 I'm Anne Pasternak, I'm the Shelby White and Leon Levy Director of the Brooklyn Museum, and on behalf of our board and the entire Brooklyn Museum family, welcome to the Seventh Fund for African American Art Gala honoring the one and only, the extraordinary, the exceptional Pamela Joyner. Did you know that for nearly a hundred years the Brooklyn Museum has had a commitment to showing the work of great African American artists? It's true, we mounted such important monographic exhibitions, including two Jacob Lawrence shows in 1960 and 1987, shows in the 70s by James Vandercie, Romare Bearden, and nearly 20 years ago, Cary James Marshall. We have had the honor of working with such great contemporary artists as Cahinde Wiley and Lorna Simpson and Wengechi Mutu and Mickalene Thomas. We have curated scholarly groundbreaking and influential group exhibitions such as Witness, Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s. And I am proud to share that in just a few weeks we will be opening the first major museum show of African American women artists from the 1960s to mid-80s called We Wanted a Revolution, Black Radical Women. You'll all get special invitations for that too, and the books. For the past seven years, thanks to a group of truly committed and visionary women, and I'm going to ask them to stand, Tracey Reese, Sharlene Goins, and Sandra Cornwall, Sharlene, I'm sorry I asked you to stand. Because of these three women, we were able to go beyond exhibitions and build what we hope will be one of the seminal collections of African American pre-contemporary art. Because of their vision and their hard work and all of your support, including the involvement of our former Andrew Mellon Curator of American Art, Terry Carbone, and her predecessor, Linda Farber, because of them and all of you, we have been able to represent the depth of African American artistic practice over the course of two centuries more fully and permanently than I believe any other New York museum. And this is also possible largely because each year we have a wonderful, deserving, amazing honoree, and this year we all know we're here to celebrate Pamela Joyner. Can't clap enough. When in business school at Harvard, Pamela met our mutual friend and an honoree at the museum this past fall, the one and only, Lowry Stokes-Sims, who was then Curator at the Met. Through Lowry, Pamela was exposed to the work of great African American artists. She was struck by their formidable challenges and saw them as, quote, pioneers with real grit and courage, and indeed they were, and they are. She was moved by their plight to assert their creative right to be seen and heard. And so with her husband, Alfred Giafrida, Pamela was motivated to collect their work, not just for their own pleasure, but to share with the world their passionate belief in these artists and that their stories are our stories. They have assembled without question an extraordinary collection of modern and contemporary art that celebrates legends as well as emerging artists of Africa and the African diaspora over the past hundred years. Artists who defied limitations. Artists who defied social conventions. Artists who defied prejudice. Artists who defied isolation. And artists who were insistent in telling our truths. Their collection shares the struggles of civil rights, equal rights, and the passion to overcome great obstacles. It is a collection that tells the story of triumph against all odds with dignity and beauty. It's a collection based on necessity and urgency and the hope that society may be transformed as a more empathetic, just and equal society through this art. Personal transformation, social transformation, that is what great art does. It is, we hope, what the Brooklyn Museum does. And for sure, it is the radical work of Pamela Joyner. Tonight, inspired by her vision, we have asked some of our artist friends who have been a big part of Pamela's life to respond to their predecessors, those great pioneering African-American artists who are represented in the Brooklyn Museum collection. I am pleased to share that the four artists we love, Simone Lee, Hugo McLeod, Julie Moreto, and Jack Whitten, will join us shortly on stage along with the talented curator, Rujeko Hockley, who has sadly left the Brooklyn Museum, but is, we're very proud of her being at the Whitney. Welcome back, Ru. At first, it is my pleasure to introduce our new Melon Curator of American Art, Kim Orcutt, to tell you a little bit about some of our recent acquisitions. Kim. Well, thanks, Ann, very much. It's a privilege to help celebrate the amazing work that's been done over the past several years to bring the finest examples of African-American art into the Museum's collection and into the conversation about the history of American art. With all of your help, we've recently purchased one of the finest examples I've seen of the work of Edward Mitchell Bannister. Thank you, and there he is, the most important African-American landscape painter of the late 19th century. Bannister was born and raised in Canada, where slavery had been abolished. In 1850, he established himself as one of the first African-American artists in Boston, where he was active in the thriving abolitionist community. After the Civil War, he moved to Rhode Island, where he became a cultural leader. Banner won a medal at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, making him the first African-American painter to receive a national award. He also helped found the Providence Art Club in 1878, which became the model for the Rhode Island School of Design. This Rhode Island landscape is a large and significant mid-career painting that shows the influence of the French Barbizon style that was warmly embraced in New England. And the painting also shows its past. You can see that the varnish has become a little yellow. And if you looked really carefully, you might find a tear in the upper right that maybe needs some repair. And our talented conservators will be working on this painting in the coming months to restore it to its original glory. And we're very much looking forward to its debut in the galleries. Our example of support for the fund has inspired some wonderful gifts as well. And I want to thank them tonight, Charlotte and Warren Gohans, for a Charles E. Porter still life and a Robert S. Duncanson landscape that you'll be seeing a little later, Peg Alston for a Charles Alston painting, Milton and Nancy Washington for a Grafton Tyler Brown Yosemite landscape, Jason Wright, who got us started on Bannister with a gift of five pastels, and they're light sensitive so we can't display them as often as we would like, but you'll see one of them on the screen tonight. Ian Fuller gave a Norman Lewis watercolor, Audlin Higgins-Williams and E.T. Williams Jr. donated a Hale Woodruff watercolor, Camille and Luther Clark presented a library collection on African-American art. And last but not least, we are grateful to all of you, the donors to the fund. And now I have the pleasure of introducing our moderator for tonight's program, our dear, dear former colleague, Rue Jaco Hawkely. She is assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Previously, she was assistant curator of contemporary art here at the Brooklyn Museum, where she worked on a number of acclaimed exhibitions, some imaginatively drawn from the collection, and others focusing on artists such as Latoya Ruby Frazier, the Bruce High Quality Foundation, Kara Walker, and Kehinde Wiley. And we look forward to seeing her work as co-curator of the much anticipated forthcoming exhibition that Ann mentioned, We Wanted a Revolution, Black Radical Women 1965 to 85. Please join me in welcoming Rue. Thank you so much for being here, and thank you to Ann and to Kim and to everybody who's organized this event and obviously to the fund, the many beautiful and wonderful brilliant people that worked on this, and Pamela, oh, there you are, thank you for coming all the way from San Francisco during a snowstorm. So we're going to get started, and I'm just going to tell you a little bit about our program for tonight. We wanted to bring the fund, which as you just heard, is pre-1945 works of art together with the present. All artists were contemporary artists once, at the time that they made the work, obviously. So we wanted to bring four of our most brilliant artists of our time up on the stage, also people who Pamela has worked with who are featured in her collection, some of whom live in Brooklyn, so we have that going. So we're going to kind of have a rapid-fire conversation myself and to start with Hugo McLeod right here, and then we have Simone Lee, Julie Meritou, and Jack Whitten. So this is a really wonderful group of artists, and we're really kind of blessed and very lucky to have them. So thank you in advance. Thank you, Hugo, for coming on stage with me first. And let's see if I can figure this out. Okay. Hugo McLeod. So very quickly, Hugo McLeod works primarily in abstraction, large-scale, beautiful works. He recently had a wonderful show at Sean Kelly Gallery, which I hope you saw, and if not, he'll tell us what else he's up to so you can find him later. But we're going to get started because time is of the essence. So we asked each artist to select a work that was brought into the collection through the fund over the last, you know, several years that it's been existent. So Hugo chose this beautiful painting by Buford Delaney, entitled Fang Crone Fruit from 1945. So the first thing I wanted to ask you, Hugo, is why did you pick this, what drew you to this work, or to this artist? Yeah. I was drawn more to the artist rather than the work. Because as I was reading more on Buford, I really started to see that he, I identified with him that he also struggled with identity within his work and identity as well within his life. Because, and I think it's interesting as an artist, sorry, I'm a little nervous, but I usually get much better in time. He's doing great though, right? I think he was interesting as an artist because he didn't identify himself in a particular manner. He was in abstraction, he was in modernist work, he did still life, he did portraiture, and it related much to my practice as well because I felt he was an artist that was continually searching as an artist and he didn't want to be identified as something particular. You know, like they say that he started abstraction before abstraction took off, but he didn't really want to be part of that movement as well. And I think that it's an interesting place to be because I feel like as an artist we come into being an artist because we want to be free. And I feel like he continually wanted to be free within his practice to explore these different ideas. So that was very interesting to me. As well as there was also a very, another interesting point of his personal life. And that was that though he respected being, he respected the black art movement, he didn't want to be identified as a black artist or as a Negro artist, as he would say. In that period in which he was active, yeah. And I very much relate to that practice as well. I'm an abstract artist, I deal with materials, I deal with subject matter, but I'm an artist and that's how I want to be identified as. So through the reading of that and also understanding of where he came from from Tennessee and the upbringing that he came from, his mother was born into slavery. He has a reason to identify with so many of these things, but he chose not to. And I found that to be very interesting. Okay, thank you. And for some background, as you can probably see from the slide, he's an artist who's born in 1900, lives through kind of three quarters of the 20th century. Very active in the early, this piece is from 1945. Active during the Harlem Renaissance, but was more closely associated with the village. So I think to your point, this kind of desire to differentiate himself on his own terms is something that we see frequently in many, all artists, particularly African-American artists perhaps, who are sometimes saddled with something they're not interested in. So I think that that kind of freedom to choose and that freedom to work in whichever way that you choose is something that we can see in Delaney. And of course, you know, a beautiful still life in general and the influence of African art, which you can see with the fang object, the statue. So this kind of merging what, you know, the Alan Locke kind of the new Negro, this kind of moment in the 1920s, 30s, 40s. So in general, Hugo, I'm curious about, does art history generally influence your practice pre-1945 or otherwise? How do you see yourself in a lineage in regards to any artist, in regards to the past generally? I can't say that it directly influences my practice, to be completely honest. I think everything that we see as an artist, everything that we put our eyes upon, that somebody has done in the past that makes us question what we're doing in our own practice. So as I come upon this, and then as I research him and start to see, you know, when he started to dive into abstraction, when he was doing portraiture, when he was doing still life, a lot of these things that he was doing back in 1940s, then it can definitely relate to my practice now. Because I see myself as well diving into all of these different areas. You know, I'm doing a series of portraitures right now that actually deals with black identity, you know, and it deals with the... Tell us more. The portraiture that I'm doing is our self-portraits of myself and the title of the whole body of work is being black, black enough. And it's the question that I have, you know, is being black a black artist, is that black enough? Like, why do I have to do anything else? So, you know, it's something that I battle within myself. You know, I come from a very, I've come from a mixed background, something as well that relates to me, what Buford is that, you know, he came up in Tennessee and there was written history about him and his brother and how they were always hands-on making stuff as kids. And I remember stories from my father who grew up in Houston, Texas during segregation about him and his brother, how they would race home. Like, my whole family on my father's side are all artisans as well, and how they would race home to make something. But they weren't necessarily making anything for commerce. You know, it wasn't for sales, it was just the act of creating. So, I think, you know, to come full circle again, come back to the whole thing, like, I think that as I'm educating myself because I as well come from an academic side of art history, I didn't go to school. So, like, as I'm coming upon these artists and these times, as I research them, they definitely then relate to my work, because then I can see, like, well, this makes sense of why I'm practicing this, and this makes sense in how it relates to the history of art. Wonderful. Well, I'm going to redirect us a little bit because we are here to talk about Pamela a little bit, and I know that she has collected your work. So, I just wanted you to speak a little bit about kind of what, who is Pamela to you and what kind of influence or impact has, do you feel that she's had in your, in your work, in your career, et cetera? Well, I think, I think the first, my first connection with Pamela was through an email, and she emailed me and asked, I think, I believe she can come to the studio. I believe that was correct, and this was four studios ago. So, she came to that studio, which was behind a cafe at the time, and, you know, and now I'm in a completely different studio, and she's always, she's always been there. She's always been very well connected to what I'm doing, very hands-on, very informative. But I think the biggest thing about Pamela that I always found, and I found it, you know, to be honest, with very few people within our world is that you can shoot really straight with Pamela. And I think that is very valuable to somebody that you can really talk straight to about what you're dealing with as an artist, you know, because I feel as an artist, like you're going through a lot of things and as you grow as an artist within this art world, you're faced with a lot of things and a lot of decisions that you have to make, and a lot of times you don't really know how to, you know, how to make the best decision. And you need somebody that you can really trust that doesn't have any incentive to take anything, you know, doesn't have any incentive to sway you any type of way. And she's always been that person that you can really shoot it to you straight and you always get a, you know, honest answer from her. And that's something I personally have valued from my relationship with her. Wonderful. So I think that we're actually going to leave it right there because I have such a lovely tribute to Pamela. Well, OK, no, tell me more. Sorry. You told me you wanted to get off the stage. OK, very quickly then, you're working on this portraiture series. Do you have where can we see it? Do you have things coming up? How can we find you? Hugo, what do you have going on? I mean, this is actually one of my galoshes right there. And she doesn't even know about this body of work. It's actually sneak peek. No, but you know, I think that's something that actually really related to me about the effort is that, you know, if you come into my studio right now, I'm working on a portraiture series I'm working on. I'm working on basically I'm working on about five different bodies of work all at the same time, you know, some stuff that I've been doing that are continuations of bodies. And then, you know, I dive into other things or I get an idea. And the portraiture series is something that I wanted to start a long time ago. And it was really with that title is being black black enough because it's always been a question as an African American abstract artist, where is the identity of my work? You know, where does it come from and doesn't need to have that? And, you know, it's always been one of those things because I'm half Austrian as well. I was like, why does it have to have that subject matter to it? You know, this is the work. It's it's left for you to read. So, you know, hopefully it's a body of work that actually comes out to being something promising. Right now, it's a bunch of black on white. That's about all I can tell you. But I I I find it interesting. Nonetheless, that's what being an artist is, you know, it's exploring these ideas that you have. If it comes to nothing, then who cares? It's not it's not the point of anything else besides just making art. OK, well, wonderful, Hugo. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Pamela. So in our rapid fire method, I will now welcome the great Simone Lee to the stage. How are you? I'm wonderful. Thank you for being with us tonight. It's really wonderful for me to be sitting with Simone, who is an artist that I've known for a while, but admired for much longer. And I'm sure many of you know her beautiful work recently. It was at the New Museum, Black Women Artist for Black Lives Matter. Simone has been incredibly instrumental in that group, and they are now doing a project at Project Pro Houses in Houston. Coming up very soon. Yes. OK. So she's very busy. So we're very lucky to have her here. And I really appreciate you being here. And Simone also lives like you could throw a stone to her house from the Brooklyn Museum. So that's very special. We are surrounded by artists here. So Simone selected a beautiful sculpture by an artist named Nancy Elizabeth Profitt, who also like Buford Delaney was born. Well, she was born even earlier in 1890. But, you know, these are people who were around in the earlier half of the 20th century. Untitled head came into the collection. It's a beautiful piece. It's on view right now. I should have mentioned that, actually. So is, I believe, the Buford Delaney. So please go see them on the fifth floor after this. But so Simone, we're going to do a kind of similar process. Can you tell us a little bit about this piece? What drew you to it? What drew you to the artist? And again, I should have said with Hugo, you know, this can be affinity or it can be perhaps not the opposite. But, you know, sometimes we're drawn to things that we're not quite, we don't quite like. Just putting it out there. Go ahead. Well, I have always thought of Nancy Elizabeth Profitt as part of a triad of artists, including Edmonia Lewis and Augusta Savage. And one of the things that's true about all of these women is that there is not that much work available. So for me, it's just almost like, you know, a meteor that I have her work here in the museum. It's actually quite significant to just be able to be next to these pieces. But when I talked to you about doing this talk for Pamela, I happened upon, I started doing some research on her career and I happened upon her diary, which is startling and changed my life. Oh, well, look. Fun for African-American art event changed Simone Lee's life, so we have that going for us. And I'm not exaggerating, because I'm writing a talk for RISD and she was the first African-American artist at RISD and she did not have the support of her family, so she paid for that by working as a domestic the entire time. And then she made her way to France because she could not compete or deal with the various forms of racism she was dealing with here. And she worked and she starved and she worked and she starved and she wrote this amazing diary. And so I wanted to read some of those pieces because it's, you know, a lot of it feels like she could have written it last week. And while you just find the section, I just want to say very quickly that yes, as Simone said, a lot, very little of profit's work survives. And so it is incredibly poignant. And when you see this piece, it is an incredibly poignant piece, I find, just even to look at it. And so there is something about, yes, this kind of commitment to being an artist, kind of above and beyond all. Yeah, no matter what. So this is about a day after she's arrived. So this is four pages into a 50-page diary. And what year is she writing this? She, it's in 1922. Out of pure weakness, I wrote to my husband to come over. This was a very stupid mistake on my part. He being a good man, but completely helpless, without ambition, without hope, character, personality, and of a fearful nature. That was a read. Yes. I couldn't believe that she wrote this. And it goes on and on. And then she says, as soon as I could stand up, I went to work, sick, but with a dogged deliberation to conquer. I worked away on my first piece of sculpture with a calm assurance and savage pleasure of revenge. This is the way she talks. And I really loved the way she posits sculpture as revenge. And so for the past few weeks, I've been thinking about that, I mean, as a revenge against whatever forms of racism she was encountering. And just thinking about this process of making sculptures, being able to really, that she's actually literally rewriting her subjectivity back into history, you know? And also the thing that I think is important about Elizabeth's prophet. I mean, there's even some moments in this diary where she talks about the way it felt to swing like clay in her arm and throw it up on the stand. And she literally worked her way into the hospital several times from starvation. She talks about her pants falling off of her body as she was working. And she doesn't talk about it with pleasure, but there's an obvious pride that she has in her accomplishments. And I'm just really thrilled, you know, that I was able to find this diary. The other thing. Does the diary, was the diary published? Where, like, where exactly did you find it? And how does it exist in the world? There's an archive in Providence, in this particular 50 pages at Brown. And it's online. I can send you the link. Sounds like it's a good reading. Even the handwriting is interesting. I'm just lost in this thing. It's so exciting. And then also, she just had a full life, you know, despite all these things. She went to Spelman and started a sculpture program there and taught for 10 years. So I'm just thrilled that this piece is here. And I'm glad that you asked me to do this because I would not have found this diary. And yeah. That's a wonderful smile. It means so much to me. And I even thought that the way she talks about work and the way she conceives of what sculpture means and how it relates to her own body and these moments of exhilaration as she doesn't have food reminded me, it foregrounded Adrian Piper's Food of the Spirit, where she also fast and recites con. This is a piece from the 1970s. So a very different period by a very different artist. But yes, was she fasted for a period as kind of an exercise in both kind of philosophy. She was a student of philosophy during her doctorate at Harvard but also as a conceptual art practice. So documenting kind of maybe every day. I'm not sure how often, but documenting kind of her body kind of as a... There's something like... Wasted away a little bit. Phenomenological about both of the processes. And so I felt like I just found a treasure. So thank you. That is... Well, thank you to the fund. Honestly, thank you. And thank you to the museum for acquiring that work. That's really to me like, this is exactly why this program, all of us being here and you four artists being here, especially I thought was such an important way to kind of honor Pamela as well as the fund and to think about kind of art history, our predecessors in the field. So generally speaking, Simone, in your work, do you look to art history? Is that something that's been an influence in your life as an artist over the last however many decades? Generally speaking, who are your heroes? I have a lot of heroes. I think the most important hero is Anonymous. There's so many women that didn't make it into the archive. So I'm always thinking about her. And I don't know. It's hard to know where to begin when I think about who I'm... I think about who I've been influenced recently like artists like Lorena Grady, who's gonna be in your show, who I've even had the opportunity to collaborate with and she's, her, especially her writing has been a huge influence on my work. Her work is on view in the Egyptian galleries. You can go see it afterwards as well. I would say that these narratives, I mean, the other thing that's interesting about this diary is it reminds me of Octavia Butler's like writing, I don't know if you saw that page that someone found where she said that I will... From her own diaries. From her own diaries and she said, I will be a best-selling novelist and I will... And I just think it's so interesting and it's similar to some of the pieces that were here at the Sackler Center that Lorraine Hansberry wrote. And looking at these different biological, I mean biographical fragments of these different... What's interesting to me is throughout, there's a kind of tenacity and fierceness and aware that this level of confidence is what's necessary to accomplish the task and so I've been very inspired by that. That's incredibly inspiring. Thank you, Simone. So I think actually we're gonna, I feel like we should leave it there because this tenacity in this heart is so much... I mean it is, I think it's at the heart as we learned earlier about Pamela's collecting. It is kind of, you nobody does anything without having a real kind of core, steely kind of core in the heart of it to keep you going both over time but also at those moments of indecision, moments of confusion, moments of doubt or just moments of it being very hard. And so I think that is so much about, I think sometimes what is missed about being an artist is that if you work with artists you know so deeply that you guys work incredibly hard and you are incredibly tenacious and museums when we work with artists we see that and we know that. So yeah, thank you. Thank you. Okay, next in our lineup is the brilliant Julie Morattu. I feel like a talk show host. This is amazing. I'm like very, very comfortable with this introduction in and out. So Julie is also, I'm basically, this is a blessing all around for me to be up here with these four artists. In particular, Julie is one of the first artists that I knew of as a contemporary artist and if you know that. My first job was at the studio museum in Harlem and I worked on an exhibition called Frequency and Julie had been in freestyle which was the kind of precursor, the first F show out of four. And a very influential one. This was in 2001. Julie has done one million amazing things since then including, you know, be a US Medal of the Arts honoree only just last year or 2015, two years ago. So yes, it is really lovely to be here with you. So Julie selected this work, a beautiful painting by Robert Selden-Dunkinson, Dream of Arcadia after Thomas Cole. And so this work is from 1852. So now we're kind of moving back even further from our first two works. So Julie, we'll talk a little bit more about the context but tell us what drew you to this work. I mean, who's not like blown away that this work is painted by an African-American artist in 1852, I mean, 1852. And to me, just I have my own kind of fascination with Hudson River Valley school painters right now for a project I'm working on but I was really when you think of Hudson River Valley or Hudson River School paintings and you think of what the project is in retrospect, how we understand that project of painting. And it's kind of the reading of that in terms of the American colonial project and the manifest destiny and the expansionist project of the American kind of imagination and the effort to somehow capture the sublime and the awe of this landscape and possibility which at the same time is a landscape that is inevitably that the flip side of that sublime is the colonial sublime. You know, the kind of intense violence and fear that's kind of implicit in that awe in a sense but also in that project and so for me, I mean, I look at painting, I study painting constantly but to see this painting, especially when I was looking at a lot of other Thomas Cole and to see this painting after Thomas Cole being painted by an artist who's living in or at the time my understanding and I'm not sure if this was painted in Cincinnati but my understanding is that he was living there, right? Yeah, he spent a lot of his life in Cincinnati so I'm also not sure but we can and my understanding and then he came and then he went to upstate New York so he was painting in this context but with an intention of being part of this conversation, studying Poussin, who I study, studying, what's his name? Yeah, Lorraine, Claude Lorraine and this type of landscape painting. Thank you, Terri. Yeah and this type of, and then studying this but studying through like engravings and studying through the only way that he could because I'm unable to see the original. Yeah, unable to see the original and but being in this city that was this fervent kind of abolitionist city but also very close to this slave state, slave like Kentucky and also being on a frontier city of this expansionist project and being in the midst of that and choosing like becoming one of the finest landscape painters of his generation working at this craft, this was this language and this project that he was involved in and there's an intense kind of contradiction that I see in looking back at that and I still, I was just talking earlier with Samuel like trying to make sense of how and it's really, to me it's in my interest in looking at these kind of paintings in the touch of these paintings in the effort of trying to, there's no way to avoid a political in this image and philosophy. Can you say a little bit more about that? Well, just how you're thinking about how there's a, it's called dream of Arcadia. There's this idea of this transcendental idea of philosophical idea of engagement and humanity and this is an artist working in a moment of this is when slavery is legal, this is when the Civil War took place, this is painting was made before the 13th Amendment. This is when this landscape was impossibly connected with and couldn't be disconnected from the violence of disallowing humanity to the black body or to that, so to me that that was the language to then use to try to insist on humanity, insist on self kind of intent. Autonomy. Autonomy, yeah, that's what it kind of like, it blew me away, so. Yeah, well on the Hudson River School is so interesting because of, as you said, this relationship to manifest destiny, the kind of sublime landscape and this kind of the vastness of America that's being such a huge amount, part of the American identity and psyche but also this art history, the school of art history, but meanwhile, you know, indigenous people lived in these places and many Hudson River School paintings you'll see, you know, like the tiny, you know, indigenous person because of the scale, but. And his paintings too. Yes, and these ones too, exactly, then Arcadia. Or black bodies that, you know, and it's complicated and to me that is so fascinating and the contradictions inherent in that that are constant and so part of me is also like, I can't, I wonder how, like why can't I look at it without imposing the political of who he was but Thomas Cole's project is implicit in terms of what that project of, we understand this entire school of painting to be but at the same time there's this whole, this other dialogue of having to prove your worth as a painter, as an artist, as in kind of owning this language and to me that's that other drive of insisting on themselves and being there and that insistence on this capability and it goes back to looking at those earlier, just the sculptor, yeah, the previous works and both artists actually. Something that just occurred to me actually, Julie as we're talking, so you work in abstraction but there's a very much kind of topographical, geographical landscape element to a lot of the work that you make and I'm curious if you can just talk very quickly about kind of, this is what we think of when we think of landscape painting but I've heard your paintings discussed as landscape paintings couldn't be more different so I'm curious, you know, in two minutes or less. You can continue after but I think it's interesting. So right now I'm working on these two very big paintings for San Francisco, SF moment for the lobby and one of the ways that I was trying to locate them there is by actually looking at Hudson River Valley paintings and Thomas Cole and Bierstadt painting and inverting them, like actually reducing them to an eight bit pixelized kind of map of this landscape but because of the violence that's implicit in this landscape for me, the kind of the internal side or the flip side of that sublime and that gaze and that what was kind of tried to be described in a sense of like this being in awe of just not this landscape but this project and what the cost and what the bigger kind of desire of that project could be and then to find this really in the midst of that project was kind of really, it made me rethink everything again within that and those contradictions are what's so fascinating about this creative project or art or you know and Pamela's like how you support the possibility of that other imagination and in terms of our moment. And tell us a little bit about how your relationship to Pamela and kind of. Pamela is the kind of heroine and advocate of the resistance like you are the marker of making and seriously for decades like putting together this amount of work that's not erased or becomes hidden figures as a lot of this work that we're talking about has become and that this is not part of the history of Hudson River Valley painting that we study but that this is becomes this aside and what you've done with your collection to the many artists from Sam Gilliams, Norman Lewis and many, many, many, many others that were so like where I didn't know of these artists I had to like come to them later and they're part of the language, part of our conversation now because of the work that you've done and the collections you've put together and putting that on the map including the work all of you do to maintain that. Yes including the work that all of us do absolutely. Well thank you Julie, this is perfect. And now I am happy to introduce our final, my final conversationalist, a person who honestly needs no introduction, the great, great, great Jack Whitton. And Jack has a beautiful show that's up at Hauser and Worth Gallery in Chelsea right now so please go see it, it is stunning. And so Jack chose not one but two beautiful works that came in through the fund. So the first is Norman Lewis's Untitled from 1944, this is a work on paper and so Jack I'm just, I'm gonna tell you guys what the second one is first just so you know, this is the beautiful Edward Mitchell Bannister Pastel from 1885 that was mentioned previously. So how did you come to your selections? Yeah let's start here first. Oh perfect. Introduction to the previous painting. The word sublime is not to be taken for granted. It is one of the most powerful symbols we have in the history of art. There are only a few symbols available to the artists to investigate. The sublime is just one of them. We have technology, we have nature as a whole. Even fashion, there are references that has remained a constant throughout the history of art. And artists react to these symbols. What's amazing about this piece, now it's a pastel on paper. It's not a glorified oil on canvas which we tend to place more emphasis upon. But it must be said that it's the artist works on paper if you really want to see the evidence of soul in the artist. It's the paper before it gets to the paint on canvas. What's significant about this? We have to go back into history. For a black person to even contemplate the notion of the sublime at that time in history, refuted everything that white people had to say about black people. This was an act of, we speak of activism and so forth, but activism comes in many different colors, many different avenues to act. For a black man at that time to even contemplate the notion of the sublime. This is what's so revolutionary. Now, them ain't just trees you're looking at. Let's go a little further and then we'll go to the lawyers. No, go, we're following you. The sublime can come from anywhere. In truth, I see it every morning when I walk out of my house in Jackson Heights. Every morning I see it. Quite often throughout the history of art, nature has been the prime mover in the search for the divine. But in the morning when I hit the street on the way to the studio, every day of the week, I look down at a little toddler that might be six months old, one month old, one year old, and they look up at me like, it's the sublime for human nature to recognize the fact of the sublime makes us human. I don't give a fuck what nobody has to say. We can clap for that. And this is what's significant about the piece. It's immediate, it's nothing fancy. It's extremely dry bean pastel. It absorbs the light. It's not glossy. It doesn't reflect a lot of light and a lot of sequins and this and that. It's basic human stuff. That's what makes it important. In connection to that whole period. Another thing we have to speak of about this piece and this artist in particular. You have to remember, Tanner's was born much later. Henry Osawa Tanner. Tanner, yeah. Tanner knew this. He knew both of them. He knew these works, yeah. He knew Duncanson. He studied it. The point that I make here is, within the black community of artists, there is a continuity that is recognizable, definitively recognizable. And it's about time that all of us start paying attention to it. Absolutely. And Henry Osawa Tanner, for those of you don't know, is and was considered kind of the first successful, very well-known African-American artist. And I think this point about a lineage is so, so, so important. Absolutely. We have to acknowledge this. We have to acknowledge this. Let's move to the Lewis. I know we don't have much time. Okay. And so this is, as I said, from 1944. So we're leaping ahead about 15 years. 1944, it's untitled, but let's get real here. These are poker players. It's a card game. And it's not a game. They're playing for money. One of the things I used to ask Norman when I first met him, Norman hiding the hell of somebody to make a living out of this stuff. And Norman would look at me with those big eyes and he would say, ah, you know, I make a few bucks playing poker. I go to the racetrack all the time. Now I'm not saying this as a demeaning factor. I'm telling you, the man was a gambler. He played in the poker dens up in Harlem, late night poker dens. That guy on the right there. See the figure on the right? He's losing his shirt. The man is, it's like anxiety. The figure in the center, he's holding the card. For damn sure, the guy on the right is Norman. He's cool as a cucumber. He's gonna take the money and he's gonna walk out of that joint eight. It's also interesting to note that if we were to compare this to a previous card game, let's go back to Cezanne, the card players. Much earlier, Norman knew the painting. One thing about Norman Lewis, he knew the history of painting inside out. You could discuss any language with him in terms of art history and he knew. He was fully aware of the Cezanne card players. If you were to put the two of these together as subject matter, very good lesson comes out. We have a good lesson in sensibility. Very different from the Cezanne. This thing is very fluid, very open, shifting planes. In truth, when I look at this piece, I have a word for it. I call it shifting psychological tectonics. Planes are constantly shifting. Legacy of Norman Lewis that exists today, part of that continuity is why I'm sitting here today. That's where it's at. Now we move to Pamela. We have to start with the larger picture. The larger picture is the art world. We use the word quite often, we see it written. But we don't stop to think what it is. What is the art world? It's a big interconnected octopus. That's what it is. An octopus? Yes. Okay. I like octopus, I haunt them. I like to eat octopus. That's why I use the word octopus, that's metaphor. We have the museums. We have the director of the museums. We have the trustees of the museums. We have the curators of the museums, first tier. Then we have the galleries. We have the director of the galleries and the workers in the galleries. Whose primary job is to promote the artist's work and hopefully, not hopefully, we better make damn sure that they sell it. That's the gallery. We have the publications, art history books. We have the editors of art magazines. Lo and behold, we have the collectors. The supporters. This is where Pamela comes in. She represents a part of this so-called art world that we in the black community have not had before. This is where she comes in. To have somebody in that position, and I don't mind saying it, I don't mind clapping my hands when I say it, the woman is black. We haven't had this before. It should be a signal to every black person in society with financial means. Do any of you know how much money is wasted in the black community? Have you ever thought of that? Have you ever thought of how much money is wasted in the black community? This woman does not waste the money. She's doing something with it. She's part of that continuity. We need a thousand of Pamela's. That's what we need to make a difference. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I think that, honestly, so this is, I wanna bring it right back full circle because I think that's so much of what we are actually doing here and what the fund has been doing over these past several years is trying to create an army of Pamela's and they are already. Also, the three of you, Sandra, Charlotte and Tracy, you are in that lineage and this is why we're honoring Pamela this year. Yes, I think that is such a wonderful place for us to end and I'm gonna ask Jack for you to stay on the stage because I believe we have another thing that's about to happen. I'm not exactly sure what it is. But first of all, I'm just gonna say thank you so much. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Really quickly, I just wanted to say very quickly that if you have not seen or would like to see because you love it so much, a work by Jack Whitten, we have one on view here at the museum. Oh no, wait, we don't, it's gone. I'm sorry, this is what happens when you're transitioning. But in any case, it's a beautiful work in the Brooklyn Museum's collection, Black Monolith and we're so grateful to you for making it, for having it here on view for so long. So thank you again and let's go on to the next part. I am very excited to welcome to the stage last year's honorees, Charlotte and Warren Goans who are going to present the award and introduce Pamela. And before I do, I wanna say that this is one of those moments where you say, I'm really glad I was here. This was incredibly breathtaking evening and I'm so grateful to all the artists and to you, Ru, for sharing so deeply and so beautifully your thoughts about these works and about life and about art. So thank you, I was for clump the whole time. Okay, Charlotte, please come join us and Warren. Pamela, all of us who are involved at the Fund for African American Art are so very grateful to you for agreeing to be our honoree for orchestrating this fabulous public program. But most importantly, for your support of African American artists, your book, all the things that you've done that have brought African American artists to the world and not just to our small group. You have just done incredible work and we are so very grateful. Thank you. We do have just a small token of something, he can hold it for you because it's heavy. But it's just a token of our gratitude for your doings. Thank you so much. And if you would say a few words, please. This is a moment for thank yous. I have to thank Anne Pasternak and her wonderful team here at the Brooklyn Museum along with her trustees for putting together not only this wonderful evening, but for being stewards of a globally recognized and really forward-thinking collection that has embraced inclusiveness long before it was popular. I have to thank the four artists who spoke this evening. I'm really lucky. I get to wake up every morning and look at works by Simone and Julie and Hugh and Jack and I am inspired. That's mostly in part because I have no talent of my own. But these are people and these are objects that remind me and us of our own humanity and the ties which bind us, which are much more important than those ties that separate us. And so in our collecting, we're attempting to be activist. I really, Simone, like this notion of dogged determination for those of you who know me, I got sort of a little dose of that. And so what we really are hoping to do is to prevent the erasure that Julie referred to and to make certain that great talent. I mean, in a way it's easy because all of these people are talented in the ultimate way. So all I have to do and all people like me who love this art have to do is shine a light on excellence and that's what we're endeavoring to do and we're endeavoring to do it in a way that permanently etches the work into the full arc of the full art historical canon. So thank you for participating.