 On the exhibition upstairs, which I hope everyone has had an opportunity to see, and if you haven't, it's open until the first week in January, so come back, please. So Esperanza was invited to curate a show as part of our select series in which prominent designers, writers, and cultural figures explore and respond to Cooper Hewitt's collection, which comprises over 200,000 objects. So it's a lot to go through. Esperanza's Spalding Selects is on view through, as I said, January 7th, 2018, and is made possible by the Marx Family Foundation Endowment Fund. An in-kind support for the site-specific installation is provided by ZGF Architects, and the piano was provided by Steinway. So Esperanza, Spalding, is a genre-bending composer, bassist, and vocalist, and educator. Her music synthesizes elements from jazz, funk, rock, soul, fusion, R&B, and Brazilian musical traditions, and I think other traditions as well. She is a winner of four Grammy Awards, has five solo albums, and will soon be coming out with the new one, Exposure, which was created in 77 hours with every second of the process broadcast live for a global audience. And I'm sure this will be the big topic of conversation tonight between Esperanza and Katelyn. Esperanza is a passionate educator, having taught at Berkeley College of Music in Boston and recently joined the faculty of the Department of Music at Harvard University as professor of practice. Her awards include a double ACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Artist, Boston Music Award for Jazz Artist of the Year, Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for the Performing Arts, Soul Train Music Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Artist Group, Frida Callow Award for Innovation Creativity, and ASCAP Foundation Jazz Vanguard Award. Besides the exhibition, Esperanza also curated the lineup of musicians at our first night of cocktails of the Cooper Hewitt earlier this summer and even performed that night. So anyone who attended was in for a big surprise. But I know she's also performed at other places like the White House and the Oscars and the Nobel Prize Ceremony, as well as with Prince and Herbie Hancock. But you know, Cooper Hewitt ranks up right up there with architect Frank Gehry, too. So please join me in welcoming Esperanza and Katelyn. Can everyone hear me? Yeah? Excellent. Thank you all for joining us tonight and thank you for the people who are joining us via our live stream as well. This is the first time that Esperanza and I have seen each other since the exhibition opened in June. Wow, is that true? Yeah, it is true. But we talked on the phone a few times. And when we talked last week on the phone, I asked Esperanza what she'd want to talk about tonight. And I assumed all the many things that she'd done in the summer since we had last spoken. But she said actually she'd like to spend some time talking about what we had done in making the exhibition. So we're going to spend a lot of time tonight being able to actually sort of revisit the process behind putting the exhibition together, which I hope most of you had a chance to see before coming down here for the talk. And if not, it is open until January 7th. So please return. So with that Esperanza, we last first talked to set up the exhibition planning in August of 2016. So tell me. I can't believe that's true. It feels like we lived about 10 years in the process of making this exhibition happen. Yeah. I'm 10 years older. I'm probably 15 years older. For sure. Yeah, that's true. I remember I was in, well, the first time I had a conversation with anyone from the museum, I think I might have been with Matilda. It was with, sorry. Anyways, and I was in July, and I was in Norway recovering from the Emily's D-plus Evolution tour. And that's when it all, this whole mess began. And then we cleaned it up, and now it's an exhibition. So tell us a little bit about Emily's D-plus Evolution, because some of the people in the audience I'm sure have listened to this album and know a lot about the project and other people may not know anything about it. Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out about the project myself. I tend to throw darts out in the dark and then keep track of the process of getting them, getting to them. And that adventure of catching up with what I imagined could happen usually ends up being a project. So Emily's D-plus Evolution was definitely like that. I had this idea about deconstructing your persona or your personality or even identity, breaking it down to its bare minimum or core elements and reconstructing them, reconstructing them from scratch, sort of free from whatever informing elements of your life led to the iteration you're most familiar with. So Emily's my middle name. So I took away the most familiar aspects of my name as Paranza and Spaulding and just dealt with that fragment in the middle. So that was partly a D-plus Evolution of deconstructing the whole, taking out a middle that hadn't been explored yet and then reconstructing it. And that process, I imagined, is a form of evolution. So deconstruction, breaking down, undoing, untieing is actually a process of growth and development or evolution. I'm using the terms free from their biological implications or applications because I can do that because I'm a poet. So you can't say boo. So you had made this album and you were in the midst of this tour. And I remember the first time you and I spoke, you told me the tour was a little different from others that you'd done that it was a different type of performance. Oh, yeah. I think the word people use is interdisciplinary. But really, we just were moving. We were just moving and using all the elements that you would be exposed to anyway in a concert, lighting and staging and blocking and placement and set. Even if you don't intentionally design those, the audience sees them. So we were just, I was just, we were just actually being intentional with how each of those elements contributed to the narrative of the album, I guess you could say. And that stage performance changed constantly. It was a constant state of flux. So we really lived out the philosophy of D plus evolution throughout the whole life of that project because it was always getting broken down in a set from early that year would be brought back and have a completely new function and mean something totally different. It was an adventure in D plus evolution, to be sure. So in the midst of that process, you get invited to come to Cooper Hewitt and to curate an exhibition, which you'd never done before. True. Why were you interested in actually creating an exhibition? I don't remember what I was thinking then. And sometimes I go, why did I say yes again? No. Well, I was all about this idea of D plus evolution. Bless you. And she even, are you British? She took the tea bag out. That's a real tea kind of sore right there. Well, I really believed in this idea of D plus evolution. And I thought, OK, I've sort of exhausted what I'm going to do. I've exhausted the idea on the stage. I'm tired of doing this project in this way. But I think there's more to explore in the idea of D plus evolution. So I just thought, hell, we're going to have to talk about something. Let's not be that cliche jazz musicians like jazz and art or jazz and I just wanted to step a little bit away from the words that tend to follow me around. So I said, let's ask whoever it was now that I was talking would you be OK if we did the D plus evolution theme? And nobody knew what the hell that meant. Neither did I, because I had never tried to apply it to design. But really, that's why I said yes. Just to see what would happen. You're so kind. You're also generous. Well, we felt really lucky that you said yes. This is a photo I took of Esperanza and the handbook making design, which was designed by Irma Boom when Cooper Hewitt reopened a few years ago. And I've never seen anyone do this before. Esperanza tore tiny little strips of paper as bookmarks for every object that she found interesting in the handbook and showed up. It was like someone did the most miraculous version of homework you could possibly imagine and came into the building. So you had never been to Cooper Hewitt before, correct? So your first impression was through looking at this book. And you came in, and you met with all of the curators here. And you started looking through the collection. And I think if I remember correctly, you came three times. And you looked at objects. And all of the curators said, what is D plus evolution? And you sort of tried to tell us. And we said, OK, we know exactly what it is. We're going to pull out all of these objects. And we know exactly what's happening. And you looked at half of the objects, and you were like, no. Well, we were all discovering what D plus evolution might mean. I would say it might mean to the process of design. So yes, we're looking for the narrative of D plus evolution expressed through objects. But really, the history of the object, which describes the process of it coming into existence, is where the nugget of D plus evolution lives. So even the first time that I came here to speak with, wow, I'm so bad with names. I don't remember who. Damn. But she's such a lovely woman. Damn it. Are you sure about the jazz exhibition? Oh, Sarah. I should have known that. So she was describing her philosophy of what the jazz age meant. And that's part of why I was tapped, because I'm a jazz musician that exhibit about jazz age. I get it. And she surprised me when she said, yeah, it's less about the music and more about this era where I asked the norms in fashion, in sound, in design, were being she didn't use this word broken apart, but I'm going to use it. She said colorized. She said not just in the sense of racial integration, but designers and, I suppose, concert promoters were allowing more and more for other layers of society to permeate the upper echelon where the canon of the design at that time was being established. I thought, huh, that is in a way you're talking about what I'm talking about in D plus evolution, this static version of something breaking apart and as it breaks apart, it makes room for the influence of another medium. So once we got that breakdown, we both started taking notes of what kind of objects we might want to look for that may have a common origin story. Not common, but have those themes as part of the origin story. So the second time around, it felt like we were all closer to the mark. And I sent better notes about what folks might want to look for. It was something. So this was one of the first objects that I remember you and I talking about where you were like, that is D plus evolution. Can you talk about why? Yeah. Such a weird story. Stuff people are getting away with, man. So have you heard of Paul Poiret? Really? I hadn't. So this is a design that came out of the school, right? What was the school called? Atelier Martin. Atelier Martin. School, which he founded. And you helped me with the history here, because as I understood it, this would have been like, Juilliard to music, this school was to design, right? Yeah, it was meant to train young professionals in the art of various arts, designing arts, drawing. So these were young students. Cool. So this particular design, which I think went on to be sold commercially, came out of that school. But it wasn't drawn. It wasn't actually composed by a student of the school or by Paul Poiret. Paul Poiret decided that he would get peasant girls to draw freehand sketches of things that they had seen in the park or wherever. And he would use those as the, I only want to say inspiration, but he used those to create this design that then went on to be commercially viable as a product out of this school. So to me, that was a beautiful example of one infrastructure completely breaking with tradition and making room for a creator that comes from a completely, you could almost say the opposite spectrum in terms of individuals creating design at that time. And it led to an advance in the design coming out of that school. That's so bizarre to me and beautiful. D plus evolution. You could look at it like a less quote unquote evolved creator contributing to the evolution of a medium. So we came up with this list. I think it was something like 80 objects originally of things after you had done all this reading. You looked online. You came through for three visits. And we came up with a checklist of objects. And we said, OK, we're going to have to figure out a way. First of all, we have to cut some objects. We can't fit 80 things in that room. But also, how are we going to convey to everyone that comes into this space how D plus evolution is at work in all of these objects? Yeah. And there seemed to be, well, there were families. It seemed like there were distinct ways that D plus evolution contributed to the creation of these objects. Because I guess it's not infinitely applicable. I mean, there aren't infinite variations of how it could manifest. But it seemed like these patterns starting to emerge like, oh, the way this emerged reminded me of how that emerged. So I created eight or nine. Eight or nine? Eight groupings. And in each group, a specific mode, I guess you could call it, of D plus evolution seemed to be operating in all of the objects, at least in their origin story. And I don't remember what they are. Oh, that's OK, because we're going to get to them. Hallelujah. We were sort of simultaneously turning over, how are we going to group these objects? Which ones are going to be the most important to tell that story? And as rounds of thought, we need something visual to help people understand. That's pretty damn visual. So do you want to tell us a little bit about what you're thinking behind the piano parts initially it was? Because when I first saw these images, I was scared. Yeah, me too. Me too. Just all that talk, and then you have to be accountable for what you say. Well, we were driving back from the warehouse in Newark. And I suddenly had this fear that nobody was going to know what the hell we were talking about, because it was so sort of esoteric. And there'd be no way to tell the whole story of each object. And which part of the story, to me, was really the nugget of D plus evolution, like the proof that D plus evolution was operating in the design of this object. And so I think I mentioned it to you. You're somewhere in the story, Matilda, come on. I think we were in the van. You were in the van. And I think it was there. I said, we need something that can physically do the mode of D plus evolution. Can show that mode in an instant. If you see it, you go, aha, I see. It's this that turned into that through being deconstructed and reconstructed with similar parts or new elements added. And I thought, well, you know, I'm a musician. People are going to expect this exhibition to be something musical. What if we took a piano and devolved it and then evolved it to live in the ecosystem of each group? So as soon as you walk in, you see the piano. And then you could see how the guts of it, how the deconstructed piano, reformed into a new object that hopefully embodied the idea of each group. And I know you're looking at me cross-eyed. And I barely knew what I was talking about. But it turns out that was a good idea. So I reached out to a buddy of mine in Portland. And the work that she does is she takes pianos that are destined for the dump. And she saves them. And she has artists decorate them, the surface of them. And then she puts them in public spaces for anybody to play. I said, do you know anybody who might know how to devolve a piano and then create a new version of it? And because we're psychically connected because we played an orchestra together when we were kids, she said, yes, I understand what you're saying. And she hooked me up with ZGF architects. And I handed them the group descriptions, a general breakdown of what I saw operating in common for all the stories of these objects. And I said, how could we express that through a deconstructed slash reconstructed piano? So that's what you're looking at. You're looking at a well-formed, highly evolved structure there. And then what would you say on your right? The pianos are going to come back, I promise. Simultaneously. Oh, yeah, that was your fault, though. I feel like it was somebody else who said, what about music? Oh, it was my fault. It seemed a natural thing that there should be some kind of music in your exhibition. But I didn't know how it should come into play. And you didn't know how it should come into play. And it actually took a while to figure out what the right thing would be. We came up with these big grandiose plans. We came up with these really small plans. And at one point, you just said, I think I figured it out. And then a couple weeks later, you sent me some files. And you had asked me to do one thing, which, could you get scans of the sheet music that where you were using the covers for in the exhibition? So tell me why you chose, because we were looking at eight different pieces of sheet music, six wound up in the show. And we'll come in circle background it. But you chose Love Songs of the Nile as the piece that you wanted to feature in the show. Why? I don't remember. But it seemed I had a really good reason. But I honestly don't remember why. It really, it was grounded in something that's since left my brain. But that's OK, because what we did to it is what matters. And we'll come back. We talked about the grouping. So all of these things were happening simultaneously. When you put together an exhibition, you're trying to figure out what the objects are going to be. You're trying to think about how they're going to come together, how the story is going to come together. And meanwhile, we were all trying to figure out what D plus evolution means, both in every object and in the exhibition at large. So we were sitting here last November at the cafe. And we were trying to come up with the names for the different ways in which D plus evolution operate within these objects. And Pam Horne, who's our head of cross-platform publishing and who can't be here tonight, decided to scroll it on a napkin. Which I don't think we have the napkin anymore, but I did take a photo of it with my iPhone. And I've typed out the actual theme names that we wound up with, which was pretty close. Yeah, pretty damn close. Yeah. So we'll come back. Because I want to look at images of the different groupings together. But just so you understand that all of these things were coming together simultaneously, and the creative process was really integrated, I think. So these are Robert Petty, who was the architect you worked with at ZGF's sketches. And you met him in person once or twice. Yep. We just had a lot of Skype meetings. And we brainstormed a lot about all the group names that you just saw could express through these D-plus evolved piano parts. So in response to that list, a couple of the groups in that list were close enough that they could live actually as one group. So in response to that list and the ideas that hopefully the title embodied, this was the first draft of what we might do in the space around the objects, in response to the objects. And it makes no sense probably looking at it like this, huh? I actually think it's amazing we came pretty close to what they actually wound up being. This was after a lot of leave that blank, please. Well, what's amazing about the drawings is that Robert did the drawings, and we all settled on how they would look in black and white in sketches. And then he had to go figure out how he was going to make them. Using real. So you mentioned the piano was donated by Steinway. That's the whole pretty buttoned up, done piano that you see when you first go into the exhibition. All these other piano elements were ripped and gutted. No, the pianos were gutted. These parts were ripped out of pianos that were destined for the dump. So we really have taken something that was destined to just fall into oblivion and uselessness and used all the elements, not all, but a lot of elements, and recreated a functional object, which is one of the groups in and of itself in the project. But it was so marvelous to see how many ways the idea of de-plus evolution could play out through this exhibition as a whole in the music and, of course, in these piano parts, and then even in the objects themselves, Caitlin. Even in the objects. Even in the objects. I've included just a couple images from Portland where these pieces were constructed of the piano parts that you'll see. And this is the stripped-down pieces from the actual pianos and the shop in which they were constructing them. About this one, what's being made right now was the piano piece that wove around the group that had to do with textiles. So our thinking was, we'll take the skins of pianos and we'll make a textile. We'll make a de-plus evolved piano textile to weave through and around the portion of the exhibition that is featuring de-plus evolution in textiles. And that sounds great. And then they somehow figured out how to do it. It took Robert months to figure out how to make this piece and then to make it in a way that could ship across the United States so it actually comes apart and then got reconstructed here. So everyone's going to have to go back up when you come back to visit Cooper Hewitt to re-look at this. But we'll look at another image of the final project. So you don't remember why you chose Love Songs of the Nile. I'll let you know if it comes back to me. But there were four parts to this piece. Do you want to play a little of it for everyone now? Sure. I guess I could describe what the four are. So first, we did a very responsible performance just of the sheet music. So Leo Genovese played verbatim what was actually in this score. Yes, microphone. I should know that by now. And the conversation just started devolving from there, that phrase. So I've always thought when my mom used to say that I heard somebody say it, yeah, but it didn't end. It just changed. Yeah, it turned into a brawl and maybe somebody's nose was broken and whatever they set out to discuss was lost completely because the conversation devolved. But it kept growing. Something kept happening. Just because it didn't continue going in the direction we expected it or hoped it to go doesn't mean that it stopped evolving. And that example of D plus evolution, I always refer to. Because to me, it's something that we're very familiar with and really encapsulates this idea that we're used to a value distinction on something that's more evolved than whatever it came from. But evolution is a constant phenomenon. It's unfolding in response to what is and what happens. That's the end. I just added an um instead of a period. So from that lovely performance that you just heard, what's this next one? Is this the? There's four, right? So the second one, what is this next one? Oh, yeah, wait, wait, wait, wait. This is the jazz one. So then we said, OK, so this is the conversation. If that first one was the conversation, we're going to add in a person who has no idea what we're talking about. And we're just going to see what that does to the equation. So we devolved it a step, I guess you could say. From my perspective, we evolved it by jazzifying it. So we're using the original song form, but that's pretty much it. We've taken out most of the notes that were actually in the score itself. And now we're just interpreting what was said. That's a pretty good idea, right? So then I said, let me deconstruct that a step further. There's going to be no piano and no chords even. We're just going to use a few pieces of genetic material left over from the original entity and deconstruct it even further. You get the idea? Great. So now we have these three performances of the song, what started as the song. And I thought, yeah, but they're still pretty together. They're still pretty formed. We could take it a step even further and deconstruct all three of them, let the structure completely lose its form and function. And then I invited Leo Genovese to reconstruct anything he wanted out of all of that raw material, all of that deconstructed material. And I don't remember what this sounds like. So every sound, and he obviously is a computer, every sound in there is repurposing or reimagining a reconstruction of sounds from the first three versions or perversions. It's amazing to me that you haven't heard that in months because I've been listening to it every day. And our guards are listening to it continuously. But actually, I love it. And so in the gallery, it plays on a loop for those of you who recognize it. And you can come in and you might experience it in any order, in any moment, because there's not a set time in which you enter the gallery or which it plays. So we had music. We were going to have piano parts, which we'll come back to later. But we still had another thing we wanted to do, which was to give people a little bit more information about all of the objects and these themes, which seemed very important to the exhibition. So we wanted to make a brochure. And you gave pretty much the definition of D plus evolution to our brochure designer and said, run with it. And she took these two images of pieces that are included in Esperanza's exhibition. And she turned them into a brochure. Do you want to show everyone? It's so cool. You've got to use your microphone. It's so cool. So Esperanza just knew she didn't want a traditional brochure. So when you go up in the galleries, you pick up your brochure like this. And on one side, it's poster. What you've got to explain what that poster is? That poster is the D plus evolved version of these two works. So on the left is a Vlisco textile from 1985. And on the right is a page from God's Trombones. So here's the front. What is this? This is the front and the back cover of the brochure. You can see a little bit of the D plus evolution in process. But the brochure becomes a brochure by transforming the poster itself. Or vice versa, it depends on how you want to look at it. So I had to put this down. But you can hear me right. I'm spending my life on voice projection. OK. So here's the put. Well, now it's kind of a crinkly poster. But here's a poster. You can turn it into not a poster. And it becomes a brochure. And the brochure can get, I guess you look at it, deconstructed or D plus evolved into a freaking poster. How cool is that? What is this designer's name again? Yowie. Yowie. Yowie. You got to give her a round of applause. That's super badass, isn't it? Wow. Yeah, I was really, I can take that back now, so stoked when she came up with this. It's so brilliant. And it was sort of like, it was a cathartic moment because I realized that people weren't understanding what the hell I was talking about. And I wasn't sure half the time if you guys were just being nice. Maybe you still are. Maybe you all are. But when that happened, I thought, OK, yeah. Yeah, we're talking about the same thing here. It's working. That was very affirming. It was really interesting for me to think about trying to make every part of the traditional exhibition process reinforce this message through action and intervention. So we were doing it through music. We're doing it through the installation process. And we were doing it through the physical part of the brochure too. And almost no one ever seems to fold it in the right direction. But really, there isn't a really right direction. The idea is that you get all the information no matter how you engage with it. The groupings that you talk about in the brochure and in the exhibition were a really hard one. You worked really hard to think about how to synthesize the concepts that you felt were important for all of us to understand. So I wanted to take a little bit of our time now to go through the exhibition and to look at those themes together so that we can talk about it. Because it was really through that process of talking and writing and talking and writing. Yes. And I thought maybe you could talk about that process for you, what that was like. It was a lot of writing. You guys, tell me how much writing was going to be when I signed up for this jam. That's OK. Now I write emails and I'm like, nothing. Where do you want to start? Well, why don't we take a moment to talk about that? Because for writing, you're a musician. You write lyrics all the time. Yes. You're a poet. But this was a different kind of writing for you as you described it to me. Yeah. And it was a challenging process, it seemed like. Did it come out as a was it rewarding in the end? Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. I mean, I love writing. I just never am forced to do it. And of all the aspects of my job that I have to do every day, writing is just so far down on the list. So I was really grateful, actually, to kind of be forced to translate my ideas into this almost essay format. I'm not used to doing that. And it was really rewarding. And I feel like it helped me find the voice of this exhibition actually to just have all the ideas laid out in these little paragraphs and be able to cross-reference and be like, oh, no, that's not actually. This one is not quite solid. Let's let that go. Oh, these two groups that are far away from each other seem to be speaking about the same idea from different directions. Let's group those together. In the process of writing, we discovered that one object was in the wrong group. It actually had an origin story that spoke more to whatever, sacred, secular, or whatever. It was really a wonderful experience to get into the idea itself and kind of find out what was in there. So much of what I do leaves ample room for interpretation. This one was so explicit, or the demands were, I felt the demand was to be as explicit as possible, at least for our internal understanding of what it was. Because, of course, you're not going to see all the writing, the exhibition that actually moved between us on the back side of it. And then just editing. These guys know their English language. I'll tell you what. And I wasn't going to make it sound academic. I wanted it to sound like I said these things. So you know that I really said these things and meant these things. So just the process of sending in an essay and being like, this is it. Checked with my mom. She's an editor. And then being like, we don't understand what you're talking about. And then I had to go write it again and be like, here it is. And I'd be like, we don't understand. And then we'd argue. And then she'd be like, OK, I do understand. And then I'd like, win. Like a third of that first draft could stay the original. And then she'd send it back and I have to rewrite the other two thirds. So it was really intense. I'm not used to that. And it was kind of infuriating at times because I just wanted to be done. But at the end, profoundly rewarding. I'm really proud of this. And it's what I wanted to say. So thanks for your patience. We're just going to say thank you. But one of the things that I found was that once we really got into it about the specific objects, that's where the writing started coming more freely. Totally. Because you were working out the concepts. And I have to give it up to you. Because on some stuff, some of the groups, I thought we're dealing with sensitive subject material. And can I say this out loud? OK. Caitlin was like, no, I'll call it out. She's like, no, you got to call it out. Because there are objects in our collection. I'm paraphrasing now. There are objects in our collection that in this day and age, you have to explain why you are showing it. Because they're from a time that was, I'll say, slightly more culturally insensitive to the portrayals of human beings from different tiers of our socioeconomic hierarchy. So some things I was kind of skirting around the point that I wanted to make by placing an object next to another object. And Caitlin encouraged me to just dig right into the middle of it and speak to what it is I was actually trying to say. So that we wouldn't get any hate mail. Well, so you could make your point. So I can make my point. Which is a really important point. So this is the first grouping in your exhibition, Evolving Perspectives. And as I said, we were originally dealing with a huge quantity of sheet music. We got it down to eight, and then we cut it down to six. But this was the first grouping that you really thought about how the piano parts would relate to it and what you wanted to say. And I think it's a really important one. Do you want to talk about that? Well, we know that all music is an expression of many cultures communicating with each other through the music, no matter where you are on the earth. Music absorbs everything that comes in contact with. So specifically in art forms like jazz, you can see that love making happen inside the music. So what I first noticed about sugar blues was, here's the word blues, which we know is an art form that grew out of the Black diaspora in the United States in the South. It's called sugar blues. I presume that this figure here playing the trumpet is intended to represent a European-American person. That's probably safe to presume. We did some presuming here, full disclosure. But I think that's safe to presume. So I'm looking at this, I say, huh, OK. That makes me think, if the publisher chose a design that features a European-American man, that makes me think the demographic they were targeting to buy this were European-American players, musicians, people who wanted this music in their home to play. And I thought, isn't that something that a European-American person in the, what is this, from the 30s? That one might be from the early 40s. From the early 40s. Again, we're doing a lot of presuming. But I'm presuming that a music consumer would take this piece of music home, put it on their piano, and play sugar blues. And unbeknownst to them, in their home now, is the music that grows out of the Black diaspora, African-American experience. So whether they're conscious of it or not, intercultural dialogue is happening there. It's happening inside the music. A person who may not identify with or want to interface with the Black diaspora at large is welcoming the sound from that cultural experience into their home, into their hands even. And what I thought of in terms of how the piano element could express that idea, which plays out in one way or another in each of these covers. Well, there's a lot that's playing out in the covers. But specifically to that point that we're discussing in sugar blues, I thought, right, it's like how when you look at the keys, some of them have a white cover and some of them have the black cover. So you pick which key you want to play based on the distinction in front of you. Someone's made a call. C is going to be white and C sharp is going to be black. But ultimately, once you get inside of the piano, they all look exactly the same. I mean, that's just as a function of the piano. You just can't tell unless you know which string is which. And I thought that's a good way with the piano pieces to explore the idea of evolving perspectives, because there is an evolution over the course of these covers. We start with a very, as you can see, disparaging representation of a caricature, the sample caricature. We can presume is intended to represent an African-American person. And we can also presume that this piece of student music, the design was chosen to sell it to European-American consumers. We're presuming. All the way down inside, the music is what it is. The music's already integrated. A lot of cultural appropriation happening and exploitation. But integration is happening. And by the time we get to solitude on the other end, the composer of this jazz composition is portrayed in his own right with a very respectful, beautiful portrait. And the musicians surrounding him are ethnically neutral. You can't tell what they are. So the portrayal of the music, all of these music, all of these pieces, in some way or another, are intercultural, even by way of just blatant appropriation. But by the time we get here, the publisher chose a portrait that embraces the idea that this is everybody's music. And I love that. And I bet you guys are hard pressed to find an excuse to show some of these covers, because they're so really indicative of a period of great cultural insensitivity. And in a way, it's like the music is the innocent vehicle inside that, I think, contributes to the possibility of embracing other people's cultures and voices and honoring them. And again, that's a lot of presuming and a lot of explaining on one little group. But as an example, this was, like Caitlin said, the first aha group, the first moment of aha. I see how we can use, how we can deconstruct and reconstruct the piano elements to help tell the story of D plus evolution as presented through these designs. So they really need to work together to tell that story. And they're not in chronological order. It's just showing how, at least through the design of sheet music, we can see an evolution happening culturally in terms of how we perceive the composers or creators or practitioners of all the music being sold. I think we can move forward a little, because I want to make sure there's time for questions. I know a lot of people have questions. What I thought we could do is we can move through the themes in the exhibition, talk about them for a couple of minutes. I have one other question. And then we'll open it up, because I'm good. So we'll just click through faster. Yeah. I get your message. But that one needed more explaining. You're like, why do you have a sample up on the wall, keeper Hewitt? That was my choice, and that's why. OK. Revealing covers. Woo. OK, elevator pitch, elevator pitch, elevator pitch. It's not so obvious. We're still working on getting title cards for the piano elements, the whole other story. Anyway, what you see that's bluish and purplish and black and reddish on the wall there are actually rubbings taken from covers of pianos. The covers have nothing to do with the sound or function of a piano. They're purely decorative. But you can learn a lot, probably, about where that piano lived, who made the piano, who made a bought the piano by the cover. And these covers, there's only five in this group, because we had to pare down. We were running out of space. But to me, the covers reveal a lot about where the designer or the publisher asking for the design was at when they chose these particular covers. So they're covers of a record, of a book, and of some magazines. And I thought they revealed a moment where D plus evolution was happening culturally in the three different times that they represent, respectively. Lord. OK. This is two groupings. Oh, god. It was a lot as happens as we did this. I'm trying to remember what the hell. We can move through it a little, because you can read about it. Oh, yeah. Get read. But you can see the final product of that beautiful textile ribbon, as Esperanza and Robert called it, where they have glued these pieces from different covers of different pianos. And some of the pianos were very expensive pianos. And as you get close, you can really see the writing, the intricate carving, and others were much less expensively produced pianos. And the melding of those mediums is really interesting. And actually, those are two groups that I think we speak to very well in the brochure. Functional decorative. I think that's pretty easy to describe. This group, is that the one on the left, right? OK. So first, let's start with the piano pieces. This beautiful, sweeping, flurry of, what is that, you might ask, is, I guess you could say, a non-functional design. It's not really meant for anything. It's decorative. Beauty is functional. But anyways, it's decorative. And it was created, that design was created, using all of the inner mechanisms of a piano. So the pieces that you would never, ever, ever see, all of which have a beautiful and distinct design of their own. So there are hammers, and pins, and levers, and things that I don't even understand what they are. Felt wood. I don't actually know what most of these things do in a piano, but you've never seen them before in either of I, because they're so deeply embedded into the guts of the thing. But when we were busting open these pianos, we discovered, oh my god, look at the craftsmanship that went into each of these little, little tiny components. So and it seemed to speak well, or to accompany well, this idea in the object group, which has to do with, quote unquote, functional objects and forming decorative design and vice versa. And if we could look closer, you see that. A really nice example is, I don't remember which country they're from, but someone took discarded bottle caps and made earrings. Those earrings became really popular. So designers in the same country started actually taking little pieces of wood and carving them to look like discarded bottle caps. And those became jewelry, again. So something that started very functional became decorative and then informed a decorative design. And also in, what's here, the Katagami prints. So you see there's a poster and then something that kind of looks like the poster underneath it. What's underneath it is what would have been a discarded pattern used to make prints on kimonos. So after the ink or whatever did you use on silk fabric was rolled on. I obviously don't know how kimonos are made. That's fine. These would eventually be thrown away. What's on the bottom there? And when you get close to it, you said it's mulberry paper. Mulberry paper. Mulberry paper. And it's been smoked with persimmon juice. Sounds tasty. And it's so intricately carved. It's really phenomenal. And the paper itself is held together by these microscopic almost silk threads. So this would be the, what would you call it? The stencil. Thank you. The stencil used to make these beautiful designs on the kimono fabric. So these would be thrown away. The designer whose name is. For Katagami? No, the designer of the poster. Dagabur Pesha. You guys know what that means. Got his hands on some of these discarded stencils and thought they were so beautiful. And obviously used them as inspiration for poster design. So that would be an example of obviously functional design informing decorative design. Yeah. Oh wow. Those little sperms flying all over the place. Maybe actually, since you can all read about it in the brochure. Okay. Why don't you describe just the piano part that connected these two groups? Great. Well, this is beyond functionality. And I'm gonna tell you the honest to God truth. We didn't really have enough time to play it out how I dreamed the piano element, but it's still working. So, the example you can see here, cause we can't see the, the, I can't remember his name again. The designer that was inspired by Wagner. Oh, John DeCisare. DeCisare, right. Okay. So we can look at this Compana Brothers chair. These two objects in beyond functionality, well, it's pretty self-explanatory. They're designs inspired by functional objects that no longer serve the function of the object that inspired them. So, we thought let's take a keyboard and place it in the position that you would normally be able to engage with it and interface with it and we'll just let it evolve. We'll just let it lose its functional format and organization and become a new decorative version of piano keys and strings living beside each other. And that's what you see here. It's not functional at all in any way. The last grouping in the show. And when you enter the exhibition, you're confronted with this beautiful Steinway piano. And depending on how you move through the space, you might end with this case behind the piano. So, can you, can you imagine or figure out where the piano parts are in this other than the obvious whole piano? Anyone wanna raise their hand and get the case exterior? Yeah. Yep. Yep. But now, here's the where though. It's not the white part. It's the pattern inside. And that beautiful pattern itself was designed in response to the the ornamentation in the gallery. Oh, that's what I was gonna say. I thought I had another word. The ornamentation in the gallery. So, if you look at this in the gallery, you'll see how this is, it was inspired by the shapes in the ornamentation. But what that design, what that beautiful, whatever you call it, flurry gesture, is made out of is pulverized piano parts, keys, exterior wood, metal, strings, the ebony, the ivy. It's not ivy, it's ivory. That's another song. Anyway, any and every piece of the piano was ground down and they actually made a type of, not putty, but something like putty out of it to create that design in the display case. And that idea of completely deconstructing, completely devolving a piano and moving it along into its evolution as ornamentation on a display case, that idea was inspired by a purse, which to me is the star of this whole exhibition and absolutely the star of this group, which is a little purse. It's the object closest to us. Oh, they're on the left, on the upper left. So, I feel like the story of this purse, when we rephrase that, we landed on that approach to this piano element in response to the history of this purse. So, in Holland, people used to use something called wall paneling in their house. So there would be these hard shellacked panels with beautiful patterns, maybe flowers or a country scene or whatever. And like things tend to do, they would eventually wear out and be discarded. So, some clever fellow decided to make shipping boxes out of those discarded wall panels because I presume they were sturdy and pretty. So those shipping boxes made their way to Japan. Somebody in Japan thought, well, now these boxes will just be thrown away. Let me save this material that they're made out of and made this purse out of the discarded paneling from the box. So, the wall panels, who did they ever get D plus Evolves? And made their way, they have evolved into this beautiful little purse here that we can't really see. And the other objects, in this case, share a similar history in one way or another. But that's the story of this group, D plus Evolve to Evolve. And that's what we tried to express with the piano, becoming this wholly new, really material, even. I have so many more questions, but I wanna make sure everyone else gets to ask theirs first. So, with that, Susanna in the pink jacket has a microphone. So, if you have a question, please raise your hand and we'll get the microphone to you. And again, because it's being livestreamed and people are joining us, not in the room, please just wait until the microphone is here. Does anyone have a question? Oh, good, then I get to ask more of mine. Oh, good. With the objects you've chosen, why is origin story so important? The origin story of the object. Yeah. Well, that's how I decided if they spoke to D plus Evolution or not. You gotta know how the design came to be. The process, the design, for most of these objects is really where the D plus Evolution lives in the object. For instance, like that purse. Just looking at it, you would never know that it was made out of what used to be wall panels. So, the origin stories for most of these objects was everything, that's where their D plus Evolution took place. Another question. Well, let me rephrase that. It's really the process of D plus Evolution informing the design itself of the object. Is there someone over there? Nope. Hi. Well, I think a lot of people in the room also recently watched Exposure, your 77-hour tear through creativity, and how does the D plus Evolution, did it lead into that? Or are there any shared elements or even just talking about Exposure by itself, you know? It was so cool. Thank you. Thanks, cousin Rick. I'm just kidding, I don't know him. Um, for those of you who don't know, you can't buy this record. Sorry. If you don't already have one, it's too late. We only made, we only sold a few copies before we made it, and then we made it. And what we made was, I don't even know what the hell it was, honestly. I was kind of not myself. I don't, I was barely there, consciously. But we went into a studio with absolutely nothing, just blank. And in terms of nothing prepared to make an album, because the idea was exposed to an audience, exposed to the necessity of making a record in a limited time frame. All the musical elements that we have spent our lifetimes cramming into our system would make magical creation babies if we just put ourselves in the right environment. So we went into a studio and we gave ourselves 77 hours and we livestreamed the whole thing. And an album happened. That's what it was, it was called Exposure. And I wanna try to answer the part of the question about, is it related to D plus evolution? I don't know. I don't know if it is. Maybe in the sense of all of us being willing to fail miserably, which for performance is a mode of, letting yourself, I don't know, just fall apart. We could have not made it. So maybe something about letting the facade of perfection or capability or ability or control fall away. And going in completely unformed and little by little out of nothing, I mean, other than like our collective 100 years or something of musical training. Developing something. Maybe there is a theme of D plus evolution, but I haven't thought about it until right now. So it's a little rough. Can I add to that for a second? Oh, sure. Okay, so where I saw a lot of the evolution happening or things changing was in where the people who were actually coming into the live feed to watch it. So there was a lot of musicians, a lot of singers, a lot of creatives that were coming to see what you were doing. And then they created this group, Team 77, where we're still communicating with each other and sharing ideas now. That probably if you hadn't shared your vulnerability, we probably wouldn't have decided to share our own vulnerability. So you did actually change. It did actually evolve into something different. So I think we have time for one more question. Hi there. So I guess my question is more about, I wanted to ask, how do you think philosophy kind of makes its way into your work? Because I've noticed through a lot of your work, this exhibition here, through exposure, through D plus evolution and all the different styles, chamber music, radio music society, I feel like what's been cool about it on so many levels is watching all these different influences and all these different ideas kind of just like, be like there's such a cool level of experimentation to so much of your work. And part of it kind of makes me wonder like if there's any underlying like philosophy or like school of thought that kind of drives that. That's cool. Oh no, I just want to tell you the truth. I'm looking for it. The answer is yes, but I don't know what it is. Yes, there's surely a philosophy and many philosophies influencing and informing all the work, but I'm not aware of them until they speak back out of the work. Because I wouldn't call like a hypothesis a philosophy. And most of these projects grow out of a hypothesis. So then when the fruits of that experiment seem viable or relevant or sound or applicable in other contexts, then maybe a philosophy emerges out of a project, out of the results of our experiment in response to a hypothesis. I can say that the last two projects have developed under the influence of Wayne Shorter and he is a very philosophical creator and a few of his key phrases play on my head, play through my head almost constantly every day. And I know that his philosophy has influenced my work. Oh, I knew you were gonna say that. Well, here's a couple. Yeah, a couple, that's two, right? Yeah, two. Am I holding up two for years? Okay, I'd say one thing first though. You know, the D plus evolution is all fine and dandy and this was really fun to explore it through these objects and design. The reason that I am so excited about D plus evolution as a potential process is because it means to me that anytime we're faced with what appears to be a profoundly devolved situation or material or circumstance or person, it means that in its devolved state is the potential to evolve it into something new and something that wasn't possible until it actually started to deconstruct. So that philosophy I wish and I hope has many applications in art, of course, in communication, in self-renewal, in family, in job, community, any way you can imagine it. And this is one application. And I hope, like I said, the reason it's exciting to me and that I even bothered to keep talking about it for a year after the damn project was over and I was almost tired and just done, was because it hit me that, all right, this is why I'm passionate about this idea. And I wanna keep finding more applications for it, but I just wanted to make sure that I shared that element of the idea with you that's not immediately evident from the title alone. So phrases from Wayne, one of my favorite Wayne phrases is, he always says, well, he doesn't always say it, but he said it a couple of times, what we practice, he's talking about as musicians or just humanists or he's a Buddhist, nature and Buddhist, I practice nature and Buddhism too. He says, what we practice is creating value in every moment, no matter what's happening. There's always a way that you can create value out of whatever the hell's going on. And he said, and he's quiet for a minute as usual. He says, because if you're not actively practicing creating value, if you're not practicing creating value, what's practicing you? If these weren't government microphones, I'd drop it. I don't wanna get incarcerated. It could happen now. So anyway, another great one is, well, when he was asked, what's the definition of jazz, Mr. Shorter, with your 80-something years? You feel like an authorized representative of the craft? What's the definition of jazz? And he said, jazz means I dare you. I really take that idea to heart. Yeah, there are plenty of marvelous YouTube videos of Wayne speaking and it's just like a quote, it's just like a quotable reader. It's like he's reciting all of his best quotes every time he speaks. Such a marvelous mind and creator in man. And like I said, his philosophy and his music has definitely been behind the origin of some of these projects. All right, well, I hate to have to end it here, but our time is up. I'm sure Esperanza would be happy to answer a couple of questions. We'll be here for just a few minutes before we all have to be out of the building. And I'm sure we'll get scooted out almost immediately. But I do wanna say I also watched Exposure intently, as often as I could for 77 hours. And I have talked to Esperanza in I don't know how many countries in between connections at airports, standing outside of coffee shops. She is incredibly productive wherever she goes. And when we talked last week about what we were talking about today, it was the first time you've ever sounded tired all of that time. But it was- I'm working on my acting. That's what it is. It's really exciting for you to come back and to revisit the whole process for this exhibition, because I think it was an exciting opportunity for both of us, for the museum in particular, for Cooper Hewitt. And I think it's gonna have many lives beyond it. And I'd just like to say here in front of everyone, everyone, y'all are cool. You don't need me to authorize that, but you've been so patient. And artists, we can't speak coherently. You know that, right? That's why we make art. We don't know what the hell we're talking about. When we talk, when we do it, we know what it is. But if you ask like, what did you just do? You'd be like, so I just wanna say thank you for your patience with me, the patience of helping me translate what I was talking about and trusting that there was something in there. Cause I know the first few emails probably just looked like I was high. And I don't do drugs at all. I rarely even drink alcohol, just saying. So I just, I really appreciate y'all having that patience and just like really digging in until you got to the nugget of what I was trying to say. And going like, aha, we're with you now. It was really, really, really fun. As tired as I was and as many times as I wanted to just be like, I'm done guys. Figure it out from here on your own. Just a lot of writing. It's a lot of writing. Really, it was awesome. Everybody, most of the people we worked with aren't here but I work most closely with Caitlin. Let's just give her a round of applause, please. And you were there too Matilda, you know? Yeah, you were there. Give Matilda a round of applause. And Pam was all up in the cut with the writing and we already talked about the designer but everybody else, you know, it's not easy to work with. What I'm trying to say is it's not easy to work with somebody who doesn't come from the art curation world or art history world because we speak very different languages and you were down for the translation process. And I think it was really amazing. I think we were both really stretched and leaned in further into the other person's mind and it was awesome. That's what it's about man and I'm never gonna do it again.