 All right, I'm going to start with some library announcements. And once again, I just want to thank all of our library community for joining us. And I want to thank our panelists for joining us. And always, it is summer stride. This is part of our big summer stride. It's not just for kids. It's for adults, too. You do 20 hours reading, 20 hours activity, coming to amazing events. You get your iconic, yes, iconic San Francisco Public Library tote bag. We've been doing them for years now. You might have all of them. You might be a collector. Get your 20 hours and come on down and grab your tote bag. And we want to also acknowledge that we are occupying the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramya Tushaloni peoples. We're the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living on their traditional homeland. And as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramya Tushaloni community. And I will put in the chat box first. Here comes the links for tonight. You can find everything you want on this doc. Links to our panelists. Links to upcoming events at SFPL. Links to tonight's book. And here's a resource list on Aloni tribes and websites and resources you can find about that. So just briefly, some upcoming summer stride events. San Francisco Public Library has a bi-monthly read called On The Same Page, where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book at the same time. And this July and August, we have chosen a summertime sizzler. And this is by the amazing Beverly Jenkins. And her book looks very like the romance genre. And it is the romance genre, but it also has family planning and feminism packed in this book. So check it out. It's available at all of your locations right now and the bookmobile. And then you can join us for the book club. Also, Beverly Jenkins will be in conversation on August 23rd with our librarian, Rachel Fajay. So come check that out. And we do these all the time, bi-monthly. We do get the author. It's very fun. We have nomadic press joining us all summer long too. And we've been doing thematic months. June was all about music. July is all about nature and environment and climate. August is all about food. So Nomadic has been joining us for each month. And if you don't know Nomadic, they are an East Bay press. We love them. And they celebrate all of the fine folks in the Bay area. Next Saturday in our corrett auditorium, we are doing in-person. Wear your mask. Come on down. It's a nice big space. We can spread out at seats 250 people. We can enjoy each other and still space out. Space out. Let's see. Some other things coming up. Ursula Pike will be in conversation with Michelle Lapeña, July 27th. And some quick, let's see. How about this one? Susan Cope in conversations with Black Panther Clio Silver about a book about the food programs that the Black Panthers did called Power Hungry. And then one more in-person event coming up with these three amazing women authors, Kristin Chen, Vanessa Hua, and Ingrid Rojas. And this will be in-person, but we're also gonna do it streaming so you can join either way. But we're trying to figure out how to be together and apart at the same time. Welcome to the new world. And then I'm really excited about this last one. This one is part of our food programming for August. We'll be talking about food co-ops in the Bay area and them sort of being the last democracy of the workforce and how this works out in the Bay area. We're gonna have from other avenues, from the deep grocery in Oakland and Eris Mindy, my favorite, and the co-op collective in Penicia. So we're pulling from all areas of the Bay area to come talk about this in-person, also hybrid. So don't worry, you're not gonna miss anything. But do come on down. We miss you at the library. We've got all kinds of amazing books waiting for you to check out, including Last Gaspism. And I'm gonna throw that in the chat right now, which you can check out at the library. You can place a hold. You can have it sent to any library you want and just run in and pick it up. There it is. All right, so tonight we have Dan Long, Kimberly Bain, Pato Hebert, and Cheryl Dericote. Dericotte, Dericotte. All right. So I'm just gonna do a quick introduction of everyone and then I'm gonna turn it over to our panel. And again, welcome everybody. And that link that I put in for tonight's, I'm gonna do it one more time. This link stays live. It's just like published on a Google webpage and it has everybody's links and their websites so you can find them. And whenever we have a panel like this, all kinds of other books and resources pop up and I will add those to the doc, especially if you can find them at our library. All right, Kimberly Bain, PhD, her most pressing and urgent scholarly and critical creative pursuits have consolidated it around the history, theory and philosophy of the African diaspora, race, gender, environmental and medical racism, the anthropocene and black and arts, black arts and letters. She's currently working on two scholarly monographs. The first entitled On Black Breath traces the genealogy of breathing and blackness in the United States. Her second book, Dirt, Soil and Other Dark Matter digs into the soil for understanding how blackness has shaped global considerations of the anthropocene and refused to extractive relations of racial capitalism. Dr. Bain regularly teaches survey and specialized courses on 19th century through contemporary black and American arts and culture, literary and critical theory and black feminist and queer thought. She joins the University of British Columbia from Tufts University where she was the John Holmes assistant professor in the humanities. Dan Wong is an artist currently living in Los Angeles. He's the founding key holder of Mess Hall and experimental cultural space in Chicago and currently works in the collaborative vehicle now Time Asia America. Recent projects include commissioned works for the Station Museum and Asian Arts Initiative. He exhibited a rag box of over stood grammars, a retrospective of 80 plus letter press prints at Fondari Darling in Montreal in 2020. His art writings have been published internationally in book collections, museum catalogs and in dozen of artist publications. He's an artist in residence at the 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica and holds an undergraduate degree in religion. Cheryl Dericott is a visual artist and her favorite mediums are glass and paper. Originally from Washington DC, she lives and makes art in San Francisco, has an extensive background in the arts community development. She holds a master's of fine art from the California Institute of Integral Studies, a master's of regional planning from Cornell University and a BA in urban affairs from Bernard College. Dericott is represented by Rery Riddle in San Francisco. Pato Hebert is an artist, teacher and organizer who splits time between Los Angeles and New York. His works explore the aesthetics, ethics and poetics of interconnectedness. He works across a range of media including photography, installation, sculpture, language, light, temporality and graphic design. Progressive praxis, spatial dynamics and the spirit of social topographies are of particular interest. And his art is what you see here and has been on all of our PR, it's gorgeous and it's tools pulls you in. All right, I'm going to stop sharing and turn it over to our amazing panel, starting with Dan. Sure, thank you. Thank you so much to the San Francisco Public Library. This is a great occasion, great excuse to get together virtually and love our public library. By way of introduction, I'll say that the last book that I just finished, that was I checked out from my local public library, the Los Angeles Public Library, was There Goes Gravity by Lisa Robinson, a memoir in the rock and music journalism and memoir genre, just kind of my go-to light reading for guilty pleasure. So, okay, anyways, yeah, I'll take a turn first here before handing it over to Cheryl and explain a little bit about the genesis of this book. And for that, I will bring in from the beginning, from the top, my two co-authors, co-editors, Anthony Romero and Daniel Tucker. And by way of explaining how we had come to do this project together, let me refer to a couple of things we've done in the past. One was the organize your own exhibition and book which was put together primarily by Daniel Tucker as a lead coordinator and curator and Anthony was a co-editor of that volume which was also published by Soberscove Press which is how Daniel and Anthony got to know Julia, Julia Klein, the publisher of the The Last Gaspism book. And I believe Julia's in the room so it's great to have her here on board. And that was in 2016 and organize your own was a whole sprawling set of projects that grew out of a revisiting the sometimes quoted line from the former Stokely Carmichael at the time of the dissolution of SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when he kind of laid out what became something of a truism which was to encourage or even to instruct the young activists of the North who were primarily white and interested in coming down to the South in the mid-60s to help with the voting registration and the different aspects of the civil rights movement going on in that part of the country to instead go organize your own. So the show and the project that came to fruition in 2016 was a kind of revisiting of that idea and an investigation of the relevance of that, whether that needed to be updated in some ways in activist culture and in social movement culture. At the same time, Anthony and myself engaged in what became a formalized conversation about race, racial politics and cultural politics and cultural difference. And that turned into a small self-published volume called the social practice that is race. So that was kind of within the context of the part of the art world that people like myself and Daniel Tucker and many others were being put into which was called social practice and a lot of people called it social practice. So that happened also in 2016. And both of those projects really, in the end, on a personal level, the most fruitful thing was that it just got the three of us engaged with each other in ongoing conversations. So when the pandemic came around and unfolded in that kind of like two months slow motion from December of 2019 through January of 2020, and then really arrived in North America by the end of January of 2020 and into February of 2020 when so many people, as you probably recall, you know, just checking in with each other especially as the lockdowns went into effect and people found themselves quarantined. It was so helpful for those of us fortunate enough to have friends who were available to, you know, reach out across distance and get used to this communicating over screens and so forth. And Anthony and Daniel and I just began to reach out to each other and fell into a pattern as that late winter turned into spring of having a standing weekly check-in with the three of us. And part of that conversation included, you know, this idea of maybe just doing something together to formalize our, you know, three-way processing of what we were all living through and what we were observing. We were in three different places. I was here in Los Angeles, Daniel was in Philadelphia and Anthony was in Boston. So we all had somewhat different local contexts to draw from as well as, you know, the view through media and through our other networks of family, friends, some of which were overlapping. So that's really how this came about. And then, you know, when we started to talk about some sort of project, what that might be, you know, we're all artists. So it could be an exhibition, it could be something else. Julia made it known that, you know, she was open to any type of proposal for something that we'd like to do then or in the future. And we kind of took her up on that offer and with her help, you know, brought into some sort of manageable shape a kind of book project that, I guess, even from the beginning because it was driven by this experience of having to interpret an event that was changing every week, it had built into the concept of the book a kind of shape-shifting as it met, you know, the different benchmarks for production. So with that, I will kind of jump ahead and just say, you know, we brought on board, invited in all of these different interesting, very, very talented and kind of complimentary contributors to help us out with it. But then towards the end of the production process, I'll say it started to already feel as we were closing down certain things like making, you know, committing to certain decisions. Okay, here's the contributors and here's what the contributors are gonna put into the book and then sequencing it and then talking about the design and working through all of that. It did start to feel already unfinished and it kind of left myself with a question mark as to how this thing would be read in a year or in two years because we already knew that the pandemic wasn't finished. I mean, there was a lot of unknowns yet to come. And then in one of our final three-way, you know, co-editor, co-author meetings, we met on January 6th, 2021. And, you know, about halfway through the meeting, one of us, Anthony said, hey, you know, guys, you should maybe have the news on while we're talking about going through our agenda for what else needs to be done here because this looks like it's something crazy is going down in DC. So even that was kind of a dramatic exclamation point to the reality that this book was going to open this period for the three of us as artists and authors and as collaborators, but maybe for everybody and maybe for the world going through this experience. And that's sort of at the top of my mind these days as we move into, you know, endemic, you know, COVID as an endemic disease sort of semi-endemic, maybe. I don't know. I'm not sure anybody really knows. So I'll leave it with that uncertainty because I hope to save time for the conversation amongst us. So there you go. Cheryl, would you care to take it forward from there? Thank you so much, Dan. I am gonna start sharing my screen. Hope it goes well. As I said on our practice, I still talk myself through this in year three, it's still happening. So we wanna view in slide show mode. Okay. Well, Dan is the person that brought me to this project. So I'd love to take this opportunity to publicly say thank you again to him. It's been really great. And not only has there been a book, but there's also been a wonderful art show that was up at Drexel University. And everything about this experience, including meeting wonderful new colleagues like Pato and Kimberly, Daniel and Anthony, the other co-editors who are not here. Julia has just been fantastic. I am gonna take about 10 minutes and talk to you all about my work that's in the book and how the work evolved. And so we will just dive in. So I always start by saying, hi, I'm Cheryl and I stand for art and liberation. And I'll start by acknowledging the land as well. I'm in San Francisco. I am so grateful to live and work on a lonely land. I also like to acknowledge the land that brought me this far, which is Washington DC. And that is Anacostin land. And because I am the last in my family, I always acknowledged my mother, my grandmother and my great grandmother, who came from a little place called Withville, Virginia, and that is Cherokee Nation land. I'm grateful to those ancestors. I always say art is very much a place where we can have the kind of conversations that we choose to avoid. I think of the museum and the gallery as brave spaces if they choose to be so, based on the type of work and conversations they're willing to facilitate. This is where I'm coming to you tonight. I came to my studio because I thought it would be more visually appealing. The studio is located, it's a series of warehouses. It's Laos Creek. It was started almost 25 years ago by a group of metalsmiths the first time they were about to be put out of the shipyards because that land was gonna be redeveloped, aka gentrified. And so they relocated here. The shipyard still has a small community of artists that's very much our sisters and brothers and cousins and we enjoy working with them. And so what you see is one view of my studio that includes my child, that's Emerald City, my kiln. We call them coffin kilns because they're pretty big. You could lay down in it. And my shelf that keeps some of my projects and glass supplies, I do a lot of work with glass powder. This is kind of what I'm known for. I make highly layered work. This is the project I'm in production on right now. It's a new monument to honor Harriet Tubman. That'll be going into the Millbury Bart Station this fall. And when I talk about layering, you can see that there's constantly this relationship to history and text and image. The base of the sculpture will actually have this brick pattern with words that pertain to her life. And that's an aluminum frame. And then the center image is surprise, surprise glass. This is also an example of some recent work. I was very struck by the fact that at the turn of the last century, factories were integrated, unlike the rest of America. And so I was really struck by seeing all these portraits of these little boys that worked in the factories side by side of a variety of ethnicities and races. And so in 2020, we all know what happened. Here it is. And I could not go to my studio. Like many people, the studio was closed and my life very much became an online life like everyone else's. And I did a lot of artist talks online. In terms of my practice as an artist, it evolved into this work on paper. And so I wanna give a shout out to the book and print communities, sort of my other communities other than glass, because I felt like a lot of the community-based book arts and printmaking, they just like got it. They're like, we are getting online, we are making stuff online, and it was just fantastic. So one of the communities I connected with online was a political printmaking community run by Kate Laster. And one of the courses was in mail art. And so we would just all sit around on Zoom and make this mail art. And over the course of doing that, I realized I was making these pieces that were kind of my own version of the play journals that had started to crop up by artists in the New York Times. My plant holdings, as you see on the left, my plant holdings increased tremendously during the pandemic. And I was just doing all this counting. And then I did this piece, pandemic bookkeeping. And I was like, wow, that's something. I'm just doing all this counting. I'm thinking about time in a certain way. And this piece was actually the genesis of the work that ended up in last gaspism. And so here you can see how the work evolved. I was very interested, again, in these historic images. And so a big part of my practice is research. And I started researching what were old ledger pages that I might be able to use as the backdrop or what were old journal pages. And these particular pages were drawn from Claire Barton's journal, who was the revered Civil War nurse that went on to start the American Red Cross or at least the early version of the American Red Cross. Simultaneously, when I started sort of searching for images that related to home and domesticity, I happened upon Mrs. Beaton's book of household management. And I was interested in that because it was a Victorian take, but the same timeframe. And that really spoke to me because I realized that a lot of women and female identified people were suddenly caught in this conundrum that we hadn't been caught in. We had hoped for a while. Suddenly we were supposed to keep these perfect houses and keep it all together, while at the same time running these businesses on Zoom and doing all the things. One of the things that nobody likes to talk about in Mrs. Beaton's handbook is that at least half of that book is devoted to the management of servants. And certainly as a black woman, working with these documents from Civil War time and Comprehensible Time in Victorian society, I was really clear what position I would hold. I would have been one of the servants during that time. And so as the book project evolved, I was able to actually make two more pieces to go with those original four. And I think these two sort of brought us into that present moment when we were getting published. And I would say the present moment that we're still stuck in. There is a desire to get together on the left and have the parties again. And then on the other hand, we're having another round of illness and caregiving, which the caregiving trays symbolize. And so I will stop there and give a shout out to Silver's Coast Press. I was delighted to visit their table this past weekend at the San Francisco Book Art Fair, which I hope some people on this Zoom were able to attend. And so you get to see the artist as book model. And I think it's a good look. So I will stop there. And I am getting ready to pass it off to Pato. Thank you so much. Thank you, Cheryl. And I agree, it's a great look and it works amazing. I wanna thank you for inviting us and really orchestrating this evening. Anisa and everyone at the San Francisco Public Library for generously hosting us and making it possible. Dan, you and your fellow editors in initiating this vibrant publication and the larger project that it spawned. And thanks to Julie Klein and Silver's Coast, it's great to have you with us. I was totally surprised and excited to see folks like Alita and Alisa and others joining us tonight. So just also welcome to everybody who's making time on a Monday evening to be here. It's really great and I'm grateful. I thought I'd do a performative reading of my essay accompanied by my images which also appear in the publication. My work is titled Asynchronous Lingering and the Capillaries of Care. What a civilian would call their dining room is what I call my artist studio in Los Angeles in order to make it semi-functional as my creative workspace. For years I've gone without a specific space to eat. Yet now, 18 months into the pandemic, so I was writing this last July for context. 18 months into the pandemic, it's fully devolved into a hovel of unnavigable clutter. So much there feels heavy, neglected, languishing. The nascent watercolor project about football concussions stopped cold by the start of COVID. Sacks of books I'd hope to read but could never quite crack. Debt I've yet to deal with. Taped to a bookshelf in the corner of the space are printouts of screen grabs. They burst with nurturing guidance from a former student turned friend. From the lockdown epicenter of Brooklyn, she sent me breathing exercises, encouragement and care. Daniel Tucker, one of the co-editors of this volume saw a post I'd made about this on social media and gently suggested I consider including the instructions as part of my submission to this collection. So I decided to digitally revisit the original messages from my supportive friend. I was struck by how consistently she's reached out during my illness and how extensive our exchanges were. I didn't remember any of these vital and sustaining communicates until I scrolled through the DMs. I got sick with COVID during the pandemic's early push into the United States. By the spring of 2020, I was already part of the first wave of long haulers. Folks who remained ill weeks after initial infection and did not quickly, easily or completely recover. Here we're looking at one of the images in the book and from a series of images titled Lingering. They're images I made with my cell phone wall walking in Los Angeles as a lesion park to repair my lungs and spirit. They're archival pigment prints on silk charmous. I'm writing this as I said a moment ago in July of 2021. Yesterday, I had a follow-up with the neurologist to track my slow but steady progress. I'm also trying to figure out when to see the gastroenterologist again to contend with my persistent digestive flare-ups. The refill of my inhaler prescription is delayed due to insurance issues. Some of my tinctures and powdered supplements also need to be reordered and I'm a few weeks behind on acupuncture. But it is the care of friends and loved ones that is the regenerative tissue of my uneven recovery. Even just this one friend's persistent efforts are voluminous, humbling and invaluable. When I first got sick last spring, she sent me a care package with a homemade beaded coaster and her original stickers, plus her mom's recipe for healing soup. It arrived via a circular forever stamp featuring the full moon and scalloped edges. I live for old school snail mail. It took me weeks to muster the energy to send the briefest of digital thank-yous. On May 24th, 2020, I wrote, I'm up and down better last few days after some relapse setbacks last week. Daily walks in park helping and unexpectedly generating new series of images of fallen PPE. Lots of writing and editing deadlines have now mostly cleared. Need to tend to my own infrastructure and body before school starts up again. Poco a poco, little by little. On June 25th, 2020, she DM'd me the breathing exercises that I later printed out and taped up in my dysfunctional studio. She wrote, I used to do an exercise with a PT, a physical therapist for quelling panic responses while running and also while not running. I felt like it taught me how to feel like I had control over my oxygen when it felt like my heart or lungs weren't working. These exercises train the tissues of the lungs and abdomen to stretch and contract as well as the body to utilize the oxygen it has available to it in the bloodstream. We began conservatively with the temple breathing a day, week, month, or however long it takes to feel comfortable to progress. Then move to the maximal breathing, then breath holding. The latter two options are more bodily stressful. The next day, I DM'd her back. Thank you, breath, movement, exhaling anxiety, next moments, so important. In September, I underwent still further exams to determine if I'd had a stroke and if there was any structural damage to my brain. More of her care streamed into my DMs with loving offers to study the exam images together. I replied, you're so thoughtful. Definitely would love to geek out about this at some point, but for now, save your precious energy on hustling your own labs. I've already had an EKG CT scan ultrasound and yesterday an MRI and comprehensive pulmonary exam. So now I just need to get results and discuss with specialists. It'll all be okay. I am however, in love with ultrasound equipment. I really want one, how are you holding up? Even as my bills kept piling up and my long COVID persisted, I kept having the strange fantasy of getting an artist residency that could somehow come with access to ultrasound gear. I wanted to make images of the inside of this body that had long since had to make room for the virus and its after effects. Later in December, my friend messaged that she'd had a nightmare about my medical bills as she juggled her own years of debt, stemming from a surgery. She said her surgeon's financial manager actually kept pushing off the conversation about costs because they were worried about it affecting her recovery which she noted as quote, so ironic and emblematic in quote. Now halfway into year two of the pandemic, again this was last summer. I still can't do these held breath exercises but I no longer take my daily inhaler every day and I only need the emergency inhaler one or two times per month. If sports first schooled me to mind my breathing in my youth and Buddhism taught me how to further listen and hone it in my 30s, my friend's consistent care was and is part of a huge ecosystem of sustenance that helps me to survive COVID. During these 16 months of sickness, my corporeal compass has skewed. Time frequently slips its register. This is a protracted and frustrating process that I call with COVID-19 care endure. The early images I wrote her about in the spring of 2020 have now become the lingering series part of which I've been presenting here. When I first got sick, I had to stop working on numerous sculptural painting and text-based works. Like so many other artists, COVID canceled my exhibitions, trips, presentations but it also radically impacted my own sense of pace and possibility. I had to recalibrate my creative research to a body whose rhythms and capacities were greatly altered by the virus, excuse me, a body that cannot be understood as mine. COVID exerts its own temporal asymmetries and pressures, its sneak attacks and subterfuges. It's not linear or easily predictable. Its hallmark is uncertainty. The coronavirus continues to wreak havoc via variants and deviants. Despite the immense privilege and increasing protection of broad vaccine access, the U.S. has now surpassed 600,000 COVID deaths. And of course, just this week, the number of COVID deaths, so that's what I wrote last year and now I'm saying in the temporary moment. Just last week, I think we surpassed 1.02 million deaths in the U.S. and the WHO now estimates something like 6.3 million COVID-related deaths worldwide. The finality of these deaths is one COVID time register. The timeline of the grieving to come is another. Still another is the expanding and difficult to measure horizon of the long hauler. One in three people infected become long haulers. This means that in the U.S. alone, we can estimate there are now 10 million of us. The scale is staggering. The timeframe for recovery unclear and bewildering. Yet in the face of the coronavirus onslaught, we also experience and embrace the half-life of hope. The life force that so often seems to fade throughout the pandemic that it can, like my friend's care, also somehow persist. Los Angeles is one of the hardest hit places on the planet at the start of 2021. But six months later, California had one of the lowest infection rates in the world, even as LA County has continued to encourage mask wearing as additional protection against reinfection or infection. Again, this is last summer. Vaccines and the fact that different jurisdictions live in different COVID temporalities. The virus is not the same in any two bodies nor in any two locales. How do we therefore understand the textures and temporality of recovery? This question has me thinking about how we practice multiple forms of care for self and with others. Our resilience can range from mutual aid efforts to exercise. For decades, LA's Elysian Park has been utilized by Latinx families, young people, elders, and queer folks, as well as multiple immigrant communities. Dogging, dog walking, and socially distanced picnics are just some of the activities that continue to proliferate during the worst parts of the pandemic, the park offering precious and vital public space and respite. When the mayor first closed the pools in Jim in March of 2020, I started walking in Elysian Park. This was also where I accessed a free COVID-19 public testing site on March 24th, and the park is where I returned once I finally had enough energy to make my first slow, gentle 15 minute walk during my initial recuperation in April of that first year. Since then, regular two mile walks in the park have become integral to my gradual recovery process. Walking can be counterproductive for many long haulers, but for me, when done with measure, it often helps. Initially, I tried to add five extra minutes to my walk each day, incremental adjustments that anxiously probe the body's limits. This too was COVID time, and these walks were and are a lifesaver. They've also slowly helped me to rebuild my long capacity and strengthen my spirit, and as part of this practice, I used my phone to make pictures. Elysian Park is a hilly beacon of 600 acres and it's right in the heart of the city. Free and accessible during daylight hours, its trails, breezes, and embrace have been even more vital to the city's wellness practices during the pandemic. It's a special place that has become integral to my own process of healing and recovery, creativity, and possibility. It's nuanced my sense of time from the geological and topographical time embodied by the bedrock itself to seasonal shifts in temperatures, flowers, and migrating birds, to the ephemera of fallen PPE littering the landscape. These different scales of time unfold as I stumbled to comprehend the unevenness of this body whose clock so seldom seemed to have any regularity of schedule. The raw, expansive park also offers the gift of images. Reminders of the pandemic are everywhere. The park is marked by people's protection and affection, care and pleasure. I've been making pictures with my mobile phone during my walks. The image presents the virus's impact on our lives, our impact on the park, and the persistence of the park's land as a vibrant life force. It's difficult to express the depth of my gratitude for the care that this land has offered me, the challenge of its inclines, the company of its coyotes, the lessons of its life cycles, the embrace of its folds. Across contemporary media, I've found that too little has been written or created from the perspective of artists and people infected with the novel coronavirus, even as our ranks continue to grow by the thousands every day worldwide. Most of us, we're just too tired trying to survive. These lingering images will walk against the silence to evoke the masses of people who are navigating the strangeness and immense uncertainty of COVID-19. This work is also an ongoing thank you to all those beings, both human and more than human, who nudge and nurture us toward health. This is neither an impatient race to embrace a post-pandemic state, nor a default into ableist notions of wellness. Rather, like my friend's guidance, I'm marveling at the capabilities of connection and care as we navigate the pandemics in swing chapters together. And it's now my honor to pass to Dr. Kimberly Bain. Thank you so much, Pato. And thank you, of course, also to SFPL, Anissa, Cheryl for organizing all of this, Dan, Daniel, and Anthony for being co-editors. And of course, Pato and all the other contributors to Last Gaspism who inspired me. I came onto the project sort of near the end actually as a sort of afterward writer. So I was going to write an afterward for the project. And so I had the very deep and rare pleasure of being able to sort of preview many of the artists' work and to sit with the words that everyone had shared and to sit with the beautiful visuals that everyone was passing on and circulating. And so when I say I was really grateful and it was inspired and had a sort of taste of sweetness of all the work that you had all done and the care you had all put in in my mouth as I was writing my own work, I really truly do mean that. So I'm going to be reading a really short piece from the aftermath, which is the name of my piece. It's a kind of quasi-afterword for the whole collection. I'm only going to be reading excerpts, so I encourage you to of course get the book and read the rest of it. And I'm just going to start right off. Here we go. One. You remember, don't you? Edward Crawford throwing the tear gas canister. You must. It was August, 2014 in the 80 degree heat of the late summer. The news of the stalking, threatening, choking and murder of Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson had just broken. It was the 13th and the Ferguson uprising had been ongoing since the ninth. Black rage was roiling through the streets and Black grief was bringing folks to their knees hands up. If you can't recall the moment, perhaps you nonetheless know the image. Crawford's arc of movement became one of the most iconic images of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, the moment and the movement. I know you remember it, you have to. Edward Crawford is wearing an American flag t-shirt and blue jeans, an open bag of chips in his hand. It's dark outside, but he's lit by the bright, searing light of the tear gas canister. The canister is on fire and trailing, sulfurious, choking smoke. But Crawford's locks fan out behind him, brushing across his face, his nose and his mouth as he throws a flaming canister away from protesters and back toward the militarized force occupying Ferguson. Don't un-remember it now. Two, despite what many of us imagine our present moment would be, we are still in the midst of a pandemic. I imagine that we will be here and now in the pandemic for some time to come. And this is less unfortunate happenstance than a calculated risk on the part of the corporate state governing apparatus. Rather than see an end to the pandemic itself, some have instead chosen to end the merely uncomfortable, while for others it is unimaginably painful, contortions of their lives. And the results, of course, are everywhere. Over, as part of the same six million dead worldwide, the tolls still rising two years after the initial outbreak. In this way, the posts in the post pandemic life becomes not a marker of the end, but a marker of an ongoingness and aftermath. Aftermaths are the debris of catastrophe, collapse and crisis. They are what remain unwelcome and unwanted. What strikes me again and again are the ways aftermaths are accumulated. They are both an aggregate of and amplified by time. The aftermath is as much foresight as it is testimony. Is it any wonder that we must actively unremember it? Four, understand I am compelled simply and irreversibly to attend to the long aftermath that even the pandemic and how we breathe through it is caught in. And the mandate begins here. Even in the face of a radically different everyday, even in the face of a globally disquieting crisis, anti-black violence continues without pause or hesitation. Five, a tale of two cities, the first Washington DC in the winter of 2021 and the other Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the summer of 2020. On January 6th, 2021, a horde of white supremacists rioted and staged an attempted coup. The mob, who were also Trump supporters, swarmed the US Capitol building, terrorizing members of the House and Senate Capitol building staff, DC residents and those of us who watched from afar. It was amid this chaos that Elizabeth from Knoxville, Tennessee emerged. In what would quickly become a viral video, Elizabeth from Knoxville was interviewed as she left the scene of the coup. In the video, she can be seen gasping and grimacing, face twisted into a rictus of anguish as she struggles to speak, dabbing at her eyes with a blue towel, poorly concealing the weeping onion half clutched in its folds. And as she tells it in the video, quote, I got maced. I made it like a foot inside the Capitol building and they maced me and they pushed me out. And to the interviewer's question, well, why did you wanna go in? Elizabeth from Knoxville yells, overwrought, we're storming the Capitol, it's a revolution. To live under white supremacy of course is to know that white women have a long history of performing distress as a means of controlling and enacting violence against marginalized and racialized folks. Elizabeth from Knoxville conjured the mirage of hurt and harm, painting her white femaleness in it. And then by identifying her home, Knoxville, Tennessee, she produced a mirage of a town filled with similarly injured crying and overwrought white women who must leave their homes for the sake of a white supremacist revolution. That is a kind of aftermath, isn't it? An in frontness, a behindness, a beforeness, an afterness. Then, of course, six months later, the Black Lives, oh, six months prior, in June 1st, 2020, Black Lives Matter protesters in Philadelphia, the third largest black population in the United States were trapped on I-676, the city's main highway. This move was an intentional one by law enforcement who proceeded to tear gas protesters repeatedly, even though, and especially because they were unable to escape. In the videos posted to Instagram and Twitter, protesters can be heard screaming, gasping out, I can't breathe, and yelling confusion as they struggle and fail to scale the steep slope to escape the cloud of chemicals effusing the air. This, of course, wasn't the most egregious use of tear gas against Black Lives Matter protesters, nor was it the only act of terror committed by law enforcement and the vigilantes working alongside them. But in a city that remembers the move bombing, a memory that still remains materially present in the buildings that have yet to be rebuilt and in the bodies that have been kept in the basements of the University of Pennsylvania and in Princeton University, it was no coincidence that for weeks after the gassing, the blackest parts of the city, places like West Philly, especially areas west of the UPenn real estate chokehold, were plagued by loud, reverberating explosions that woke folks up in the middle of the night, the scuts of fireworks constantly ringing in the night air, and the threat, the soon to be delivered promise of tear gas in the home. Nine, do you remember the protests in Philly? Your eyes burning, your throat closing. Do you remember the hands that pulled you over the fence, pulled you away from the cops advancing on folks trying to flee? Do you remember, later, gentle hands helping you wash your eyes out with water, fire running down the back of your throat? Do you remember the gas? Do you remember the hands? Do you? 13. The aftermath is the laundry of the everyday catastrophe. In it, we find traces and remnants of things that seem impossible to lose, and yet we do run, we do that anyway. But we also sometimes find new networks between people who care, in the spaces between, we hold on to what might have been forgotten. I have been trying to write it all down. This is my tool for dreaming a different aftermath, sifting through the remnants of the dreams we needed, wanted and couldn't manifest. And since writing the end feels impossible, I will write the aftermath of our next and our current pandemic. It was August 13th, 2014. Don't un-remember it again now. Thank you. So I think we actually now will pivot to a Q&A. So if anyone in the audience has any questions, you're welcome to throw it into the chat or the Q&A. Otherwise, I think my fellow panelists and I are just going to have a kind of a quick discussion about our projects and such, but I don't know if anyone wants to start it off. Well, it looks like we have a question actually from William Bain and Dan might be actually a really great person to answer this, but how do you go about putting a call out for contributors and then deciding who to select for final printing? Sure, I took a little stab at that in the chat there, which pretty simply addresses that. I mean, one of the things is the timeliness of this project was such that we really didn't have the time to do a kind of public call and then a kind of jurying or a committee selection kind of project. Also it had to do with having more of a curatorial approach where we each had an idea of some people that we knew, like whose work we kind of knew, or we'd already been in some sort of conversation with, but we wanted to have an opportunity to work with more closely. Cheryl, I mean, the two people that I invited in myself were Cheryl and Sandra de la Loutsa, a really interesting Los Angeles-based artist. And with both of these brilliant women, I'd been intrigued by their work, but never had a chance to work directly with them. So I think for most of us, it was kind of that way. But I think I like say like in the case of Kimberly, I'm not sure any of the three of us knew you prior to just being intrigued by what we knew of your work and hoping that we could somehow edge our project in and into your busy life and maybe get some of your attention. So it was that kind of a process. But let me drive the conversation forward and just say that out of Kimberly, out of your excerpt and in your aftermath text, they bringing in that term, long-duree, I think, is so helpful in, and I mean, it totally dovetails with what Pato talks about with the different temporalities of COVID, like slow motion and suspension on the one hand, but also what you're talking about long-duree, it's like, so many aspects of the pandemic as we've experienced it in the United States are really just a continuation of these crises that have been at a boiling point, held at a boiling point for quite a few years now. I mean, even if we're gonna talk about George Floyd as an incident that jump-started a movement that really came into big visibility in 2014 with Ferguson, let's just remember it was what? Like two years before that, I think, that was Trayvon Martin and that horrible incident. So, yes, that's what I'm saying here is yes to your kind of zooming out a little historically to remind all of us that for myself, like now thinking through like what it means to have an end to the pandemic, well, that question is very relevant to what was actually, what was the beginning? That's a fair question as well. Yeah. I mean, I think the sort of question about its beginnings and what you were saying about there being a sort of boiling point for a long time and pandemic simply in many ways following into line or marking those kinds of boiling points for us in a sort of great crisis kind of way. I think it's very true. When I was writing this piece, I was really inspired actually by Sheryl's work when I was thinking about the sort of historical or thinking about the ways that our struggle to breathe now in the pandemic, et cetera, is actually a sort of part of a longer genealogy, right? That we are sort of unmasking, we're unmasking, but working through in many ways and all of our work in the text, right? Thinking from Pato, thinking about long COVID, thinking about how do we enact modes of care, Sheryl's pandemic bookkeeping. So I guess I have a question for you all while we're sort of sitting here, but my question is, so what are the genealogies that you all sit with when you're doing your own work? And for me, as I said, like my genealogy is oftentimes black feminists, but it really was as I was writing and as I was thinking, the work of everyone who contributed to this piece is out of collection because I got to see the sort of previews and I got to sit with it and like really delve into them and think thoughts, critical thoughts and there were all these notes I took and everything. And so when I think of the sort of relations of thought of creative processes, et cetera, for this piece, I think of the contributors even though I haven't met most of them, right? So I guess my question to you all who are the folks who add to your creative energies, your critical energies? What are the genealogies you lean on? What are the sort of histories that you turn to that are maybe already have happened or may not have happened just yet? Do you know that you sort of, the histories that you were imagining will be histories in the future? So my question is really about that. Where are you all thinking? I mean, Sheryl, Pato, you guys can start. I'd be curious. Well, thank you all so much. This panel has been so great. And for me, there are two names I always call because they're really, the people that raised me as an artist. The first is Tim Tate, who is a co-director of the Washington Glass School. And that is the first place I learned my craft 20 plus years ago in Washington DC. He is an artist who was always interested in glass as a storytelling medium and as a sculptural medium. He's also an incredibly honest person having now lived HIV positive for over 30 years and made work about that. Was a co-founder of Triangle Artist Group, one of the early LGBTQ plus plus artist groups in Washington DC. And so I was immediately sort of nurtured with this sensibility about wanting to talk about issues. I wanted to talk about whether it was race or poverty by a person saying, great, come on. And then from that, he actually deepened his craft at a place called the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, which is the oldest craft education school in the U.S. And my first year in, he said, I think you got a future. We got to get you some more training. I need you to go to this place. And by the way, I need you to go this summer because there's a guy teaching named Thurman Stadium and he's the most famous black glass artist in the world. And you need to see somebody that looks like you right away so you know it's possible. So I was very fortunate to have these two men, very different voices in glass, also rooted in place to Washington DC. And so they definitely inform a lot of what I do. One of the people on the panel for Harriet Tubman when they looked at my design and I mentioned that I had studied with Thurman Stadium, they were like, oh thank goodness, because I looked at that design and I could see sort of the nod to stained glass, a nod to the house. And I was like, gosh, I wonder if she knows Thurman. And she's like, yes, that was my teacher. So those two people are definitely always top of mind for me and how I compose work. Yeah, I also feel like even in your intro, it wasn't a singular eye. You were already harkening to place and to the three generations of women before you. And that's not lost on me how consistently you've done that in the short time I've known you Cheryl this year. Always connecting and that sense of interconnectedness. And I really love your question, Kimberly. I can't help because we're being hosted so lovingly by SFPL. I feel the need to say proyecto con trasera por vida, which was the project against AIDS for life, 16th admission, early important queer organizing project among Latinx folks against HIV and towards a multi-gendered harm reduction possibility. And so much of what I learned there, particularly around harm reduction and mutual aid continues to guide me. Though of course these practices have to evolve. I always say COVID keeps evolving as we're finding out with this BA5 variant, we have to keep evolving too, not in a Darwinian sense, but in a sense of way we care and carry one another. I think I shouted out some of my lineages as diverse as sports, which taught me to belong to something much larger to myself and to put in time consistently whether I wanted to or not. And to follow instruction, but also learn how to improv. And there's all kinds of other stuff that is maybe less savory about sports culture, but I'm grateful for what it taught me about the body, even though I've had to unlearn so much of the ablest underpinnings in chronic illness. And that's been a complicated lineage, but also practice and Buddhism, which I think is moves throughout this publication and project more broadly without being prescriptive or presumptuous, I think. But it's certainly part of how I think about both practices of breath, which you harken to and understand the politics and histories of Kimberly and your work and also interconnectedness. So those are some, I think, indigenous frameworks and practices, longstanding of relations and reciprocity, which I allude to and also shout out in my piece. And I think I said it, but mutual aid. And so those are some of the more political ones. There are, I suppose, plenty of others, aesthetic and place-based, but I kind of want to toss this to Dan, particularly since you're an editor and you do weaving in your own practice and in the practice you enacted with this book. Like any thoughts on any other lineages or practices or folks beyond the ones you named at the top? Well, I mean, you know, it's, as for many of our artists who are, who do feel a kind of deep commitment and responsibility to the society that we live in, and yet at the same time have our own internally driven creative spirit and creative aspirations and visions of what we want to see in the world that may not really be shared by anybody else. I'm constantly oscillating between much more political thinking, even topical thinking, on the one hand, and then on the other, more abstract, more philosophical, more personal ways of thinking. That are, can be, are difficult to contain in the world, in the world, inside the worldliness of politics. So I mean, from there, if you're talking about, if you're talking about names, I could say, you know, in the world of art, you know, for many years I was primarily a letterpress printer and there's a whole world there of craft knowledge, of old trade knowledge that is dying out a little bit, but also being revived by new generations. So there's a whole sort of community of educating each other and sharing what one does. And then on the other side, as an organizer and as a citizen, you know, I've had a long history, like yourself, Pato, and like others here, of being an activist and involved in campaigns and in much more concrete kinds of efforts. To that I'll say, let's give a nod to the latest in all of these stacked crises, which I would say is the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And to that end, I'm gonna give a little shout out to my mother, who was mostly a Republican voter and a landlord, which are, you know, neither of those appealed to me politically in any way, but she was a landlord in the 1980s in central Michigan to two abortion clings. And because it was a private property, you know, she managed to keep the onsite protesters at bay, but then she got all of the harassment. So we know something in my family about how personal it gets and what it takes to stand up to that kind of pressure. And for my mother, it was because she was an immigrant and she was a child of war and she knew something about suffering and what a real upheaval in a society results in with children and families. And that was part of her practicality when it came to politics of reproductive freedom. So I'll give a shout out to my mom in this moment. That's awesome, Dan. Thank you for sharing that with us, you know. And I think in so many ways, you hit on something that was so sorely lacking through watching January 6th and how, you know, I wanna go back to the Tea Party and how the Republican Party has dissolved into the level of chaos, if I may, that it has, you know, because your story illustrates how a person could certainly have certain ideologies on the one hand, but then embrace some other things about freedom and those two things together are what used to bring us more to a middle ground than anything that we're seeing in the current polarization along the political spectrum. So I just really appreciate you honoring and highlighting your mom and sharing that story with all of us. I know we are a little past time and our kind host, Anissa in San Francisco Public Library would love to go home. I saw that William had a question for all of us and it was a question we had actually talked about. So maybe we can close there and just if people wanna say their relationship or not to Buddhism or Buddhist practices by way of closing out tonight. You wanna start? I can kick it off. I don't practice Buddhism. I don't know that I have very much of a relation, but there are two things I wanna say quickly. One, there's a wonderful, wonderful interview that is in Last Gaspism. If you go ahead and go get it, that is thinking about Buddhism and also thinking about its relation and it as a practice of helping to center us or helping us to think through the questions of racial justice, et cetera, that I think is definitely worthwhile reading. But the second thing I wanted to say is one practice that I do have is a practice of altering. And so it's the practice in which I put together spaces in which I very deeply try to connect to on a sort of spiritual, emotional, mental, critical, creative level questions around those who have passed on, those who may still be among us. And that's my sort of own practice in many ways. So altering is what I will say I do. Yeah. Thank you. Hattu or Dan, you wanna jump in? Sure, I can take it briefly. I mean, I definitely have a relationship. I mean, in some ways, I mean, in my bio that was read by Anissa in the beginning, I made it a point to mention that my undergraduate degree is in religion. That's partly to say that I feel like I've been kind of like a dabbler in Buddhism. But if that dabbling is lifelong, then it becomes something else. So my sitting practice is fairly recent. It really dates to around the time that Cheryl and I met maybe about four or five years ago. But my intellectual engagement has been much longer than that. And my undergraduate thesis was had to do with Buddhism. So that's kind of the arc of my engagement. I'm well aware saying this in the context of a San Francisco identified platform is something else altogether with since so much of North American Buddhist practice has such a deep place based history there. So with that, I happily defer to Pato and especially to Cheryl. Yeah, I mean, I guess I feel incredibly grateful for the teachings and practices that I'm so grateful that I was introduced to them a few decades before COVID arrived and could hold something like attending to the breath, thinking about impermanence and suffering minding my own ego, especially at the level of the body, being willing to meditate on the idea of continuance or the rotting of the flesh or that we are not only our body or a singular eye and what I cling to, what are these, do I cling to an ableist body? Do I cling to be able to breathe or to my gallbladder? What does it mean to surrender or to at least try to live in non-attachment when if not mortality, then certainly, viability are in question. And so those practices have been really, really valuable now and as ever, and we don't practice so that we can survive crisis, right? There's, and I was grateful that I didn't have to try to come to it in the challenges of COVID, but that it's lessons and how much I still have to learn through practice with others. I've really been laid bare and affirmed over and over and over. So I feel a lot of gratitude and I've only written a little bit so far, but I've been trying to make sense of Tana Khan's continuance this year and what that means for so many of us, particularly, I think folks of color, refugees of war, migrants, the neighbors who belong to multiple places that can't be held by a thing called a nation state. And there's so many other ways that's a whole other project. I'll say this as I talk to you, Cheryl. I want to publicly thank Dan for his essay. You didn't even talk about it, but I think that essay that's in the book about American Buddhism and the complications of American Buddhism, America in communities of color living in this country is, as I say, I've been waiting for for 15 years and yearning for and it's a huge contribution and you're very modest, but I just want to shout it out and say thank you for that. I think it gives us something as the Kimberleys of the future ask us what are our lineages that can help us just understand the way these tributaries feed rivers, feed lakes and seas, but what about you, Cheryl? So I guess the short answer for me is I'm old straight edge Dharma punk. I was introduced to a Dharma punk's group in Washington DC through my yoga teacher at the time who actually was a punk and used to run a club called The Black Cat at one point as a manager in DC before like many of us, he adopted a kindler and gentler way of life which involved teaching yoga. And when I came to the Bay Area, I got connected to meditation communities here, both the local sort of San Francisco Dharma punk's community and East Bay Meditation Center. And my teacher at East Bay Meditation Center was actually Zen or Mahayana. And so for the most part though, I for the past 12 years have been learning more and more about what would be Theravadan schools of Buddhism or insight meditation or Rupasana, if any of those words mean anything to anybody, but just a way to sort of still the mind and find the breath. And as Dan mentioned, I always say those people you meet in the desert because we met in a carpool, going to a meditation retreat in Joshua Tree about might be five or six years ago now. So if you haven't been to a meditation retreat before, I would say go on a nice quiet meditation retreat and you never know who you might meet in the carpool and where life will take you. That's a beautiful way to end it, honestly. So good, Cheryl. I love that story. That's really nice, I love that. I wanna thank all of our panelists and we actually do have a meditation. It's called the fourth Friday home online meditation. It's hosted by the SF Zen Center. And, you know, we don't get a full huge turnout but the folks have just been like, this is a lifeline. And it's very basic and it's very beginner. So if anyone out there wants to try some breathing, fourth Friday of every month, join us. Thank you, Kimberly, Cheryl, Dan, Pato. We really appreciate you spending your Monday evening with us and sharing all of your work that you do with the library community, as always. And library community, get your book. And Anisa, somebody from the library community is asking for a link for fourth Friday? Oh, sure, sure, sure. I can find that, really. Sorry. Sorry. Thank you, Anisa. Thank you very much to you and SFPL for hosting us. Thank you very much. I'm gonna put it in the, whoever's asking, I'm gonna put it in the document and you can find it. There's the links to tonight's document with everybody's links as well as the YouTube recording of this and links to the book. We have several copies. Four of them are available, four of them are checked out. And you can buy the book from our local City Lights and I will find the link and add it to there. Join us, fourth Friday at home. All right. Thank you, everyone.