 Thanks, everyone. There are a couple of seats in the middle if anybody wants to come a little bit closer. Thank you all so much for coming. My name is Irene Samu. I'm the director of exhibitions here at GSAP. And we're really pleased to have this opening of the exhibition number nine, which has been created and designed by Frida Escobedo. Before we get into the conversation with some of the content, I also just wanted to say some thank yous specifically to our dean, Amal Andros, who is going to be with us tonight. But she's been incredibly supportive of the project from the start, so a special thanks to her. I also wanted to thank our fantastic shop crew, our fantastic student team at the exhibitions, and also our communications and events team for helping us organize this evening. So I'm also joined tonight by Luis Castaneda. Many of you might know him from his wonderful book, Spectacular Mexico 68, which I think we can all agree is the book on the Mexico City Olympics from 1968. So it's a real pleasure to have him here. And next to him, of course, is our guest of honor, Frida Escobedo, visiting from Mexico City. And Luis Carranza, a professor of architectural history at Roger Williams University, and also a member of GSETUP's faculty. Just to give a short intro to this project, Frida's exhibition is, I would say, the third in a series of exhibitions that have been held here at the Arthur Ross Gallery, where we've done a little bit of curatorial experimentation in terms of working with contemporary practitioners and really approaching them in order to kind of develop a new project with them. So a really unique, creative project that might give them an opportunity to test something out that they might not be able to do within the context of their own office or professional practice. So in February, we had a great exhibition with the photographer James Ewing on model photography. And then following that, a show on cinema by Liam Young, where he was able to present a brand new film project. So similar to that, when the approach of Frida about doing a show here, it was kind of an open invitation, which put a lot of pressure on her to come up with something. So in fact, she did have the option. Maybe she didn't realize at the time if she wanted to. She could have shown some of her recent projects. She didn't know that, she just said. So I was just tricking you into trying something totally new so that I could work with you on it. So it really was a very open invitation. And during one of our Skype conversations where Frida was brainstorming, she just sent me a little photograph of a sculpture that was under construction that she had found in an archive in France, I think. It was probably the week before. And I didn't know anything about it. And maybe she didn't know that much about the photo at the time either. But she did some digging and exploring. And the exhibition that's here is really the outgrowth of that moment of curiosity and exploration for her. So the show in short, and we'll talk about this in more detail, but the main subject at hand is the Ruta Friendship, or the Ruta de la Amistad in Mexico City, which was a sculpture project developed in tandem with the Mexico City Olympics. And to just kind of get us in the spirit of Mexico in 1968, I thought we would just show a short little video clip that I'm sure you will all enjoy. And then we can take the conversation from there since we'll have some really fantastic visuals. And music. I'm going to run that day for you, but we just... OK, so I wanted to start the conversation by asking Vida if she could just tell us a little bit about the project, if she came to it, and what it is about the project, which she is trying to kind of express here in this speech. First of all, that the piece that is sent up to this exhibition didn't make it all time. Here tomorrow, maybe installed, yes, Tuesday. And it will be important to mention it because this is the piece that we want to present. It's inspired by the original, especially on October 9th, my Todd Williams, who is joining us tonight. And we're very honored that he's here. Thank you so much. And as you can see here, and as Irene mentioned, this first glimpse of what these monumental sculptures were really in the inside happened in Orleans at the Prague Center. I was doing some research time also to find a project to work with them for the biennial. And I had no idea also of what we were going to do. So they were collecting a lot of material from Mathias Geritz Arkad. And they had that on the corner of one of their beaches, a small picture of these sculptures. And this was the first time that I saw that these sculptures were not these solid monumental gigantic sculptures, but they were really flimsy. And then they really depended on human labor and these very precarious structures of scaffolds and bits and pieces of other buildings around Mexico City to be constructed. So it kind of contradicted the idea of the original purpose of the Ruta, which is to present Mexico as a very young and modern and sophisticated country as it was showing us the time ago. And it shows this, this is the way that the country was really being built. This is a country that was built by human labor, by the small and fragile bits and pieces of the surrounding areas. I think that's the basic idea behind the project. And what is your role with investigating this? What is your interest in terms of architectural office, looking at historical art, that we're kind of rethinking? I know that's a hard question. No, I know, but we have traditional practice, I guess, in Mexico City, but we also like to take looks at things that are not really traditional architecture. So maybe this is a window to maybe for us to review this idea of the ruin in Mexico, we're very interested in that. But also, I think we learn a lot from the past and I don't know why, but there's like this thing about modernism and I think this is something that we all share that teaches a lot about our identity, not only in terms of the urban and the architectural, but also like moving the cycle of the Mexican. So we're a little bit obsessed with that moment because it explains a lot about how we develop our idea of national identity, but also about who we are and who we are not. So yes, it's not an architectural project, but it has to do with the urban landscape and it has to do with space for sure and it has to do with construction, but it's a different construction, it's a construction in body space. And this is also an idea that I'm very interested about and this is probably something that was born out of my time at the GLD and the Art and Design and Public Domain program, because this was like maybe like stepping outside the world of architecture and just like taking a look at other things, but it's still architecture and still navigable and it still produces space and so on. Our other little piece, I have a question for you. Just picking up on freedom of saying about this public sculpture project in the city and this being one of the many leftovers of the Olympic Committee's vision for 68. I mean, for you, how does this particular public sculpture project fit into that larger history? Sure, so it's very interesting. If you were to walk around as I did a few years ago and I was just envisioning my own research project through Mexico City, you realize it's a unique city in the sense that it's actually parts of it anyway, full of modernist ruins. There's all kinds of ruins in Mexico. There's very ancient ruins and there's also modern ruins. It's a city that has a lot of modernism and the project we're looking at now is part of one of a number of initiatives for those Olympics, which themselves were full of other kinds of interventions in the city. So many interventions, in fact, that in a way they're kind of, those Olympics are kind of a prototype for what we understand as being normal today in Olympics, that Olympics are an opportunity for cities to totally reinvent themselves. So the Rune of Friendship was just one of several very spectacular things that happened in the context of those Olympics. But my experience of it was kind of similar to something we were talking about earlier. I'm not really knowing, I kind of stumbled on what remains of these Olympics the way that one maybe stumbles upon an ancient ruin or something that looks very old but also very modern. And one has many of those moments when one walks around the fabric of Mexico City. So I think for me what's interesting about this kind of relationship with these artifacts is that as a researcher as well, I was mystified by these frat pants of something that looked like a very grand vision that wasn't quite that old but that seemed also to be simultaneously old and also from a kind of, from the future as well. Sort of like that for Kelbalch video in the film. So I enjoyed that very much about, I enjoyed the process of others creatively looking at that relationship as well. I was gonna say that one of the things that I think is really interesting about this moment too is that how it represents a particular kind of shift in how Mexico tries to also present itself to the world. I mean, one of the calls I think that Pedro Ramirez Vasquez, the main organizer of the kind of Olympic Games had was to basically present Mexico both as modern but also historically grounded. And how to basically kind of negotiate this thing, no? And one of the things about the Mexican interest in art started in the 1920s with the Mexican Neural Movement, right? That goes all the way through to the 1950s with the university campus. And then there's a kind of a shift, a rupture with kind of abstraction, abstract forms coming in. And Matias Guedes is a really interesting figure within that. And what he kind of proposes like sculpture as a vehicle for kind of self-understanding as a place for kind of looking at the world differently that is not ideologically kind of directed like the Neuralist Movement was proposing. He kind of proposes like something kind of broader. And I think that the project of the group that I was that this kind of utopia that is very similar to say the ideas from the 1920s or 1930s, a lot of certain kind of transformation of society. But in this case it's done through these kinds of abstracted forms that one would perceive in different ways. I mean, it's kind of important to kind of to note the transformation from being in a mural space and walking versus say looking these forms and kind of assuming that's the right model. Yeah, and just to give some context to some of you who might not be familiar with the premise for the Sculpture Project that Matias Guedes gave to the participants, the requirements were that they were made of concrete, that they were brightly colored, and that they were gigantic, right? And so it's really amazing to see the photos when there's actually a human figure for scale because I think Todd's own piece is six meters high and some of them are even bigger than that. So the idea was that when you were driving by on the brand new slick highway in Mexico City that you could experience these sculptures in a succession and that each of these would be crafted by a sculptor from a different country. So there were 17 different countries participating. But so that this, it had this experiential quality to it that was about modern technology in the new modernized Mexico City, but also that this was somehow linked to a sense of international peace and friendship. So there's a lot invested in these gigantic pieces of plastic objects that is quite striking today when I went to visit Frida a couple of months ago or maybe it was just a couple of weeks ago. I actually, I tried to go out and see as many of the sculptures as I could and took a really crazy long Uber ride. And it was amazing to just kind of see them in the distance, but experience them as they were supposed to be experienced from a passing car, but not being able to get out and see them. So it's a very fleeting experience with huge expectations imparted on them. So I had a question for Frida too as someone who lives in the city and is able to experience them on an everyday basis or maybe not depending on where your destinations are. Like for you and say your generation as well, what is the general perception of these objects today since some of them have also been moved, which is an interesting project as well to discuss, but some of them are not necessarily as prominent as you might think even though they're enormous in terms of scale. So I'm just wondering what, is it really a ruin for people today or is it the sort of forgotten history that you're trying to excavate? Well I think there's something in Mexico that attracts us to symbols and this becomes of course a very symbolic gesture, not just for a specific time, but also for a very specific emotion, this national idealism or a very positive moment about what Mexico could be. When I was a kid and the first earthquake that I can remember happened in 85, we had to move temporarily to my uncle's house, which was in Pedrega, very close to these sculptures, but at that time already like the city had grown so much that these sculptures were surrounded by housing blocks and things like that. So these sculptures were not seen at the distance anymore. You could actually climb on top of them and we would go and climb on top of them to play. So we had kind of this relationship to sculpture. This was very playful to us. So in a way we humanized them in a different way. They became familiar, we touched the surface, but even at the time I didn't realize that they were so fragile. So there was something that was very monumental and still very present and very symbolic. So they were not a ruin, what was a ruin was this idea of development and progress because it was surrounded by the city. So the sculptures were still majestic but the city was not giving them a chance to be like that anymore and it changed over time because yes they were moved and the contradiction is that they were moved because of the freeway. So actually they were created to be looked at from the car, but then the car completely displaced the sculptures. So it kind of makes like a nice relationship to the critique that Matias Gales was doing because he was almost explaining that these sculptures would create like the city of Prokres and maybe like trigger some new areas in the city, but it was actually in the highway that was creating that effect. And then the highway itself kind of just made this a ruin of an idea of the public sculpture. I wonder actually in continuation of this if we could talk a little bit about the relationship between the sculptures and urbanization and the idea of urbanization that they were, I guess it's not proposing because there's this kind of you know, the notion that art could kind of get you know, different living conditions. So before he sponsored Williams, before he kind of sponsored an ambitious project, they are inside an even more ambitious project for a giant highway that would criss-cross the entirety of Mexico and then the entire country. And then certain intervals would be sculptures that would come first and then cities would follow them throughout Mexico. So of course, it's not a project in the sense that he never thought it would actually happen that it was a kind of utopian vision that this project was supposed to be a realization of in a smaller scale, but he definitely believed that these sculptures would be sort of avatars for urban development, that they would come first and that the city would follow them and that they would bring with them a certain idea of organization according to certain modernist ideas of what the city ought to be and that they would by themselves have this effect on the urban landscape. And it is very paradoxical that in a way the sculptures, if you wanna think about it like that succeeded because the city grew with them but maybe the city or the car took the metaphor too seriously and eventually displaced the sculptures themselves and after the car was done there was only cars and not sculptures anymore in a certain way. But yeah, in these photographs you're seeing, you're seeing what was at that point the periphery of the city, the edges of the city, a frontier of the city and a part of Mexico City that's very interesting, this very dramatic volcanic landscape. The Pedrigal, which means in Spanish was kind of a rocky place, it's a very interesting landscape in and of itself. And then this would look very much filled by a city that has grown tremendously since then and has transformed entirely. I wanted to also ask Frida about the design process because it was actually a very unusual one. And I think the project of Lava de Dela Amistad itself as a design process for each of the artists was also very unusual. So can you just walk us through how you began and also what the culmination is even though it's not present yet? So the original idea was to recreate them in their full scale. Of course we wanted to have number nine in full scale right here at Columbia University which was pretty difficult. So we had to scale it down. But it does relate to the history of the Lava de Dela Amistad because from what we understand from our research is that sculptures produce these beautiful models that they were shipped to Mexico. And then from the models, they actually translated that into a monumental sculpture. So it's going almost like from a miniature idea or something like really an abstract idea which we can see right here. These are photographs of the model into a full scale sculpture. Sometimes not even with construction plans which is like an interpretation. So they had to come up with how to resolve the structure, calculate the way, calculate the resistance of the materials and then apply the color and the concrete. And then we did the exact same opposite thing. So it's from the photographs and from looking at the real sculptures that we tried to find the bones underneath these sculptures and then translated into a three-dimensional object that's scaled down. So it's like going a little circle back in a very contradictory way. And it was also fun to see because this is not a work that I did on my own, of course, but there's a team of people, a great team of people behind this. And the metal workers that actually fabricated the piece also were translating these photographs. So it was also going back to that image in the room and in these photographs of people interpreting someone as this idea. And I think that's something crucial to understand in architecture and in urbanism. So that is probably related to your first question, like how does this relate to my practice? It's understanding that moment where your idea is being executed by someone else and lived in a different way than you expect and you plan and this always happens. Well, before we began this evening, I had a friend come up to me and I was kind of explaining the project to him and he asked me, so is it a model? I said, oh, I'm gonna ask Frida. Yes, it's kind of hard. And I think it's this funny moment where I notice how some of my colleagues are doing also like experimental things where when we were presenting the sister project of this piece, Oriental of the Orients by Emil, I noticed that there were many architects that were flirting with the idea of maybe like doing some sculpture or just like doing some drawings or some research. So I think it's kind of hard to label now what we're doing things and what are we producing. So it's not specifically an architectural exhibition. It's not about just urban sculpture. It's not a model, but it's not a sculpture. So I think it will change depending on the context in which it is presented. So maybe now it's a sculpture because it's presented as a sculpture, but if it eventually goes into a public space, maybe it can become a playground or maybe it can be something different. So, yeah. I think it's kind of interesting too that the objects and their scale and how one would perceive them, and especially kind of in the gallery space. Minimotias Geriz always thought about these things as primary form. So he's really describing them in terms of minimalist sculpture. And of course, I think as one of the earliest persons who's like dealing with minimalist sculpture, he's really thinking about the relationship between the spectator and the object and how one moves around it and so forth. In this case, being, in the case of the Ruta de la Mistade, being in the car, and in a particular scale, it's gonna be interesting to see the object here because of its relationship to the gallery space. Obviously, if we look at those photographs, Williamson's photographs of the model and its site, which are also very interesting in particular because they're kind of like in the, like here, they're in the middle of Prospect Park, we thought, we thought. You know, which is like very, very different from Mexico City a little bit. You know, and to sort of extend it, you know, like the idea was that these things were not only contextual to the pedagal, but also that at some moment that they had to do with the city, where the city was always a kind of a reference point, you know, that they would allow the city to grow. But I think that they didn't realize how fast the city would grow. And then there was always a kind of play off of whatever the context was. To see it here, the play will be different. And it will be interesting to see how people like react to it, how people interact with it. And especially once it has this kind of transparency as compared to the massiveness that the objects initially have. And we should also clarify, you'll see one of the images coming up of a contemporary photo of Frida and a team using one of her projects as a playground, I would say. So in Orleans at the Biennial that just opened, I guess, last week. By the way, this is Frida's fourth exhibition this fall. She's tough as nails. She got through an earthquake. The hurricanes in Miami and in Puerto Rico have created delays for various projects that she's still here smiling. And her birthday was on Monday. So she's had a really crazy fall. But anyway, so my point was that in Orleans, she had constructed number 16, which was by the French artist Olivier Seguin. So because she was working in New York with this invitation, she turned to the United States contribution to the project. But in Orleans, the project that she did of the actual steel framework of the sculpture also inspired by the photograph is full scale. So about how high is that one? Okay, so when it's finished, it's gonna be 80 meters tall. But the question that I wanted to ask you though was because you're in this context and you have contained space where you could do something. I think the clear project from the beginning was doing this full scale sculpture, trying to get it as big as you could kind of dealing with fabrication and all of those questions. But quite interestingly, as an architect, you were tasked with doing all this archival research and also kind of real curating, you know, really picking out every object, figuring out how it's gonna be laid out, what the experience would be, even what the content would be in the little booklet that we provided. So I was just curious, you know, what was your experience putting on your historian hat and how it might have differed from other projects of this type? Or if you've done projects like this before and then how this kind of introduced something new to your thinking process? So we had been working with Pedro Ramirez Vasquez Archive before because we were invited, I was invited to write an article for the 15th anniversary of the Muses de Borotea, the National Archipelage Museum. So that was the first time I really did this kind of historical research and it really opened me to this really crazy world of the Pedro Ramirez Vasquez Archive and all the things that happened behind that. But you're very right, placing this culture and also reason, when you place this culture in this white box, it completely changes the idea of the object. And if there was something really important about having those photographs, that could give you a distance again from the piece, like this is something that you look from afar. And these are staged photographs. These are from Pedro Ramirez Vasquez Archive. They're meant to look monumental even when they're being built. And there's some beauty about the composition of the photograph. So they're like highly aestheticized images. And you can tell, even like some of them are super nostalgic like number two and number nine. Some of them have these tiny little humans that are looking at the horizon, like if he was looking at the sea. But at the same time, we wanted to have something that was really very proximal to the public. You know, like you can touch this culture. Like you could really climb on top of that until you didn't want it, you could do it. So it's almost like changing this idea of the monument but not just the monument itself but this idea of power. How power can be like rescaled and then re-checked in a different way. So that was I think the crucial point of the project. How you can transform that idea of something monumental, sociologically, geologically, symbolical and turn it into something a little bit more personal. And based on this, I think for context and I think the best person to talk with this is, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the whole kind of process of the kind of like Ramirez Vasquez's kind of like hand and all this and this issues of power and the monumentality and expression. Sure, so Ramirez Vasquez, that bizarre archive is an archive where I spent a lot of time, maybe too much time. Ramirez Vasquez was a very powerful architect in mid 20th century Mexico. That's one of the most powerful architect alive there. Very influential person. Influential not just or actually not really in terms of the architectural merit of his work but because of the political connections of his work the political resonance of his work. So he was part of a generation of architects who were very closely with government agencies who had built these very monumental things because they were, they had basically the unlimited resources of a whole state apparatus degree, these kinds of monuments and spectacles. He was the largest one of which was for the Olympics. And since that moment, there's a culture around his persona that's very peculiar that's right, of preserving the image of the grandeur of that moment and there's many things about that moment. Of course, they're also very sinister. And the event that some of you might, that might resonate for some of you considering there's several but maybe the most traumatic event around those Olympics or what the shootings of students were protesting was really against the Olympics but certainly against the regime that organized the Olympics. And also this photograph of course speaks to a whole other set of tensions around racist sports around that moment in time. And this is a photograph of the students who were demonstrating in a place where afterwards, not all after this photograph was taken, the forces of the state which you're seeing in that photograph seems a great timing for what I'm saying, open fire against them. So it's a very dark moment also in Mexican cultural politics. And Vargas Vasquez and a number of other architects and artists and figures like Garretz themselves are embedded within this panorama too. So it's important to say that that was also part of the context we were discussing. I think this is something really important because we're talking about almost like this idea of the mask in Mexican culture. Like how there are always two sides of the history. The Olympic Games were very positive and they were about friendship and youth and sports and culture. But at the same time there was something happening on the other side of the street that was very closely related to this same exact moment. It's interesting that these monuments because of their abstraction don't necessarily keep the memories. I mean, you know, because you see them and they're just so kind of distant, they're so neutral. As compared to say that murals, there's a femoral mural that was created during the time. Like objects that were trying to represent exactly the moment. I mean, these things in a sense have the kind of timelessness that Vargas Vasquez had asked Garretz to kind of embody within the idea that they should be abstract because he didn't want that, you know, like Latin American countries to show their national leaders or the Soviet countries to have images of the lemon or marks on the sculptures, right? So, you know, there's this kind of abstraction that almost dehistoricizes them and it's kind of interesting how even in these photographs there is this kind of almost like you try it to your just kind of genericness of it that doesn't speak about the kind of like very complex times, you know, that were happening at the time. Some of them do actually, there's a beautiful one where you can see the construction office. Like it's very precarious. You see that like it's plywood and some scrap materials. So there's like this very nostalgic moment. So some of them are really abstract but behind this curtain of no-stage photographs you can still get this piece of reality that's really like a tiny window maybe in the back. Yeah, and so I think what I'm getting out of those last few comments is that there was this kind of desire to break away from these grand narratives that people like Ramirez-Baskos established and even Gerritz, the way that he promoted it and even wrote about it afterwards. And I think we should mention that during the research process there was this detour that very serendipitously happened because Frida had selected number nine by Todd Williams, we thought we gotta find this guy. So we somehow hunted him down. It took a couple of weeks, I think, of intense phone calls and emails and his gallerists. If she's here, Paik Holston was really the key who put us in touch with Todd. And Frida and I went to go visit him in Maryland and found a whole other archive about love that there were on the spot. So it was really beautiful detour in terms of historical documents that we uncovered. So could you talk a little bit about some of, maybe the things that you learned from Todd and through some of his wonderful items, which he so graciously loaned us for his flight? Yes, you're right. And this was like a shared, I think, magical moment because Todd just came to his dining room and he had this folder in his hands and then he opened the folder and he had these original letters that we were looking in Mexico, like in the archives in the Archivo General de la Nación, but there was only copies and Andresa and Axel who were very involved in the project and thank you guys for doing such an amazing job, were constantly trying to get a copy for the exhibition and it was super difficult. And then the letters just came to us, which was really magical. And the other beautiful layer about this is that we get to know the people who were behind the project. We get to know the stories behind it and the experiences. It only not just happened with this project, but also with Rez Nacion 19 with Olivier Segan, which also recently, sorry, in the pictures they changed over the course of the production of the piece because Monsieur Segan is living now in Orleans, which we didn't know until we were very advanced in the project for the Orleans. So it's kind of like these things that you don't find but actually that come to you, like what we feel, come to you, you were like very, you know, you made them, they come to us, they're in some of you. But yes, and what was also really interesting is to understand how this moment was actually very important for a generation of artists, especially like how this presented them to the world in a completely different way and from what we learned from the stories that we had from Todd Williams was that this was his first monumental sculpture that this really made us shift in his career. So actually this was like the positive outlet that maybe Matias Gris was looking for. So there was some truth in his positivism about the Ruta de la Mistad, even though there was a dark side. So as I was saying, these are always decisive. Now to the audience, if there's any questions or comments from any of them. Is it possible that the artist who's here could say a little bit himself? I mean, if you give him just the, well, like his own impression, which is like, I need to go home and put him in the photo. If he would like to share some more, so that was absolutely nice. Yeah, yeah, I would love that. If it's okay, just like in particular, I was interested, I was interested how hard it was at the time to be African-American as an artist and what the thing was with the politics, you know, and so it's an interesting how it's so, it's almost the same today. I mean, we have the same discussions with Trump and so on. You've had a throat of French grunts involved. I don't know if I can tie it into what's going on today, to that particular time. Being involved in this project was something that I've never even thought about before. It was a new experience for me. And although there was a lot of things going on in this country at that time, the experience was far different and far removed from what was going on here in the States. I met people from all over and together, I mean, it's called the Rue de Ramecette, French. And it really was that way. We lived together in the same hotel. We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner together. And we really formed a fellowship. Some of those people I know, and some of them are, I was about to say I know today, there's a very few of us alive today. I just happen to be one of them. But we kept it in touch, especially the ones who lived here, like me, Moore, Fonseca, Constantino Miola who was living out in the Hamptons before it became the Hamptons. And we all kept in touch. And it was something, I was the only black person down, but nobody made a big deal of it. I was accepted and it was a far cry from what was going on here. I could say that there was one time, well in the hotel, there was one incident where I think I might have told the story to Frida and Irene. We were in the hotel and like I said, we met every day downstairs in the dining room. And this one particular day, I came down to the dining room and walked in and I was saying hello to everybody and stuff like that. And I noticed a group of people, a family sitting in a table not too far from where we were. And they were all looking at me. And nobody ever paid that much attention to me, except for the people who knew me, okay? And they started whispering amongst themselves. And as I got a little closer, I picked up the actions. So I knew that they were from home territory. They were southerners and they reminded me of where I was. They never said anything to me, which was not surprising. But every time I walked into the room, they would look up and follow me as I went about my business. But they would never say anything. But I guess their curiosity got the best of them. And they had to find out what was going on. What was I doing down there? And they started asking questions. The good thing about it, nobody sold to me, they said. So they could have come to me, but they wouldn't. And that's the only tie-in to what was going on there. I met other Americans down there, but they just happened to be black. There were some black entertainers, musicians. And that was homecoming. Other than that, like I said, it was far removed from what I, or any of us who was experiencing here. I hope that answers your question. Yeah, and who created the show? Like, who invited you here to be part of the presenting back in space? Well, Herbert Byer saw my work. Well, the first international show that I was in happened right after I got out of school. I had one fellowship, and then the next year, I won another fellowship. And through that, I got invited to be in an exhibition into a place in Dakar, Senegal. They used my work for the cover, which you can see in the display case back here. Herbert Byer saw that pamphlet, and he became interested, and he spoke to Matias Gertz about me. And that's how I got invited into the show. I think that no one ever told me this, but I think they wanted to make it, they wanted to include people of all different types. And at that time, I was one of like, maybe five people who were doing sculpture in the United States who happened to be black, and they felt that my work fit into what they wanted to do. And when you come back to New York, there were not that many African-Americans working. How was it, did you tell people, were you ignored by the art, so-called art world, or like Manhattan-centric art world, how did they receive you afterwards? Afterwards? Yeah. We got a few wall lines in the papers and magazines. It would always say, anti-Wheels. It would name everybody else and say anti-Wheels. But they never, I never got any real publicity out of the show, out of that work here. But it did help me in other ways. While I was down in Mexico, Matthias Gertz, he played a big part in my career. He entered just me to a friend of his, a woman by the name of Annie DeMaz, who was an agent. And when we got back here, she started representing me. And through her, I did about five or ten, about five or six major self-sure works. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Anybody else? And those public works that Todd's mentioning are actually in New York City, so in Williamsburg, in Harlem, and elsewhere, right? Yeah, Harlem, the Bronx, and just pretty around. Yeah. So you definitely made your mark in the city. So we're so pleased to have you come back as well. How old were you when you, because you're, I'm still very young. How old were you when you- Yes. I was, that was about 29. 29? 28, 29, I guess. I started, I was about 22. I skipped years, I didn't know, I went to city college for about a year, right after high school. And then it was a gap of about four or three or four years before I went back to school. So about how I got out of school, I was about 26 years old. Were you the youngest sculptor in the group of people working on the flip-flops, Todd? I'm sorry. Were you the youngest one? Yes, I was the youngest one. Yeah, I was the youngest one. There was someone who spoke, there were two who were close to me. One was from Mexico, and the other one was from Belgium, I think. He was a Belgian war polo. Poland. We were the youngest three, but I felt the three, I was the youngest. The artist, Mark, is short on the idea about his sister, Keith, because we've been talking about this since then. He's very beautiful and I want to hear more about him. You want to know how long he's been here? He wants to hear, she wants to hear more about your piece. It's beautiful, and she would like to hear more about your sculpture and the Ruta de la Mista. Well, it's hard to say how I work, because I really don't know. I, most of the times I don't put anything down on paper. I'm a great daydreamer, and what I do is I just kind of let my mind go. I believe that the universe is full of ideas, and some of us can reach out and grab those ideas, and I happen to be one of those people who can do that. I don't know where, other than that, I don't know where they come from, but they're just there when I need them. What happens is I start thinking about something, and I get an idea. I usually don't have a vague idea of what I want to do. And I start thinking about it, or daydreaming about it, and I get something in my mind, and it's kind of fuzzy. It's like a picture that hasn't been developed yet. You've got it in the mix with the chemicals. You know, the negatives is in the chemicals, and the picture's just starting to come through. I don't know if you folks have worked in photography before, but when you take a picture and you get a negative, you have to put it in chemicals. The chemicals make the picture come through on the piece of paper after you expose the paper to the negative, okay? And you put the piece of paper or the photo piece in the chemicals, and you have to start staring it, the chemicals around it, and it slowly starts to come into what you're looking for. I don't know if I can explain it better, because like I said, I really don't know where it all comes from, but I'm glad that I'm able to do it. Anybody else? Anyone else? Do we wrap it up for the YouTube? Well, thank you all so much for joining us. It's been a real pleasure.