 Lisa Ferryton will be talking to us today about her book African American Art of Visual and Cultural History. Let me just give a point. Lisa is the first in a series of book talks, excuse me, the Office for the Advancement of Research, which is on every year. After serving for 16 years as a senior art historian and associate professor at Carson School of Design, Lisa became professor and founding chair of the art and music department at John Jay College. Her award-winning books African American Art of Visual and Cultural History and Creating Their Own Image, The History of African American Women Artists were published by Oxford University Press in 2005 and 2016, respectively. A third book for Oxford Press, the first truly inclusive and diverse history of American art will appear in 2018. Lisa has won dozens of awards for her scholarship in writing from the National Endowment of Arts, the Ford, Warhol, Daedalus, and Mellon Foundations, as well as from the American Library Association for Outstanding Contributions to Literature. She's also been awarded the coveted Endowed Scholars' Chair in the Humanities at Atlanta University's Spelman College. Lisa's expertise lies in the intersection of African American and female artistic identity. Lisa Gale Collins, a professor of art history at Vassar, has written about Lisa, Farrington's focus on the creativity of African American women offers new insights on visual art and its histories. And Lisa's work has been called Truly Enlightening and Engaging. Today, Lisa will be talking with us about her book African American Art of Visual and Cultural History. The book offers a current and comprehensive history that contextualizes black artists within the framework of American art as a whole. Lisa's book offers a fresh and compelling look at black artistic expression as considered one of the soundful works in the field. Please help me welcome Professor Lisa Farron. Everyone, I'm really glad to see so many students here, and I'm glad for those teachers in Magica. Every time I hear a description of who I am, I always wonder, who the heck is that? So up here, just get the book I'll show it to you. I thought it was my magnum opus, but apparently I haven't done it yet. But this book was conceived because for years, all of the books on African American art that I've read were written like history books rather than art books. And this bothered me because I have friends who wrote history. Is this echoing my too close to the line? It's okay. So I have friends, scholarly friends who were not African American who were writing large books on American art and western art. And periodically they would pick up the phone and call me up because they wanted to include minority artists in their book. And they would say, Lisa, I want to include somebody in my chapter on neoclassical sculpture. Were there any black people doing that? But of course there were. But the reason they were difficult to find is because almost every history of African American art ever published, and there were maybe 10 of them, were organized according to socio-political problems. So if you looked through the table of contents of a book called African American Art, it would be like this. Slavery, post reconstruction, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, which to me were not titles of chapters that had anything to do with art. They would have been titles of history books, of black history. So the problem with looking at black artists as black first and artists second is that they stay marginalized outside of the world's comprehension of art. And so it occurred to me that a book should be written that combines socio-political approaches, aesthetic approaches, as a matter of fact there were maybe 8 or 10 methodologies used to analyze art, and that these things could be discussed fluidly without only talking about politics or only talking about gender. And that the chapters should be organized according to the style of art that the work fit rather than the political problems that the artists were having. And that way it would be so much easier to integrate those artists into the larger canon. Those of you who have taken my class this month, you know how the class was canon, that's a rule. So that is the pitch that I made to my publisher and I got really excited. I have a lot of women in there. I'm going to put the artwork according to the style of art and I'm going to talk about photography and architecture. I'm so excited. And then of course my publisher said, yes, which then meant I had to bury myself in books and on the internet for literally two and a half years to actually write it, so be careful what you wish for. Having said that, hoping that someday someone would write a book on American art that wasn't just majority male American art, which tends to be what the books are. Only most art history books, no matter what they're written about, include about 10% women. Even though in the last 200 years, 150 years, more like 30 to 50% of women are maybe more. So an American art doesn't, books, if you pick one up and buy it, it doesn't include anywhere near the appropriate number of women or Latinos or Native Americans or African Americans or Asian Americans. So I managed to mention that to my editor and he said, okay, you're going to write that book. So now I'm going to write the book for next year for the 18 months if I don't go crazy. On American art that will include everyone and not just the few. So that's the book story. Now what I'd like to do is immerse you in two chapters of this book on African American art that show that African American artists are both a product of their cultural identity and a product of their avocation as artists and some of them really need to be understood as artists. So I don't really talk, at least in this talk, about race unless it comes up in the art or about gender, unless it's in the work of art. This talk is about abstract art. Oh, by the way, I should point that out but I'll just tell you. If you're ever interested in this book, I wrote a book, I wrote a manuscript that this one has 450 pages. I wrote a manuscript that was 600 pages and my editor said that book would be too heavy. Nobody's going to be able to carry it anywhere. So cut out a quarter of the book. So I had to slash and burn essays that I wrote on lots of artists. It's a very hard choice to make. Very difficult to decide who stays and who goes out. But Oxford was kind enough to put up an entire website with all the excise essays on their, you know, if you go to OVP slash Barrington slash something, there they all are. So that's what I love about academic presses is that they're really interested in education. Bottom line is important but it's not the only thing. Okay, so shall we begin? Now this I'm going to read because I can talk forever and then you have to leave in the middle of my talk. This way it's down to specific time period. Okay, so we're going to lower the lights a little bit and we're going to talk about abstract art that happens to be made by African Americans. So in discussing rock formations, just stay with me, the American sculptor and philosopher John Flanagan made a cogent statement. He said, there is often an occult traction in sheer abstract form. It fascinates with a queer, atavistic nostalgia as either a remote memory or a stirring impulse from the depth of the unconscious. In less lofty terms, across time and generations human beings respond to abstract form with parallel reactions and insights that link them to one another and tap into our shared consciousness. In Simone Lee's artwork Coulee, which is, you can't really see it again. So Simone Lee's abstract art, this one is called Coulee and Marin Hassinger, which is on your left. Marin Hassinger's Love from 2005. In these works, the colors, shapes, textures and installations. Is it still echoing? How about that? We don't need the mic, do we? Yes. How about that? That's good. All right. All my students here, I don't want to hear any smart value about this. I'm thirsty. So these works offer no story, no narrative that we might easily follow. Instead, they send observers on a thought-provoking inner journey that begins with pink orbs, which signifies bubble gum or balloons, or if you're thinking more organically, breasts and wombs. These thoughts inevitably give way to others that are broader and deeper, such as fertility, motherhood, love, joy, beauty, and so much more. So Simone Lee creates abstract multi-partite ceramic and glass sculptures that you're looking at that dazzle with a wide range of assortment of textures, biomorphic shapes and varied patinas, prompted by a desire to subvert and reconfigure the stereotype associating African-Americans with watermelon. You all know that stereotype. Beginning in 2007, Lee began casting her now signature oblong forms from fruit gourds like watermelon, related to words like juicy, succulent, and ripe. For Lee, the watermelon also signifies the black female body itself integral to her iconography, which engages perceptions and misperceptions of black womanhood and female sexuality. Once completed, however, sculptures that she makes evolve beyond their primary and secondary illusions, and they become organic, rhythmic abstractions of beauty and mystery. Lee's 2012 Kool-Aid, which is transformed through the use of colored gel into a primordial cluster of pendulous breast-like glass ores hangs from wires attached to the ceiling. Carefully lit by Lee, the sculptures create uncanny auras of pink and blue that reflect on the floor below. Using color, light, and placement, Lee transforms these erstwhile fruity shapes into ethereal formations that refute any and all racial or gender stereotypes and signifiers. Lee describes her orbs as preternatural, suggesting that they are of an otherworldly source. Her art begins with palpable realities of watermelon and stereotypes of fruit and breasts and fertility, but it ends up as sculpture that rivets the gaze and the soul because it doesn't refer to anything. Passenger's installation, Love, is comprised of hundreds of pink plastic, you know, dewayne rebadge, and each contains a love note inside, and then she glows each one up with her own breath. The installation overwhelms with its 38-feet high scale and its ability to alter the viewer's cognitive and emotional state by reflective pink-white and repetitive use of unexpected materials. In the same suite of works are Hassenger's shredded and torn newspaper sculptures, which are shaped into discs that appear to be made of shed wool carpeting. In using the witty pun Wrenching News as the title, Hassenger alludes here to the bleak stories that sell newspapers, as well as to her laborious creative process while performing this feat of media alchemy, returning newsprint to its original fiber origins. If immersed in either Hassenger or these non-objective environments, meditation is the desired outcome. These works have an effect not unlike that of a Zen garden, like this historic garden. If you're ever in Japan, you should see. It's 600 years old. In Kyoto, from the 1400s, visitors have come to this Zen garden for centuries to sit and meditate on the rock formations, those abstract shapes, and the raked sand of the garden. In this classic Buddhist scene, through meditation upon abstract shapes, observers are able to disconnect from the minutiae of daily life to forget their egocentric concerns and to simply exist without conscious thought, to be only where they are and when they are, not to think of tomorrow or yesterday or of some other place, to allow their minds typically so noisy to be silent. Many believe that only in such silence can one experience oneself as part of the larger universe rather than as isolated from it. Working within an equally meditative, even mesmerizing aesthetic context, College Art Association Distinguished Body Award winner Howard Ena Pindell's non-representational art has been associated by the famous curator, Lowry Sims, with the grainy texture of vintage video. As abstract composites of infinite minuscule dots, these works in Sims' works are atomized art. Pindell literally creates thousands of paper dots using a hole puncher to perforate paperboard. The paper dots are then painstakingly transformed into intricate, relief sculptures. She ends with the flickering, iridescent hybrids of painting and sculpture that as one dealer put it, wink at you as you go by the hundreds of tiny eyes. Harvested from such disparate sources as abstract expressionism, minimalism, color-filled painting, and West African Ediri Aleco fabrics, Pindell's art, too, evolves beyond its genesis into visual book that compel meditation. Indeed, Pindell describes the monotonous act of punching with thousands of holes as meditative in itself. She describes the process as something that heals her stress. Do you ever do something that you don't need to think about? It's very common. Like gardening, I don't know. People have different ways of meditating. To paraphrase, we now abstract, as factionists and long-time dean of Fine Arts at Howard University, Starman de Bullock, non-objective means no object recognizable in the image, which is different from abstract, where you can see something familiar which is distorted. Non-objective art fuses psychic and physical being and enhances one's ability to know one's own thoughts as well as those of one's ancestors. Indeed, Bullock describes her own abstractions as a full-realization, visible form of the deep subconscious and as an expression of cosmic destiny. Bullock intends for her paintings to speak to the subliminal psyche of the viewer through pure form and color. Her paintings as such function much in the same way as in musical composition that without lyrics does soothe the savage breast. Do you want to relieve your pain? Okay, somebody get ready to relieve. Because like her arm is not on hold. Okay. Bullock's painting, The Wind, A Search and a Star was created along with an original poem penned by the artist. Her verses question whether an individual life is unique or part of the long chain of existence. As she ponders, as Div Kant, Einstein, Plato, and so many other thinkers throughout human history, whether all that we perceive in our physical environment actually exists or is merely an illusion conjured up by our flawed powers of perception. As so eloquently stated by Glez and Metzanger in the Cubist Manifesto de Cubisme of 1912, there is nothing real outside of ourselves which means if you don't perceive it, I mean that if you're thinking it, you may get real. But everything that you see is an illusion. And for those students here who are new to the concept, it's an age old thought. Okay. Let's see, where am I? I thought I had that done. Okay. So in other words, everything we perceive, believe, and experience is a product of our minds. Once we realize this, like the character Neo in the film The Matrix, we can literally imagine and us do anything we want. Felix's painting is boldly conceived with biomorphic shapes and vigorous brushwork at the painting center and radiating wedges of color around the perimeter. The design alludes to the artist's experience of lying on a sandy floor, contemplating the heavens and as described in the accompanying poem which you see quoted there. And so upon a sand dune I laid. Out into the vastness these tired eyes did scan and finally rest upon a star. The star metaphor in this painting denotes the unknowable nature of the universe and is reminiscent of post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh's writings about stars. Van Gogh, too, pondered the gap that separates the known from the unknown or more aptly life from death. He created his legendary painting Starry Night to articulate that gap and he wrote to his brother Theo that one ought to be able to pass into the next dimension by way of the stars. Perhaps death is not the hardest thing in a painter's life, he wrote. Looking at the stars always makes me dream as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns on a map. Why shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map? Just as we take a train to reach Rouen we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis, and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses, and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot. And of course it killed himself the next year so he was in a hurry. So he links the stars to the transcendental journey from life to death or as Einstein believed from this dimension to the next. Committed to a life philosophy the colorist Gay Ellington, granddaughter of the jazz musician Duke Ellington combines figuration and abstraction in order to represent the link between the finite and knowable and the infinite and unknowable. As a Howard University student Ellington's style matured at the same time as the African American abstract expressionist Alan Thomas who in the 1970s exhibited at the Whitney Museum and rocked the art world. There's a kinship between these two artists although Ellington is younger than Thomas by a couple of generations and it's expanded to the Washington Color School and its late modernist exploration of color and form as subject matter superseding any narrative content. In Ellington's paintings a kaleidoscopic palette of lilacs and plums, jades and serenades unite to create imagery that while abstract is also figurative and gives us a glimpse of human beings rather than as they look. From a series of fluid, flame-like shapes inspired by the jazz music of her grandfather specters of human faces and figures emerge and observers are presented with both the appearance and the essence, physical and metaphysical realities. This relationship between the two sides of the existentialist coin is a concept first articulated by Plato of the century, B.C., in his allegory of the cave. In this parable, Plato likens man's loss of memory of his pre-birth existence and his disconnection from his future to being trapped for eons in a dark cave where only the shadows dancing on the walls are real to him and where the reality outside of the cave is long forgotten. In other words, we are living in a dream and we only awaken at the point of death. Plato's ideas were embraced during Renaissance when under the patronage of the Medici family's Platonic Academy in Florence, the painter Sandro Botticelli created his 1485 birth of Venus. Placing the gently tilted head normally associated with the Virgin Mary upon an idealized classical Greek nude body, Botticelli fused the pagan concept of glorified humanism with the Christian concept of spiritual purity. Botticelli's goal was to inexorably link physical beauty and spirituality using one to invoke the other. His objective was to lift the soul and mind of the viewer out of the mire of everyday life to a higher or divine plane through meditation upon the ideal human form. Renée Cox's 2014 photographic series Sacred Geometry pays homage to Botticelli's Neoplatonic approach. In these works, the artist digitally manipulates nude portraits of her models into kaleidoscopic fractal-like forms whose geometric configurations add a second layer of beauty and meaning to the images. Through repetition and image manipulation, Cox causes her bodies to shed their corporeality and replace it with a signifier that represents human beings as cogs in a larger wheel. Multiple elements that create a new home distance from its individual elements. The 21st century works mentioned so far spring from an early 21st century, spring from an early 20th century legacy were in a number of avant-garde artists determined that no matter how transcendent realistic imagery is, this is realistic even though it's sort of manipulated, no matter how good that is to elevate the consciousness, in their minds, realistic imagery will always bring you back to Earth, always remind you about this physical world. Therefore, realism as a genre was considered by them inherently flawed as a consciousness reason. In 1915, Russian supremacist Kazimir Malayevich attempted to redress this dilemma when he chose the austere form of his now legendary black square to allude to the unknowable face of God and to all that is nameless in the universe. As you can imagine, the first time I showed the black square to anybody in my class, they'd all be at the right. So, give me a minute. It's worth a few millions, a zillion dollars, so it's got to mean something, right? No. But studying, he was a traditional artist at first, but he became very thoughtful after studying scientific theory at the turn of the 20th century. Malayevich concluded that the three-dimensional world in which we live is indeed an elaborate illusion and that another unknown but infinitely more authentic reality yarns like a vast of this just beyond our human perception. He agreed with Einstein and most intellectuals of the age that outside of the myopic platonic cave of our three-dimensional world there was a fourth dimension to which all human beings truly belonged. Even though the fourth dimension, which Einstein turned 1905 the time space continuum, was invisible. The famed Russian mathematician and philosopher Peter Uspensky, inspired by Einstein's theory of the time space continuum, agree in his 1909 book on the fourth dimension of hyperspace that unseen dimensions explained death and that death was, in fact, the movement of a person from three-dimensional to four-dimensional space. However, since we occupy three-dimensional space are physically incapable of imagining a fourth dimension, our understanding of the universe and of ourselves is incomplete. Uspensky restated Plato's allegory of the cave when he said we see everything as unlike it actually is. Three-dimensional perception is a sort of blindness the result of seeing the world as if through a narrow slit. In other words, there is an entire world, perhaps many worlds to which we are almost entirely blind. In fact, Uspensky identifies consciousness as a limited state barely above sea. To better understand this concept, try to imagine what three-dimensional beings like ourselves, signified by the white cubes might be able to see if they were trapped in a two-dimensional space signified by the pink squares. As long as the cubes are in contact with the squares, they are only able to perceive a slice of themselves at a time. At birth, that is, at the moment the cubes enter the two-dimensional space, they can distinguish themselves only as small triangles. As they, quote-unquote, grow up or move through the two-dimensional space, the cubes become larger and change shapes from triangles to hexadons. At death, that is, when the cubes move beyond the two-dimensional space, they shrink and eventually disappear from it, returning to the three-dimensional world where they are able to see themselves in their entirety. This makes sense if we accept Einstein's theory that the alleged passage of time is merely a measurement of movement of bodies through space. With our limited capacity of perception, however, we comprehend this movement through space as time passing, or as the trajectory of our births, lives, and deaths. Scientific theories such as these, which persist today, suggest that what occurs at death is a return to the real world outside of Plato's cave and a recovery of one's true form. Despite what appear to be physical changes in our bodies, the fact is that our forms never change. The only thing that changes is our vantage point. This four-dimensional hyper-cube will help to illustrate the relationship between our own three-dimensional world and the Einsteinian four-dimensional world. The inner cube represents how human beings perceive themselves in three dimensions, despite the fact that they exist in four dimensions. The external hyper-cube, even though it is an integral part of the internal one, is nonetheless beyond the scope of three-dimensional perception, and thus it is invisible to itself. Despite this handicap, human beings seem to know intuitively that they are more than their three-dimensional bodies, as is evident whenever we use words such as our souls, our hearts, our minds, or refer to things such as the afterlife, heaven, and God. We cannot see these things or places, but we believe firmly in their existence. Lusvenski further argued that the ability to perceive the four-dimensional world requires a quality scene quote most clearly in art and in artists, a cosmic consciousness. According to Lusvenski, we possess nothing so powerful as an instrument of knowledge of the world as art. Only that fine apparatus which is called the soul of the artist can understand and feel the reflection of the numinom in unseen, in the phenomenon. In other words, Lusvenski called upon artists to express through their words that which the mind knows that the physical senses cannot detect. The artist must be clairvoyant, Lusvenski insisted. He must see that which others do not see. He must possess the power to make others see that which they do not see. We must learn to visualize others as they would be seen from the fourth dimension, not in a one-point perspective, from all sides at once as they are known to our consciousness. For Malevich, the black square achieved this because it depicted nothing from the three-dimensional world. It was instead darkness as in the dark cave of Plato surrounded by the white abyss of the unknown. The geometric works of award-winning artist Jenny C. Jones arise from this lofty tradition. The nature of such works as her 2013 bold double bar line are minimalist and architectonic, much like the black square. Furthermore, the hard-etched forms in her paintings suggest order, as did the geometric paintings of the Dutch distil painter Piet Mondrian, who were working in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, utilized squares and primary colors as metaphors for the invisible underlying order of the universe. An understanding of the optic qualities of color and form and an ability to deftly manipulate compositional weight and balance are fortes that Jones and Mondrian share. Jones diverges from her modernist predecessor, however, in her use of acoustic panels that are used to record music as art, as medium to support her art, instead of painting, and in her interest in sound as the ultimate abstraction with the power to alter human perception. The art of Atlanta-based artist Mildred Thompson is also influenced by music. In particular, she was inspired by the jazz compositions of Eric Dolby, Charles Magus, and Thelonious Muck, as well as the classical music of German Baroque musician Bach. Many of her abstractions fused themes of unknown dimensions with music, as is the case with her painting series Music of the Spheres, which comprises the artist's visualization of both music and heavenly bodies as having the potential to elevate one's consciousness. Thompson shares this in common with the legendary Russian-slash-German expression as Vasily Kandinsky, who also titled his highly gestural, non-objective paintings with musical names such as composition and improvisation. In his historic 1912 essay Luger das Geistige Interkunst, or on the spiritual art, Kandinsky eloquently described non-representational art in musical terms. He said the sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with base notes. Color is the keyboard. The eyes are the hammers. The soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another to cause a vibration in the soul. Lend your ears to music. Open your eyes to painting and stop thinking. Profoundly influenced by Kandinsky, Thompson created her large-scale painting series String Theory as an homage to 21st century scientific concept, also known as The Theory of Everything, which supports the existence of unseen parallel dimensions and even universes. Using rich and radiant hues and gestural drawing, Thompson made visually palpable the vast unknown. Spurred by her passionate interest in astronomy and metaphysics, Thompson produced images that embody both the wonder of the cosmos and evaluate, I'm sorry, to elevate the soul. Like Kandinsky, Thompson saw non-representational art as the most direct way for the viewer to access a state of spirituality. The latter is exemplified in her Music of the Spheres series, which is what we're looking at here. In fact, she studied the writings of German existentialist Arthur Hermann Pessa, who was also an artist, the South Exploration, I'm sorry, and the writings of the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, on The Collective Unconscious. Working in a similar vein, this is a work by the artist Ellen Gallagher, whose abstractions are rooted in postmodern semiotics and conceal more than they reveal. A persistent motif in Gallagher's art is the minstrel, a black samba minstrel who's a very sort of physical thing rather than a transcendent thing. In this work, Dancy Longster, she creates a strange dancing figure out of many little flourishes of her pen to suggest a black minstrel dancing for his audience. But if you look closely at this work, it no longer looks like a dancer, a black dancer, for a white audience, which was her intent. Gallagher achieves this literally by breaking the object down into its tiny pieces. But in another work by her, we see it more clearly. This work is an untitled piece from 2000 that sort of looks like a smiling face. It refers also to the grin of a black minstrel. If you look at it in close-up, you'll see that it is made up of hundreds of tiny big lips and further eyes, which are the two attributes of the black minstrel. Her hundreds of... But the reason she breaks it down this way is to deconstruct the stereotype. It's like if you say a word and over and over again, like in a Buddhist chant, it loses its meaning and it just becomes sound. Do you know what I mean? And that's kind of her approach. So her hundreds of tiny mouths and eyes conspire to build a composition of larger shapes that are ultimately unrelated to the bug-eyed minstrel. She said that this reminded her there's some more from billions of bug-eyes in big lips. She said this reminds her of the old, famous black minstrel dancer, Bert Williams, who if you ever listen to his old recordings from like 1915, he takes black songs and he sings it really slow until it's just a strange kind of noise and no longer a racist song. That's what she sees her work as doing. Taking apart something that was a stereotype until it's meaningless. Her images are reminiscent of the drawings of the French artist Paul Collin, whose illustrations and caricatures captured the etchings of early 20th century Parisian minstrel shows as seen in this most famous poster, in 1927, Collin published a portfolio of lithographs entitled In one drawing from this week, he inscribed words of miniature to look like a bug-eyed big-liped minstrel. The words read in part these blacks inject movement. Their mouths resemble a crater that spits slivers of glass. Their eyes have brotherly peoples. India ink streams down their temples and some say their granddaddies ain't leopard. They have might in their guts. Collin's words that he used to draw a stereotypical face of a black person show both an attraction to and a disdain for black people, typical of the era. Well Gallagher has done the same in her works, except she's flipped the script. She's taken the face and made it evaporate instead of taking words to create the face. How are you doing on time? You could tell me the time. What? 5.20? Okay, so I'm going to finish. What I'm going to do is show you some beautiful pieces, some of which are 30 feet tall by an artist named Chakaya Booker, made out of Mack truck tires that she slices and twists and you can't imagine how much she's a powerful woman. And her works have titles like Good Law, Hala as in Hala Ben. It's so hard to be green, the fatality of hope. I like it so hard to be green because it is, isn't it? And they're enormous and you can read the titles and see the blackness of them and think race or concept or you can just lose yourself in the enormity of these beautiful abstract organic shapes which is what most people do. Now these works, one very vaginal, one very phallic you can read those anywhere you want but I love the title of Repugnant Rapunzel Left Down Your Hair which is all about self-loathing and the whole hair thing. So my point is that I'm not trying to make some genius observation but what I'm trying to show you is that artists are artists. They create beautiful things that may or may not be related to their cultural, gender ethnic identity and we have to perceive both of those or all of those things at once. So in my closing remark my goal here was to expand your appreciation of abstract art and as Guspensky put it, expand your appreciation of that fine apparatus that we call the soul of the artist. Most of what propels us through life what shapes our experiences in human things such as love desire, determination, joy sorrow, loneliness, courage, fear are abstract concepts without visible form. Yet these feelings are as real and as solid as stone. If art is a reflection of the human experience then it follows that only abstract art can express the profundity of what it means to be human. Thank you.