 Welcome. Welcome to the longtime friends of the Sackler Center and welcome new friends of the Sackler Center and welcome everybody to the Brooklyn Museum on this Sunday December 14th 2014 and this is our final Sackler Center public program for the year and we have a lot coming up next year but this is a wonderful way to end all of the wonderful and exciting and important programming that we do throughout the year. I'm Elizabeth Sackler. I am aka at Sackler soapbox if you're a tweeter and today if you want to tweet you can do hashtag Emma Salkowitz and hashtag States of Denial and I always join you to join invite you to join us at feminist art which is the name of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art Twitter site. So there is beauty in our imperfect union our imperfect union called the United States of America the beauty that we can and sometimes we do take to the streets when the union is cracked and crumbling when the union leaves our Constitution and our bill of rights in the dust we take to the streets to protest or in civil disobedience. Citizens have finally and yes even some of our politicians have finally after 15 years due to perhaps sleep deprivation from overwork or stimulation from virtual living or as a result of paramilitary training of police forces and propaganda producing fear and loathing but yes citizens have finally emerged from a comatose state and realize a parade permit is not required to protest and that makes me so happy. It is our democracy it is our right it is our Constitution and we are in the streets again bravissimo. There is also there's also a beauty to our imperfect museum as all museums like life we are imperfect by definition but our beauty is that we get better all the time. We are about and are the power of art and the beauty of culture. The Brooklyn Museum teaches the beauty of our history and our history and the beauty of immersing ourselves in the present with your presence. Dedicated to the education of our visitors as well as our large community we bring all manners of relevance to you manners of relevance that are the underpinnings of a civil society. We offer solace with art during painful times and the power of art during times of change. When Americans are enraged revolutionary change is in the offing. People have taken to the streets with a clear message police violence violence against women all violence as a cultural norm public and private must end protest is in fact sweeping the country and in fact going across the waters. The September 22nd October 3rd New York magazine's cover had a photograph of Ms. Alkowicz a visual arts major at Columbia University with her blue mattress. Leaning supported on her back and the block letters on the cover announced a very different kind of sexual revolution on campus for those of you who are my generation we know what kind of sexual revolution we enjoyed on campus. Vanessa Gregorio this wrote in her New York article by owning accusations by pointing a finger not only at a silence but also at the American University the ivory tower of privilege those survivors of rape have built the most effective organized anti rape movement since the late 70s rape activists now don't talk much about women's self-care and protection like they did in the 90s or take back the night marches which many of us do remember self-defense classes and cans of mace. Today the militant cries aimed at the university kick the bastards out. End of quote. Vanessa said that Salkowitz's generation retired the word victim preferring survivor but she writes and I quote Salkowitz calls carrying the mattress performance art and that is why we're here today and that is why Roberta Smith is here today with us to be in conversation with Emma. Carry that weight the title of Emma's piece was named number one of the bet of the 19 best art shows of 2014 by Jerry Salts and Vulture the New York New York magazine online and from Jerry's paragraph I took snippets art is born of many things among them righteous indignation messianic rage and the drive for for justice and Mace Salkowitz's powerful performance piece carry that weight comes from all these places and from great activist art as well. Since September she's simply carried around campus alone or with the offered help of others a 50 pound mattress identical to the one on which she was raped. He ends this work is pure radical vulnerability. I had the pleasure of meeting Emma a few weeks ago and discussing her work her experience as a performance artist her protest and of course her art. It is my job here at the Brooklyn Museum and it is my calling and my passion in life to weave the threads of art culture community justice and righteousness together. That is the job of all good citizens and all great institutions and I thank all of you for joining me here to do that today. Biographies Emma Salkowitz was born and raised in Manhattan New York she is a senior at Columbia University measuring in visual arts after the University failed to expel the student who raped her and has assaulted a number of other students Salkowitz has become an outspoken activist on campus. Last fall she collaborated with Zoe Redulfi star and others to found no red tape. Recently for her senior thesis arts project Salkowitz has begun an endurance performance art piece titled mattress performance carry that weight in which she is carrying a dorm room extra large twin size mattress everywhere she goes on campus for as long as she attends the same school as her rapist. Mattress performance has sparked in national movement and students all over the country have shown their support by protesting with mattresses of their own. It gives me great pleasure to welcome Robert Smith to the Sackler Center at the Brooklyn Museum to converse with Emma. Roberta Smith was born in New York City. We're all native New Yorkers isn't it lovely. In 1947 raised in Lawrence Kansas and graduated from Grinnell College in Grinnell Iowa in 1969. She has written art criticism for the New York Times since October 1986. She was art critic for the Village of Voice from 1981 to 1985 and in the 1970s wrote for art forum art in America and arts magazine. She worked on the Donald Judd catalog resume and has contributed essays to museum catalogs on various artists including Judd, Alex Katz, Elizabeth Murray, and Saich Wombly. Smith has lectured widely and taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Rhode Island School of Design. She received art criticism grants from the NEA in 1975 and 1980 and in 2003 she received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association. Smith lives in New York City with her husband Jerry Saltz who I quoted earlier, senior art critic for New York Magazine. Please join me in welcoming these two wonderful women Emma Salkowitz and Roberta Smith. Thank you. Thank you all for being here today. We're really thrilled and now we'd just like to go home. Emma and I really haven't spoken since my article came out so we've got a lot of catching up to do and I thought we would just, if she and I were getting together for a coffee, I would have tons of questions and I thought we would talk about that and also maybe how we came together like I wrote on her because it was suggested by an editor although I certainly knew about it and as I told Emma and she then told me today that I had told her when I met her that I don't usually talk to students or students. I just let them wait to get into the art world and I don't do studio visits anymore because if I go to one studio I'd really have to go to everybody's studio so it was very unusual for me to be doing that. It made me nervous when she said that. And in point of fact it took me about three tries to find the building, right? You were sort of like talking me in. So my first question would be, to Emma would be, do you have gloves? Gloves? Gloves. Have you gotten them yet? Well I have a suspicion that one of my sweet mates is gonna give me some for Secret Santa. I keep meaning to go but then I forget and I don't know he said something about industrial strength gloves and I know Secret Santa's coming up and I feel like he might as I went as I'll let him make the purchase. Every time it rains I get kind of very far and maternal instincts wondering what's going on with Emma and how is she managing and you know even when I was first met her when we were doing this I was like oh my god what's your mother going through like ice the snow you know it's like the mail getting through MAIL and I just I couldn't and then we had this weird thing where there was we started talking and then the New York Times Jennifer Adelman came in the photographer and started photographing and so she was like moving me out of the way and you know this room that you've probably seen photographs of where Emma has the rules of engagement is fabulous kind of environmental thing and she asked questions like so how long are you gonna be carrying it for and I'd be like she was coming to do her job and then we had this I don't know how it was for you but it was totally bizarre because I had wanted to see Emma carry this actually see it in action so and of course the photographer did too and so we set out from what's what it's called the Watson Hall Watson Hall which is like 115th 115th in Broadway yeah west of Broadway so then we had to go up to the campus and her dorm is on the far side so there was this kind of cavalcade of Emma who immediately met a good friend who started helping her and then the photographer was like I've never seen a photographer in motion like that she was kind of like swirling around taking pictures and I was just trying to like stay stay out of her way and you know and then also trying to catch the faces of people as they were coming toward us what was your experience of that that was just a routine taking the mattress back to the dorm yeah it's always different when the cameras around because I find that people are more likely to jump in and help if they don't see a camera because they might think oh something's happening I don't want to do it but I think that the guy who did end up jumping in the guy with his cell phone and there was a guy on a cell phone who ended up jumping in despite the camera and I think that he might have been so distracted by his phone that he didn't see it there but that's he stayed on his cell phone the whole time yeah carried it like this yeah and then we got to her dorm and sat on a bench in front of it and like four or five people going into the dorm stopped and asked if she needed help so that was an it was like she had been talking to me in her studio about the mattress as a performance space and also as a social experiment I think yeah and she started and she told me and a number of sort of good and not so good stories about interactions with people so you know what I want to know is how is it going how is it I saw you on September 18th you were barely three weeks in two and a half it was a balmy autumn day you were in a sleeveless dress I mean how is it going how has it changed for you has it gotten how have the interactions changed if at all I remember you said the shuttle wasn't didn't stop for you one time multiple times the shuttle would see me and just go right past the Columbia University shuttle yeah it's changed in a lot of ways since we talked I mean one of the biggest changes is that now I'm keeping a diary of what's going on which I call my mattress diary I started that on the fourth week and it just sort of gives an account of the more private things that are happening that are to me integral parts of the piece but to an outside observer wouldn't be apparent without the diary and then in terms of the interactions I've started to actually at first I conceived of the performance space is just the mattress but the longer I live with this piece the more I'm realizing that the performance space is beyond the mattress because it has to do with the way people interact with me through the internet and talk about mattress girl whoever the f that is and just the the mattress as a space is actually moves beyond just expanding yeah and I think that the diary has helped me see that a lot because I'm able to live my life and see when I'm having a performative moment that is actually not connected to the physical mattress anymore when a person comes up to me and treats me a certain way because of the piece or says writes an article about piece online or about me online it feels like it's a part of the performance it's hard to describe but to me the space is now expanded but yeah well I was I was just talking with your parents about the idea of the of this mattress creating a space that is both sort of like a bubble where you have a completely unique view of the world like there's nobody else in in the vicinity that's doing this and at the same time it's completely porous so that you have all this stuff coming at you all the time yeah and has the feeling do you feel people have gotten used to you or has has well it's interesting I definitely like if I'm taking the elevator by myself without the mattress and someone gets on it's just like you know another student in the elevator with me if I'm in the elevator with the mattress and then the student gets on they smile at me and then they stand next to me it's a very different interaction or if I'm walking down the street no one will really acknowledge me but if I'm carrying the mattress people will like give me a thumbs up or smile at me and it's a yeah I get treated differently when I'm with the mattress and are you you said to me that you would be visiting your you know I assume you sort of know the rules of engagement or that she she carries the mattress whenever she's on campus and when she leaves campus she leaves the mattress some at home like in your dorm yeah either at home or in my studio so one thing I wrote about was when she goes out of the dorm to catch the subway she has to walk around the perimeter of of the campus and then back up to 116 to not to cut through the center of campus right um and do you find that there's the same willingness to for our people still always helping you and like you said well anyway I'll I'll quote some things you said okay yeah well it depends I've found that on on these really we've had a pretty bad I've been very sensitive to weather lately so the past week and a half has been really rainy and people have not really been helping but on days when it's not raining people are much more likely to help usually if the person helps me on a rainy day it's because they were in class with me and we're having a conversation with me after the class and then they feel awkward not helping me because they're talking to me already and then they're like okay I'll help you yeah well you have to think about what that person who's alone with you in the elevator is thinking like okay do I should I ask her should I not ask her she needs help you know I mean yeah it puts particularly that when you're solitary isolated with you let's put an incredible kind of you know you really experience this line between action and inaction and because that's sort of what's being acted by by all the people that help you mm-hmm I think also because I've gotten a lot better at carrying it now yeah I can imagine yeah I mean for Thanksgiving break I didn't carry it for five days and I got back to school and I picked it up and it felt so heavy just because I hadn't carried it for only five days but I've gotten a lot better at carrying it now so I'm able to move pretty quickly with it which doesn't mean that it's not really difficult and I'm panting and sweating and whatever but people I think also people I'm trying I'm always trying to figure out why are people helping me less maybe they they are less interested maybe I look more capable of carrying it now that I've gotten a little bit stronger but yeah I imagine that maybe that's one of the reasons that people aren't you know when they're in that alone situation with me in the elevator and then they see me pick it up and I know how to pick it up now like I know exactly where I have to hold it mm-hmm they're like oh she's got it me I'm just you know a hypothesis I guess but yeah okay now I'm supposed to ask you a question right now I don't have one well just to get back to logistics this is another thing the photographer especially since she probably works out doors more than I do we got really in change on talking to Emma about covers for the mattress because we didn't have a particular one you wanted me to get she did she did she had the name or something I'm not sure I did I didn't write but she had it has this kind of rape you know it's a synthetic cover but you said it wasn't totally waterproof so that was another thing that we got stuck on like it's just gonna absorb water when it gets rained on you get even heavier but now I have I have I found these like that wetter bed bug protection dust cover sheets that have that's what she suggested yeah yeah Jennifer so but they're not see-through which I remember you're saying it should be see-through I wasn't able to find that and you know I just have to take what I can and it's kind of flimsy so people often when if they do help me when it's raining outside they grab the cover and it just rips so I have a few of those and sort of cycling through yeah and have you had any more experience with people people who don't who sort of invade your your personal space because you I mean that's just what you were talking about was this kind of formal that accrues when you have it you know you're doing you're doing your work you're doing a piece but are people still sort of guys are making not quite appropriate remarks and I haven't it's I'm trying to think I can't I haven't experienced that much since we last talked I think I think people even it when they're trying to be helpful though they have a little trouble understanding boundaries like if I'm carrying the mattress by myself sorry I just lean if I'm carrying the mattress by myself and someone just jumps in and helps me they actually are knocking me off balance because if they jump up behind me and push the mattress up they're actually throwing it over me and I've dropped it a few times just because they don't understand that like you need to communicate with I mean it's it's obvious if this is the language of consent right they need to communicate with me before they jump in and help yeah it's a complete enactment what it's a complete enactment of that yeah and I think I mean every interaction that is that falls along these lines inevitably has this sort of language attached to it which I find very interesting but yeah if they don't if they don't talk to me before they jump in and grab the mattress then they're actually making life harder for me and I don't know if this is sexist or not but does that that's that line between the people who do make contact and don't make contact does that is there any kind of gender specificity involved with that no I think that's pretty equal I have had people who like touch me on the street as if I'm a saint as that's there so they like they come up to me and thank you which is again like and I get that there it's all they they want to be kind to me they want I don't know it's a lot it's an act of love but at the same time they've just forgotten that I'm a person and I don't want strangers touching me on the street so you're least of all what I said you least of all yeah exactly so and I that's happened with two two men and one woman so yeah I mean there's a way that when you get in to start talking to her you do get if this is being a little too like minutia oriented I apologize but I don't think people quite I mean you said this when we spoke that people had said they didn't think it was any work and they they didn't really understand the extent to which this was worked out it's preceded by a less successful work that was at Yale Norfolk that was then critiqued by students and yeah definitely I think I mean and I was actually I was thinking about I'm never gonna pronounce his name right ever but the artist he did pieces like the he did this one year long piece where he had to punch a timecard every hour on the hour for a year which meant that he couldn't sleep for more than 55 minutes or whatever ten year-long performances yeah when he was tied to Linda Montana yeah about three feet and another time he just sat in a cell for a year yeah but the way the the reason I bring him up is because we all think of that piece is like okay he did this piece where every hour on the hour he had to punch a card and he couldn't sleep for more than an hour he couldn't talk to someone for more than an hour before he had to run and punch the clock you know he you can just imagine how crazy that was but then you for then when you return to the piece when you look at all the little details like they're so beautiful there's this one thing one detail that I never known about is that he had to record every mistake that he made and for what reason so you can see that at the beginning of the piece that there's only one mistake in the first month and then there may be five mistakes in the seventh the second month and then by the middle of the piece he's making he's made 22 mistakes in one month and it's because of over sleeping or being late or being early and I think that these little details to the piece give it so much more color and make me love the piece more and I think that with my piece it's people all know that I'm carrying a mattress around campus people barely know how long I'm going to be carrying it for but they have a big idea that it's something to do with the fact that I'm on campus with rapist with my rapist but I think that the little details that are the little things that happen in my life such as people touching me on the street as if I'm a saint and not realizing that they're doing exactly what I don't want them to be doing by invading my personal space or people walking next to me for 10 blocks and not helping because it's an art piece and they're not supposed to touch it when really like I would love that help for the 10 blocks that they've walked next to me and like had a conversation about this yet by four people helping you and then two people talking and walking in front of us smoking cigarettes in our face and then they finally said and then by the end yeah by the end of the walk another person saw me and the four people or don't mean the three people walking and he was like hey do you guys want help and then the two people who'd been blowing smoke in our faces the entire time we're like oh do you want help and didn't realize that they could have been helping us that entire time but it's those little details that aren't covered in the general outline of my piece that I think are what are the most exciting parts about it to me at least that they're sort of between the cracks of your different rules of engagement yeah yeah and it was interesting also that you that you would work out choreographies like when when Jennifer and I went down in the elevator I just thought well she gets in first and Emma said no you guys get in first like she's already figured out that that's how it works best we get to the side and she comes in and takes the available space I had a really intense reaction from readers about Emma's piece and a lot of them were favorable and really happy that the piece had been written and admired the work you're doing and then some of them were not and some of them so I don't know if I don't know what kind of reactions you had that you might want to talk about too but I don't mean to put I was just gonna yeah I was just gonna read a couple of them and this may be something that I just don't know about but but other people will be will know about somebody who wrote in about a political art story in the 60s when a famous Columbia University sociology professor was accused of sexual harassment of female students behind the closed door of his office some radical women graduate students removed his office door and kept it thereby letting thereby letting the office's gaping openness stand as a testimony to his misbehavior and their power so they wanted to know if you knew about this history my answer is no it's pretty interesting and then the other one I just loved was one of my best memories that basically they're saying escuelas did it better you know one of my best memories as a freshman at Columbia College was an outdoor performance of Agamemnon of the Agamemnon of escuelas a far more powerful indictment of what men do to women both as can't be and this is probably those without saying this is someone who is not actually seeing Emma's piece you know both as drama and spectacle it was overwhelming as was mild Davis's sketches of Spain which was used as the background music and wait wait for it if my memory serves me correctly this was also accompanied by the passage of Sputnik over low-library wow well I should have got Sputnik involved I really overlooked that one and though the one that hurt my feelings the most was this kind of harsh letter from a woman who wrote in and it's sort of like I had overlooked this glaring fact and she in fact it was just a more a further interpretation of Emma's work and she said well you should have said that she's carrying a weight and that the administration doesn't give any weight to her words I thought yeah I should have said that thank you you horrible I don't think I don't think of everything that it was pretty if it's interesting just a lot of them do you have other ones you want to share I don't those are the only three that seemed there was there were a number of people who wrote and said well you know too bad you're not writing about interesting art you know you know well I'm sorry I couldn't be making interesting art and I'd always write back and say that's just a matter of opinion you know the statement of fact not interesting yeah I guess I've just I've been excited to see the the there were a few other critique a bit like a yeah reviews I guess of my piece that I always like seeing the artists that they say I'm in the lineage of because I never like we were sort of talking about this before when we were sitting outside but I I had the idea for this piece and it wasn't like oh how can I convey this message let me research artists let me find inspiration from somewhere it was just sort of like I want to carry a mattress everywhere and I don't know why let me unpack that idea oh it's because of my assault it's because of Columbia it's because so when people say this is in the lineage of I don't know whatever artists Marina Romovich for example I'm like oh that's so interesting and I I've mentioned her yeah and I don't and I didn't notice these things before so I always enjoy reading the reviews that people write and then I guess in terms of the weirdest things I've seen or received online are one of the best ones was when a woman wired me a hundred dollars for a massage because she said my shoulders must be tired and then and then on the other hand they're recently Suzanne Fields wrote this article about how I'm crying rape and she has her whole scientific analysis of why I must be lying because and she even went back to my rapist's argument back when we were in the hearing process he said that there's no way he could have pinned my legs down because I was an athlete so I had very strong legs and I could have pushed him off and she so she returns to that argument and says of course like see this proves that it couldn't have happened and this is all too strong for that yeah so that it's just strange to see people dissecting what was for me such a traumatic experience and then giving their own analysis of it's just you know no other few other people on earth have ever had to see that you know I mean the common argument against that is it why would a woman do this to herself like why would yeah why would you tell this story subject yourself to this really I mean really it's a kind of ordeal what you're doing a kind of ordeal and I know I think it's I mean I think it's actually kind of you know probably unprecedented in terms of just the longevity of it the kind of open end in this of it and just the real physical labor I mean it has great symbolism and I even before what you know when I was reading about it and when my my enterprising editor so came up and said you do this it had this kind of clarity like I sort of knew I would get up there and I would write a piece because it just you know it's really it really broadcasts it as a work of art which is something we might talk about I took I took notes extensively during our conversation and and I just have some phrases that MS things that MS said which may be modified by my sloppy note taking process so she can affirm we're denied but I just thought I'd read through them to sort of you get an idea of how our conversation went although I've moved them out of sequence a little bit some of the things we've already talked about this piece really began when Emma went to the police with her story and recorded it and she's referred to the recording as real material that I could work with she also said that the piece you may want to stop and explain this particularly since your parents who are practicing psychiatrists are here she said it's better than therapy I guess I can explain sort of that whole police situation so when I first came out with my story I was on the front page of the Times and it was just an article about what happened to Emma and these other women at Columbia what's up you were in the lead you were the first thing in the article I remember reading this before you weren't named I don't think I was named in the New York Times you weren't okay and so after that I got all these emails from people being like I'm I'm happy you told your story blah blah but you should have gone to the police it's a mistake why don't you police people commenting on things online saying girls are so dumb they should go to the police and I was like all right there's a big fuss about going to the police I have five years my case can be statue of limitation yeah that statute of limitations is five years long I can go to the police now if you guys are so smart about the police being the best people to deal with this then let me trust you and do that so I called the I called the police after my last exam that semester and recorded everything that happened and of course at when you went in to see them oh you started the first responders came to my dorm told me that my my friend and my boyfriend couldn't be with me when I talked to them had them sit in my room then conducted their investigation or basically harassing me in the hallway of my dorm and I recorded everything and I never listened to that you know I ended up going to special victims unit the people there weren't very understanding either but I so I had that audio recording of them saying things like so he got a little weird that night and then I'd be like no he raped me that night so he got a little weird that night you agree and then I'd be like what why are you using that language here you know it was stuff like that and so then see I never listened to that recording but I got to yell and I the ill residency that summer and I made a video using that audio but to make the video I had to carry a bed out of well that was the performance that you were recording yeah well was dismantling a bed and taking it out into the front yard and yeah well the video was I was going to use recording and not do that but to use the room that I wanted to make do the performance and I had to take a bed out of the room and move all the furniture out and then the idea of me moving a bed out of the room sort of got stuck in my head and then I decided to make a video where I took a bed out of a house piece by piece and I ended up using that footage with the audio but then yeah in the final critique people were like it's weird that it ends in this house this house is not that relevant to the audio because the audio has to do with Columbia and what happened at Columbia and then I was like I should carry this mattress at Columbia why do I want to carry this mattress at Columbia and then I that's where the piece started and then you spent quite a while working out the terms of engagement rules of engagement yeah the rules of engagement I spent the entire summer from the moment I got back till the first day of school perfecting the rules of engagement they were very different when I started the year off and I you know figuring out how to get a mattress because the people who sell mattresses to Columbia don't sell mattresses to individuals I ended up getting my mattress from this place called Tall Paul's Tall Mall which is a store for that's it I was trying to it's in my notes what is that yeah it's a it's an online store for tall people so who need dorm room size mattress I guess I don't know yeah well because they're extra long oh yeah but anyway you can go through your notes more that was a long tangent well one of the most interesting things you said which I think got edited out of my piece was that you became an artist with this piece and I think that that's really important that this this was this kind of summer of compression toward clarity that you had where and you said it was made me an artist before I'd only ever really done art by assignment so there's this very abrupt shift and you have this experience where you told yourself it was a whole different idea of art for you something that's asking to be made I told myself I need to do this now the world really needs this now and that's why I asked the question about is this a weird mess aonic artist impulse artistic impulse and then you had this great answer you said I'm never really doing it myself that is every I wish I had said that now yeah I don't know if I could have worded that as well now yeah I definitely see my life as pre this summer when I was when to me art was you know fulfilling an assignment for a class like make a monument out of wood and that was my art but I now I look at that and I think that's not art art is to me at least it's made out of necessity and like I definitely feel like there was a force greater than me that was compelling me to make this piece because I felt like you know it's yeah and I agree you I agree with the Emma that said that because I did feel like the world needed it I felt like it was more than just something that I wanted to do something that I had to do for fixing a problem or fixing for people yeah which explains the public nature of it and the long and and the real endurance the enduring you know the open end in this you also said I have no idea what I'm doing after this actually that's changed now that's another big change I don't know if I don't think that this is the place for me to say what my next pieces are but I'm going to be working on my next pieces over winter break so and will they be of the performance kind they'll be performative I should back up a little because you were your major you were majoring in sculpture right in visual art oh I thought it was it but there had been an emphasis in your in what you were doing on sculpture not really it was just sort of at Columbia the visual arts major is you can you just take studio classes that you're interested in and then as long as you take a certain number of them you have the visual arts major so I was taking mostly photography and I took painting drawing sculpture and photography but did you or did you not characterize the work before this as being about rage and violence against women oh I think I remember yeah well so they were like particular sculptures that I made yeah that definitely evoked that and you talked about violence as a formal configuration so it was like something you were trying to get into shapes and yeah like I mean there's this one sculpture I'm thinking of where I created this no it's too weird to talk about but yeah I definitely yeah there's death there's definitely like I think the verbs that you would use to describe the process that I had that I used to make the sculptures that I was making were all very like violent words and then I I took photography my entire junior year so that was that would have been before I talked to you and I think that most of my photographs sort of had this tinge of well that's out of the event yeah yeah of the assault yeah oh yeah since the assault I took sculpture and photography and this is before you really sort of compressed it down to this very clear yeah sort of yeah and then you said well you said once it once once this is over I'm definitely going to be searching which you kind of covered then you said art is powerful it's something that moves people this is the crash course in and then I have exp of power so expression and experience of power this is a note-taking you can't just be protesting things that was one thing you said that as a personal yeah I I mean to me I wouldn't be satisfied just going to rallies and speaking at rallies and I do I've been thinking about the power thing a lot lately because I think that on the meta level of my piece there's this really strange dialectic going on where you know I'm powerless because the school has done these things to me my rapist has done these things to me the police have treated me like crap and ultimately I'm forced to if I want this education to continue going to school with my rapist at the same time because of this piece for example all of public safety at my school had to have a an emergency meeting where they told them you're gonna get fired if you don't pick up Emma at the shuttle stop like there is this weird that way in which I'm powerless and powerful at the same time often I like my pure emotional feeling is powerlessness even because we were talking about how it has something to do with the fact that I felt like I was I had to make this piece or like a force was sort of my memory is that when we were talking about you you said something like I'm still crying every day yeah which is not a laughing matter but yeah I definitely it's I think people see me as this hero or that's one thing I was that that's one of the one of the passages I read I did it we had our final thesis show on Thursday and at the show I did a reading where I selected passages from the diary I've been keeping and one of the passages I selected was about this whole treating me as a hero thing because that's been something I've been thinking about a lot lately this one woman came up to me and said I was talking to my friend recently and she asked me if there was one person I had to choose to teach my eight-year-old son about who would that person be and then she looks at me and goes and I said you and I started crying cuz I just don't teach him about what just she would teach him about me as I see you would be the subject yeah there was one person she had she would choose to teach her eight-year-old son about she would choose me which and then I started just crying in front of her cuz I don't I mean even these pot like the positive way that people sort of have treated me is really stressful as well it's just a lot of responsibility and I just don't feel like I know I feel like I'm so I'm 22 now I've had a birthday since I started the piece and I just don't feel like I have the wisdom that these people are you know they it's this there's that you're sort of operating by instinct still yeah and people are like your hero I'm gonna teach my son about you and I'm like what yeah so should I ask my question of you yeah I mean okay yeah I don't know did you have other quotes I'm just gonna finish up to go back to logistics that one thing that struck me just just a little detail but she said we were talking about the carrying techniques yeah and you said you would not roll it up that would fetishize it oh yeah in addition to making your job easier by the way but you know or maybe maybe not but I always thought that was like how conscious all this stuff was you know that no there's not gonna be a rope involved there's not gonna be that kind of process yeah that was actually the other the other one of the other things I read from my mattress diary the other day had to do with the idea fetishizing it because there was one day that I was walking to the shuttle stop and a homeless person came up to me and was starting was trying to get my attention and I've always been very anxious about this kind of stuff because there's a reason that I'm this this piece is very site-specific because if I were to carry this piece all over New York City for example it would be a piece about homelessness in a while I'm I'm happy about those connotations and the the references that it has to that I don't want it to be about homelessness so I was interested in what would happen when I had this interaction with a homeless person with a mattress and he he he just saw me struggling and wanted to help and I was like oh you don't work like don't worry you don't have to help and he's like no let me help and he brought over his shopping cart and I don't want to I've been resisting using any wheels or straps to carry the mattress because I do believe that suddenly becomes this fetishized objects like oh I'm pushing my mattress around on wheels I don't know it just feels wrong to me and it's about to me the piece is about an honest struggle with the mattress and not trying to come up with tricks to get around that make it easier honest yeah so but when this person came up with his shopping cart to me it was actually one of the most honest encounters I'd ever had with anyone because he was coming to this piece with no knowledge of why I was carrying it right he was also the first person in the history of the piece to offer help not because he'd seen me on the news or not because he heard about me from a friend but because he just saw like a pure visual experience he saw me as a person struggling to carry this mattress and wanted to do whatever he could to help so he tolerated it being in there yeah and I was like you know what like you're right that's the way to do it yeah we had a great conversation he told me about his sister yeah and I was really happy about that experience and that was I think if I if wheels are ever introduced to this piece it has to be in a very honest way like that right yeah and just to catch up on a couple of other things in the Vanessa Grigori artist article is that the one that quotes Lee Bollinger saying he feels really bad about what you're doing he likes to get that quote out there wherever he can has aside from doing things like you have to pick up and the silk of what's there be fired has there been any other response from the administration any any attempt to approach you or any attempt to reconsider what might have happened what happened no my parents wrote an op-ed sort of explaining everything that happened in the hearing process and he wrote them a sort of snarky reply that was not it wasn't substantial at all and then yeah of course you know the administration the administrators aren't going to take anything onto onto themselves in order to help me they're just going to yell at their workers the public safety shuttle drivers about it so because they don't want to look bad yeah kind of minute way yeah as opposed to the larger way in which there seem really committed to looking bad and in terms of just to continue the fetishization conversation so this goes all the way through and becomes you know I think more and more interesting to think about kind of you know you go you end up at commencement oh here's a here's a tiny question because I think it's on everybody's mind and we're probably embarrassed to ask it but have you seen the man with your have you have you come across him on campus with your mattress um no actually a lot of people ask me that question it's not that weird but I've seen him twice without when I wasn't carrying a mattress once before school started so before the piece started and then one time when I was like actually I was purchasing paint on and I was bringing it to my studio and I saw him on that walk to write the rules of engagement but I never that that was the beginning of the year and I haven't seen him with the mattress but I figure that's because when I'm carrying the mattress I can't see 50 percent of the world right so he's like dodging so I mean yeah he could he could be dodging me or I just might not I have no peripheral vision so I might not be able to see him and then in terms of fetishization so this however long probably probably it looks like commencement don't you think um yeah and I sort of I sort of unless you just sort of dies of shame and embarrassment guilt so what is the mattress after you graduate is because I can imagine like the Museum of Modern Order another museum that being really interested to acquire it in which case it's installed leaning against the wall probably looking pretty shabby by by the end of the year with a label explaining what had happened but does the does the mattress live on in any aesthetic way or artistic way I have this whole plan or image of how I would want the installation to look and it would be an installation because I want the rules of engagement to be painted on the white wall museum it would look pretty much like it does in my studio and I'd want all of the wet bed wetter the torn up bed wetter sheets to be on display as well maybe in a pile or however they want to do it I don't really care and then the mattress diary I'd want that to be maybe on an iPad so that you could scroll through it because I've been typing it it's not a handwritten thing or some some way that people could read it next to it mm-hmm so it would be the and then all those gloves you're gonna get oh yeah through the months the gloves that I'm getting I'm hopefully getting that I'm dreaming for yeah so all the all the tools and the diary and the painting okay do you want to ask me questions or sure or is there anything is there anything we haven't spoken about that you want to say no I think we've covered the bases on on my part or we could just I don't know what our time is looking like but we can move to question oh come on give me a question just one okay you came up with okay so in my philosophy of art class we were reading of course Arthur Dante's art the art world revisited and I'm gonna read a paragraph from it from it it is instructive to observe the way members of the art world respond to works of a kind encountered for the first time when the task is to lay down something like a piece of theory of the work and then against this some appraisal of it as critics for example are called upon to do with great frequency Roberta Smith a critic for the New York Times once told me that this is the part of her job which she finds the most appealing often she will be the first one to write about a given artist with no available history or theory to help her since the artist is quite unknown so that's what happened when you came to my studio and I was wondering I was wondering if you could describe the steps you took to decide that my piece was art because I think that I mean maybe to you and I it's obvious but I think it was definitely I mean I I was nervous before you came for a reason if you could talk about that well I think I've sort of touched on it already when I said that kind of clarity where where the another favorite word of mine is economy like there's nothing you can take away from your piece it all is essential to it like the rules of engagement and and just the kind of utter simplicity of this act and yet how complicated it becomes symbolically emotionally you know how it's this act of assertion and then sometimes it's it's sort of self-denigrating I mean it's just you know maybe even kind of self-sacrificial like you can just sort of move around it and get a full spectrum of emotion and I don't you know it's funny because like I said I from a distance I thought yeah I would I would go see this and figure it out but I don't really figure it out you know I just I just know that I took about 20 pages of notes and then followed you across the campus a campus and then by the time I got to the other side it was like yeah I can like there's a piece here I can do this it's sort of just and that's really the way I write I mean Dantos totally right I mean I love the fact that I can write about people before anybody else does and that's what journalistic criticism is about and there are other people who write like Danto writes essays I don't write essays I'm sort of writing more reports from the front and that's you know that I want to do that and go on to the next thing or you know and by the way if you start showing somewhere I probably would not write about you because our situation is totally contaminated you know I try to keep those things kind of separate so but anyway we'll see so I guess we should open it up to questions now I have I have a longer question and then a very quick short question my longer question has to do with beyond the national day of action in which students worldwide all picked up mattresses as well the students who may have previously only been engaged with issues of sexual assault on college campuses with rallies and protests also entered a performative space and I wondered what your thoughts were on that matter and then my quick question is are you planning on bringing your mattresses with you to the graduation ceremony I mean I was really excited about the national day of action I thought it was amazing over 130 schools participated in over five countries so that was amazing yeah I think and just I loved it it was a really wonderful day and then in terms of graduation I do have a plan for graduation I have this vague image of myself going to shake whoever's hand up close to shake on that day maybe the dean and maybe the president I don't really know and then just dropping the mattress there at their feet that way yeah see what it's like guys so and that would be the end I'm cathartic or catharsis to it in regards to your experience or your relationship with your perpetrator or has it been more of an accumulation that's a interesting question because what I've been finding is that whenever people ask me questions about my emotions I'm so laden with emotions that any given moment that it's really hard to pick them apart and to quantify them I'm just it's been I mean from the moment I I came out with my story it's just been a roller coaster so I think that yeah well you know what right now I'm the biggest question I have is like why does this why does Paul want to stay at Columbia like I'm questioning that and then like the longer he stays there the more angry I am with him so I am angrier with him than I've ever been in my life and the the mattress piece I don't know I guess it's just a thing I have to be doing like I need to do for my yeah it's a strange feeling like when you have you yeah you have to be doing something again like you were talking about earlier that feeling that there's a force greater than myself that's making it and I don't know if it's either helping or making things worse for my emotion so yeah thanks right up on this event for Brooklyn calm just this is happening people should come and I got so many negative and hateful comments and affected me for a number of reasons I was a great survivor as well and I think what you're doing is so brave and so powerful so just knowing how much that upset me from that perspective how do you deal with people that are saying things like oh she could be lying think what she's doing to this poor guy I mean those there's no way to not be upset about that stuff I think every time another comment or online says something and hurt the little bit in the end of the day I I'm not gonna like argue back with those people because there's a reason they're attacking you from the veil of anonymity online right they're not brave enough to say it to your face and I found that like people have will say the meanest things online one person said Emma's ISIS let's bomb her her mattress makes a good target but no one would ever say that to my face because that person's probably a coward so yeah there's I don't I don't really know I don't have advice but it's just sort of a casualty I guess thank you yeah thank you one of them is that rape of campus women how long has it been standard operating procedure it's it's been at least two decades probably more and we haven't heard from the women who who work didn't have the option for whatever reason to protest publicly and I guess secondly the justice department released its data this last week that women are color low income women are much higher risk that of being raped than college age women of women in college so there's this whole layer within layer is this very public movement about the impunity of men on campus is it is it designed to expand will it is it will really attack male impunity and deal with the other problems that you just brought up the thing is that I'm not really the the to me it seems strange because I'm not really the I think I've been framed as the leader of a movement and that I have a lot of control over this movement but really in the way I see it I'm just a person making an art piece that seems to be an appropriate symbol for a movement I think that the like the real the activists who have been doing the most work have also been the activists that like I don't want to say the appropriate that has negative connotations but have been using my case to further that and I don't think that as an artist I can really I personally can really only make artwork about my experience and what's going on in my life and I think it would be sort of dishonest to be making work for them and speaking for someone else so I so right now I'm just sort of making artwork that comes from my heart right and there's not much I can do to like say alright now I'm going to make the activism have a different slant or now I'm going to change the course of this yeah I guess what I'm trying to say is that right now I can only do what I can do which is make art and then the activism stuff is at least from what I've been seeing completely organic and has been happening like because hundreds of people on the campus decide they all want to work together at a certain point or people make a Facebook group and all these activists have been talking to each other that's less under my control but of course like I want all those things that you want and like if I had the power to do those things I would be doing those things but right now I just have to make the artwork out of me yeah well I didn't want to say a fellow rape survivor I guess thanks for being so brave to do this I'm an artist too and it's never something I'm able to confront in my work because it's just so scary but I'm curious as to how Columbia's response has affected your healing process and it seems that everything they've done has really only added insult to injury as far as I can imagine and at this point even if your rapists were to leave do you feel like your protest or the protest aspect of your work would be completed or is there still something left there like if you were to imagine that? Well if he left I would be very grateful because I would no longer have to hurry and match us around but I have I think that this whole experience has shown me other problems with the way we talk about rape and the way we talk to survivors that I didn't see before especially in the way that the news treats survivors such as for example when I first came out with my story and I've been interviewed by a ton of different newspapers and whatever other new newspapers were starting to email me asking if I knew of any other rape survivors that would want to come out for the first time on their blog or their TV show and I realized that survivors are being treated as commodities in a way it's a thing that will make your newspaper sell especially seeing what's been happening with this whole UVA thing so I think that I mean that's just one of the many things that this work has shown me that I feel like I need to fix or the artistic impulse in me is starting to get excited about so yeah it's not done I just think that there's that my practice needs to expand in a certain way I graduated in 2012 and I've used to donate but you mentioned that friends will actually wrote a snarky letter to your parents has he ever engaged with you at all you know I don't know of course not well when I graduated I actually got in trouble because I hugged friends and because he's actually a hologram he doesn't want you to know that your arms will pass through I invaded his personal space and you know he's not defending the Yorkers I feel that the reason this piece is out is we got a real experience and you've able to transform that experience into my consciousness and awareness is a way that I have not experienced this and I think that's the thing of that out is good my question does lie on the tricky boundary between activism and art and I was wondering if both of you maybe can comment on that because I feel that it's a dicey kind of boundary where activism meets out and your comment before about these women taking off the door of the office was framed as an activism piece and an art piece and so I was wondering if you could maybe talk about that. I'd like to talk to that. Well I think there's a kind of hierarchy in the art world right now of this feeling that art should be engaged with social values which which are changing the world which implies that art isn't enough that art is not doing its job and I react very negatively to that idea. I think that an artist has to do as Jasper John said what you are helpless to do it has to become out of absolute necessity and lots of different artists have to make lots of different art and some of it's going to be overtly political. I think basically all art is political in some way if you really break it down and I think that art has gotten in a way that's very interesting has gotten very fuzzy around the borders. So in terms of activist art you could talk about like how much of this how much of any given artwork like Emma's is activism and how much is art. And what is the kind of balance where you experience its form what you could call its form which is her thinking about it and her clarity and then you get a kind of message. And I think that there may be some kind of ratio where when it becomes more activism than art it's totally useful and it can have great impact but I don't necessarily want to look at it in a museum. I think it should be out on the street you know and it's not it's so I mean that's a really really complicated question but I think that it's incumbent if you're going to be as much an artist as an activist. You really can only do what's in you and you have to make something of it. You can't just kind of adopt a cause or a subject that's sort of out here. It can't be done in your head and I think if you look back at art it's always come from that you know and that that's really important to us. So you know I would say like Romare Bearden all kinds of people they're doing what only they can do and I think that Emma is sort of in this situation. I mean I don't think there's anything quite like this in terms of what she has set up and this kind of peculiar you know I think successful balance between as you know like this great definition between subject matter and content or Thea Rockburn said you know subject matter is what a work is about and content is what it does and her this piece really does something in addition to having this very specific subject. Yeah I think another way of thinking about it that I thought or that I was interested in was I don't remember who you were quoting dad but you quoted someone when you said this. Someone was explaining my piece as not like 50% activism 50% art but art that sparked change and art like art that had the power to transform something which I think was I think yeah I thought that was a pretty good way of Kevin Rudd. Yeah I thought that was a good way of saying it just because I agree art is something the way that I started to see it now is that art is something you make by necessity and this is why when you asked a question earlier I was saying I can only make the art that comes from me I can't make art to speak for someone else. I think that would just be morally wrong but also like I don't know how to do it and so I think by nature I'm sort of an activist person and I think that's the artistic expression of my activist nature. Hi I'm also a 2012 alum and I've been slightly involved in some of the discussions about what should change at the university level and what students want to see change in terms of policy responding to sexual assault. I'm wondering what you care about seeing change in an ideal world if we can even think of that how the university would respond differently to survivors. It's just that I think that when we get into this conversation it goes into so many little details that it almost might be better for you to just read the document we wrote up which I can send to you. But I mean for example they would I'm just thinking about the process from A to Z they would record the investigative sessions with the survivors rather than having a person take notes and they added this new thing to the policy where now the investigator gives a subjective evaluation of both the survivor and the response credibility. That they hand to the hearing panel so the investigator thinks oh she doesn't she sounds like kind she doesn't sound like a credible person they will tell that to the panel like little things so many little things along the way that I would change. For example oh my gosh I'm going to give so many for examples like they wouldn't allow a case in my case they allowed to drag on for seven months just because every time they scheduled hearing my Rebis said oh I have to study for a midterm and then they would postpone it for another week and they wouldn't do stuff like that. You know it's so many things but I can send you the link if you're interested. I can only start by echoing all the thanks and support and appreciation from everybody in this room and everybody outside this room who's heard about your work and appreciates what you're doing I can't say that enough so I'm not going to try to. I come from or I go to a small college in Minnesota and I come from the activist communities on campus where we did organize involvement like participation in the national day action and that was really exciting for us. To follow your model and kind of engaging in a new and visually arresting way really on this issue and I was struck by something that you said earlier this afternoon about how going to rallies and speaking at rallies wouldn't be enough. That the higher as your expression of your experience is something that's critical. I'm wondering like we as activists against sexual violence can learn from that and take to what we're doing on our campuses across the country. How can we bring some of that expression into our work and I don't know if that's a question that makes sense. No it makes sense. I would say that none of what I'm saying is prescriptive at all. For example I founded No Red Tape with Zoe Ridolfi Star and then I basically don't really participate in No Red Tape. Zoe does all that because she's the I think like if Zoe and I are yin and yang I'm the artist and she's the activist and then we create this thing that's going on at Columbia. But if it weren't for her you know No Red Tape would not be happening or you know running all these rallies passing out flyers like all the things that they need to do. And I think that there's that going to rallies and doing all the activist stuff is so extremely important. And I don't think that I think that I it's not that I think that the rallies aren't enough. It's just that for me as a restless person who needs to be making artwork girls that go crazy. I don't think it'd be enough for me. And you know I don't go to like I'm I'm not really a rally kind of person like I kind of show up late and feel awkward while I'm there. I think that I meant it's not enough for the way I live my life but I think it's it's so so important you know. And yeah I hope that's a good answer to your question. If there's a way that we can make space for or draw attention to artists like you who are working in this same issue subject to topic. What is the way that we can do that? I don't know if that's an easy question to answer. I guess just support them if an artist comes up to you and says I have an idea for an art piece and I think it would work well if we I think that it'd be amazing if we work together. Support them. We need a lot of support. Being an artist is a scary thing. Yeah. No problem. I think it's a really powerful project and I really appreciate how honest and vulnerable you are about you know mostly about talking about this piece not just the piece. And I was curious if the rules of engagement or something you've thought about before if you have anything planned for if the rapist does this side to help you one day with the mattress. That would be really interesting. I probably I don't know. I have to ask you a moment. That's a really scary question. I doubt he would. Right. Yeah. Helping you does not mean he doesn't have to say sorry. You know. Yeah. Also there isn't no contact policy. So if he does contact me maybe he could get kicked out. That would be even more interesting. Rather than leaving the school like getting kicked out because he's sorry about I mean I'm just making up some epic songs. If he contacts me maybe that would be like he would probably get kicked out. Look if he wanted to say he was sorry he wouldn't be doing like some of the awful things you know he's not. There are other ways to say that he's sorry than jumping in and helping me with carry this mattress and if he did that it would probably be a violation of the no contact policy and he'd probably get kicked out which would end the piece. So I don't know. Maybe that would be a crazy chain of events but yeah. Interesting scenario. I think we're going to take two more questions. I'm really fascinated by the fact that this guy is at campus and staying at campus and you know it just seems so bizarre because as much as you're a symbol for rapes or ravers you know the symbol of rapists. I mean it's like everyone hates you. What are you doing. So my question for you is you know do you hear stories about him and like what like why like any rationality people. I mean I can imagine people probably like your friends do they ever interact with him and tell him like leave. When you saw him on the street do you like cower or what's he kind of like. The first time I saw him before school started like before the piece started he just glared at me when I walked by the second time I saw him he didn't see me I was sort of behind him. The strangest story I've heard is that he's in this class about a statistic class and they were talking about like infant mortality rates or something having to do with children and they were talking about the way that statistics can be shown to sway people in either one direction or other. Like if you use a pie chart it'll make it'll emphasize this or if you say a ratio it'll emphasize this and he started arguing about how people are so moved by the statistic one in five. And he never said one in five women are raped but everyone sort of knew that that's what he was talking about and then got into a lively debate with the class about why one in five is or is not an important statistic. Supposedly the teacher doesn't know that it's him so the teacher thought it was like a happy little class discussion whereas everyone in the class was like no what are you talking about one in five is a really big number. So that's the most interesting anecdote I can share. So I guess I've been really moved by how much you are to us and for me and people of the next generation and I'm sitting here thinking well what can we do for you and I don't know if this would be possible or an invasion but have you thought about some sort of schedule of where you're going to be during these cold months and some sort of posting so that those of us who live near the Upper West Side or wherever want to come and participate in helping you carry your mattress or in some way or is that what that interferes with about their performative nature of what you're doing. So that's already happening. There's a Barnard senior named Allie Ricard who started this website called Carrying the Way Together where you can just contact her and she has my schedule and sometimes groups of people will help me carry. It gets a little messy because sometimes my class will get cancelled and then there are all these people waiting outside of my class and I'm not there. Or things like that but it's been pretty cool so far because these people have been very helpful. So yeah you should check it out carrying the way together. From what I've observed and the people that have supported you at least from my perspective or at least what I have access to is a lot of people see you as this heron and you talked about it as a hero and you have a shield around you. You're the strong woman I see on the website like the top ten strong woman of the year all these things. And the other side is that people pity you and they want to hug you and they want to take care of you and they want to just the human feeling of that which I'm not saying is very important. And I guess my question is how you deal with this idea of the heron of the strong person that is sort of starting a movement or raising awareness and this person that is a human and suffer this and needs to be hugged. So the idea of the pity and the hero and the strength and the weakness coming together which I know is a hard question but if you could speak about that and even think about the word survivor rather than victim. So just your idea of the hero versus the human. Yeah I've actually yeah when I when I talk to you survivors often one of the things I find and of course you can never say this is true for everyone but true for a lot of people that I've talked to. They've gotten a lot of pity from people who like you know they say they've been raped and someone goes oh I'm so sorry and then the more the more pity. Like it's important to have the pity but after a while the pity starts to get sickening because then you start to feel sick yourself. You're like oh do I need to be pity am I broken and then you are yeah there's a long phase of like the sadness and the feeling broken and like there's a reason everyone needs to be pitying you all the time. And I found that when I talk to survivors often people are I'm like do you want me to say like I actually will say this will be like do you want me to say I'm sorry or are you sick of pity. And often they're like I'm really tired of pity I'm like yeah because I'm mad at that guy and I'm like yeah I'm mad at that guy too and then we can you know turn the sadness into a feeling of anger or. Which is I think more constructive. And so yeah I feel like I've gotten so many pounds of pity at this point that it's sort of like I don't know I don't want to feel broken anymore. I'm tired of people being like oh you poor thing and I feel like I have my family for that but because they can take care of me when I'm broken. But and then in terms of the hero that is a completely different thing because it just confuses me. I'm just like I mean as I said earlier when the that was one example but another another woman came up to me and told me that she sees me as the Rosa Parks of my generation. And I just like I don't know I just see myself as a person making an art piece at Columbia and it just really like it's I don't think I'll ever look at myself in the mirror and go hero. You know so I think I think we have Liz creeping up on us. I would say shero. Also just as a reminder Rosa Parks said I didn't do this to start a movement. I was just damn tired. That's pretty much how I see it. So thank you Emma. Thank you Roberta. And this program is all of our programs can be seen on www.brooklynmuseum.org slash EAS CFA. And I'd like to say a holiday shout out to David and to Euro Pacific who is our cameraman and who produces all of our videos that are online and available to you. And I want to thank you. You've been a wonderful audience. I'm glad you all came and we're going to have an informal tea and coffee outside thanks to Michael Pollock who is Brooklyn Roasting Company. So please instead of coming up here to address questions please move your way out onto the Bozard Court. Have some tea and coffee and have an opportunity if you would like to speak to Emma and Roberta. And I thank you. I wish you all a very happy healthy new year. A lot of strength a lot of purpose and keep on March in 2015. Thank you.