a little bit more um you know some of the research that we've conducted the different archives and participants who have have shaped the story I would encourage anyone who has a story about Willie Smith or Willie where to to share it with us we would love to publish it um if you have a picture of yourself as a teenager wearing Willie wear at a important moment in your life we especially love those because they really give a sense of um you know what what the clothing meant to people you know which I think is something that I wasn't necessarily expecting to hear but we've heard over and over again um so please everyone thanks so much for joining us today um we would love to hear from you when the exhibition opens up again um please please come and join us but for the meantime um you can view it online right and are we doing or do we have time sadly we've we've run out of time for today yes we do yeah oh and there is uh is there a survey um I know Phoebe mentioned uh there's a survey that you all can fill out I'm not sure Phoebe you can send that to everyone while they're still here oh it will okay when they close perfect so you all can fill that out thank you all so much as Alejandra said we really appreciate this and we really appreciate the love oh you must read Eric Pritchard's essay also right blacking through remembering on Willie Smith's day which has fed into most of what we know about Willie Smith's day so thanks so much everyone for joining yes thank y'all bye