 So I'm going to segue and introduce our next panel and our next, I tried to do that slickly and look what happened, sorry. Our next panelist, moderator of the next panel, Yuri McMillan. Dr. Yuri McMillan is a cultural historian and assistant professor in African American Studies at UCLA. I think they'll in researches and writes in the intersection between black cultural studies, performance studies, queer theory and contemporary art. His 2015 book embodied avatars, genealogies of black feminist art and performance, explores black performance art, objecthood, and avatars staged by black women artists. He has published articles on performance art, digital media, hip-hop, photography, and 19th century performance cultures in varied journals. Joining Yuri will be artists in the exhibition Linda Good Bryant, Marin Hassinger, and Lorena O'Grady. Thank you. Okay, I'm gonna begin with two quotes before we get started. This first one is by Hazel Carby, white women listen, black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood. Quote, black women's history though interwoven with white women was not the same story, and black women were capable of writing it themselves. However, when they write their history and call it the story of women but ignore our lives and deny their relationship to us, that is a moment in which they are acting within the relations of racism and writing history. And the second one is from women artists in revolution, otherwise known as war from 1971. Quote, the answer to the question of what do women want is a very simple one. Women want 50% of what everything men artists have and black women want 50% of that. So the title of this panel is called Just Above Midtown East and West, and the title of the panel is seeking in some ways to gesture outwards. So linking the East Coast to the West Coast, specifically New York City and Los Angeles, to gesture toward the criss-crossing geographies that make up black feminism, as well as to gesture towards the other folks, some of which are in this collection for the show who are also from Los Angeles. And there's also referencing ephemeral works of art, so time-based art, particularly performance art, the power of gesture, and the creation of inclusive art spaces. The three icons on this panel were all invested in breaking down calcified notions of what the art object looks like, which is often meant in blocking trends and making work that has taken years to recognize not only due to its subtle nuances, but more specifically due to an art world that has been slow to recognize the contributions of black artists, especially black women. Rejecting facile notions of what constitutes black art, what constitutes feminist art, or even representation itself, artists such as the ones on this panel, Marin Hassinger and Lorraine O'Grady, have often broke down borders between aesthetic categories, merging fields, theoretical insights, and techniques, and a cross-pollination of sorts. So to begin introducing our panel, Columbus, Ohio, raised Linda Good Bryant, arrived in New York in 1972 after graduating from Spalman College. Working at several arts institutions, including the Met and the Studio Museum of Harlem, Good Bryant found it just above Midtown Gallery. Jam was housed on 50 West 57th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues on New York City's Venerable Museum Row. As described in a letter to Los Angeles-based artist Betty Sarr, that's upstairs in the gallery, that was dated August 27th, 1974, just above Midtown was, quote, dedicated to the promotion and sale of Afro-American art on a quantitative and qualitative level within the present dominant Western art production. As she notes further, Jam's mission to dedicate itself to the needs of black artists, to cultivate a base of black collectors, I do guarantee a one-woman exhibition to those artists who were invited to participate, was a, quote, unquote, virtually new venture for a commercial gallery featuring African-American artists in a major commercial arts district. Moving to Tribeca in 1977 and eventually becoming a nonprofit, Jam's distinct curatorial vision expanded to also include live events, a newsletter, and other innovative programming before it's closing in 1986, which we'll talk about shortly. In the context of We Wanted a Revolution, just above Midtown is a particularly important node, especially for black women artists whose race and gender often doubly excluded them from claiming their rights to be artists, as well as limiting their participation in a feminist movement reluctant to address race and class, and a black power movement that often did not want to address its sexism. When there were so few galleries open to the work of black women artists, especially those making non-traditional, non-representational, and non-didactic art, as exemplified by Shinga Nungudi, for example, as well as Marin Hassinger, just above Midtown represented a space where that work would be unquestionably accepted, and that way we may think of just above Midtown alongside New York-based collective started by black women artists, many of which have been mentioned today, just as such as where we are in 1971, which would eventually become where we are at black women artists, as well as AIR or AIR, the first woman's cooperative in the United States, and AIR's mission to offer women artists, quote, a space to show work which is as innovative, transitory, or unsellable as the artist's conceptions demand, a rare opportunity for women artists, unquote. Alternatives art spaces such as just above Midtown sought to offer alternatives inside the system, and thus AIR, where we are at, and JAM, sought to open up a more democratic, if not radical vision of not only what constituted art, but also more importantly, who makes it. On June 8th, 1980, on the opening night of the Ott Law aesthetic show at the just above Midtown gallery, artist Lorena Grady debuted her fiery and disruptive Agaprop persona, Mille Bourgeois-Narré. Dressed in a elaborate dress made of 180 pairs of white leather gloves, a Grady whipped herself with a cat and nine tails, spiked with white chrysanthemums, while defiantly declaring, quote, that's enough. No more bootlicking, no more ass kissing, no more buttering up, no more posturing of super similits. Black art must take more risk, unquote. Widely skewering black middle class norms, while transforming the neutral white cube of the gallery into the kinetic black box theatrical experience, a Grady's provocative performance art suggests that the risk the black artists might take, not abandoning representational art, but rather transforming one's self into both the subject and object of art. A Grady's prescient performance is now widely recognized as a pivotal node in an ever unfolding network of black performance art, suggested by its inclusion in the exhibition Radical Presence, Black Performance Contemporary Art, as well as feminist art as suggested by its inclusion and whack art in the feminist revolution that was shown at Mocha. Mille Bourgeois-Narré, both the costume and the 14 photos documenting the performance, is included here and we wanted a revolution along with Rivers First Draft, a collage in space, performed in a Central Park lock in August 18, 1982, but 17 performers including a Grady herself. I'm showing some of Lorraine's other work while I introduce her. A graduate of Wellesley College with a degree in economics, Lorraine had several successful careers before becoming an artist. They would include as a government intelligence analysis, a literary and commercial translator, and eventually a rock critic for the village voice, which we can ask her about during a panel. Her now canonical artworks include some of the ones I've been showing, as well as the series Art Is, this is from 1980, was used a Harlem African American parade as a stage, framing surprised and often elated spectators as art, which was displayed in full last year by the Studio Museum of Harlem who's also acquired all the photos from it. In addition, she is the author of the essay Olympia's Made, Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity, which is originally published in 1992 and has since been widely anthologized most recently in the feminism and visual culture reader edited by Amelia Jones. A Grady's work is included in a permanent collections of several museums including MoMA, The Walker, and LACMA in Los Angeles. In 2014, a Grady was the recipient of the College Art Association's Distinguished Feminist Award, and in 2015, a Creative Capital Award in Visual Art. Similar to her aforementioned avatar, a Grady can be seen in dialogue with We Wanted a Revolution's gathering of Black women artists, gallery owners, and curators who have stormed perverbial gates of the art establishment in similarly potent terms, using whatever was at their disposal to stage this aesthetic assault. This is another picture some art is, and this is River's first draft, which is Upstairs. Trained as a dancer since the age of five, Marin Hassinger was born and raised in Los Angeles to parents from Cincinnati, Ohio, and St. Louis, Missouri. She graduated from Bennington College with a BFA in sculpture in 1969, and from there went to UCLA obtaining a graduate degree and designed with a concentration in fiber structure in 1973. Discovering why her rope to be her ideal medium, Hassinger created sculptures that emulated movement and environments that referenced nature. Hassinger's work merged the sculptural and the performative, the flexible and the static, and the durational and the ephemeral. We see this at work in several of the titles of Hassinger's pieces, as well as her performances. These would include Still When from 1981, a performance sponsored by Chest Above Midtown, as well as Forrest, a large-scale version of Still When that was sponsored by Creative Time and that was staged in Battery Park. Hassinger's first solo show Beach in 1980 was Chest Above Midtown Gallery, and it showed a room full of birchwood dowels inserted into rock-like structures constructed by Hassinger that appeared to resemble a reed to blown halfway over by a strong wind. At the opening, David Hammons weaved around the reeds while playing a flute, inviting members of the audience to interact with the exhibit. Hassinger would eventually become the first African-American artist to have a solo show at LACMA in Los Angeles and moved to New York in 1984 to serve as an artist and resident at the Student Museum of Harlem, a program that has supported a multitude of prominent black artists over several decades, including many of the people in this room. This is Hassinger's piece, Whirling, some other pieces. In addition, Hassinger was a member of the Los Angeles Collective of Black Artists called Studio Z, and she frequently collaborated with several of these artists, most notably fellow dancer and artist Shinga Nangudi, often activating Nangudi's pliable nylon structures of the dancing body. I think I have a slide. So Nangudi and Hassinger often collaborated in each other's work and often performed together as these pictures show, as well as a Nangudi solo exhibition at the Pearl Seawoods Gallery in May 1977 in Los Angeles, as well as more recently in Radical Presence, the traveling show celebrating black performance art and its historical forebears. If Studio Z members, as Kelly Jones has recently noted in South of Pico, shared interest in the public, the centrality of the body, and performance as it means to reach this public, Marin Hassinger's work also engaged in metaphysical, as well as a ritualistic. In her body of work, we see a praxis for gesture as a feckened potentiality, a form that creates its own temporality and communicates to audiences, ancestors, and objects. So to now want to welcome Lorraine, Linda, and Marin to the stage. So let's start with, let's actually start with Linda. Linda, you have a particularly unique journey into both New York City and visual art prior to forming Chest Above Midtown. Can you discuss your initial interests in visual art, growing up in Columbus, Ohio, dreaming of becoming quote-unquote Picasso's black mistress as your entrance into the art world, as well as your impetus for performing Chest Above Midtown. What was your vision for the space? Um, I think around the age of six, I realized that I was an artist, and I said to my parents, you know, I'm an artist, and they put me in art school, which at the time was at the Columbus Museum, and they had this Saturday class for children. So from that point on, I knew that was what I wanted to do, and you brought it up. But anyway, by the time I was 12, I remember our family every weekend had family Sunday dinners, and I was around 12 years old, and I was at a family Sunday dinner, and people were asking the questions they asked. And I'm like, what do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to be? And I said, I want to be Picasso's first black mistress. And so they said, why do you want to be Picasso's first black mistress? I said, because that's the only way I'll get the world to look at my work. So to have that keen understanding, I think, I do believe it was keen, understanding at the age of 12 was obviously very disturbing to the family, but it seemed like a viable strategy to me, because he had all kinds of mistresses, so why not? I always saw myself coming to New York City, too. I mean, my mother would always say when I was like four or five years old that I would watch TV and then turn to the family and say, when I grow up, I'm going to have eight rooms river view in New York City, something I've never had. And then I always wanted to go to New York, always. I was like, why are we here in Columbus, Ohio? We should be in New York. We should be in New York. My route through Atlanta and Spelman College was not a direct route to New York, because in 10th grade, I became insanely infatuated with Stokely Carmichael. And I just wanted to be with Stokely Carmichael and SNCC. And so after high school, I went down to Atlanta, Georgia. My parents convinced me I should not go down there to work for SNCC, but that I should also be in college and convince me to consider going to Spelman. So that's how I got to Spelman, took art. And then, but finally realized that I needed to be in New York, that that's where my heart, my blood, and my soul was, and came to New York. And through a number, through graduate school and opportunities I got at both the Metropolitan Museum and then the Studio Museum in Harlem, and meeting just countless, countless artists, I realized after too many meetings that went on too long with us talking about, or artists talking about, they won't let us, they won't let us, they won't let us. At some point, I just screamed in a meeting and said, well, fuck them, we'll start our own. And that's why there's jam. So I wanted to also ask about the innovative programming Jim had. So I told him of this backstage. I mean, I first came across a lot of the ephemera for jam in the Fales Library NYU when I was trying to finish up the book. And one of the things I really noticed was just all the different kind of programming you guys did. So like the newsletter, B-culture, retakes to dance series, and even like a panel discussion you had about the emerging aesthetic of rap music that was like featuring like Thulani Davis and Greg Tate and a bunch of other people. So I just wanted to ask you about some of the programming you guys did and kind of what your vision was for that. Yeah, you know, I always saw a gallery as a creative space and I didn't have a conventional definition or view or perspective of what galleries were supposed to be. And so I have to say that the programming that you're referring to, I think got its, well I know, got its initial kind of emergence at Jam on 57th Street, which was like 724 square feet, probably about the size of the state. But anyway, I'm exaggerating, but it was small. And one of the shows that I was able to convince artists to do, though there was much grumbling, was called Institute, where I believe there's six artists that we brought and put together in that 724 square foot space and said for the next three weeks, create something. The whole idea behind that for me was let's keep pushing the boundaries, let's keep pushing beyond what you currently already have in your studio and let's see what happens from there and let's see what happens when all this creative energy is in a room. Like I said, the things that happen. There was some strong work that came out of that. There was also a lot of drama. A lot of drama. So when we moved downtown, we had a larger space and it was two floors. And so more work could focus on artists like expanding their ideas, their vision, etc. beyond what they had already produced. And out of that also grew more interdisciplinary work. So we were primarily visual at JAM on 57th Street, though there were some performances piece and some media pieces we did videos and stuff. That really expanded when we moved to Franklin Street. And also the staff grew. So there was a lot of input from others. And so you have something like you brought up B-culture. Actually the precursor to B-culture was Black Current, which Janet Henry created and oversaw. And Janet's whole vision of, so that was kind of interesting when Greta Tate in anyway. Yeah, we don't have a lot of time. So but what was great about that is that Janet saw, she wanted a publication that was purely visual. So Black Current was a visual magazine. And then when Tate joined the team and said, let's reshape this into B-culture, it became what you're referring to, which was also text and visual. There was always a visual centerfold for B-culture. More and more performance work was going on. We started showing films too. Like we would show anything from Birth of a Nation to Sweetback and do like Midnight Film Series. There was, it continued its kind of creative laboratory space with choreographers where we would have people just come in on a Sunday, have choreographers come in on a Sunday around two o'clock in the afternoon and the audience was gonna come in at seven. And they had to create something between two and seven, which was another just, it was fabulous because like the, you could taste, you could taste the creativity. You could taste the curiosity and the exploration and the innovation happening right there and the audience would walk into that and then people would perform the work. It was just alive. It was just, it was a live space. And that happened because we didn't stay in departments but started to integrate and interweave and just work together as a collective creative body. Well, I think it's striking that Lorraine and Marin have actually both performed in your space, right? So I wanted to ask you Marin about gesture because it figures so prominently in your work and the way they, in terms of dance, the way you combine dance and sculpture together and often they kind of, they interact together in a very particular way for your work. So I want just to hear more about that, how you think of dance and sculpture together. Well, first off I have to say that I believe in part it was so exciting. Jam was so exciting because all these people who never got an opportunity got an opportunity and I was one of those people. So I'm really very indebted. And as far as sculpture and dance, they all take place in space and things that happen in space define the activity and the idea and the concepts, whatever they are. So in other words, if I were to stand up right now and come and sit next to you, that would mean a whole different relationship to the audience. And then if I were to get up, go down, sit next to you and then decide I was still too close to the stage and I got farther back and I sat somewhere in the middle, that would mean something else. And I would actually like to do that now, but I think that's not that I want to get off the stage, but I would like to do that because it actually points to what I'm most interested in now, which is the idea of equality. And as long as we're sitting above you on this stage, we aren't with you. And that's an exact, that's an absolute example of the way space works for me. I also want to ask you about Los Angeles, you know, what it meant coming to New York and that particular time period and working with Wanda and Lorraine and other people. And I guess being by coastal in a particular time period, how that was for you in the 70s? Actually, I think Linda was the one that made me want to be by coastal. And then I applied to the Studio Museum in Harlem and so in 1984 I came to New York and it was permanent after that. Can I just say something to what I need to say this to Mary? You know, yeah, jam was the space, but it was, it was you artists who were eager and thirsty and just desires of taking risk. Something that doesn't happen enough today and hasn't happened for a long time in the creative process from my perspective among artists. Artists at that time were not afraid of not knowing and in fact were very much about let's discover. That's what made jam's energy. It wasn't the space, it was really you all wanting to take risk. Well, but we were also like people who were on a desert and hadn't had water for, you know, ever. So you gave us the opportunity to take the risks and we might not have been so aware of those risks because we were so thirsty. Well, Lorraine, I want to ask you about your work in a show. So I wanted to ask you first, before we get to River's first draft, about Millie Bourgeois-Noray and I just want to hear you talk about kind of your motivations for making a piece. And also I think the legacy of it because it's been included a lot recently in terms of the Student Museum of Harlem, and now Brooklyn Museum. There's been a lot of attention to that particular art piece. I just want to hear you talk more about it. Well, I think I basically it was a piece that announced my intention to become an artist, to be an artist. I had come from many other different worlds and for me, there was always a question about what was the world I wanted to live in and I had gone to the Iowa Writers Workshop and I realized that I did not want to live in a world of totally verbal people of, you know, in that world where you had to sit and like, you know, listen to poetry readings and give poetry readings and that sort of thing. And I saw an advertisement for a show that was at PS1 and it was called Afro-American Abstraction and I went and it was an advertisement for the opening. I went to the opening and it was the first time in my entire life that I had ever felt myself completely surrounded by people like me that I wanted to be around. It was 200 gorgeous black artists, you know, all smart, all good-looking, all everything, you know. And I said, okay, I want that. And it took a couple of years, I think, before I saw another article in The Village Voice. It was about Linda and she had closed her gallery on 57th Street and was building a new gallery. And so I went and I went down and I did something that was kind of like a reversion to his past life and I became a very bourgeois lady and I volunteered. I don't know if you're right. I said, I'll do anything. I'll do anything, you know. And literally, I stuffed envelopes for about three weeks. I don't know if you remember this. And then suddenly somebody realized, oh, she doesn't have to stuff the envelopes. She can write the press releases. And then I started writing the press releases. So it was like, I kind of like went to Dust Above Midtown because I wanted to be part of it. I didn't care how I was going to be part of it. But I also knew that I was kind of like a wolf in sheep's clothing because I knew I was going to do something. I didn't know what I was going to do. But after a while, I actually put together my reaction to the Afro-American Abstraction Show and my desire to be part of Dust Above Midtown. And at some point, I was teaching in SVA. I was crossing Union Square on my way home and I just felt myself covered with gloves, you know? And I realized, where did they come from? And I realized, well, that my basic response to Afro-American Abstraction like Love the Crowd. But the show was gorgeous. It was beautiful. It was perfect. And I felt it was almost too perfect. It was with white gloves on. And I wanted to make a statement about that, about how I felt that needed to be disrupted somehow. And so I created this character. It was first came the gloves, then came the whip because the gloves seemed to me like the sign of internalized repression. And I needed something that was external. So I made plantations move, which was, you know, the external thing. And then I wanted to make an extension. So I inserted flowers into each of the studs of the whip. And I said, well, who is she, right? And I realized, well, she's this creature or creation, maybe a creature who is actually revolting against her own past. She's actually revolting against what we've all been trained to be, which was well-behaved. And so I said, but I'm not the only person. All of us are in this together. And I realized it was a totally international condition. If you went to Paris, if you went to Berlin, if you went anywhere, you would find people just like us. And so I made this imaginary beauty contest in Cayenne, the capital of French Cayenne. And she got crowned, she won the crown that year. And it turns out that the year she won the crown was presumably the year I was graduating from Wellesley. And then this was 1980. So it says, Mademoiselle Bourgeois won 1955 on this. But actually, this is her 25th anniversary. And so she went, at the time she was in 1955, I was wearing goddamn black white gloves. You know, I was. They required them of spelmanites. Okay, all right. We had to wear them Founder's Day, all white and gloves with hats. So I mean, I was really definitely a part of this, but I was getting rid of it when I did this performance. And I did this performance unannounced. And I thought I might lose every friend I had because down there, all of these artists had been the artists in Afro-American abstraction. And I wasn't trying to make a critique, not of them personally, but of something larger. And I was terrified. And I really thought that people would dislike this. And I finished this performance. You know, my back was all welted with this whip and everything. And I looked over and this woman was rushing to me with her arms outstretched. And she said, that's the best thing I've ever seen. And I just was, I was like dumbfounded that she would have that response. And it was two months later, three months later, two months later, I got a call from Janet and on Linda's behalf, and she was asking me to represent the gallery in dialogues, which was a performance show that they were having. I couldn't believe, I couldn't believe the sophistication, the love, all of the various, every combination of things. It was just something I will never, ever forget. You know that. I can hardly talk about it without tearing up. But I have to say that after that moment, I said, yes, I'll do a performance. It was like Halloween, right? And I said, I'll do a performance. And the only performance I could, I was out in San Francisco. I had just bought a calf tan that was gorgeous. And I said, oh, I'll wear this calf tan. And then I thought, what did I do? And I said, I said, I'll do a performance called Nefertiti Devonio Revangeline. So that's how that got done. And then the next thing I did, which could never, ever have happened without the gallery, was in all of the connections through the gallery, which is because the gallery was not just a creative director. It was not just brilliant artists. It was a whole coterie of people that were around it, including wonderful art historians, wonderful curators from other institutions. It was all these people. And all of them together made it possible for me to do the pieces. Beside matters that was going on up there, which is Rivers First Draft in Central Park. I got invited by Gilbert Coker, who was part of the scene. And half the people that were in it were people I knew from Dust Above Midtown. I mean, it was just a total, and the only people that were in the audience were from Dust Above Midtown. There were like 40 people there that day, right? And they were all from Dust Above Midtown. So I mean, I feel that I had the opportunity to become an artist through Dust Above Midtown. It took maybe four years or five years for the process to sort of like come to a conclusion. And even the piece that sort of like topped it off, which was Art Is, was something that, just above Midtown, acted as the 401, 501C or whatever it was that helped the application with the New York Council on the arts. So it was a complete envelopment and support. So I want to ask all three people about, as we close out the panel, thinking about imagination. All three of you have radically imagined things into existence that didn't exist before. So I wanted to ask you about imagination and your work. And I think also, just going towards a title of this exhibition about revolution, particularly in a Trump moment, what revolution means to you guys in terms of your work or just in terms of what's happening in the present moment. Thank you. I think since the age of six, art for me has always had the power, the possibility of having a direct impact on the socioeconomic and cultural place where it exists. And for me, revolution is that now. And now I'm an urban farmer. And for me, these farms are forms of art that are having a direct impact in the communities I'm most concerned about and love. Well, I can't say that I just learned about revolution. I think I've been in revolutionary mode since I was five years old or something. But I think that learning to speak as a revolutionary is a very long process. And I think that when I was a child, when I was debating in high school and so forth, that I spoke in a very direct fashion. And then you go to college and then you get in the real world and you learn how to make the indirect. That's a revolutionary comment, right? And I've been basically unlearning that and learning how to speak directly again. So I wanted to close out the panel also, which was on display here thinking about friendship, right? So I think what this panel really demonstrates is what it means to think of friendship as not just something you have, but friendship is actually like a praxis. Like friendship actually creates things. It creates spaces. It creates collaborations. It creates opportunities to imagine other possibilities. So with that, I want to thank Marin and Linda and Lorraine for sharing your insights with us today. Yuri, can I say one final thing about all of us? All of us, we are all related.