 Good evening everyone, and welcome to first Saturday, started for Saturdays. My name is Matt Branch and I'm the academic programs coordinator here. This month we are celebrating our theme which is Defying Stereotypes. Inspired by the special exhibition Question Bridge Black Males, tonight we are celebrating artists and performers whose work helped to redefine black male identity in America. We are really excited to have the Question Bridge collaborators here with us tonight. Let me tell you a little bit about Question Bridge. Question Bridge Black Males is a groundbreaking trans-media art project that aims to shatter notions of black male identity in America and encourage people to rethink pre-determined ideas about all demographics. You can hear a lot more about this from co-collaborators, so I'm not going to get into it. Question Bridge Black Males is making waves across the country. In addition to the installation here at the Oakland Museum, it is currently installed at the Oakland Museum, the City Gallery in Atlanta, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and was screened at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Now, for a little bit about the three gentlemen that I have seated to my right, I'm co-director Chris Johnson who was all the way on the left-hand side. He originated the Question Bridge concept in 1996 with a video installation created for a museum in San Diego. A photographer and educator, Chris has been exhibited in venues across the country, including San Francisco MoMA, the Smithsonian, and the Oakland Museum. Chris is currently a professor of photography at the California College of the Arts. Co-director Hank Willis-Thomas, who is seated in the middle, is an artist working in themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. Hank's works have been collected by institutions here in abroad. Uh-oh, my board's going wrong. Sorry, it's all my fault. Oh, okay. You're controlling this there? Oh, okay. So, I'm almost done. Um, where last time we had the same? Oh, yeah. No, I messed myself up. Dropped all my notes, trying to do a little bit better this time. So, I'm back to Hank. He's an artist working in themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. He's been collected all over here and abroad, including the Whitney, the MoMA, and right here at the Brooklyn Museum you might have seen his work. Last year, I'm branded, it was on the fifth floor. He's a 2011 fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute in Harvard, and has been featured in publications such as 25 Under 25, Up-Incoming American Photographers and Third Amendment. Co-producer B.A.T. Ross Smith, who is on my right with the closest name, he is a multi-media artist, photographer, and arts educator who has been exhibited nationally and internationally in such places as the Oakland Museum, MoMA's PS1, and the Gerta Institute in Ghana. As an educator, B.A.T. teaches and mentors college, students, and youth in collaboration with a vast array of organizations. And you might have seen B.A.T. on Bravo TV's art competition, work of art, in which he was a contestant. The fourth member of the team who could not be with us is Kamal Sinclair, she is a co-producer of the project. On behalf of Arnold Layman, our director here at the museum, and Radia Harper, who is the Vice Director of Education, I'd like to say to the team that is an honor to host this exhibition, and it's a pleasure to have the opportunity to work with co-collaborators. Please join me in welcoming the question-rich co-collaborators, Chris Johnson, and Willis Thomas, and B.A.T. Ross. Thank you very much for joining us this evening. So Question Bridge is a fairly dynamic project, and so I just want to start by telling you a little bit about all the different aspects of it. We call Question Bridge a trans-media project because it operates over multiple platforms to give a creative and enjoying and thoughtful experience to the viewers in a variety of different ways. So we have the installation which is here at the Brooklyn Museum and several other locations across the country, which is the core content that we filmed over the course of several years in 12 different cities. We have a website which is currently in the process of being constructed. You can see some footage and some information on the website, but ultimately the website will be interactive where people can go to the website, search questions and answers, and look at profiles of the different men who participate, as well as the various witnesses of the project, and I'll go into more detail about what that means later. We have a curriculum that we've designed for high school students that utilize the concepts and issues that arise in Question Bridge in the dialogue between all the men to help students develop a more 21st century approach to identity and communication. And then we have a series of community events, things like this, but also community engagement events that have people interact with the content and with the project. One of those being a concept that stemmed from a question that came from the project, Why Didn't You Leave Us the Blueprint, which is a series of blueprint roundtables which are intergenerational discussions. So the idea is that through these variety of platforms we take the art out of the ivory tower, if you will, and make it something that people can engage with in their daily lives at their convenience. So let me just give you a little bit of background on how Question Bridge actually works, because we get a lot of questions about how we actually prompted the content. So what Question Bridge is at its core is a video mediated exchange of questions and answers, and this particular version that you see here at the Brooklyn Museum, Question Bridge Black Males, is an exchange of questions and answers between different types of black men from all different backgrounds across the country. The colon and Question Bridge Black Males is very important, because that colon symbolizes that we could do the process of question bridging with essentially any group of people. We chose to start with black males because we thought that, well, we feel that black males are one of the most feared and misunderstood demographics in American society, and we thought it would be very powerful to provide black males the opportunity to speak their truth in a direct open and honest way. You know, there are a group of people who are often talked about, but rarely talked to in a national level, and then we also knew from an engagement standpoint like, okay, if we're going to create a situation where people get to, you know, listen in on a conversation between a group of people they normally don't get to hear, well, we'll pull them in. We're like, let them listen to black guys. Let the black guys check them out. I'm not around. So that was part of it also. So the way the Question Bridge works is it's really deceptively simple. What we did was we had, we prompted, we found black men of all different types. We traveled across the country finding a wide variety as we could. And then we started with the prompt. We know you've always had a question that you want to ask another black man that you feel different or estranged from. Look into the camera as if you're talking to that black male and ask the question. And so that's what they did, and that worked somewhat like this. But my question to the black man in America or anywhere else is what is common to all of us that we can say makes us who we are? So we then took those videos of questions and then showed them to black men and then we thought could answer those questions. And then they looked into the cameras if they were talking to the original man asking the question and answered it like this. Our commonality is in our history. But I think our beauty as black people is also in our diversity. So then at that point it became our responsibility to weave these questions and answers together and present them across the five channels so that you really got the feeling of stepping into a dialogue because have there be some sort of arcs of story and theme so that obviously you viewers would stay interested in watching Question Bridge. Now our collaborator Chris Johnson actually pioneered the concept of Question Bridging in the original Question Bridge project that took place in 1996. So he's going to tell you a little bit about the roots of that and bring you up into its current manifestation. So did you notice how we're slipping the verb of Question Bridging into your vocabulary here? Because people ask us do we interview these people and we don't interview them really because it isn't us bringing content, bringing ideas. What we do is really create a setting where people can spontaneously generate what for them is meaning. We simply provide the setting for doing that. But the idea behind doing this began actually since we're sitting on a site at the Brooklyn Museum I have to say that I grew up near the corner of Notion Avenue and Eastern Parkway, Lincoln Place and witnessed what happened in the mid-60s. I was 16 years old and witnessed what happened when the Fair Housing Laws passed and it became possible for African Americans who had been role models in my neighborhood to leave that they left. And it completely changed the chemistry. That rupture that started in 1965 obviously grew. And by the time I became a hippie in California, a fine artist studying fine art with Antel Adams and people like that in California I became a professor at the California College of the Arts where I teach now. I got involved with a woman who named Suzanne Lacy. Some of you may know who she is. Suzanne Lacy is a really renowned performance artist. She comes from the feminist tradition and is really instrumental in shaping the theory and ideas behind engaged art projects when she came to our school as a dean. And right about then I was really interested in something called media literacy. I mean just the idea that there's an academic subject in most other English-speaking countries for helping people better understand how values and ideas and perceptions and aspirations are all shaped by media. She and I had a conversation in passing and she said, you know, I'm in this area and I would like to do something that relates to Oakland as a subject. So we did a project where we went into a classroom. This was our first experiment. We sat in the classroom. She's a blonde woman with frizzy hair and we sat in the classroom completely anonymous and the teacher didn't introduce us. Halfway through the class he said, tell us about those people. And the students thought they were being tricked, you know. And he said, no, tell us who they are. And so they said, well, she looks like Murphy Brown. So she must work at a TV station. They said, he must be a truck driver. So I realized this thing is working. I mean this idea of trying to get them engaged with considering how they shape values at all. That led to a year-long process of really coming to understand how incredibly rich and complex the thinking and values and ideas of inner city youths are. But we also knew that the disconnect between them and the mainstream world who has these perceptions of what it means to be a black kid is a vast one. So we thought to ourselves, what could we possibly do to make it possible for the world to really understand how complex these young people are. If that person had been a fly in the wall and witnessed the conversations we had, they'd have a very special experience. So what could we do to make that experience tangible for them? So working within the genre that Suzanne Lacey is a master of, what we did was we created something called the Rufus on Fire. We got a local municipal garage that gave us access to two stories. We got, well, we rented about 250 cars. We went around to high schools and got inner city kids to come. And just sit in the cars with badges around their necks that said, shut up and listen. With that as a prompt, the kids felt safe enough to have really elaborate, complicated conversations about what it was like to be a teenage black kid suffering from the oppression and misunderstanding and what it was like to deal with drugs issues and crime issues. But they felt as if they were having a private conversation and you can see the audience actually hold that sight for one moment because you can see one really fascinating thing that's happening. This person is really listening for the first time. But can you see how there's a question in her mind? I mean, she's in the position of being very generous, just like you're being generous to me, listening to me. But I realized from that project that even though a really powerful exchange of meaning and truth was happening, it was happening in one direction. That was great and very empowering for the kids. But four years after this, I got an opportunity to do a project for the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. They said, Chris, come in. There's the Republican Convention is happening in 1996 in San Diego. We're creating something like a faux newsroom and we would like some content to come in from the black community. So I reflected back to Nostra Avenue and I remembered just what it felt like to go through a two-year transition when there were white businesses there to where there were shutters all of a sudden. I realized that the gulf between African-Americans whose lives were are centered very much, their aspirations, their values, their vocabulary, their lifestyle, their sense of meaning is all invested in the neighborhood compared to those whose lives are really out in the world in large. So you see here two subjects from the original Question Bridge. It was called Question Bridge Black Community. On the right is Kayona Johnson. She's a welfare mother. And I decided that if listening is a passive way to be generous, asking a question is actually a very powerful form of discourse. Because what happens when I ask a question is I'm revealing an area of uncertainty in my own vulnerability. And I'm also setting myself up to listen. So I thought, well, maybe it would work if I got African-Americans whose lives are invested in the neighborhood to simply ask questions on camera. Now, the reason why the camera is important to camera functions like the car and the badge, it created a safe space for these people to express themselves. And then if you take a videotape of that person and show them that question to someone like William Gaines, who's a businessman living in the suburbs of San Diego, there might be the possibility that he would listen to her. I mean, she would essentially be there, at least her body language, her way of speaking. And if I had a camera set up and captured his spontaneous response to her question, it might be that he would respond. I thought to myself, well, I'm using questions to bridge this gap. Question bridge, that might work as a title. And so that's how Question Bridge was born. And what we'd like to do is show you one excerpt from that initial exchange. Have you given any thought to where the money comes from for people who are receiving public assistance? And do you care? I start about where public assistance money comes from. And I do care, but for one, I am on public assistance. And it's not because we don't want to work. It's not because we want to sit at home and get a check or anything like that. A lot of people perceive us young teenage mothers to sit at home and just collect a check where a lot of times we do go out and look for work. We do work. We can't work as long because childcare is really up there. At this point in time, I pay $300 a month for one child, and I have two. And I pay $150 a month for another child. The 300 is because my child is under two. The 150 is because my child is over two in his school age. So, yes, I know where the money comes from, comes from taxpayers. But we do have people who take up American jobs who are not taxpayers because they're not an American citizen. How about that? We get decreases in our checks because we are American citizens. But yet, if you're a refugee or you're an immigrant or you're able to work an alien, legal working alien in the United States, you get an increase in your check when you come over here from different countries because the United States government have so-called some kind of agreement with them. They come over here and they're able to get grants to start businesses where we are already living here working during the backbone of the country. And we don't get that same type of respect. But yet, people look down upon us because we are on public assistance. They like to say, oh, the black teenage moms are growing out, opening their legs and having babies just to get on where for to get out the house. That is not always the case. It's a small proportion that does that, but you only focus on this small proportion. So you see what happened? I mean, why was she so able to answer so eloquently? Because like a lot of people, all of us in many ways, we live under a cloud of questions. And so all Question Bridge is doing is tapping into the opportunity that if provided, all of us could be incredibly expressive. And so that's a quick summary of how Question Bridge came to be. And so I was one of Chris's students, both Baite and I were Chris's students at California College of the Arts when we were in graduate school. And Baite and I grew up together since first grade. I got kicked out of first grade. I like to point out. Tell that story real quick. Do we have time for that story? Let's just say it was the last time me and Hank were in private school until we went to the California College of the Arts. So, well, anyway, Chris was our professor. One of the things that you learn relatively quickly as a person of African descent in mainstream colleges and universities is that you wind up being the voice of kind of whatever conversation, anything that happens that is in the news that it's black, you feel like you need to respond to or people are looking for you to respond. And as an artist, say you may not want to do work about quote unquote blackness, but if you don't, then no one's really talking about it. If people were talking about it, you feel really uncomfortable with what they're trying to say. And those are some of my experiences. But while I was in school, I was taking a class called Art and Public Life. And Chris came and did a presentation about this project, Question Bridge. And just the title really resonated with me. And he showed some of the footage and I was really kind of engaged with kind of the way in which like this conversation, like it's amazing just to watch people have a conversation while I'm not there. And a few years later after we graduated, Chris commissioned Bayate and I to do another art project. And we started collaborating. And I was, my mother, my parents are here, but my mother and Chris have known each other for a long time. And Chris had sent her a kind of a trailer version of that project. But it was a VHS. And by that time, VHS was kind of out of date. And I was like, you need to get rid of these VHSs. And I was starting to throw them out. And I saw this Question Bridge thing. I was like, oh, I remember this actually being a worthwhile VHS to keep. And around the same time, the Tribeca Film Institute invited me to apply for a fellowship for new media art. And to be frank, I didn't have any really good ideas. So I just called Chris like, hey, I had that Question Bridge project turned out. I said, what Question Bridge project? I remember that. That was 11 years ago. And basically from there, we decided to propose a grant. And we wrote a grant. We wound up getting it. And immediately, we were just going to go on the road. We were like, whoa. Wait a minute. He's skipping over two really important things that he added to this concept. First was he saw that I started with a preconceived idea of what it is that divides the black community. Hank's suggestion was that we, A, do it on black males only. I mean, one of the things, conceptually, that Question Bridge does is only work within demographics, only because working across demographics is kind of predictable, frankly. But his suggestion was that we use black males as the target demographic. And I thought, wow, that's a really cool idea. That's not exactly what he said. No, you're right. That's right. I came around to understanding eventually how profound this idea was. But the idea was, I was really selling it. I was like, Chris, what's interesting is there's as much of a diversity within this demographic as there is outside of it. That's right. So why do we need to talk about kind of this or that when we realize that between you and I, and between me and Bayate, who grew up together, we have divisions about what it means to be a black male. And that conversation, actually in a room of black men, we're quasi-invisible as far as people won't be able to say, oh, well, they're obviously on this side or that side. And so we started to decide we were just going to go find a few black men to answer these questions and answers. And Bayate and I, you know, we've been collaborating. And so we asked Bayate to come on the road with us. And what happened by a thing? Well, we went on the road. Well, I mean, a lot of things happened. What was interesting about it is, as Hank mentioned, each of the three of us has very different perspectives on what it means to be a black man. And we ended up starting off filming in Birmingham, Alabama, because Hank had some events to go to down there. So we figured that's as good a place as any to start, especially considering Birmingham's role in the history of the civil rights movement. So we started in Birmingham. We should tell more about exactly how we started, because it's a really amazing thing. People wonder where we got these guys from. Well, it just so happens that on the leg from North Carolina to Birmingham, Bayate and I didn't sit next to each other. So we had no one specific to talk to. We had an opportunity because of Hank's lecture, but no one specific. So this black guy sat next to me. I thought, well, this project has to begin somewhere. So I said to this guy, gee, why are you going to Birmingham? He said, well, I'm going to be selling T-shirts. So then I waited to see if he was going to ask me why I was going. He said, well, why are you going? I said, well, actually, I'm doing this project. It's about black men asking questions of other black men to make a long story short. He said, yeah, I can see that. That might work. He brought five guys to our motel room, and that's how it began. And what was funny about this experience is Chris is 60-something. And Bayate went to an HBCU in Florida. Chris had never been to the South, and he'd never experienced a front. A front had racism. And part of the subtext of this is like, Chris was like, I want to go actually feel what this racism feels like. Which was, for us, having gone to school in the South at parts, we were like, wow, how do we feel it? And you had it, actually. And so that was kind of part of it. And that was where the really interesting thing was like, well, we had such diverse black experiences. And so we're just going to show you a quick trailer of kind of some of the things that came up. Black man. Do you want to get out of the situation that you're in? What is the reluctance for taking responsibility for improving our communities? Are your children better or worse off as a result of your involvement? Why wouldn't you be happy with your son being gay? Why are you so violent? Why do you have that take mentality? Why are you afraid of being intelligent? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? What I want to know is, why? Why did y'all leave us the blueprint? We did leave you a blueprint. We just didn't tell you where it was. That's something that we dropped the ball on. What do you fear? That something will harm my children. I fear success. Am I the only one who has probably eaten chicken, watermelon, and bananas in front of white people? God, I don't know. Your nigga's crazy. That word, we have to stop using it. I think black people can say nigga anytime they want. How dare you? What right do you have to use this word? A lot of nigga questions for the rapper. What is common to all of us that we can say makes us who we are? Hmm. This is the easiest question in the world to answer. The thing that we have in common is that we are male and we are black. So one of the things that really got me interested in this project is a lot of the work I do as an artist deals with how people perceive each other with preconceived notions and perceptions based on appearance and how that affects human interactions and how we engage with each other. So I had begun a project around that same time a little bit before that called Our Kind of People. And I'd read this book by Lawrence Otis Graham. And I was thinking about how we select and segregate ourselves and form preconceptions about people based on their gender, their ethnicity, and the clothing that they're wearing. And so I did this project where I experimented with putting people in a variety of different clothing that they all owned and then photographing them with the same background. And kind of examining how you perceive each person differently given what they were wearing and just what their face was, be it male, female, black, white, mixed, etc. And so when we started working on Question Bridge what I was really invested in is this idea that most people have pretty significant preconceptions about black males, even other black males. And how we can give a voice to people breaking down that image that other people have about them that comes from somewhere deep within you that you slowly develop over time. And having a preconception about someone is like a natural thing. We wear a certain clothing, we walk a certain way, we talk a certain way to convey a certain message about who we are. But it's also interesting how that message is perceived. And so I was really curious about Question Bridge as a mode of communication that built upon those ideas. So I mean there's, and Kamal, our fourth collaborator who we've found along the way when we got to Atlanta really kind of helped us to really break it down. She's the only female of the first four collaborators, but there's a pretty broad group of people here that are part of the project. And she really was really interested in kind of the ideas around the social science aspects of what the WASIS project could be used. And she was really interested in kind of how we could talk about the challenges of the achievement gap and also like the discipline gap. Or more importantly, actually how young African American men and also Latino men have been shown to be actually over-disciplined from the ages of like being kindergarteners to the way that they're treated. That's why I got kicked out of first grade. Ma, do you remember that? Why did I get kicked out of first grade? See, I got kicked out of first grade because somebody punched me and I fell, hit my head, and apparently... The funny thing is like, so he fell and hit his head and he picked up a rock. Now as an adult, I'm just like, why was it just rocks in our classroom? Just laying around, we're like seven, there's just rocks laying around. Of course someone's going to pick up a rock and eventually throw it. So this kid, like we're playing in the water pool. Some kid, you know, I got him a little wet, you know, because I'm clumsy. He punched me, and that's all I remember, but apparently... He picked up a rock and started chasing him and threw the rock at him, but he missed and it broke a window. And so the school was like, you know, this kid needs psychological help or he can't come back. And my mom was like, my kid's fine, he doesn't need no psychological help. But in that story is really what happens. Unfortunately, my mother, where we live in Manhattan, Upper West Side, there were decent public schools that she actually really helped to get me in. And my dad, big up to my dad, Hank Thomas, the original. But having these two parents who actually broke the molds of what society told them they could do and really told me, no matter what society was telling me about myself, I was okay and I would be okay and eventually wound up kind of okay. But really, without that support, without, most people don't have that opportunity and how do we kind of foster that kind of conversation between intergenerational conversations within a family and with men in general, there aren't very many places for healing dialogues and this project could, Kamal was really suggesting, could really present that. And the part, there's this thing called the Pleasant Association Test that Harvard does that shows that even African Americans have trouble putting, associating positive words with images of people of African descent. And that actually one of the things that kind of she says moves the meter on that is actually more whole and familiar relationships with these, the diversity of these kinds of these people. And that she felt like our project could do that. And so when we, and this is kind of part of that example. So as we stated, we hit the road and we found over 160 African American men and we shot in 11 different places. And it was just like, this was a healing cathartic project process for us, like being in places where we wanted to go into San Francisco County Jail because someone asked the question, what's so cool? Someone just down the street on Washington Avenue said, what's so cool about selling crack? And we also had other questions that were directly for men in prison. Right. But like in that meant we had to go to prison. And which, at which point Chris said, I have an idea. I'll start teaching meditation in the San Francisco County Jail and they'll let us bring cameras in there. Me and Bytes are like, makes perfect sense. They're like, fine. If you think that'll work, try it. And it worked. And it worked. And that's the beauty of this project that each of us at times, totally like, you know, two of us might disagree about something or two of us might disagree about something. And we have this tension because, and that tension helps the project not be weighted in one, two or even three or even with our larger collaboration group here of our perceptions of what the authentic black male experience is. And you know, at first we were trying to make a documentary and we realized this kind of single channel documentary with just talking heads would be kind of interesting, but really the idea of being an art installation with multiple channels would be something that's really, really, really exciting. And Yukiko Yamagata, is that how you say it? And Yukiko Yamagata, up there, is a friend of mine who works at this open society. And I called her and she introduced us to Rashid Sabaz, who I also knew through other ways, but he's from the open society's campaign for black male achievement. And Chris and Bytes had a meeting with them. And we, and they were like, immediately like, this is the kind of project we want to support. And we went basically from there to the next day, meeting with Radia Harper and a few other people from this museum. And the museum, we're like, okay, we're down. And that really set us on this journey. Within three days, we're like, okay, first we had an idea, now we have some backing, and now we have a place. That literally happened in three consecutive days. And I don't see Radia, but thank you so much. And so, and then I called another friend of Bytes who actually reached out to Rene de Guzman, who's a friend of ours who's a curator in Oakland. And we wound up having a very simple conversation. Like we had this idea. He's like, okay, let's do it. I'm no one asked how we were going to do it, you know, what it would look like. You know, we showed a couple clips and they were like, okay, fine. And so that quickly morphed into this idea of like, now we're going to have exhibits in two places. And then we called Bytes and I had another project at Sundance. So we called our friend at Sundance and she said, yeah, let's bring it to Sundance. And then they're like, well, the Utah Mocha wants to do it too. And then Kamal had, there's a community center in Atlanta that's like, yeah, we want to do that too. So we wound up having, launching, you know, this project with five different cities at the exact same time, which was really exciting, really stressful. And so. And the thing, you know, the thing that really has to be remembered is that what is being launched are the everyday voices of black men. All right. The opportunity in Utah, in Salt Lake City for black men from all walks of life, all ages, from nine years old to probably mid-80s to speak what for them is true without any prompting from us in a completely spontaneous way. That is the thing that makes this project so special. And that's what gives us the passion to carry it forward. And the other thing that is amazing about it is that imagine how different it would be if we had decided to say to these black men, ask a question of someone who you admire. You can predict pretty easily what would come from that. But instead, the prompting question is, we know you have a question for somebody that you feel different from. So will you allow us to record you asking that question? So right away it sets up a conversation about things that black men feel divide themselves from each other. And then it gives the black male community an opportunity to respond with what they feel to be legitimate answers. And so if anybody from outside the black male community has any doubts about what range of things concern black men about their own state of being, Question Bridge contains an incredible spectrum of that issue. And do black men have the resources and wisdom and perspective to provide their own solutions to these questions? And Question Bridge provides a view of that and the fact that that is the essential content that's being carried from one place to the other through the voices of black men. This project obviously has a face that's aimed at the white world but it also has a face that's aimed at the art world because we really feel as if art, as Suzanne Lacey has been saying for her whole career, can be a powerful source of engagement. And the dinner party lives here. That was a good example of how art and ideas and social issues can really support each other. So that's basically what it is that's traveling from one place to the other. I mean, this project is really about individuality because one of our challenges is, well, first of all, I'd like to point out this is a project, what I love about this project is it's something that's never been done before in the fact that it's very much social science and very much art as well and where in most social science projects or documentaries actually, there's usually an expert coming from the outside and saying, okay, I'm going to do a story on this and I'm going to control the dimensions in this way or that way. Whereas in this project, both the researchers and the experts are actually the subjects and the participants of the project. So it's really a collaboration between like we're kind of helping facilitate a conversation so that really the people are making the art. We're trying to figure out a way to help present it. But that's pretty much it and what's really exciting about the iPad app which allows non-African American men or non-Black men to participate in the conversation. You start to see very... You've been keeping that. Oh, it's amazing. Every day. I mean, those of you who've been upstairs know that what we've done is provide an opportunity for this methodology to be present out in the world. We call them hotspots so upstairs there are iPads that have an app that was developed for us by one of our strategic partners in event. And what that app allows Black men to ask these questions to do is present those questions to you and then you get a chance to see other answers to the questions or respond to the question yourself and that gets added to an increasing database of responses to increasingly complex questions. Every time I open my iPhone version of it I see a new face, one of you folks may have actually done that. The fact that this thing is something that other people can participate in where they are remotely. One of the things that we've done is take posters with key questions and locate them in places where we feel the question will have a special resonance. For example, as you can imagine there are a lot of questions that relate to the questions and answers. Here is one thing, but if we were to take those posters and put that question in a gay community and have that question appear through either NFC or QR code technology, the question appearing in a different context has a different meaning. Because we don't believe that as wonderful as museums are it's not that we want to be in museums, we want to be in theaters, we want to be on the street. But let's just show a little bit. Let me just say that what they're getting at is that the logic is truly collaborative and the problem a lot of times with art particularly fine art is it's very self centered and self indulgent. What we wanted to do is make something that actually was collaborative with a specific community and then expand that so a larger group of people can get engaged with it and interact with it. By doing this process this way not only do you see the insight and variety of different thought processes in black males, but you also come in humanity because a lot of the questions a lot of the ideas, a lot of the insights even though it's through the lens of black males are actually very human ideas, questions, answers and insights. So that was something that was important for us to illustrate through this lens of black males and by making this project truly collaborative with the particular community we were examining and I just wanted to add that the only criteria for someone to participate in this project as a subject was to identify as a black man. So that could encompass almost anyone if part of how you identify as a black man then we could include you in the project. But you'll see when you interact with the app I just want to say the app has an opportunity for you to participate even if you're not a black man. Growing up I've seen black people who have made it out either financially or educationally change who they are and so my question is how has your financial success or educational success compromised who you feel that you are on the inside for what you feel that people want you to be? I'd have to say the first answer is that I feel like I've compromised my membership in the black community and it's not because I left the community or the community left me but it's as if there's a zero-sum blend that the more successful a black man becomes the less the community seems to embrace him and it's also got a little bit to do with how that black man is defined by the non-black world it's as if your success makes you other. An example of a conscious way that I did that is with a soul shake I remember growing up in Dallas, Texas and meeting my friends on the street I mean you give them a soul shake I also remember the day that I stopped doing that on the courtyard in Harvard I remember walking up to them instead of giving them a soul shake giving them the corporate handshake I remember walking through the hospital the floors and doing the same thing being conscious that when I see my friends I should just give them the corporate handshake and you know the disappointing thing was that one day walking down the hall was a cardiothoracic surgeon and a soul shook me the moral to the story is don't try to be black, just be yourself and by definition you're black. Imagine yourself being a knight in your riding into battle a knight has to put on his armor and a knight has to have his shield and sword and for me if you're going to go into a corporate environment you can't go in a corporate environment the same way you would if you were going to your grandmother's house or if you were going to McDonald's or if you were just comfortable there's a code and there's a shield and a layer of protection that you need for all the harmful things that are going to be in all of those environments because they're equally treacherous I just look at it as you have to be confident about who you are know who you are and just know that in certain environments you have to dress a certain way and the way that you speak is just about how relaxed you feel in those environments and I must say that's not changed me at all what has changed is people's perception of who I am and what I'm about and what's in the black community has created a dilemma because we have the idea that for an individual who has succeeded is now not part of that community but part of some other community that we believe we're not a part of on one hand the reality is that when we get into these positions of power we make people uncomfortable so that's one thing on the one hand on the other hand in all different types of professions there are certain things that you have to do in order to be successful there's certain ways that you have to be but there's a difference between adapting to different situations and being in a hostile environment because you are black so I haven't changed who I am I've gained new skills I can adapt to many different situations but I'm still me I'm still me at the end of the day and I'm not afraid to be that there's a thing in this world called maturity it's something that's undervalued in the black community today because people seem to be centered around this idea of what I call ghetto centricity that is the ghetto is the center of all black expression which is a very recent phenomenon and a very divisive one because the truth is everyone evolves no one stays the way they were in 18, 19, 20 if they did, they wouldn't be human I don't know what they would be as black people, as black men we need to be in the process of evolution it cannot be about there's no ultimate blackness there's no ultimate black street credibility there's who you are then who supports you at that moment and then who you become next and who you become next you take everything that you've ever had ever happened to you and you keep adding on top of it and that's life so as you can see there you get a better idea of how this was presented over five screens in this particular case this is a single channel version of it that we created so that we could present this work constructing a space like in a museum in order for people to see it but it was really important for us to have multiple faces for people to engage not only to make it visually stimulating but to show the variety of different types of men who just appear who are not only black men but also to represent how this particular conversation is a conversation that's a national conversation between dozens of men across the country and we're very fortunate in cultivating this idea that my younger cousin Will Sylvester was able to come on as one of our editors and technology technicians as well as Rosa White who was our supervising story producer and they worked closely with us so that we could figure out how to take all this content and not only put it together in an engaging way and create that conversational aspect within the edit over the five channels but also to create an arc of story from topic to topic so that it does become the type of thing even though it's talking heads it's engaging and you can see it gives you the feeling as if the men are talking to each other, responding to what each other are saying and listening to each other Which of course in a kind of vicarious way they were because remember that there was a videotape of the person asking the question that was present for the person who answers it and said something that actually was incredibly profound when we were working on a previous project where we were trying to show the diversity of the Bay Area so we just said we want to get Latinos, we want to get Chinese people, we want to get Korean people we want to get people with Down syndrome, we want to get black people we want to get white people and he was like just because you look different doesn't mean that you're diverse that's a misconception that because people in the room may have that actually we're diverse because we might be here because we have the same political values, the same class kind of relationship or the same geographic relationship that actually makes us a community so it's really another part of this project is how community actually something that is malleable can be defined in a multitude of ways but it's kind of often we're often blinded by this kind of ignorance of saying okay because our skin is a certain complexion that we are, we think this way or we act this way or we have but so much that we agree on I wanted to show you guys yet another clip this may seem like a silly question but I want to know am I the only one who has problem eating chicken, watermelon and bananas in front of white people I don't have a problem with it period no I'm going to be honest with you I don't even eat watermelon I don't have any expectations that it has around black people but I will eat some chicken though I never heard the bananas one I never heard bananas, bananas really huh I don't know if you're the only one but it is not a problem for me to eat whatever I want to eat in front of anybody you're not the only one, brethren to be honest every time I still eat chicken I eat a lot of watermelon and I love bananas but I'm always looking over my shoulder where I'm at seeing who's watching me eat this watermelon and this piece of chicken and this banana always you're not the only one no I know plenty of African Americans who as a rule will not eat watermelon in front of white folks now for me the question only in the sense that I've never ever liked watermelon and I don't eat meat so I don't find myself in the situation where chicken and watermelon comes to a head but I do know that there are times where you feel like you are the stereotype because if they say hey do you want to go play some basketball and of course I love basketball I love it every single day but there's a part of me that wants to say no I don't want to play any basketball what makes you think I want to play basketball but in those moments I think we have to be honest with ourselves and just know that there are some things that are true yes you know we like chicken we like watermelon and there's nothing wrong with that and it's nothing to be ashamed of it's not a silly question brother I love watermelon every week in the streets of South Chicago Milwaukee and Gary Indiana and have been since 1953 and we're okay with that and by the way I like fried chicken in fact I'm going to make some tonight I don't know if you the only one ashamed I'm not ashamed but I do give chicken a second thought sometimes even when I mention it but I always pass it off as so like in a jokie jokie way I do love chicken watermelon I don't eat watermelon so much so I'm not really so much ashamed of it bananas I had thought about bananas because I always think about a banana because I'm gay in a sexual way so when I feel a banana I'm always self conscious in front of anybody just because sexuality but not because of race I think really that question leads to a deeper question why are we so concerned with what they think about us I mean you know that's what the real question is I don't really care I know somewhere in there I do care but in my consciousness and what I'm going to say I don't really care what they think you know I don't need their approval in order for me to go ahead and be me or order for me to do my job you know or order for me to be who I'm going to be I don't need their approval I don't need their job none of that I think it's really important that we stop worrying about what they think and start worrying about what you think about yourself and maybe what the little black kid next door to you thinks about you fuck some white person thinking what they think about you eating a watermelon or anything else your shoes, your jacket your hat backwards I don't go with the sagging pants but you know whatever you're doing it's because it's your cultural identity or your food or whatever what they think about it's not really important so I mean and there's other answers one of my favorite answers in there but let's open up to some questions and comments what do you guys think two questions one what was the most surprising question or answer you heard and two, Chris can you share a little bit about your experience in the deep side sure so here's a typical experience that I had in the deep south after traveling around Birmingham, Alabama I'm going to tell a story looking for racism I want to feel it I found really good poached eggs really fascinating people who are very generous to us this is just a circumstance I'm having a lucky experience we had to leave on the way to New Orleans we crossed Hank was driving as we were driving along the highway and we're literally having a conversation about this thing we were leaving Alabama we didn't find any hardcore racists to stereotype and we crossed the border and it isn't five minutes maybe a minute after we crossed the border into Mississippi we get pulled over by a Mississippi highway patrol and I'm thinking well here we go so I'm sitting in the passenger seat this guy comes up rolled down the window and I'm sort of observing can I get my camera out I better not know, don't do that he tells Hank did you know that you strayed across the marker or something like that Hank says oh I didn't really notice but I notice I'm observing that he has an emblem on his jacket that looks suspiciously like the Grateful Dead symbol so I thought I'm going to take a chance and say that symbol looks like a marijuana leaf from the Grateful Dead logo funny that you mentioned that I'm actually from the narcotics bureau of the highway patrol in Mississippi but we chose that because it was kind of funny I said well that's interesting he said oh you're from California he says well how's your experience in the south I said fine but we're looking for a place to have a vegetarian meal for breakfast do you have any suggestions he said well just down the highway down there there's a diner I'm sorry that's a long way to answer your question that's typical but then I told him to try to go buy something at a store in Williamsburg down on Bedford Avenue and there's still that tension from 20 years ago in the riots between the blacks and the people of the city community I felt real racism there I walked in it's a whole nother long story but this is not to say that there is deep racism in the south I went to the south to find it and actually felt it 10 blocks from where you grew up so you also asked what was the most profound question or he said he didn't say profound he said he said surprising there's a section in question bridge where someone asked the question what do you think about white women and that to me is one of the most entertaining sections of this project especially not only just watching that but also watching people watch it I'm very amused by that but for me I was personally just surprised I would go in there actually I'll tell you the question without a doubt kind of did it the most for us my question is I try to live good but I'm surrounded by bad I wonder what it is I could do to do better and look peaceful surrounded by all evil how can I do that that's a sincere heartfelt question all the questions were a surprise that question really touched our hearts my question is did any of your participants address the practice of down low oh yeah of course yes the short answer to that is yes and it is interesting the issue of homosexuality in the black community how many myths there are around that misconceptions even between black people and black males about the variety of perspectives but that's one of the things that's been really interesting about question bridges you have a question that's asked and then there are four or five different answers and they're all pretty good answers and they all have their own truth in them and so none of them are really necessarily right or wrong but yeah that issue was addressed in the project and so if you take a look at the project you'll see some of that being addressed I want to do a point out we have 150 questions and answers I mean 150 questions 1600 exchanges it was hard to fit we couldn't fit everything into the three hour video installation so that's another reason why it was important for us to utilize these other platforms to give people access to the other content but we devote a lot of time among the clips that are there to that question from lots of different angles this is one of our subject Thomas Allen Harris hi I saw someone on the upper level I saw a hand raised on the upper level there we go we don't want to forget about the people up there when it comes to the Q&A thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you more time to become the same, but are you considerate kind of another angle to this pilot there? Do you include black link of two different countries such as Africa, California, the Scottish continent, a lot of them come back or maybe because they have a different perspective and they sometimes don't even know the ways to do that. Well, they weren't excluded. Yeah, no. There's meant, like for instance, I mean, if we didn't say like, are you not that kind of black man, so we have people from Barbados, from Guyana, from where else? Guyana, I mean, many, many places. But they identify this. Yeah. But one of the things that is interesting about this is that if you do a project like this with enough commitment and over enough period of time, every issue that is pertinent to black male consciousness will come up in one form or another. And so that question that you're asking actually came from within the project itself. It came in the form of a question that a lot of, particularly in New York, a lot of African-Americans are sensitive to, and that is why is there this perceived difference between the degree of success and establishment between those who are of Caribbean descent and those who are from the South? And I mean, I'm currently living in Paris and I actually understand kind of what happens is that you missed the social codes. I've been in Paris and I'm like something will happen. I'm like, was that racist? I don't know. And there is a privilege, they say ignorance is bliss. So if you come from a place where the president's black, all the lawyers are black, all the doctors are black and you have a real broad range of people who look like you, who are there, you don't have the same chip on your shoulder that we have where you can't do that. And someone brought up the challenge just last night for a lot of teenagers, this watermelon question isn't relevant because they're from a different generation where they didn't grow up with those things. So I mean, I feel like it'll be interesting how this project grows and how future generations will respond. I know there's a lot of people, I know you have. Yeah, we have about seven minutes left, but I have a question also. Sure. Two part question. I haven't seen the entire video. Did you three gentlemen partake? Did you take videos yourself? No. So my question is about that. What was that dynamic between that decision to whether or not to make videos of yourself and how was it frustrating to be kind of on the periphery of this conversation? I know you all have a lot to say. And how was it to not be contributing in the form of video to this conversation? Well, you know, as artists, it's really important to try to maintain the vision, to try to be as clear as you can about what are the dynamics that will make this work. And all you have as an artist are your instincts, your life experience, your intuitions. And so we were in the center of this project. But one of the things that we made as a commitment to it is to not interject. Okay. To be there with our human resources but not to put ourselves in the process per se. Because we're in the process. I mean, a deeper question would be how are we implicated in- If one of us shows up on the screen and someone's asking a question, like, okay, so now- Where are you? You kind of break the force of it. We're just facilitating the conversation. But there was no time when you felt frustrated that you weren't able to engage in that conversation. I really feel like this project is a generosity project. We're walking through most of these total strangers that are being vulnerable to us. We don't know these guys. And we, you know, so we, for us to be- Throw you some of them. Some of them, yeah. But like, most of them, we didn't know. So, you know, for us to just be like, we're just ferrying this question to you. You know, and so we get to like be, have that opportunity of these people who are just engaging and being open with us. I did want to acknowledge, I see Tom Stylen Harris who has a project called Through a Lens Darkly that he did with my mother about black photographers of representation. But I see Joe Brewster and, I mean, Joe, wait, Rochelle Brewster and Joe- Joe, what's your last name again? Joe Brewster and Michelle Stevenson and their sons who have this project called American Promise, which is a project that really kind of paid the way for our project where they have been really over the past 12 years been documenting their oldest son who I can't see behind the pole, his experience as, you know, being growing up as African-American men and from kindergarten to K through 12, to graduation, which you're about to graduate. And kind of the experiences kind of, of having that kind of educational challenges and the discrimination and all of those complicated ways of kind of being a young black man at this time. And I feel like their project is really kind of one of the many next steps of what our project is trying to address. And thank you guys for kind of being the project that other people were kind of that paid the way for us. You know, so. There's a question here? Yeah, for me, it wasn't hard to not be in the project because I started my career as a photojournalist. So that's ingrained in my training as a creative person. So it wasn't that hard. It may seem like it, but it wasn't once we got going. Good evening gentlemen. My name is Admatix. First of all, I'd like to thank you for the Question Bridge Black Male Project. I think it's a wonderful thing that you guys are doing. Thank you. My question is, I've noticed on the video that you have a lot of young black men asking questions and a lot of older black men answering those questions. I believe that communication is something that we definitely lack in our community. And I wanted to ask you, going through the responses that you've seen, have you noticed a bridge between those older black men and those younger black men closing in the responses that you've gotten? You know, I think that, I mean, that's a very thoughtful question. I think that we approach this with the hope that this will function the way it did for the participants broadly, that in fact it will be a way for young or black men whose fathers and brothers, grandfathers aren't inherent to their lives to speak to those generations through this project. That's actually what happened. Whether or not by extension it functions that way for other young black men and old elders to speak back, we hope that that colloquy does unfold over time. I mean, I think it will, but we have to just see whether or not it does it. That's certainly our aspiration. Okay, please. Well, it's easier to talk about the hope apart. I mean, there are assessment tools built into it. It's a curriculum that is aligned with the core standards and to do it rigorously, we had to build assessment tools into it so that teachers administer to their students a standard assessment test before and then after they take the same test to see whether the needle has moved. And so we encourage teachers to give us that feedback so that we can build the database and address that question more rigorously. What we hope happens, the reason why the curriculum exists is because we discovered right away and it was really the insight of Kamal Sinclair who's not here. And a female. And a female that we need to be as resourceful as we could to find as many ways to make this project salient and relevant to the communities that need it. And that every young child of color needs to be part of this conversation in a way that is mediated and promotes them to be thoughtful about all these issues. The curriculum is a way to do that. It's divided into 10 modules that take core themes like representation and identity. And we hope that that propagates frankly. We're making a big effort as much as we can as a small organization to make administrators, school administrators aware that it's there. Because of the generous support from the Open Society Institute, we're able to offer the curriculum as PDFs that are downloadable for free through the educators portal on our website. And that's true now and it'll continue to be true. And so we're doing what we can to sort of propagate the curriculum. And we're finding that people who get to see it are incredibly responsive to it. The first iteration of it was designed as Hank said, for high schools. We immediately got feedback that it needs to be addressed to middle schools because that's where a lot of the kids get lost. And so it's being adapted in that way. And we really have been encouraged by the support that we're getting from it. But it's a hard thing to do to really get it out there as broadly as it needs to. Let me just give one more round of applause to the Chris Johnson, Hank Lewis-Thomas, my name is Terry Ross Smith, and Kamalson player who was not able to be here. For those who had questions unanswered, this is not the last question bridge related program that we will have come back on Saturday, May 19th when we have a program inspired by one of the questions in Question Bridge. The question was why didn't the previous generation leave us a blueprint for how to exist and how to go forward? And we're gonna hope to help answer that question. We're gonna have leaders from the community in Brooklyn, New York City, and emerging young leaders in dialogue. And hopefully these gentlemen will be back. So please come back, bring your friends and bring your questions. Thanks.