 Well, we'd like to invite our special guest, the panel to come up, I think, is going to introduce that in a few years. First, we have Cheryl McAkins, who is a managing curator of exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, where she has coordinated numerous special exhibitions since 2009. Of special note, she organized GO, a community curator of an studio project in 2012 with Chevron Burn State, and currently has organized two important exhibitions that have opened this month at the museum, including the Brooklyn presentation of Highwayway according to Wax, and, of course, Cheryl organized Swoon to Merge Model X. Keith Schweitzer is the co-founder, director of many projects, murals around New York, and the co-founder and director of the Lodge Gallery in Manhattan. He's also the director of Open Art for Fourth Art Law, the nonprofit leadership organization from Manhattan's officially-designated cultural district in the East Village. Keith was also a founding member of No Longer Empty, serving as director of exhibitions and curator from 2009 to 2011. Katharine Lorimer, a UNAPART, is a Brooklyn-based materialistic art enthusiast, photographer, curator, and live writer. As co-founder and regular contributor to the Street Spot Lodge, she is a passionate about urban art and her photographs have appeared in leading street art books and magazines, and have been in New York, exhibited in New York, LA, and Chicago. An occasional lecturer, she has recently presented her observations on street art at the New York Public Library and the Long Island University. Soon, Caledonia Currie, a street artist living in Brooklyn for the last 17 years, is coming to study at the Grand East Village. Since 1999, her point-pasting of linoleum and woodcuts in the industrial sections of Brooklyn Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx have made her work her favorite and inspiration to fans and to other street artists. Her art is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate Modern among others. And, of course, she is currently at the Brooklyn Museum with Suley, so merrily she might have met. Yeah! Please welcome our panelist. So, Kelly, first, last year we saw this piece on the street, and it's a bit of a departure from your typical style, and that you're combining your figures with children's drawings, and wondering if you can tell us a little bit about who you are, and what you've worked with, and a bit of the story behind it. Yeah, okay. Do I have this on right here? You have one of these funny menonin-like little linoleums on the case. We'll do that later. Okay, so, yeah, this piece is an interesting one for me because I actually translated directly the drawings of some kids that I've worked with. They're my discovering the total genius of child artists in a way that I've never really seen before. You can kind of feel like the weight of the weight, and the expression is really kind of perfect when you start kind of translating the drawings. And what's going on with this piece is I was lucky enough to work with a group about two years ago called The Equality Effect, and they are a group of lawyers, actually, who work on sort of human rights issues around the world, specifically around the rights of women and children, and they were, at the time, teaming up with this woman in Kenya, the famous mercy city, and she is like... I've never met a person like this. Literally, she's a warrior queen. She's like over six feet tall, and she is a person who started this organization to protect women and girls in Kenya, and she started a safe house because there's actually a rape event going on, kind of a social situation happening in Kenya that she decided to try to tackle her multiple friends, and so she's a person who's like one minute dealing with international politics, and the next minute she's standing in front of this giant bell gate going, if the police come to take one of my girls, they're going to take her over my dead body, and she needs it, you know? Yeah, and really incredible person. So I was really, and admired the work that they did, and a friend of mine, Mike Snell, who's done a lot of sort of interesting projects over the years at a gallery, sort of we, like, together dreamed up this idea of going there to actually work at their safe house to create a workshop with the girls that would be kind of a therapeutic experience and then also to create a piece from that that they would be able to use for their work. So at the time that we went there, they were just actually in a major lawsuit against, they were suing the Kenyan police to uphold the constitution of Kenya. They were trying to get them just to enforce the laws that were already in the books. Exactly, because Kenya actually has one of the most developed constitutions, like, around rape laws. They just don't enforce them. In fact, like, girls and women were going to the police to report their rape cases and actually, like, sometimes being raped by the police as a mode of, like, enforced silencing. And so, you know, she was like, I started a safe house, I started this clinic, I started this hospital, but I'm tired of mopping the floor while the faucet is still running. It wasn't crazy, she was like, I want to take this right to the stores. And so she started working with the government and I just sort of created this piece as a way to contribute to there. You also worked there. Yeah. You worked with a number of the kids to create art projects. Exactly. Seeing the photographs of that. Yeah. So we spent about a week in the compound with the girls and we did the school, like, these drawings and we sort of talked about the things about home and safety and strength and all different kinds of words and lots of associations and then we created a performance and they performed it for the families. And I photographed all the notebooks before I went home and then these drawings were the ones that came out of my books. All right. And did they then see the final work? Yeah. What was there? I mean, they were excited and they really wanted us to come back. Sadly, I haven't been back yet. But yeah. And actually, one of the girls was a girl, usually the girls were there for a short period of time, but one of the girls that I took a lot of the drawings from ended up being adopted by one of the main lawyers and she lives in Canada now. So I was able to see her about six months ago. Oh, it was so nice. Yeah, it was really great. So nice. It was quite sentimental and she remembered me from Kenya and it just was really memorable. It's great that you made that connection. Yeah. So anyone interested, look up The Equality Effect. They're totally sentimental. And Luna, you've been documenting graffiti and street art for more than a decade? Yeah. Almost 10 years at this point. Can you talk a little bit about your experience finding one of the early swimming pieces on the street? Yeah, sure. I can actually remember the very first piece of Callie's that I saw for the very simple reason that it was my introduction to street art. It was about 2005. Not this piece. Not another one. I don't actually have a good photo of the first piece because the camera I had on at the time was like the first point of shoot I bought that was so low-rated that I think I'm really at that point where you're thinking about it. Yeah, at that point I had no idea that I might, 10 years later, be interested in having a better copy of the picture. So I was walking down the way that I knew sort of knew where the White Hotel is today in Winsburg and all of a sudden this female face popped out of me from the door and because I hadn't really given street art or completing any job until this point I really had no way of putting this into any kind of context. So it literally stopped me in my tracks and I was looking at this face and it was a girl wearing a stripy shirt and I think it was printed on some kind of Asian newspaper on it was already sort of half decayed and it really marks sort of a paradox for me and it was like the wool had been pulled from in front of my eyes and I started seeing street art in the TV everywhere just looking down the street while there's something there just a stencil across the street and for a place a place that you had that you were walking around every day. Yeah, I mean once you're sensitized I mean those of us who pay attention to tags and stickers and weed pastes are really you know know that once you've become sensitized you can't really understand it anymore. No, it's like once that male has been here to street art is everywhere and everything is possible street art. Just because you've seen it on the street it might be a solution. So I was actually really pleased to be invited to participate this evening in a way I feel I've come full circle and to be able to sit here with the woman who inspires me to take this journey is a great opportunity. So this actually the other last piece the mermaid piece I shot I think about a year after that in 2006 and I remember being on my way to work and being late and on the bus a flash of something white and I popped off the bus even though it wasn't my stop and ran down and ran down the street and was confronted with this beautiful mermaid piece which is one of my favorite street art pieces to this day not only because of the content of the piece but because of the memory of the joy and excitement of the discovery this was really at the beginning but looking for a street art and these early pieces really inspired me in a way that led me to where we are today. Can you talk about this piece? This is a wall on Worthington Street on the Lower East Side that Callie had maintained for a couple of years in 2003 to 2007 I think and had painted a couple of times as someone who was just getting into the scene at this point this was a really great place to kind of watch her craft evolve from early stencil pieces to increasingly elaborate line-up cuts and portraits of friends and then sort of finding the introduction of Callie to the server work and I've really come to realize that in all the years I've been doing this it's a scene that sees a lot of fluctuations but it's been a remarkable investment in all these years. Now Keith, you've been very tied to the Lower East Side community in organizing murals creating opportunities really creating opportunities for street artists and I know you did some work with a very few female street artists in cake on project and I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about how the community responded to this work and just tell us a little bit more about it. This is a this organization is called Truth and Fies Together and it's three portraits two of which are portraits of her host friends and one is self portrait and it's part of a public art program that I direct in the cultural district through its non-profit leadership organization and we program areas New York House and Long Valley East Earth Street, Central Street, East Earth Street so on. This is on East Earth Street and this block in particular in the neighborhood is somewhat neglected in a sense meaning it's stimulated at night right directly across from this wall is a men's homeless shelter and a men's health services center and this particular location was used to be a school house that had a fire along the car and it was shuttered, it's now the mom theater. So it really was a beautiful triple art way and when I invited Kate to participate in the program we immediately responded with a few of these even to the keg over time I haven't something to paraphrase and we talked about things like stained glass or things that actually belong in this thing that hadn't been seen or really looked like it's been hiding inside this entire town. So she went back to the studio and she created and observed all of that and made these in-studio on paper over the course of a month and a half and then we came back out and we retasted them onto the wall and I expected that this would take a lot of maintenance that there would be a lot of people trying to add to this mural and call it a parade. Yeah, it's like by a durian's log graffiti snack graffiti block but it was pristine, no one no one I was there was like a one point line not the other one point line but it wasn't still the third one I know there's one little yellow graffiti tag and I went to the office and I got a little pink bucket and a roller and I started to come back down and these two guys stopped and they asked me what I was doing this is getting to the effect of what this mural had in the community they said, I think in the next slide if there was one they'll see the two guys and stop me so I'm walking with this pink bucket to paint over the yellow tag and they said what are you doing and I told them what I was going to do and they said we've been protecting this is how you're working and they took it for me and they took care of it themselves and at that moment I realized that this artwork had become part of the copyright of that block and had become part of the community on that block and they appreciated it and that is one of the most powerful things to do with this type of art you know how it goes on the street is the connection all right, I think it becomes part of this course on the street there's a great sense of ownership over the piece that they're ready to push you as I say no we got this what are you doing and I love the way that when I walk through the street they see it again and again and I've seen it become attractive and become like I have a personal relationship with the piece and I'm a little sad one and so on and one of the things that you're talking about is this idea of family and autobiography and the way that that comes in and it creates a connection to people who are encountering work and I think Kelly that's one of the things with your installation upstairs submerged motherlands one of the works that you incorporated into that is this relatively new work that you created that is a portrait of your mother in various stages of your life and I think that's kind of the things we see it here I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about that and about including that in this installation as well yeah so I this installation is something I've been thinking about for over a year for quite a while when we've been planning it and I've been thinking a lot about kind of climate change and the flooding of our homes of motherland in that way and then during that time my mom became sick with cancer and died and I went through the process of mourning with her and started to think about this installation this kind of a multi-layered installation of thinking about some of the loss of your own mother and that sort of initial motherland as well and you know my own mother she was this totally kind of sweetest most heroic wonderful person who struggled terribly with drug addiction for her entire life she was addicted to heroin when I was born and she remained addicted to all different substances just throughout her life and that was something that I had really been as it was quick form and in my life in the last couple years I had been working really hard to find the process of forgiveness with her and then when she was diagnosed with cancer I really kind of realized that all the work that I had been doing to try to put her addiction in the perspective was kind of all coming to this place and I gave a talk about it on if he's done good it's called and I also wrote a piece for CNN so if anybody wants to like learn more about this process or if he's for the doctor that I talked about you can look there but there's this doctor named Fabo Lante and he really introduced to me the concept that people were struggling with addictions of that magnitude where you really lose control of your own life that that is not something that comes out of a heathenism but that's something that comes out of a deep deep pain that you wouldn't ever choose that and you wouldn't you know it's not this woman was like I love shooting smack more than I love taking care of my baby and you just don't you just don't choose that and I think that I spent a lot of my life being like fuck you why can't you get your shit together you know and then in the last sort of years of our our life together I came to kind of really shift perspective and to actually be able to have conversations with her about that and to really kind of make a deep connection and a deep forgiveness with her before she died and so if you see the this this culture right here kind of what's going on in there is that the top portrait is a friend of mine who's just this most incredible mother and I think they in a way I was kind of trying to give another to my own mother to sort of mother all of us you know she's just very right she's like this many universal mother here she was at the opening I did not miss her baby and she was crying I really wanted to make a gigantic portrait of her and then there's also you kind of see some sort of demon figures and those are kind of all of the drawings that I made of my mother in the life process including the demonic figures and the drawing with my friend were all pieces you know sometimes I kind of work on a different schedule also okay I'll make that next week I'll make that next month but when my mother came out I just immediately had to shift into making that work while I was caring for her and trying to process that experience and so that was something that you know originally this show was just going to be the tree of the boats and then this thing happened to me and so the narrative of it really shifted and deepened into containing the sort of personal history of my mom and her life and of our whole process together and I'm trying to really understand her and understand understand I think it's remarkable that you bring these personal stories and share them with others and I also think it's interesting when I see something on the street that I don't understand and then some leaders find out what the back story is about we've been lucky to have that experience a number of times and your work can be so powerful particularly when I find out that the story is about sometimes I think of the story myself and it's just it's just being and I think one of the things that in the work that you've shown tonight by a number of artists I think you get that sense that these are not anonymous that they mean something to the person who's created them and I think that that's one of the things Luna and you worked with the artist C215 and went around documenting and shooting the work and then that work comes up very personal to come practice as well and very much about that family connection comes with this project it's a passion really and I think all of these works are true so I first became aware of the work of the French artist C215 in 2007 I think a friend of his comes to New York and kids did a lot of work with this on paper, on the wall and I found a photograph uploaded to Flickr and I guess at this point I should mention Flickr in the early 2000s was a real important resource and kind of hub for not just the street art community but it was where I really had my first education in the street art it was where I really was able to make personal connections with a lot of artists and so having uploaded this piece C215 came out of the woodwork and identified himself and through that started a conversation which sort of corresponded and then we actually met a person the first time a year later in 2008 where he literally showed up on my north step he had come to New York and I guess the place where he was supposed to stay fell through was he doing that show at Anaheim? no no no this was before that this was his first his first trip before he was really well known and he didn't really know anybody else he sent in an email can I crash to your place yeah yeah I was living with my brother at the time so I let him go you know what I'm going to like gamble and take a risk and put this slightly disheveled paint cover fresh in Anaheim fortunately he really hit it off and he ended up spending the rest of the week with us and in Chris I found a highly intelligent tropical very motivated and passionate artist and the one thing that was really clear from the beginning was that he was madly in love with his then 5 year old daughter Nina and at the time he was separated from her mother and the situation clearly troubled him very much and I think he was afraid that she would interpret his absence in her life to mean that he didn't want to care for her and so he started cutting and painting her portraits and in the beginning just putting them up in the town where she lived leaving them in places where she might find them on the way to school be surprised and I think as a home situation more unacceptable he decided to travel so this was about the time I met him and he was on the beginning of what would be sort of a whirlwind multi-year, multi-city campaign to paint as many cities as possible and even though he arrived with a stencil portfolio that was literally an interesting way to continue to produce new pieces literally around the clock and my kitchen floor was littered with bits of paper and he put up an enormous number of illegal stencil pieces in Brooklyn but the one thing was always Nina Nina and Nina was captured in all her many goods in that last piece she was looking for, she's looking for Lauren it's next to a mail slot on the door so I always think she's waiting for a letter that I think but this other picture was a more recent portrait of her now a sort of young preteen and I'm happy to say that the home situation is improved and she now lives with them part of the year and I asked him and I'm thinking probably hundreds I feel like I've seen at least a few of his daughters and it's really wonderful because you can really see how this process of obsessively portraying his daughter and other people how his craft has really developed and you can see in that last piece where he's in a much more colorful place and that's work we have to move a little quickly can you tell us briefly about some of the images that he's done and who's laid out the street yeah I mean one of his great passions was his daughter he's also very much interested in social justice and so he's gone out of his way to a portrait of a homeless and really to kind of draw attention to the people that might otherwise be overlooked and this was a homeless person on the streets of Dublin now Keith one question before we turn it over to a couple of our audience questions a couple of years ago you were able to secure a wall for the Israeli artists no hope and here when we see that you're in part a story about a local resident I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about that yeah this piece actually is another part of the Black Folk Art Program it's on the second street of Los Angeles where we saw Kate's hero and no hopes it's deceivingly simple and that's the power of no hopes and work it's very poetic and minimalized we're first seeing this big swamp blue and then we're seeing this little cartoon character on the right-hand side on this hungry flag and the cartoon character is recurring in the central character and it's not made in linear narrative that no hope has been putting out there throughout the years and I think that you all know this is hard it's not where it should be it's on this sleeve and this character is literally wearing this sleeve it's being threatened by this this oncoming wave of blues of this blue field and it's important to realize if you can see the flag there's a flag on the left-hand side and you know, we're conversations with no hope while it was here before we did this composition I mean the flag is a very powerful it can represent criticism or a heritage but you know, we've all been talking about this we're all feeling this process of wave of development and justification and increased cost of living and feeling like where we live is no longer our home and a flag is where an advancing force will lay claim to a land that they now have conquered and it becomes theirs so it's a powerful metaphor in this image but he did it also with a second fold where he made it a surrender flag so now you have no more character bearing the full brunt of this enormous wave of development and justification and I'm totally not entirely teasing him on the far end is this flag that you know, we all know of white flag he tries to reach for it in any way this thing's just going to collapse and he'll get his character and and no host characters are typically put in these situations where they're responding to these human conditions that we can all relate to that together they can address more complex issues but through the use of an illustrated character it disarms us in a way that we can explore and talk about it but the blue field that you see there we knew that it would invite that type of contribution and participation and there was collaboration we wanted it we knew it was going to happen it's on the second street just east of Valerie and we knew that it would happen and that conversation with Delbo was that it would become part of the case does it support or does it become part of erasing the blue part and it becomes more of a community bulletin board in a sense or does it become more of a burden in a way that has to be carried it's going to get a legal advertising what's going to happen to this blue field but I never imagined that because I think they based everything on the flag and he had never been to New York and he sent me an email saying hey, I'm in New York it's a big inspiration to me and I'd like to collaborate with Delbo's piece my character so I think there's a slide of what happened so you'll sort of see some of that the other background and the walls and in one afternoon he created a character you can see how he is inspired by Delbo he's a great artist in his own way but his character is helping Flem is visiting from UK and here their characters are meeting for the first time in New York as they've never met and Flem's character is pulling and helping assist Delbo's character defeat this awning convoy but it looks like they're dating and they're dating so we have time for a couple a few questions to give me my cue but maybe maybe we'll start here with this question that I think any number of you didn't want to answer with the increasing gentrification of Brooklyn what impact do you think this will have on Sridhar and his girls? what's happening in the city is the city is becoming increasingly sanitized it is more difficult for street artists to go to the street art that is illegal but somehow they managed to do it so I have the utmost hope that they could still find time to go to the streets themselves because we see them I mean there's a lot of murals that are omissioned but at the same time we see a lot of the illegal street art is a place where every there are people and yeah there's an increase in gentrification and development running down neglected industrial sectors and that's usually the first place street art in the neighborhood is kind of an indicator I don't want to call it the health of the neighborhood but it's willingness to tolerate unauthorized additions and the more things get white washed the more giant, anonymous glass boxes get put up the more street art disappears so it's kind of a fine line of watching as neighborhoods get developed made over that in many cases street art and public art are part of that and that being said is almost empty of street art well that relates to another question is can street art itself be gentrified a gentrifying factor or is that the absence of as you were saying I think if it's true street art it probably isn't used as a tool but often despite itself it is a gentrifying force in the neighborhood because it draws the attention of people to look at the work of the creative class and its attractive and certainly there are a lot of muddy, blurry lines these days between developers and street artists and illegal work that's a continuum I mean I think muralism definitely and by that I mean the sanction of street art it's definitely been used by developers to add cachet to neighborhoods and build value to build a great relationship and here is a question for you a question about are you nervous when you put up your art on the streets that experience of having those moments tell us a little bit about that yeah I've been doing it for so long and I still get nervous every time I don't know I've had mostly good experiences because I think of the way that I do it because the pieces are so permanent because if it becomes an issue it's so easy to take down because of the nature of the portraits because there's such a for me there's always been a kind of a desire of generosity in the images and for kind of a connectedness and empathy within itself and so I somehow kind of always managed to have like mostly pretty good experiences around putting up work but I still always feel a sense of nervousness and I don't know if that's a little question but I think each city is really different and you can tell a lot about each place okay I think we have maybe one last question that seems particularly fitting as we're all in a museum having this conversation and what kind of advice you would give to chariots maybe to artists who are working with street artists for exhibitions and within a museum context and how can create an authentic experience and for chariots to be a good person I said that's what you want to use I'm curious from another perspective I think it's interesting talking about it here but what do you think the important things are that you would pull back to I think part of the power of what I think when you put art out in the street is in context of where it's placed so I think smooth activity here is very active because it's a huge installation and you come around and immerse in this environment so I know when he exhibits inside of a gallery complex he is exhibiting and creating these installations I like the museum work I like to see curators working with street artists to create situations that they maybe don't have the budget to do and the time to do it illegally on the street I think it's a real challenge to keep the original sense of transgressiveness and energy and badassness that you feel when you see stuff on the street once it crosses any institute whether it's a gallery or a museum it loses that energy and anything that you can do to try to preserve it to communicate that same feeling of excitement is a worthwhile endeavor obviously you're going to lose some of it but I agree in particular everyone needs to go to the works of words motherless it is site specific in this huge environment it has room to grow and to express and it does retain a lot of the rawness of the work in this industry I hope that we were able to do that can I tell them the story about the fire especially the fire extinguisher so you have to understand when you're in the installation and you see the beautifully beautifully covered walls of the central space and the great washes of color that Kelly went to town the fire extinguisher in that space in a way that when we started talking to people in the museum like she's going to do one she's going to do what I'm like yeah yeah yeah yeah it'll be fine it'll be fine plastic down it'll all be fine and then as people are coming in there are puddles of water all over the floor they're coming in a little bit into the museum offices but yeah you maintain that so pushing the boundary is such Kelly actually said that the game burned a lot of leeway she pushed the team thought it would go sometimes there's a story that I'm going to tell now I'm telling you later yeah I'm waiting to tell you stories with that thank you all for being here thank you all of you