 Okay, thank you. This is our final panel of afternoon. Thank you all for staying with us for what's really been amazing. Thank you guys. So our last panel is moving on from Yuri's into deeper into the 1980s and beyond. So I have the really amazing honor and privilege of being on the stage with these incredible women. So Kelly Jones in the middle, you've already met. Art historian, curator, writer extraordinaire. To her left, her sister Lisa Jones, writer, playwright, journalist. Yes. And I believe that their mother, Hedy Jones, is in the audience. I don't know where you are. She's over there. Also an incredible woman, author, and we're very lucky. Thank you for joining us, Hedy. And finally, Lorna Simpson, photographer, filmmaker, painter. First African American woman to be included in the Venice Biennial in 1990, which whatever, that was not... We don't need to get into that. But these are incredible people and I'm incredibly honored to be here. We're here to talk about the 1980s. They're all New Yorkers also. Just put that out there. The Rodeo Caldonia High Fidelity Performance Theater Collective, which is a mouthful. So we're just going to say Rodeo Caldonia or Rodeo for now on. So the first image we have is this incredible photograph of them that appeared in Interview Magazine in July 1987 in an issue called The Hip Issue, which was profiling kind of up and coming talents in New York. So this was in the stage and screen performance. So you can see Lorna on the right and the white dress. And to her left is Lisa. And many other members of Rodeo, I think, are here. So I'm just going to ask you guys right now, if you were in Rodeo and you're here today, can you please stand up so we can see you? I think they're all right here. And these three women are also all on this photograph. So Alva Rogers on the left with the flower. And Green Young, I believe on the left, Neely, yes. And Candace Hamilton, there you are. Is that you? Okay. Right behind Alva. So thank you all for joining us as well. So Rodeo was, and I'm drawing very strongly from Lisa's book, Bulletproof Diva, which you should buy and read if you have not, was a loose confederation of young black women in New York in the 1980s based firmly in Brooklyn, Fort Green. Artists, writers, actors, dancers, musicians, screenplayers, screen designers, set designers, all sorts of creative people together. And I think something that is, if you were wondering about the name, Caldonia, a blues term, meaning a hard-headed or independent woman, and Rodeo, you know, for the Rodeo, the athleticism and the social space. So quoting from Lisa, they wanted to get out in public and act up to toss off the expectations laid by our genitals, our melanin count, and our college degrees. And so I want to very quickly, what we're going to do, I'm going to read something from Lisa's book that describes their relationship to feminism. Then Lisa is going to read something she prepared and then we will continue through the slideshow. And I read this because in this show we are kind of drawing a lineage from the collective practices and the early days of the 1960s, the Black Arts Movement, et cetera, the women that we've heard from earlier today to the 1980s into the 1990s to today. So this is history, but it's living history and it impacts what they did and what we do today. So I think it's really important to make sure that we understand, A, that feminism is diverse and literally, but also in its meaning, and B, that it's relevant from then to then to now. So the portrayal of feminism as some sort of game sport of man-hating or pulpit of country granola correctness has always read to me like some impossibly cartoonish send-up. It remains so far from the feminism that I've lived, particularly the one I knew in Rodeo. I count Rodeo as my defining feminist experience, even though I've been calling myself the F-words since high school. In Rodeo, I learned that feminism was, to me, stripped to its intimate essentials, a passion for the creative culture of women and a belief that communion with other women was a bread and water necessity. Outside of debates on employment rights, abortion, childcare, and whether feminism serves women of color, and the other big politics of the movement, what has kept me interested in feminism and identifying is the pleasure. The pleasure in women's voices, our dozens, our ways of caring and getting mad, and above all, in the way we love deeply, as some call it, hard. Give me a girl gang, a crew. A zillion sisters ain't enough. To be a girl among girls, I'm at the height of courage and creativity. As an adult, I'm continually trying to recreate these spaces of safety and unconditional love, like my grandmother's house where Grandma, Aunt Cora, and Mom address the world's ills with a little Johnny Walker and a clean dish rag. Like Mom taking her daughters out of the city in her geriatric car, us three singing love songs from the 40s like Bells of the Ball. Like the We Was Girls Together off-campus collective at Renee, Myra, and Maria's, where we took character names from black women's fiction and imagined ourselves divas of myth. Renee was Willie Chilly after the wild child of Meridian. Let Desdemona keep stepping, like Rodeo. So welcome to the tiny, squeaky, shaky voice of Lisa Jones. I was born like this. People made me and they say, you know, I thought you were taller. I thought you'd have a bigger voice. I thought you'd be a bulletproof diva. I was like, no, this is it. This is perfect. So I have the hardest job. I have to be on stage with the genius, the legend, and the visionary. So, you know, I brought some thoughts last night and I just want to share them just riffing off of the title of Rue's panel. Ain't nothing going on but the rent. And this is called When the Rent Was Cheap and the Art Was Everything. Hey there, 1980s. When the rent was cheap and the art was everything. Every once in a while I see you out of the corner of my eye. I see my 20-something self, big androgyny, wearing my grandfather's bowling shirts from the 1950s and rocking those pork pie hats, which I stole from my boyfriend. At least I thought he was my boyfriend. Because it seems now everything began in the 80s, even situation ships. And then there was that pair of canary yellow Suede men's oxfords that I wrote, wore for the entire decade and never cleaned. Because why? Why clean your shoes when you could be making art? Those yellow shoes were my rebel heart, but my most important accessory was a bright red messenger bag because it was the only bag big enough to carry all my documents. And I had documents. I had a day job copy editing at The Voice, but I was also writing freelance for the paper and working on films with 40 acres and co-writing books with Spike and writing freelance for women's magazines, for the extra cash, which I needed to spend on my most serious 1980s addiction of all. The performance pieces or rites of self-discovery, which I called them once, which starting in 1985, I had begun staging with my troupe, Rodeo Caldonia, co-founded with Alvarajas. Let's start and haven't got second wave black feminist theater group in four easy steps. Feel free to take notes. First, it helps to be born into a family where theater groups are a thing. In my case, I remember being around the Spirit House, a black arts movement theater which my father, a Mary Baraka founded in Nork in the late 60s. I remember the kids in the family and around the block would get pulled in to do various theater things. Once we did sound effects where my fathers play the slave ship, this was 67, I would have been six. We had to stand in a makeshift sound booth with a group of adults and make sounds as if we were enslaved people chained to a ship. Naturally, that kind of thing stays in your mind. Then there was my mom, my rad black stocking wearing Jewish poet mom, you know her. America's streets just like Stanley and Durham raising Barack Obama's. My mom was tight with Douglas Turner Ward, the director of the Negro Ensemble Company, I mean New York's legendary black theater company of the 60s and 70s. She had us, me and Kelly, actually on stage, the Negro Ensemble Company when we were seven and eight in a review of black women presenting their original revolutionary poetry. So yeah, that happened. Two, go to an Ivy League college in the early 80s where every black striver is headed to Wall Street for only one of three self-proclaimed black feminists on campus. Commit black treason by being the moderator of the Black Student Alliance but then standing in support of the first campus pride rally then deciding to edit the brackets white feminist magazine too because intersectionality wasn't invented yet and somebody had to invent that too. So apologies to Kimberd Crenshaw. Then after college you hightail it to London chasing some boy in his black rock band as usual. That thing fizzles quick but you end up falling in with this community of young women of color, black mixed South Asian who actually identify as black feminists like the poet Jackie Kay who is now poet laureate of Scotland, a black woman. So Nirvana, you found your people, you found a model. So back home you decide to call together all the women you know who are flirting with the art thing and call a meeting. A meeting because that's what black women do. We call meetings farm clubs and get things done. A fun fact that I read on the University of Iowa website when Elizabeth Catlett went to Iowa in 1938 she wasn't allowed to live in the dorm. It was the Iowa Association of Colored Women's Clubs that found housing for her. So back to that meeting. Alva was there, Selena was there, Candice, Donna, all women who would become part of Rodeo. We talked into the night about black women and images and what was missing in the 1980s from the frame and we decided to do something. Of course that something was still unclear. Would it be art or activism? At first it was going to be a black women's art magazine called Diva de Kooning. But what we did do was make art, begin to make art. So three, have a genius in training big sister who commissions you to write something for an exhibition she's curating at the Longwood Art Center in the Bronx called In the Tropics about the Caribbean and colonialism. So of course you ignore the theme of the show entirely, little sister's prerogative, and write a theater piece called Carmella and King Kong about a young feminist who falls in love with the larger-than-life black literary Kong because after all it's best to stick with personal experience when making art. So that's how all my friends who were artists aching to be came together in 1985 to put on a show in a hallway of an old schoolhouse which is what the Longwood Art Center really was and went on to create the performance collective of roughly two dozen women that became known as Rodeo. Four, find a visionary accomplice, Alvarodgers who would walk into rehearsal one day giving the spiky hair of an Afro-futuristic queen straight out of an Octavia Butler novel and the next day would have long thick braids looking like a daguerreotype of a 19th century woman off to teach colored free school. And this was years before the internet's black freedom hair movement. So Alvar's vocal styling as I once wrote a blend of opera, jazz, blues, and nursery rhyme always explained Rodeo better than any motto. So Rodeo had a short lifespan and a small repertoire but we were an inspirational force in the Brooklyn-centric art scene of the 80s and 90s. Alvar was the lead performer. Darin Young did the sound collages and musical direction. Donna Burwick designed the costumes. Selena was assistant director. I wrote and directed the pieces. Candace Hamilton, Sandy Wilson, Ray Dahl, Pamela Tyson, Amber Villeneva were some of our iconic performers. Lorna Simpson took photographs. Kelly Jones did publicity. So we took Cardell out of New York City boho tour performing for almost a year in bars, storefront galleries, and church sanctuaries. We expanded it, added music, slides, but the piece always ended in an exorcism because I'm big on exorcisms, which is a collision of love songs and women speaking in tongues. So Rodeo was satirical, experimental, women focused and political all at once, far from crunchy granola and full of multimedia downtown panache. I guess we took our college educated, uppity black feminism and put it into motion and made it sexy and fun just like our lives as if there were a how-to manual for that. This, of course, was a few decades before this array's awkward black girl and hilarious political young black feminist bloggers like Jamila LaRue and Awesomely Lovey. Our next show, Combination Skin, had its first performance at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery in December 1986. There were lines around the block. Every young black New Yorker with freedom hair was in the building that night because Rodeo was getting reviews and small art mags and Alva was now a downtown, a darling of the downtown music scene as well as a muse to black visual artists and filmmakers. So Combination Skin took place on the set of a fictitious game show called the $100,000 Tragic Mulatto, where contestants came on the show to sell their Rachel Case histories for big bucks. Mind you, this was decades before reality TV. Contestant number three, the ultimate crossover queen played by Alva, a brown-skinned woman, wins the title. The piece was an exploration of the Tragic Mulatto archetype brought to us by fiction and film and a send-up of the sugar plums of crossover success that were being offered to black artists in the 80s. For me, it was also a personal exorcism, told you. I felt I had to do battle with the mighty caricature of the Tragic Mulatto so I could clear a space for myself as a healthy, happy, politicized black woman of mixed parentage. This was a few decades before work like Dear White People in Blackish and the normalization of mixed identity. Talking about being mixed, even as late as the 80s, was still very much taboo. It was like saying out loud that you're a product of interracial sex, which is always presented in popular media as being illicit and non-consensual. And this was also a few years before the rainbow baby literary bonanza before lit stars like James McBride and Danzy Senna hit the scene. And before, of course, the age of Barack Obama and our 15 minutes of post-racial utopia. If I was a bit ahead of the curve, then I owe it all to the badassness that I learned in Rodeo. Apart from my Rodeo assistant, it was the black arts movement of the 60s and 70s, ironically, that gave me permission in the early 80s to write about being a black person of mixed race, which I did in combination skin and later in essays in The Voice and in Bulletproof Diva. The black arts movement said, go forth and make black art, black people. Make art that reflects your experience. And even though the movement often put forth narrow definitions of blackness and frowned on race mixing, I was still able to come out of that time as a young person and say, I have to do me. Because that's what you said, didn't you? I have to be brave enough to write about my hybridity. But that's not shameful. It's a common black identity and it's in all likelihood a common white identity, as I've been hearing today. And in fact, it's a fundamentally American identity and all of us in this country are titled to it. So, yeah, that happened. Thanks, Rodeo. Thanks, black arts movement. I wish I was there. I wish there was time today to do justice to all the Rodeo women, to their contributions to the collective. I feel so privileged to have come of age as an artist in their embrace and be privy to their radiance. I see you brilliant, Lorna Simpson. As I wrote in Prutiva, we were smart-ass girls with a sense of entitlement who availed ourselves of the goods of both continents, delight in our sexual bravado, and lived womanism as pleasure, not academic mandate. We were walking tableau of diva complexity, each eccentric self and artistic point of view made possible one's own. I chuckled when Hollywood came calling after combination skin and pronounced Rodeo to be a new exquisite brand of black woman only invented in 1986. Of course, we knew better. We had named ourselves Caledonia, an old blues term for headstrong women, and Rodeo, in celebration of Entezaki's move to Texas, post-color girls, to become a woman who could ride horses and continually reinvent herself. Little did Hollywood know that we were from a long line of art-race women rebels dating back to Phyllis Wheatley and Harriet Wilson. Maybe our first ancestor was Josephine Baker and Moulin Rouge, a blues storytelling of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, or Freddie Washington's over-the-top mulatto tragedies, or were they comedies, or were they strategies? And later in the 20th century, there were our avant-garde dramatist, Adrienne Kennedy, Ayesha Rachman, and Laurie Carlos. So, no, we were not new at all, but squarely in the tradition. I interviewed Rachman once and asked her how she managed to say goodbye to realism, but later, I never said hello to it. Thank you, black girl surrealism, for giving me life! Thank you, Rodeo. Thank you, 1980s. Glad I was there. Thank you, Lisa. Like, thank you, Lisa. That was incredible. Thank you. I don't even... I don't know what... Okay. We're gonna keep going, but that was amazing. Thank you so much. The first image that I picked to be up here is this beautiful photograph that Lorna took in 1982 in Mexico of Carrie May Weems, another artist in the show who is not here, but her work is upstairs. And so I wanted to ask you, Lorna, so another coincidence, I went to UCSD. So did Lorna. So did Carrie May. That's the only reason why I made it through, because they did, so I could, too. So I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about your before... out of New York inter-regnum period, because you came from New York, and then you came back to New York. But can you talk a little bit about being on the West Coast and being in San Diego briefly? Well, I first have to say it's quite an honor to be today, and, like, you're reading that, it's almost gonna make me cry. I think every... It means so much, so thank you. Thank you. That really defines the spirit of that particular time, which is quite beautiful. And I would say, in kind of even listening today, and particularly listening to Howard Dina Pindell, I mean, I'm an art child. I was brought up by parents who love the arts. I was taken everywhere, to museums, to play, stuff that was way over my head, and went to the Art Institute. I'll get to what you're saying. Why San Diego? But I'm studying at the Art Institute while I'm going to Art Camp in Chicago. But always in these situations of being one of very few black people in any condition since I can ever remember. So I always felt, and I think as an American, in this way as a young black woman, that there were all these different worlds that I would travel and navigate in. And so I met Carrie May Weems when I had gotten out of SVA in New York early, and I was just doing graphic design in a whole kind of analog way, which was very slow, painstaking, and a lot of knives and cutting, and text, out-text, and wax. And she, I think it was at Jules Allen's home, and there was going to be a meeting of photographers later, but of course I wasn't invited because I was young, and I was just barely out of school, and I was like, oh, well, I'm going to leave. But before I left, she said, well, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm just working. And it was February. And you know how February in New York is? It's never-ending. It's cold. It's raining and sleeting. And she said, why don't you come to San Diego? And I had grown up in Queens for most of my life. Born in Brooklyn, but raised in Queens. And my friends, because my parents were kind of appreciation of arts, and my mother would sew some of my clothes. So I had bell bottoms. And everybody thought I was a very hippie in a certain way and that California would be the place that I would end up. So, yeah, San Diego. It's like, and I literally, like, never heard of it. Although I had been to Los Angeles. I've been to Northern California, but I hadn't been to Southern California as a child. So I said, well, what's there? She goes, it's a half an hour from Tijuana. I said, really? It's near the beach. It's even more interesting. Tell me more. So I applied. I did not care who taught there. I was just ready for an experience of, and my experience of going to SVA, and during that time I met Kelly Jones, because we were both interns at the studio museum in Harlem, was that there was this bifurcated experience. Like, I would go to art school, and I would learn about history photography. And there was nobody black or very little, maybe one, maybe Gordon Parks. And then I would go to art history class. And that was kind of an absence of talking about African-American or even African or African Caribbean or anybody of color's contribution to art history. But then I found myself in Harlem with friends from college. And then I found myself at just above Midtown. So I think from my generation I was aware, and became quickly aware of different arts, like Howard Dina Pindell actually threw Kelly and her writing and kind of traveling along with Kelly. Like, I'm going to go interview Howard Dina, but can you come help take a photo? I don't know what I was doing, taking photographs, I don't know what I was doing. But I learned that. But I had this assumption like, oh, they've been doing that for a long time. Like, just above Midtown, seeing Bill T. Jones and Artie Zane do a performance, and then see David Hammons kind of walk through that performance, I felt like, okay, this is the baddest shit I've ever seen. And SVA doesn't know any idea of what's going on in Manhattan, but that this seemed to be a cultural life to me that I was drawn to and thought, this was amazing. And spoke a language and created this entire world that helped balance my idea of what living in New York and wanting to be an artist was about. So going to California, you know, kind of going west and like, who knows what that's like? I really didn't care. And it was strange because I was, in arriving, I mean, as you may all know, like, Carrying Me Weems is about six feet tall, maybe six feet two. She's very statuesque. And maybe five, seven. And there was this other woman named Robin who was maybe five feet tall. And they would confuse all of us. I would be Robin. Sometimes Robin would be Carrie. Carrie would be me. And so my experience in San Diego was quite one that was the most, you know, coming from New York, where I just felt that segregation in terms of community was far more apparent, like you had to drive, get in a car and drive to find a black community that was over on the other side of town in downtown San Diego. Or the Mexican community was on the other side. And that was new for me in terms of kind of transversing a landscape and the way segregation kind of happened in that way. But in speaking to your experience at UCSD, and I kind of always felt like, okay, this is great. And like, okay, fuck, graduate school is being this place that people are supposed to understand you. Just take it as this time to understand myself. So I would travel back and forth to New York a lot and kind of go back, touch back home base. And also my family and my parents were alive at that time. And found myself going back and forth. But in terms of the production of my work, I was very much isolated in San Diego. I was very kind of just working and trying to figure myself out. I mean, I felt that in one class, which we discussed before, I was in a film class that was being held by Jean-Pierre Coran, who's a filmmaker and worked with Giddar. And he developed this amazing course where we were all supposed to have found material and that found material would be work that we, as a class effort, would edit together this found material, thinking that it was all by one director that was unassembled. And we would assemble it with the idea that in finding this material, it would be the language of one filmmaker. So of course, with myself, thinking that, oh, that's a really interesting idea. You know, like from what I've learned about French New Wave, okay, let's do that. I mean, this will be interesting. So video was gonna, analog video was gonna kill me because I couldn't take that. But I was happily ready to kind of jump into this venture. It was hopefully somebody else would be editing and I would just be making selects. And as we were putting things on the table in terms of people had super eight, super eight footage or found photographs, and I had a whole bunch of found photographs that I had brought back from my last trip in New York, maybe around December. And I put them on the table and sat back and one of the students who was kind of from the Midwest somewhere said, yeah, but Lorna, I mean, if we use your photographs, and that means the director's black, doesn't it? And I was like, and what the fuck the problem was that? Like it didn't even, I was like, what kind of question is that? But in realizing that, I was like, okay, this is the last time I'm coming to this class. Like fail me, I don't care. This is not a collaboration that I want to continue. And kind of went back to my own work. But I kind of found myself in those kind of, certainly that was kind of the usual thing. Even to the point of the work that's here, which is Gesture and Reenactments, was my thesis project at UCSD and my, I guess what you call my show, which was in downtown San Diego and I had chosen like a storefront. So I had two photographs that were in a kind of closed storefront. Oh, okay. If you can imagine, like, so that it was open to the street. It wasn't in a white box, so to speak, that you could see it from the street as you passed by. And I remember really being nervous in terms of my critique with my quote-unquote professors. And they were just like, well, you know, it's interesting. And I was really like, are they going to fail me? Is this, like, not good enough? And they were like, well, it's interesting. I mean, you know, okay, well, I can't even remember what they said, really, but it was very oblique and not quite congratulatory. I'm kind of like, okay, we'll see what you're doing. And I kind of left and then came to New York and then started showing in New York. So I was kind of surprised a little bit of the attention of my work, and I kind of realized that I had, within all of that, a lack of acceptance or lack of diversity of the structures in which I had chosen to enter, I kind of really focused on what it is I wanted to make and was dedicated to that. So I kind of just said, well, yeah, that wins, doesn't it? When you want to do what you want to do, you just do it. Regardless. And so in that, it was amazing. I did go back and forth a lot, and by 85 I was back in New York, and it had met Kelly again, and then through Kelly met Lisa and then Alva, and kind of it then became this really interesting collective of women I don't perform. I wasn't part of any of their performances, but to watch rehearsals and to be part of this language, and to be part of this time of women kind of telling their own stories in their own ways, whether it be Kelly and who she was interviewing that week. I mean, I think, and I may have the dates wrong, but I think she was interviewing David Hammons for one of the books that she did, like a monograph on his work, and I remember sitting in a bargle house where she goes, girl, I'm almost done with this David Hammons interviews. I just needed to let, let his attention long enough just to finish. And that, you know, artists are not always forthcoming in their information in the way that they want to talk about work, but I was surrounded by people who were driven about what they wanted to do with the kind of unabashed arrogance of that I am going to do, regardless if it's received poorly or with accolades, what it is I want to do, I'm very grateful to have had that at that moment in my life. Yeah. Thank you so much. And so the next, so we saw that Justin Green's work that Lorna spoke about, and so I skipped ahead, so you saw the slideshow. Sorry, surprises over. But now I'm just showing behind you some of the test prints that I was privileged enough to unearth in Lorna's studio. So Kelly on the right and Lisa on the left. And so just to show kind of these early portraits of Lorna's that I don't know if they ever became official photographs, but they are upstairs as test prints. So I want to move now to, we heard a little bit about Carmella and King Kong from Lisa and in the tropics. So on the left, we have a flyer from a performance of Carmella and King Kong at somewhere called Blackbirds. I don't know where that is, but y'all probably do. And on the right, we have I guess kind of, yeah, also a flyer for a performance of Carmella and King Kong but at the Longwood Arts Project in Kelly's show in the tropics from 1986. So I wanted to chat with Kelly a little bit now about your work in this time as a curator, as a writer. We also have, I'm just going to show very quickly this issue of the Black American Literature Forum from 1985 that you co-edited with Camille Billups. So the table of contents is on the right and on the left, we have a beautiful photograph by Karine Simpson that shows a very multi-generational crew. It's Faith Ringgold, Emma Amos, Whitfield Lavelle, Camille Billups is in it, Vivian Brown, who is a member of where we are as well. Let's see, who else is in it? There you go. I'm trying to read on the right, but you were there. Bruce Nugent. Karine Jennings, who we heard from earlier, heard about earlier, excuse me, so yes. Well, I just want to say only Ru and Catherine could get me to open and close a day, so you all rock. And this is fantastic, right? Can we say? Yeah, they're doing it. Yeah, they're doing it. And just a privilege to be up here with my sister friends. Of course, I've been with this one for many, many years. This one almost as long, just not quite. But I just want to say, you know, one of the things to think about that both of you said before jumping into Mimi is that, you know, thinking about, you're talking about rodeo as a kind of a short-lived thing, but if we look back at other women's collectives or groups and thinking of Gallery 32 in Los Angeles, Suzanne Jackson is only open for two years. And so this happens. I mean, Smela Lewis had a million things going on. They were all short-lived, right? Basically, as she told me, I said, well, how did you do films, books, galleries, a museum all in ten years? She said, oh, I collaborated. And so that is actually something that has been done, has a history, so it's not like something bad, short-lived or whatever. But also the other thing is, you know, lines around the block, and this is the other history, that is the hidden history of black cultural production that is always popular. And anybody who's going to tell me it's not, show me the archive that said only two people came. Because if they came for the first time, only two people, then next time everybody was going to show up. So, you know, I think those are two things that we always have to think about in terms of the vanguard that these type of groups are in history. You know, and we thank Ru and Catherine for reminding us that we're part of this long history. So I thank you for that. Thank you. Very moving. And we did this so that you can do this, so we can step off the stage one day and be happy. But in terms of the Longwood, Longwood project in the tropics, I think that was my second show, my first show actually, Elizabeth Murray helped me do it. It was a collective that she had been a part of on Christie Street, and she said, you know, do you want to generate a show there? And I was like, yeah, you had to pay for everything yourself. But you did it. And I'm going to, I think Jamila Jennings was in it. And I'm not going to remember, I'll have to remember for the next time and get that and get that. But in the tropics was like my second show, it was much bigger, a lot of artists in it, including Lorna's piece, and that's upstairs. And so, you know, I always was bringing my sister with me and said, hey, you want to do this? And gave her some of my little bit of money here. You want this? You want to do it? And so that's how it happened. And I think, you know, this kind of collaborative ethos is part of what drives that. And, you know, as Lisa said and as Lorna has said, you know, do you think about making history? No, you were just doing the work. You know, you're just doing the work. You're just trying to make yourself happy. I mean, I tell the story that, you know, when I went to college, I wanted to be a diplomat. And then, you know, didn't quite work out. I went to, you know, a college which was just becoming co-ed. Of course, there were not too many black people there. And, you know, you're in a men's school, basically, why I decided to do that, I can't tell you, but I like the people there better. And, you know, you go into classes and you're not the person that the professor is looking for. And, you know, so you say, okay, let me rethink this. I kind of, I didn't want to be an artist, but having grown up with the arts, you know, I was familiar with it. And I was always shocked that people didn't know living artists. What? All the artists I knew were alive. And they told me, most artists you're supposed to study are dead. I was like, really? Wow. You know? So then I had to, you know, I realized I, when I couldn't kind of, I had to rethink my French, not my Spanish so much, but my French, I started doing research basically on the artists that I knew and on African American artists and realized this was a thing. And that's what kind of drove me to that. But we had, you know, other people that helped us along the way, working with Camille on guest editing this. I had forgotten that I had guest edited that issue. I just remember being an essayist and then I wrote about Whitfield, my high school friend, Alva, of course my high school friend. So there's all these, you know, what my students have told me are genealogies. You know, the connections between all these things. But also the other connection is that Fred Wilson was the director at Longwood. And he and Whitfield were together then. And so, you know, it was just one of these things. Hey, you know, let's, you know, work with our friends to, do you want to do this? Do you want to have another show? I think you're interested in curating. And he basically gave me the space to do that. And, you know, just been doing it ever since with these wonderful people and others, and others who are in this audience today. Can I just very quickly ask you specifically about, because Rodeo was a very particular generational moment. And I think a really kind of decisive different kind of moving through the world differently in your generation in that time. But, you know, this photograph belies that and the intergenerational nature of just even this issue. But also we have, I assume we can extrapolate further to the other work that you were doing. So, and actually that's really a question for all of you in when you were young and even kind of moving for the intermingling of generations. I think for me, you know, interviewing David, and I think that was probably that interview, you know, that I spent so long on. I would never spend so long on something like that now. But, you know, interviewing the person over days, and if you know David Hammons, it probably took weeks to interview him. And then it took weeks for me to transcribe that all myself and then, you know, edit it. But it slips on because of that process. I think, you know, the reason why I became interested in the California artists that are part of my new book, South of Pico, including Marin, who's here, singing in Goody, David, is because those were the artists that I met when I came back to New York after college at Jam. It was a real hub. Dawood Bay, Candida Alvarez, meeting people there. And so it was, you didn't even think about it as intergenerational. You know, it was just, these are people who were doing the stuff. It was really interesting. The people were, you know, fascinating. And you met a lot of great people hanging out there. And, you know, that's how you did it. And there were older people. There were younger people. Of course, for me, I'd always grown up with artists. Jack Whitten, Melvin Edwards, grew up with these people. William T. Williams. And so that, Al Loving, you know, that was already a given and you didn't really think, like I said, I always thought artists were alive and people who were my elders, you know, my mother and father, you know. And of course, there's poets and artists, just a whole lot of people. And also being on the Lori side, right? Nothing but artists over there. So it was always, you never really thought about, just like you never thought about being famous. You just thought, oh, these are the people. Some of them are older. Some of them are younger. That's the way I felt it. You don't want to add anything? No. No, no, it's fine. So then I would like actually now to ask Lorna about Water Bearer. So I didn't know that this was in the tropics. I have the whole book. Well, somebody will probably try to kill me if I add anything else to this show. Another show, another show. It probably will be Catherine. I don't know where Catherine is. So we'll just look at it. But thank you. But just to hear about, yeah, Lorna, this has become such an iconic and incredibly beautiful, it is an incredibly beautiful work and so evocative. And I think that I know that that is Alva. Yes. And I would love to just hear a little bit about this piece. Well, I think in making it, I will say this, that it was taken in a place that I was acting. I was working as a secretary because I returned. I got out of graduate school and I called up Kelly and I said, oh, I'm coming back to New York. She goes, you don't have a job? I said, I don't have a job. Oh, I'm working at this museum that hasn't really started yet but they need a receptionist. Why don't you interview? I was like, okay. So Colin, I interview, I have an interview with Joan Simon, who I use years later now work with as a writer and a curator. I get the job and it's in this loft and so-ho that's kind of a workspace. And I meet amazing people at that job through Kelly. And at night, Kelly would give me the key and I would use it to photograph. And so in the middle, back and forth, I would say, Alva, okay, what are you doing? Okay, I got this thing. I got the black velvet up. It's going to be two jugs. Would you pour the water? I did it. Alva said, okay, cool. But you got to take pictures of me because I got a show coming up and I need some pictures. So it was this kind of exchange, photographic services. And so that's how, and unbeknownst to everybody who worked at that, at the, at the, at Broiton Museum that had kind of never took off, but was interesting. And so it was kind of, you know, I would work. And I think at that time, which is a different economic time than now for artists, but you know, I'm overeducated. I have an MFA. I've been undergrad with school. I've been a graduate school. But I don't want the kind of job that's going to require my full, full attention that I think answering the phone I can do, work for a few months, save up that money, quit, make some art. And then I was, as I would say to Kelly, okay, and then get the stockings and the outfit and then kind of go back in, get another job. And like, it would go in those kinds of cycles. And Ward of Barra was one of the pieces of my coming back to New York that I made kind of in this kind of cycle of working and taking off time from work to make art. And came as an idea about memory of kind of family stories and kind of put, I guess, in part of what we are saying or even in the world that we live in now, the discounting of what we remember or the histories that we have or presence or discounting even, the invisibility factor and amnesia factor in terms of either art history or in terms of American history. And that Ward of Barra kind of speaks to that as in kind of many subsequent pieces about memory. Thank you. And I'm going to close by showing this also incredible image that you took of Alva, Sandy Wilson, Candice Hamilton, Darien Young and Lisa Jones. And I'm going to ask Lisa because you are there in that photograph. Can you tell us about this day? Can you tell us about your outfits? You can, this can be a collaborative answer. I have no idea. Williamsburg. Do it together. I have a question for anybody who recalls. My loft in Williamsburg. Yeah. And I think it was, again, I think it was in preparation for maybe something of publicity, of something that was coming up. But that there was this, I mean, from my perspective, it was a desire like, well, why not? That's what I do. Why not photograph the people that you know, and they're so amazing and so beautiful that I would kind of take the opportunity to photograph you guys and kind of to make portraits. But it was also kind of for something. It wasn't just a kind of vanity project. But that's what I believe it was that moment in the summertime. I mean, I have no idea what I fashioned myself as. You know, later I described it as a kitchen table surrealist playwright. I think it was around Carmella and King Kong. That's what I think. Yes, definitely. It would have been that. That's what I think, the kind of motif. Like the skirt that Alba has on is a Fiorucci skirt that was mine. They should borrow it for the shoot. Maybe the mud cloth is also mine. Yeah. The Christmas lights are mine. Yeah. But it was this kind of impromptu kind of costume. But it's a performance group. It's a performance troops. And in some ways there was this flexibility about appearance and kind of creating personas. What stands out for me is the joy. And I think that's what's different about this generation. You know, we were coming from this wonderful moment in Black women's fiction in the 70s and 80s where the work was very powerful but also very heavy. And I think a younger generation of women were looking for the Black girl joy. And that's what comes out here. I mean, just Candace's finger is everything to me. Yeah. You know, pointing up like, you know, it's kind of like a New York party stance. So that's what comes out, the joy. Thank you. Well, that is where I want to leave it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.