 We're gonna go ahead and get started. I'm gonna give some library announcements and then I'm gonna turn it over to our featured artist. So we are celebrating more than a month and if you, you know, we've already, we're about a month in because we started MLK Day. And if you haven't noticed by now this amazing and beautiful artwork that we commissioned and worked with Tiffany Conway on and she developed this art specifically for us. So we have a huge thank you to her. And if you haven't made it to the main library lately, come by and you can see this in Beyond Larger Than Life. It's so gorgeous and welcoming. And we're looking forward tonight to hearing Tiffany's journey with art and her inspiration and what it's like being an artist. First off, we wanna welcome you to the unceded Ancestral Homeland of the Ramutishaloni peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their homelands. And as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives in the Ramutishaloni community. And in that link that I popped in the chat box that has some great reading lists about Aloni lands and some great websites you could donate to and learn much more. As I mentioned, it's more than a month. You can see Tiffany's artwork is just so gorgeous, so warming, the colors are gorgeous. I wanna just give you a couple of hints of what we have coming up for more than a month are on the same page, which is San Francisco's bi-monthly read. 17 years strong, we've been doing this and we're celebrating the work of Jessamyn Stanley and she will be in conversation with Tamika Castanella, who is a yogi, yogini and yoga studio owner and organic farmer. So it's gonna be a really great conversation talking about yoga and you can pick this book up at any of your branch or main library locations. This year's Black History Month's overall theme nationwide is Black Health and Wellness. So we have a lot of programs that are really centering around this. We have Mr. Dennis Billups, whom you can see his activist work in Crip Camp, Netflix Crip Camp. Amazing human being. He's been leading meditation every Wednesday at the African-American Center noon. Come on by, but we just got a video too. So if you can't make it, we totally understand that as well. And the video is coming. This Saturday, we have author Afetayo Ojilande and she is gonna be talking about letting the Orishas speak and she's part of Making Black Lives Matter book. She has an essay in there. I think it's gonna be really healing workshop and come on by for that. We have a lot. I'm gonna highlight the art for sure too. We have Ramakan. We love Ramakan at our library. He's so generous to us. And he's gonna come to a crochet jam with us Sunday the 20th, African-American Center, one to three. And you know, I think Tiffany tonight is also gonna highlight just the healing properties of art. And if you... I love art. I love bringing art to the libraries one of my favorite perks of this job. I'm so excited to work with authors. Artists like Tiffany and we generously, Tiffany is gonna come back on Thursday and do a draw with Tiffany workshop. We're having it at 430. So all ages, family, it's gonna be a good one. So come on by. And now I'm gonna introduce Tiffany. Tiffany again, like I've already gushed, but thank you so much for being so generous with your art and creating a specific piece for our library and it's so amazing to me and to all of the people I work with. We're all like, oh my God. And everybody we've worked with on panels. We had an amazing panel of black physicians and health experts. They're all like, we need that poster. Like, we'll get it to you. So everyone, Tiffany, let me go back up. I lost it. Tiffany is a visual painter. She breaks the generational curse and the door to beautiful beginnings. She has overcome stereotypes and an absent mother due to addiction and began speaking life herself first. She's raised in the Bay Area and she's gonna talk tonight about her creativity and how it grew from her life experiences. I'm gonna pop in links. Her website is really beautiful and her bio is much longer than I just gave it. And I'll add her socials and anything comes up. I'm gonna add that as well to Tiffany. And you can either put questions in the chat or the Q&A. It's gonna be a nice intimate talk tonight. So feel welcome to add those questions and I'm gonna stop sharing and turn it over to you, Tiffany. Tiffany Conway, everyone. Wonderful. Okay, let me share my screen. I'm gonna do a little deck presentation and enter the screen. Usually I'm pretty good with this. Here we go. Enter full screen. There we go. Okay, so just wanted to talk about my journey so far. Tiffany, we don't see it in full screen. Okay, what's going on here? What do I... I'm going to stop sharing for one second and then hopefully we can... Done. Maybe I put a little bit of kerosene on this room here. Okay, let me see. I apologize, I'm usually more savvy or I'm more savvy than this. I think that all the time. And I'm like, okay, I've done this a hundred times. Now why is it doing this? Okay, well, I think I'll just... I think a little bit of it might have frozen. So I'm going to just kind of give like an overview of my life so far in terms of how I became an artist, like what inspires me and things of that nature. So I wanna say that my creative journey as far as becoming a visual artist started about 10 years ago. I was at a pivotal age where I was kind of deciding, okay, what's next for me? And I'd already had a long career in my 20s and in property management and real estate. And I was looking to really just kind of set my own path. And I started going back to school and I started studying art, the fundamentals of art and art history just because I've always been a creative person. I've always kept a sketchbook, a journal, things like that. And I was like, why not just kind of go back to the basics? And me making that step and pivoting my life in that way, I really fell in love with the process of making art. I really fell in love with like learning about art history and how so much of our culture and innovation is really founded in the principles and fundamentals of art. So I started that journey about 10 years ago, took some classes, but I really started to take myself seriously about five years ago. In the beginning, when I was taking classes, I wasn't the best painter, so I would just kind of splosh paint around and I was actually doing some really abstract pieces until I taught myself how to paint people. And my computer is really frozen. So I started teaching myself like how to paint people and when I found myself being successful with that, I realized that a lot of my personal narrative gets kind of sucked into whatever painting that I'm working on at the time. So at times when I think I'm painting someone else, I'm really painting my story or painting my emotions. So once I came to that realization, I started to work just very intuitively and allow the work to teach me. So a lot of the times I'll make something very freeform and organically and kind of sit with the piece and meditate with it and then it speaks to me, it tells me what this work is about and I'll come up with the title of the piece based off of that dialogue that I'm having with the work. Tiffany, would you like to try to share the slides with me? Yeah, I put my, I put our message to your message. Well, it's really interesting because let's see, let me see if I can do that with you. But it looks like my browser may have frozen. Of course. Right, of course, so... I can share like anything from your website again, like or... Yeah, that would be great. We can, if you wanna share the portfolio page, that would be great. I'm gonna do that right now. Yeah, really the whole thing froze. I apologize. It is the name of the game in Zoonland. Well, we learned that that's just, you know, unfortunately how things go, but we work as we will, here we go. Right, exactly. So tell me what to do. That's wonderful. I'll just kind of talk and you can scroll down as I go through the timeline of my portfolio. So 2017 is kind of when I realized that I had, I really had something there. One of the first paintings that I was extremely proud of was the painting in the middle, which is called Daydreamer. And at that time, I wanna say that's when I really, I really wanted to, I really started taking myself seriously. This really became like an undeniable passion for me. And when I look at Daydreamer, I see, you know, all of the elements that I feel are still carried out through my work to this day, which is like a sense of softness and elegance to her and like a sense of mystery. So I have some other paintings from that time period. My Thoughts Become Things and Mama Bear, those are all reflective of a personal narrative. And we can zoom down to 2018. So 2018 was a challenging year for me. I realized a lot of the time, at that time that a lot of my personal relationships were shifting and as a result, it really started to show up in the work. I found myself around that timeframe, you know, really, as I was really pushing, you know, my creative endeavors, I found myself really being alone and having time to reflect and think about my path. So I wanna say a pivotal moment from that year would be this self-portrait, The Uncomfortable Shift and that's to the left there. And in that painting, that was actually, you know, again, something that was very organic and free flowing. I did not necessarily anticipate her to look like me to a degree and at the time I did have short hair, but I was like, oh, she doesn't look like me. And I was like, wait a minute, she really, really does. So I was painting from a very intuitive place and in hindsight, I realized that I was going through a very uncomfortable shift. My mind was, you know, moving into the direction of wanting to be an artist full-time. My friendships and my relationships and my family relationships were all shifting and changing because I was coming into a different person. If you scroll down to 2019. So this was a really fun and creative time. I, you know, I really, I wanna say I, you know, I got really, really wild with color. All of these pieces are really breakout pieces, but the one that kind of sticks out to me the most is the one in the middle, which is called Young Elder. And this is actually a painting that won me my artistic achievement award and essentially launched my career as a professional artist. What I love about this painting is I actually woke up, you know, from, you know, a very interesting night of dreaming and spent the day working on this. I woke up and I just got to work and I was able to complete this painting in a day. And at that time that was really, that was unheard of for me. You know, I had paintings before that would take me months to finish. But this one I finished in a day, like I was just really moved to convey this message. And in the painting, you can kind of see that, I call it Young Elder because she, to me, she's very young looking, but, you know, sometimes you meet children who are very wise or, you know, they call them old souls. So I imagined her being that person. And I wanted to create this really interesting background where her world is kind of shifting and things are not exactly as they should be. Like the sky being red, the fish are up in the air and the, you know, the birds are flying down below. So I wanted to convey that, you know, with all of that symbolism in there. So 2020 was a really interesting year as well because these three paintings actually were all completed right before the pandemic. And the one that really sticks out to me the most is Blooming in Spido. She's actually really popular, but the story behind this painting is, once that we would love to learn more about the dreams in your work, have you always had a strong, mm-hmm. Okay, so in terms of like my dreams being incorporated into my work, it has slowed down a little bit, but I think while my world was shifting and I was really like falling in love with painting as a creative outlet, I really feel like my dreams were really guiding me at that time. A lot of these paintings from that time period are really, you know, inspired by something that I had in the dream. For instance, this painting in the middle called Yemiah. Yemiah is an African goddess. She's the goddess of water. And in African spirituality, we have all of these gods and deities. And if you study the religion and study the practice, all of these gods have individual characteristics that claim you as their child. So the way that it typically goes is while you're in the middle of spiritual transition, certain gods will reach out to you and embrace you as their child. And typically when you are pursuing that as your religion, that particular god becomes the god that you connect with the most and pray to the most. So in my spiritual pathway, Yemiah was the god that reached out to me and that was through a lot of dreams. And it was a very fun time. So yeah, we can zoom down to 2021. So 2021 was the year that I created somebody of work called Aetherial Hue. And I was responding to so many things, lots of things that were happening in 2020. I wanna say that I chose most, all of the work from this show had a theme of blue in it. And I really feel like I chose that specific blue for its calming effect. I feel like at the time that I created this work, I was responding to the pandemic and then all of the stress around the pandemic and then all of the protesting and everything that was happening in this tumultuous timeframe. I really just wanted some peace, to be honest with you. And I just kind of immersed myself in the work in what I was creating. And the goal for me with this body of work was to create a sense of calm and peace and to also see black people and blackness without the barrier of race. I feel like there have been times where because it's black art, it's not necessarily considered in the same level of professionalism. So I wanted to see if I can challenge the viewer to look at the work for what it is without automatically categorizing it as black art. And the breakthrough painting for me in this body of work is the painting in the middle called Wisdom Lap. I was looking at images and responding to images of hair braiding because that's very big in our culture. I personally feel that in the process of grooming your hair, braiding your hair, things of that nature, it becomes a resting place for the person. And it also becomes a place where wisdom is passed. And it could be used as a child and it could also be used as an adult. In this particular image, this is a child resting on the lap of an elder who is braiding her hair. And the story comes out to me is that as she's braiding her hair, the wisdom that she has is being carried through the child. And I wanted to convey that in the corn rolls. You can kind of see the pattern of the corn rolls are rolled into her fingers. And I didn't necessarily include the full body of the woman because I really wanted to zoom in on the peacefulness of the child. And then there's also an ancestor in the background because a lot of my work is very intuitive and guided by spirit. So in relationship to my spirituality, I like to include an ancestor in my work as like a thank you for them getting me here to this point. So that was my portfolio so far. And I'm going to answer a few more questions. What is the story behind the third eye in the Flower Boy series? So this is a really, so with the Flower Boy series, I was attempting to understand the humanity of black men. And I'm married now, I've been with my husband for quite some time, but I always see with black men that they are balancing their own vulnerabilities while also being protective. So while with this third eye, you can kind of see that all of the different eyes in this particular figure has different reflections. And to me, that shows that he's looking in different directions and trying to be protective, but at the same time, I was also trying to convey a softness with him and a vulnerability as well. And when I typically work with men, sometimes I will be a little bit more playful and abstract with them. Typically when I'm working with women, they all kind of feel in relation to me as like a daughter or sister, just because I'm usually very connected to their story and with men, I'm not as connected. Let's see. There's so much in this one, the flatness, mm-hmm. Thank you. These are not people that I know, these are people that I imagined, which is I prefer to work with imagination as opposed to working from a real person's reference. And I do, I have paintings of myself, my husband, family members, friends, but I prefer to make them up. And the reason why I enjoy doing that is because it gives me a chance to be creative, but I also like when a viewer can see themselves in the work. A lot of the times when I'm exhibiting or doing shows, people will walk up to the work and you'll see that they have a resemblance to the painting that they walked up to. So that's fun for me to see. And I don't see any more questions. So I have a question. I have a question. Sure. Tiffany, because there was celebrating black health and black wellness, I'd love to hear like your take on what art does for your health and maybe for your mental health or just for your being and how do you think that I personally think, you know, art just makes, if you're, I don't know, I think it just helps people. I'd love to hear your take on what you think health-wise or body-wise or mental-wise art does for you. Absolutely. I feel like art kind of hits all of the areas in which I need healing. There are elements where it's meditative and there are times when I'm listening to music and I'm dancing, so I'm moving my body in a full range, being able to express my creativity or just kind of being, you know, like a vessel for, you know, whatever spirit is doing. Having that in my practice, it really does help. I mean, you know, when you're working intuitively, you can always look at the work in hindsight and figure out, you know, what was this about? What was that about? And my work really teaches me, you know, whether it be weeks, months, years down the line, I'll look at something and sometimes I'll find something new that I didn't even know that I added. Sometimes, you know, you'll see something very subtle like the expression in their face or my color choices and what those mean. So for me, it's extremely healing. It's extremely relaxing and honestly, it really saved my life. When I think about who I was before I discovered art as my medium, before I discovered painting as my medium, I was an entirely different person and I'm thankful. So I'm thankful for the practice. Thank you, Tiffany. I see another question in the chat is where do you see your art taking you next? That's a great question. So I am working on a new body of work at the moment. And you know, I'm always responding to, things that I may not necessarily be, things that are bothersome to me, you know? But when I work, my goal is to, whatever frustration I may have or lack of understanding I have, I tried to work through that so that the work itself doesn't really necessarily reflect like pain or struggle or anything like that. So I am working on something that I'm really excited about and I can't wait to share. I hope that my art will continue to teach me. I hope that it continues to resonate with everyone, with black people and with everyone that it resonates with. I think sometimes with black artists, we have a tendency to be pigeonholed just because the people in our work are black, but when I have meaning behind the work, it's something that can relate to everyone. Anissa is clicking on my Instagram page right now and I have a post about the little girl in the painting family meditation. I realized that, you know, looking back at my work in hindsight, I realized that, you know, I have a theme of little girls with their eyes closed in my work. And it may be some inner child work that I'm expressing through my creativity. So I was really, another thing that I learned in hindsight after the work was created. Come on, Catherine is asking, who do you consider your major influences? So my biggest influence, and it's really interesting because his work is not, it's completely different. His work is very abstract and that would be Willisky-Condensky. And I have his book here. I wanted to show you guys. This is kind of like my Bible. And the reason why I consider this my Bible is because he talks about the spirituality aspect of art and I feel like my spirituality is, my creativity is a vessel for my spirituality. So, you know, like when people turn to their, you know, Bible for inspiration or, you know, some type of guidance, I can pick up that book and zoom through it and land on a page and find something that I absolutely need to, that I needed at that moment that's gonna pick me back up. So that's my main, that would be my first influence. I really love Amy Sherrod's work. I also like her personality as well. I'm kind of one of those people when I really get into someone's work I'll listen to all of their interviews and I really like her perspective. Another person that I would say influences me greatly would be Carl VanVetchen. He's an author and a photographer from the 20s in the Harlem Renaissance era. And he's actually white but he documented a lot of the artists and performers and poets and writers from the Harlem Renaissance era and his photography really shows, really shows all of those creatives in a very beautiful, elegant way. So those are my top three. So Anissa has an image up from my solo show, Ethereal Hue. This was the very first painting that I created. You can kind of see the work has a lot of heavy breaststrokes. It was really dense. And I was really working through some frustrations at the time. I mean, at the time we had the pandemic happening, we had protests happening. I was responding to some limited beliefs that I had about what it means to be a black artist in this day and age. And what I love most about this painting is the documentation of African hairstyles, traditional African hairstyles. And I like the idea of her hair encapsulating the moon. It reminds me of some of the spirituality texts that I've read in the past about African DTs, Demaya, Yoruba, and things of that nature. I'm adding links in as you talk. I just love when folks bring their artists and their books and who they love and who inspires them. So I do put all of that in our document that I shared with you. It's over here. Now I have all the windows open. And I'm just gonna put that in there one more time because this links will be the go-to for Tiffany as well as on Thursday. Maybe now you could, do we need to bring any special supplies on Thursday? There's my question. I was saying, just bring whatever dry materials you would like to use. I would kind of steer clear of wet materials like watercolor, just keep it dry with pencils, ink, markers, color pencils. Yeah, I would say just kind of, bring whatever you're comfortable with. Wonderful. Okay, I've put all of these links in so you can check out these books, artists inspired, that are inspired by Tiffany. Okay, I'm gonna stop talking your turn. Would you be able to pull up? Well, actually let me see if I can do it. Do you want me to stop sharing? Yeah, I'm gonna see if I can pull up this painting. I love how the, I think Anisa, I think you're on mute. That's okay, I'm just rambling. I just saw how beautiful that last painting was that you did with the woman's hair. Looks like there's two sons, one coming from behind her head and then one through her hair. It's gorgeous. Thank you. Can you see the painting of Family Meditation? We can. Perfect, okay. So when we were talking about the theme for the work, I really got excited. I automatically went to meditation. I've been practicing meditation for about five years. Ever since I kind of decided that this was going to be my journey, I started incorporating lots of different health practices. I changed my diet, I started journaling and then I also started meditating. For me, sometimes I will meditate with kind of like nature sounds. Sometimes I'll use a guided meditation. If I have access to like singing bowls and things like that, I'll use that. And then there are times where I meditate in silence. So I was really excited to create this piece. And spending a whole year working in blue paint, I really wanted to get back down to reality and create something that feels a little bit more, feels a little bit more actually like what my home kind of looks like now, just kind of very serene, calm, lots of earth tones and neutrals and things like that and plants. When I, my favorite part of this painting, of course, is the young girl, just because I realized there's a theme in my work of adding little girls into the work and making sure that they're at a place of peace. So that might be some inner child work for me. But I wanted to display a family meditating in their living room in all the ways in which you can meditate. A lot of people think there's one way to meditate. Sometimes you're sitting down and sitting up. Sometimes you have your fingers touching or your palms held together. There's lots of different ways to meditate. There's even walking meditations as well, but I wanted to kind of show you the traditional ways of sitting down to meditate. And they have some singing bowls in front of them. So I have some themes in my work in regards to ancestors. And I wanted to make sure that I incorporated that into this painting. So behind the male figure, you'll see a bookshelf with an African mask. And then you also see that carried into his shirt as well. And then if you look behind the girl, you'll see that there is an ancestor there as well. But it doesn't necessarily look like, that it's a painting on the wall or a picture on the wall. It kind of looks inscribed into the wall and that was intentional. You know, in African spirituality, they teach us that our ancestors are always with us. So I wanted to make sure that I incorporated that because that's our way of carrying our ancestors with us. So I wanted to make sure that I incorporated that into the painting. And again, to also thank my ancestors for what they did for me and what they continue to do for me. And that's it. All right. Do we have any final questions for Tiffany? It's been such a joy to see you work every day this since Martin Luther King Day. Any final questions, friends? And we definitely, I'm gonna throw the chat link in there one more time. This is also the link for Thursday's event. And I'm also gonna put in the chat. I do see that someone wrote a mayor or a marine as she wrote something about my bio and breaking generational curses and creating doors to beautiful beginnings. So we talk about generational curses. We're talking about, you know, things in our family lineage that can prohibit us from really living like to our fullest potential. Unfortunately, my mom was, she succumbed to a drug addiction. And because of that, she wasn't necessarily present in my life. And then you also, being a child of the 90s and 80s, there was a lot of turmoil around that time in terms of like how we, how all of us were really brought up. So for me, my breaking generational curses is not succumbing to addictions. And then also, you know, I'm an advocate for education. And unfortunately, I wasn't able to complete my degree, but I didn't necessarily let that stop me from achieving my goals. I've always wanted to be a creative person. I just didn't necessarily know the medium. I've always aspired to express myself. So with me, you know, pivoting my life in my, you know, later 20s and deciding to, you know, go on this journey and continue down, and continue down this path. To me, that's breaking generational curses because I'm doing what I love to do every day. And I know that a lot of people don't get to do that. And because of that, I'm thankful. And when you decide to kind of go down a path that's, you know, less travel, you endure a lot of obstacles. And you also endure a lot of naysayers, but I'm proving that, you know, despite having, you know, not necessarily having, you know, my mother present, despite not being able to continue my education the way that I would have liked to, despite those things, I'm still living my dream. And that's what I mean by breaking generational curses. Thank you, Tiffany. And there is some love coming through on the YouTube side. They love seeing this family in unity and in meditation. Wonderful, thank you. Is there any questions from the YouTube side? You can throw them in the chat if you like. We all appreciate you sharing, you know, it's personal work too that I see here in your work. And we, it's not easy for the artist to always be like, to be the spotlight and promote yourself and all that, which you do a great job of. I love your website, it's beautiful. Thank you. Your top notch at responding quickly. Whenever I pestered you in all the spots. Wonderful, thank you. Any last words you'd like to share? No last words. I'm looking forward to seeing you Thursday for our drawing session. And yeah, I look forward to meeting with you and connecting with you all. And I hope that you cut off in the drawing session and we're going to open up to meeting. So we can all see each other. We can see all your work that you do. Perfect. Good to share time. All right, Tiffany and library community, thank you so much for coming out. Your work is gorgeous. I'm so happy that you were able to share it with us and that as well as sharing your time with us. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Tiffany. Thank you, library community. We'll see you next time.