 Good morning, everybody. Good morning, good morning, good morning! Yeah, and we are live streaming, and we are happy. And I'm Elizabeth Sackler, and I am a very happy woman this morning. And I want you to know, and I hope you are all very happy people and feel like I do that you died and have gone to heaven. Because the art historical canon has been level wide open. We are making herstory right now to make things right. And while making the 10th anniversary of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Criminal History, which exists entirely and fully to make things right, it is what we are not. Equality, justice, equity, equal pay, equal wall space. Catherine and Rue, hi Catherine Morse and Rue Hawkely. Please stand this room here. There you go, thank you. You two have magnificently conceived this enormous exhibition and you've manifested it with brilliance, with intelligence, with heart, with grace, with grit, with certitude. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart. The Sackler Center has had 10 incredible years of revolutionary exhibitions and progressive programming. And it's been made possible in part because of my partnership with first 15 years with our previous director Arnold Lehman and the Board of Trustees to whom I owe and we all owe a world of thanks. And to Radea Harper, who I think is stuck on the two trains someplace, and I was going to ask her to stand up because she is my sister, she is my friend, she is our former chief and I do mean chief of education, and her fingerprints, your fingerprint and print, Radea, who isn't here yet, are all over this one. And it gives me great delight to thank her and to recall our herstory together as the Sackler Center was seated and as it grew. I know this is a little bit unusual, but I'm going to actually close your eyes and to take a deep breath and I'm going to do it with you. Burn in and play along with me because I'd like to speak as if we were just two people or three of us old friends in a living room with a glass of wine, having an intimate conversation surrounded by art. A faith wring old here, or the rain of Radea there, put your choice of paintings or your sculptures around you, Laura, Carrie, Beverly, Linda. So here we are in a small room and you can ask, and now you can open your eyes. When Catherine Morris became curator of the Sackler Center, did she ask you what you wanted her to achieve? Yes, I respond to you. In fact, she did. The Sackler Center, I told her, has changed the game. We've created a new model and have forged a head to change museums. So I continued. The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan and the Whitney are scrambling to catch up, but they have something we don't have. They have a lot of money. So now I take a sip of wine. You'll take a sip of wine. But I say, we have something they don't. We have unwavering commitment to women. We have unfettered service to our community. And at the Brooklyn Museum and at the Sackler Center, we have complete and utter determination to change the world from western white men to the colors of the rainbow. So I continue to tell Catherine, your mission is not only to keep us ahead of the game, but to make certain that we lead the way, that we break the ground, that we continue to change the course. Catherine asked, this is all true. Catherine asked, how? And I replied, I don't know that you're joking. Catherine Moritz, you are the most fantastic curator a Sackler Center could ever have, or the museum for that matter. And you have been my partner in revolution. You have been my partner in evolution since 2009. And I love you. Thank you. From the 1969 demands to Museum of Modern Art by the Art Workers Coalition to Linda Good Bryant in Atlanta with Stugley Carmichael to the 1970 stats of the Whitney Biennial that have improved a little bit to the Swirls and Whirls with Lowry, with Lucy, with Alice, with Carrie May, with Lorna, and with so many more. 1971, K-Brown, Geraldine Croakes, Pat Davis, Marma La Roa, Ishka McCannon, Faith Ringel, planned the first Black women's art exhibition in history, in known history, known as Where We At. 1972, the name Where We At, retained. An organization emerged by laws. Article 1, the name, the name of the organization shall hereby be known as Where We At, Black Women Artists. Article 2, Purpose and Philosophy. The Where We At Black Women Artist is a sisterhood which provides a support system for Black women artists. It's members will use its collective talents to serve the community and to heighten its cultural awareness, which will include the ultimate establishment of an Academy of Arts. That very year, Where We At issued a list of demands and it read, I quote, we have six demands which we'd like to address to the Brooklyn Museum. One, a Black Women's exhibition, because there never has been one, so that women should be recognized not only as Black artists, but as women, but also because most Black women artists live in Brooklyn. Two, the museum should provide daycare centers or children's workshops so the mothers can attend classes. Three, the museum should underwrite projects and workshops relevant to the community. Four, the museum should provide part-time scholarships as well as full-time to women having to work during the day. Five, any scholarship program should be publicized so that the artists could know about the program. Six, the museum should take an active part in helping the women of artists obtain living and working space. Well, I thank you Where We At for the roadmap and you can now check off number one we'll have a minute ago. 1972, the opening paragraph of the National Black Feminist Organization's Statement of Purpose, quote, the distorted, male-dominated media image of the women's liberation movement has clouded the vital and revolutionary importance of this movement to third-world women, especially black women. The movement has been characterized by the distorted black-dominated media image as the exclusive property of so-called white middle-class women and any black woman seen involved in this movement has been seen as selling out, dividing the race, and the assortment of nonsensical epithets. Black feminists resent these charges and have therefore established the National Black Feminist Organization in order to address ourselves to the particular and specific needs of the larger but almost cast aside half of the black race in America, the black woman, end quote. 1977, an excerpt from the Combehe River Collectives of Black Feminist Statement, and I quote, we believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our identity as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of black women, this is particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore a revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is considered more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, leveling human is enough, end quote. Art holds special places in the lives of all humankind. Art presents all facets of life, for good and the ugly. Art is the living story of human truth. Art spans civilizations and cultures. To create is a human addiction. Humans have no choice but to create, and the creations have no choice but to live. Holland Cotter wrote a sterling review in today's New York Times of the London Revolution by woman artist 1965-1985 and his last paragraph sums us up. He wrote, if the exhibition encourages us to learn and it leads us to at least one broad conclusion that the African-American contribution to feminism was and is profound. Simply to say so to make an abstract triumphalist claim is easy but inadequate. It fails to take the measure of lived history. The curators of We Wanted a Revolution black graphical women 1965-1985 do better than that just by doing their homework. They let counter-narrative contradictions and confused emotions stand. The only change I would make, writes Cotter, apart from adding more artists would be to tweak his title. I'd edit it down to its opening phrase and put it back in the present tense. We Wanted a Revolution, end quote. The Sackler Center's most recent exhibition that closed to make way for revolution was Beverly Buchanan's Ruins and Rituals. I hope you all had a chance to see it. It's a comprehensive exhibition of her extraordinary works and I would like to end my welcome to you today with Alice Walker's poem. Beverly Buchanan, artist, 1940-2015 Alice Walker. Someone who knew me well that I lived in many a gray shack my mother transformed with flowers took me to your house to meet you. To see the shacks you rescued from our shame and transformed with your whip small nouns and boards and paint. I was enchanted to see my mother's magic emerge from the end of your brush. Now, you have left us. The streaming light through all your shacks like the streaming genius of your obsessed mind. How do we make new and restorative of soul the old pain? How do we learn to carry with grace and humor all that has happened to us? Buchanan, for instance, whose name was that before it was slapped across the memory of the enslaved? Your ancestors in Africa were not Buchanans and may have been esteemed artists, every one of them, for all we know. Beverly, all of us in our age clan are in the home stretch now. We will not be far behind you trailing our chalk and pencil sticks with which we wrote and drew in the dirt our paints made from the berries, barks and tears. With open hands we have offered our art made from whatever scraps were left over from our disruption, their absence from the big house table of greed and ignorance never missed. This poem is to say, how glad I am to have the shack you made for me. Red is a strawberry. I would never have thought of that yet how bright it turned out to be for I do not roll over sadness though it visits more often these days than I would like. The world is dying in so many ugly ways and humans with it. And yet against all odds I realize there will always be a Beverly Buchanan arising from a virtual nowhere to cobble together broken pieces left over from the beauty that is destroyed and painted in red for dance. Please join me in welcoming Catherine Morris, son of family curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Thank you very much.