 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to those of you that just arrived for the second roundtable discussion for our discussion today. We're thrilled to be celebrating the Witness Art and Civil Rights in the 60s exhibition and thrilled to be sharing the stage with such accomplished and well-established artists both that are represented in the exhibition and also that aren't but are contemporaries that are very very very amazing artists. So I'm just going to pass over the mic to Miss Kelly Jones who's coming to us from the Department of History and Archaeology from Columbia University and also as a co-curator for the exhibition Witness and also she's joined with artists from the exhibition Atomola Olu Bafola. I hope that I did that well. And Jay Jarrell that are both represented in the exhibition as well as Leslie Hewitt, Adam Pendleton, Stephanie Jameson, and Kanbui Oluji. So without further ado, thank you. I didn't want to have to use my New York voice on y'all. Thank you all for coming out and thanks to all these wonderful artists for gracing us with their presence and taking time out of their busy lives where they make beautiful things, important things, and sharing a little bit of time with us. We're going to have a little bit of a, well, basically same kind of format except I'm asking the question, different questions to the contemporary artists and the witness artists and it's basically one simple question to each of them. Their work will also be on the screen and so they'll be able to include that. And I just want to say thanks to all of you for coming out. Thanks to Brooklyn Museum, Rudia Harper and her whole staff here at the museum for doing some fantastic education programs with Wiggins. So thank you so much. And of course as always to my co-curator, Terry Carbone. Well now we're going to change you because this is not the, this is the different powerpoint. So Adam, you're going to go first. I have a whole other different order that I changed it to, but let you finish with. All right. Do it the way I was thinking. I am going to do it the way I was thinking, which is to start with Stephanie. Thank you for that. Adam. So the question is for the contemporary artist, do you feel your work is activist? So Stephanie. Thank you Kelly. Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for coming. Thank you for inviting me to join this panel in response to really amazing exhibitions, really incredibly powerful work. My name is Stephanie Jevis and I'm an interdisciplinary artist. My work is deeply connected to photography's core concerns, which include reproduction, documentation, and narration. I make photographs, videos, and mixed media works that evolve in the studio and develop archival and social projects that contextualize my practice and engage with other artists and with the public. Instead of simply trying to describe sort of my work and what it, the way that I think about activism with relation to specific projects, since we don't have a lot of time, I thought I would just a little bit about, describe a little bit the general conditions, I guess, that I feel that I face. Some of the challenges as a contemporary artist I feel that I face with regards to the concept of activism in contemporary art. As I think many of my peers might also understand, I think the concept of activism carries really sort of a paradoxical and conflicted connotations in our contemporary context. On the one hand, we've seen that the contemporary world really worships and is fascinated by politics as picture in particular, and as story, pictures and stories that are best observed and told from a distance, I think, especially at the safety and comfort of historical distance. And artists who can demonstrate a fashionably working class commitment to social issues are often rewarded. These artists, these are artists that our world can believe in. Their fervent belief serves as a kind of excuse or sometimes as a kind of proxy for the disengaged politics of the art appreciating community, including dealers and collectors. On the other hand, work that's too strident or specific or indict specific people or specific communities is sometimes distasteful. It's supported at the margins, murals, or community art that can be excluded from the center. And to make matters even more difficult, black artists are often sort of expected to make work from a political position. Even the most formal, personal, gesturally expressive, medium specific work is inevitably viewed as a vessel for sublimated political content. So work that is not explicitly or implicitly about sort of racial politics can feel illegible to critics who are looking for black artists to bring them into a kind of voyeuristic proximity to cultures and lives that are otherwise inaccessible or unavailable. So I find that activism sometimes ends up serving as a kind of muse, kind of passive visual muse in the context of some contemporary art practices. In my own work, I've been less interested in the glamour of politics as a kind of visual subject. But instead, I think a lot in this, I think what Jack Whitten said earlier really resonated regarding the importance of action and process with relation to thinking about the kind of politics of an art practice. So thinking more about form, not sort of solely about image, and thinking about form as always ideological. I prepared so many notes which I'm not going to be able to share. But I'll just state that for me, one of the most important questions is what is the mode of thought in which art is at stake? This is the question that I understand to be kind of the implicit subject of all art practice and it's an inherently political question. What is the mode of thought in which art is at stake? And regarding the question of activism, I'm not sure that I regard my work or the work of a lot of artists as activists per se. But as it's sort of inherently ideological, it specifies and deconstructs the codes and strategies of our socio-political system to speak really, really broadly. The image on the screen is a detail of a work that was produced as part of my exhibition at the same time. And it includes language direct from a speech that was delivered by Shadie P. Newton at Boston College in 1970. Newton wrote really beautifully about the revolutionary as a great despiser and a great adorer who longs for another shore. He wrote that the revolutionary is a fool and that foolishness is our great leap and our commitment to the dead and unborn. I really sort of connect with the context of despiser, adorer and fool. I think that these describe me pretty well and maybe that's a good place to ask. William DeGymy. How are you guys doing? Good, good. My name is Campbell William DeGymy. I'm from Bedside Brooklyn. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the piece that's behind me before I respond to the question, today's question. Also, thank you both the museum, thank you Kai, thank you the whole machine. This is a this is a piece called Life in Pictures and essentially I was thinking about how there's a generation of images constantly, constantly that sort of die in devices, whether it's computers or phones or and I was interested in what happens when we bring those into a physical space and so I made an archive essentially. This is the last time that piece was shown. There was over 2,000 photos from having a digital camera for over 10 years and that archive is then traded in so you bring a photo from your life and you trade it with a photo from this archive. It starts off being a kind of a description of a life and something that's suddenly brought up is how often or how narrow the expectation of an artist of color, particularly a black artist, what that life looks like, what that position is and what are the expectations of that piece. So when you have 2,000 photos from my life it looks a little different than maybe it should and as people trade in they're constantly confronted with the fact that how different their life intersects with mine and how seamlessly it does as well. The piece is essentially a space for people to spend time and also spend time with those expectations. They're past photographs. If you don't have a photograph that you brought with you there's facilities to print out an image on a site and so there's a whole process of looking through your thousands of photographs to figure out which one are you going to bring into this physical space and then trade and in that process inevitably there's conversation with strangers and so I think of the work more as a kind of a prompt for a merit of different reinterpretations and inspections of position. One of the things that I find most exciting about the piece is that is that you constantly meet in a space, I show up in a space and spend time constantly meeting people from different neighborhoods very much like my neighborhood in Bedside and I find that there's a kind of surprise and I think of coming up through parents who are very politically active I think that the one of the greatest assaults of oppression is an assault on imagination and I find that there's a surprise and when you see the bounds of your own imaginations and I really hope that in the work so I don't think that the work actually is activist because that requires an action and I'll never know it's always beyond me. I think that my work looks to plant seeds for action for for the borders of imagination to be constantly pushed or cracked or reposition and I think that that's my hope for the work that I can do that and it's a faith-based process essentially because there's no way to quantify the impact like you know a bus driver takes you point A to point B if you get to point B you know they did their job. What I do and what I do as an artist is completely faith-based I don't know if anyone if it matters if what that matter what matter means until after action and I may be present for that or not and so it's coming the way I see my practice in the work. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation to be that there is a position that's being established here just here in Kambui and coming suddenly so far and I'm sure Adam you may hear certain echoes but I've prepared something to to speak to the question so please bear with me as I'm reading and I chose two images instead of one similar to Kambui one image that has an source of inspiration and one image that is of a recent installation okay um somewhere lost in the sea of images amongst millions there is always one that stops you that haunts you an image that arrests your attention and actually slows down your perception your view is simultaneously obstructed by and yet distilled in the act of looking this obstruction or distillation has a form this form falls in the space between the object of one's gaze and the viewer this liminal space between looking and thinking about what one is looking at is of utmost importance the feeling of or the attempt to try and focus your eyes on this echoing image but the image remains in a kind of status do you try to imagine clarity to fantasize in order to fill in the gaps the spaces where the information is lacking or do you pragmatically admit that somewhere lost in the original moment is something that falls beyond representation in the present moment and that the data just isn't there or perhaps it is protected in its own time not meant to resurface or to be relived or retrieved in expected ways much of my practice points to not simply my personal but a collective personal as a site of political agency as the space where self-actualization occurs and is developed and perhaps sustained this space is what litter literary theorists jared trees feedback would refer to as the location where the subaltern or the postcolonial subject speaks this is an image of my this meaning to the left to your right excuse me is an image of my paternal grandmother and great aunt as they move through photographic space reflecting agency not only for themselves but for me as a viewer not in the early 40s but now in 2014 their movement introductory push push back objection i'm haunted by such images and many more because they confuse me how could certain bodies express such self-actualization and beauty in the face of a world and society that projected the exact opposite onto them wasn't life too hard and horrible so full of disgust and injustice i'm interested in the interior i did that many of these images and my practice as an artist and not as a historiographer attempt to push to push the effect of this kind of personal and such often overlooked and undervalued political and radical sensations into the public sphere for contemplation and confrontation equally this is often a battle for me as it is about to find a form of address that reflects the multitude of such concerns that it isn't locked into the complacency of nostalgic sentiment or corrective tropes or radical chic gestures but to refer to the past of political histories in order to reveal and uncover hidden pathologies in our current state of affairs so to the right is a project called untitled structures this is a collaboration with cinematographer brad for young it is a series of short silent nonlinear film vignettes that explores exposes mid-century civil rights error photographic language typographical and psychological landscapes through a contemporary lens exposing this tension formally through still photography and the cinematic experience of moving images this collaboration film installation was formed by the invitation to view the adelaide demino carpenter and edmund carpenter photography archive at the minnow collection houston texas this archive consists of works by bob edelman dan budnick bruce davidson elliott erwin lennard freed and dany lion and is fittingly titled the civil rights error photography collection the time frame of the archive begins in the late forties and ends in the mid eighties it includes images from various us cities both urban and rural there are also several images of americans african descent in europe during world war one and world war two in response to having the opportunity to view this archive i was interested in what it meant to have a collection of images that represents the civil rights movement and to consider if this this is even possible working sculpturally through the impulse to appropriate to collage to cut and to pace i was interested in the viewer's body in relation to shifting images and in this process perhaps their perception is altered in relation to the surface of projection and also in this highly condensed perceivably shallow depth of field is where we myself and my collaborator had found space that was active so i want to look at the the question is your work activists in relationship to the question it could easily be coupled with which is quite simply are you an activist the simple answer is your work activists the simple answer would be yes but it is not agile prop it is really an answer that plays itself out in the space of the work and i think it's important to look at the idea of artists of being an artist making art in relationship to being a citizen and citizenship and to all then we think that these things are easily easily observed easily um the relationship with each other but in many ways they're explicitly different so the work while it is activists while it is political while it functions in a political space in a social space it does not make direct or blunt statements rather it moves in many directions at once it is work that locates itself in language and image image that is both moving and that is still image and language that is concerned with performance thinking about originally people like Audre Lorde or Jim Jordan moving forward towards the language poets say the 70s it locates a network of ideas and in that it tries to speak to a kind of simplicity to create a kind of site of engagement a place where perhaps a protest could be staged language could be heard and really dwell on that word of hearing actually hearing something i heard you you heard me um so artists activists activism protest prayer protest peace wind wall sound so i'll leave it now switch over to our wonderful witness artists who um we're here and also agreed to be in the exhibition so we thank them for that and we're going to switch over to a special question just for them what do you think your work offers to audiences today firstly i want to know that i'm extremely happy that the next generation maybe in two generations from me intelligent committed and engaged that is very reassuring i want to also say at this point it's very important that while we are speaking of a particular period in american history and perhaps most turbulent and revealing decade in uh contemporary american history we are still alive and well and contributing so i don't want you to stick us or put us up for passage this is exciting and revealing and innovative as anything that's going on today and i can say that for jay and myself with that said what you're looking at is a 1967 woodcut we're now in 2014 so you're looking you're going to be going back four decades plus but the importance of me being able to have some relevance today to the very fact that i'm alive the fact that i have children my son is in the audience out of hanbrook and that we've been able to impart that out to our children the sense of urgency the sense of commitment the sense of engagement so that is what part of my work is i don't separate my visual science work from life itself my life and my art have been one of the same so what you see here is from a particular period in american history when we had to we had a task and that task was to begin to unravel demystify and destroy some of what we had to deal with this is a a fan by the way and it's commonly from churches and so on and this is it's a piece of memorabilia from the schaumburg center which is one of the letters to the exhibition and as a matter of fact along this particular piece from the schaumburg center for research in black culture for those of you don't know that's part of the new york public library system but it's a really one of the research ladder this particular piece says stereotype versus human types in the sixties we had to deal with a population for the most part to the steep in this turbulent period of civil rights uh rights evils and education african nations throwing off the yokes of colonialism and becoming independent and the fact that for several hundred years the visual culture of the united states much of it uh should let me back back up some of it was designed to make sure that people of color thought very little of themselves so you have we had the task or we felt we had a task when we began to realize who we were as artists to begin to destroy these negative images and create images that were uplifting and reflective of really who we are that was our task so my relevance today is the fact that this marvelous museum and this marvelous exhibition has given me an opportunity to speak to you and it is only because of my work as an artist that i made me sit on the stage and impart my experience to you today i am currently working on a series called new american landscape and it's more abstract than anything you can imagine but here we're talking about the images of african mass that i kind of merged into what professor jones is called a sovereign image of african sculpture and african art presence and that was part of what our mission was at that point uh african art was that actually relegated to antiquity one of our mission was to take this these forms these cosmic forms which influence the entire modern art movement and bring them up to relevance so that the large audiences can see them one of the things when you talk about activism we were in the streets at the point that i was coming into my own as an artist our people our particular community were not going to museums were not really going to galleries that was just not part of our culture we were into music and dance and those other forms so one of the things what our task was to take the work to the streets so we actually got into the streets and these works were hanging on the fence of a housing development on 127 street and and what was formerly known as the seventh avenue is not called adam played paladino boulevard so the art had to be taken to the streets and that was that's what we had to do so that puts a different whole different kind of tone on what we're talking about today i'll leave it at that you feel jay that your work has to offer to audiences today and something that was a mission of mine to bolster to strengthen to give body to and to reinvest in and that was the black family and it was very important to me that an awareness of the conditions of our culture experiencing a splitting of the family i'd be a decreasing of the value of the american black male um it was important that we restructure that image allow that to be a goal and that became my flag and if what it is is pushing back at the experiences that we may have known and a strong black family it is the arms that i feel you need to take to the revolution so that's my beginning of activist art to an extent because i was one of the founding members of african group a group that pledged itself to positive experiences for our people through our art and african stands for african company of bad relevant artists uh hearing that alone um it's something that we relate to today as well as um in that time our people are are known to be catching in phrases and it becomes a comfort zone to uh those who have an experience with us they remember they met us they remember what we talked about we leave an impression edge is a very important thing to me as an artist i like edge edge leaves a cut um it's like a paper cut you know you got it and it's very important to mean the footprint and particularly if you're walking in mud so you need to make your mark and leave that impression and this was a good jump off point for our after cobra community um my background in our training started so far as um my fashion design in a couple of years with the school of the art institute of chicago that was a good place to be i've never trained previously you know previous to that entrance um in art i was a musician i not in fine art so i was a musician so uh it was interesting to go into that field uh starting off with uh an entry program that introduced me to painting and sculpting and uh just the beginnings of of those eras and it meant that when you chose a field and i chose fashion design in my second year the first assignment was to um to if you could bring the other piece to bring up um a piece that was inspired by an object less related to fashion at all go out on a building go out on michigan avenue choose a building you like and be inspired do the design and i found that very challenging fresh and i wasn't dealing in the institute with any of the ramifications of my my uh the social injustice that we'd experienced um frankly i was rather naive when i and i rambled but i should tell you this i was rather naive when my beginning experiences in cleveland ohio i i didn't know about um segregation and i didn't know about preaches it was all sort of painted over i went to a high school that had one third jewish one third italian one third black americans um we had so many jewish kids and faculty members that we had that holiday off okay so we didn't you know we we were not in and i had no i had one black teacher in the whole experience um and she was in social studies but cleven had a way of sort of brush painting things you know it's very artsy community good museums good uh galleries good um concert halls and we went to these places as a part of your education and i don't remember but yeah and and we did we did go on public school tours of the the concerts the concert uh the concert leader would come to the school and bring the string quartet and introduce us to the instruments and they would play and we'd recognize what they sounded like and you could hear in other um you know in other beautiful pieces and say oh that's an oboe you know that's a french horn whatever um and visualize it jay can we you know what we're gonna hold that thought for now sure and wonder if you have any questions or animal has any questions for these other people here who are not in the witness show that way and if you have any questions for these next generations of artists as a way to get into our conversation um two things that i would you know we had the trauma but the distinct advantage when it comes to inspiration of being in the midst of the civil rights movement uh the civil rights movements i do see some of my peers in the audience so they knew they know what that meant in terms of actual action and it's a terrible right so point me in your essay about evidence um you don't have that same kind of impetus and energy where you have you know on television you see in dogs leaping at people and people being beat with clubs you don't have that today but is is it a different uh situation you still have your challenges i also had the pleasure in my colleague mlj johnson's in the audience and was my other one of two of my other brothers from the wave sea artist we had because there was um when i read your reference i see the old these wonderful uh exhibitions you've had in museums all over the world you know europe asia here in the united states uh people like faith wring old benny andrew's jack witton kicking we had to kick down doors and that literally in these museums to get them to even recognize that there was a card there was a population for artists of color who were working in many of the same genre they were uh had something to say so with that mind right now you many of the things that we had to kind of go through in order to make it possible for some of you to have these entrees uh what is your challenges today in respect to coming together as organizations are they organizations like the way you see artists where you see artists for cooperative african group uh and what are your civil rights challenges now when it comes to these institutions first the image that you painted or that you put forth because as soon as you describe that image in you in a way positioned it in terms of um you know we didn't see this these images on television like it wasn't in this kind of direct moment but now in a way that same image can easily be appropriated and kind of be served for our american express or bernie king or would have you and i think that's what also happened in in the eighties which is also the time that i grew up my formation my relationship to certain images of protests were already co-opted and utilized to serve a different purpose and to produce a different kind of consumer so i think um for me part of my um i guess that self actualization as an artist is also kind of reclaiming those images for for another um generation including my own being able to parse out the distinction between when something is being used for advertising when something's being used to kind of lull you to sleep or if something is actually connected to something that is um towards your agency so i just wanted to maybe just add another nuance to the way which images that um reflected the time that you were referring to um or the time that we're all black and non-black uh are beneficiaries of the the the paradigm shift of the mid 20th century um now how that relates to our institutions i think they still are in formation you know so there are still challenges and there's challenges also around language um the assumptions of i think um Stephanie maybe want to jump in here but i think even Stephanie's response kind of started to point to um the the way that um hegemony or power just reasserts itself it keeps reasserting itself you have to con it's a constant battle you know it's never it's it looked it may look different but um it's a constant and fortunately we're strong we collectively people human beings is everybody seen the exhibition in the audience just kind of bouncing off of it to see what it's there uh there's a particular piece of it it's the kind of dress of what you're talking about adjumama okay again some of my peers know they saw adjumama on the pancake box you know we're talking about these these images now joe overstream took adjumama and he put a mk 15 or whatever those guns are in my hand but this was his way of taking what i think you'll glue to here and revolutionizing it and making it relevant one of the things that is important in my view is it's fine to create these wonderful works of art and come into these magnificent institutions like book museum book museum happens to be uh a unique in the sense that it has a real commitment to the community so it's it's now it's in my view again and it doesn't have that elitist uh aura that a lot of these other museums have because you know the mr. Lehman has made it his charge to make sure that this museum engages the beauty but it's a part of our our driving force and i think it should be all of you too you have to get the work out for people to experience it and if you just wait for a museum to show in museum you're not going to really be read maximum audience now of course you have a today advantage of social media and that's something that we did not have in our day so in many ways you haven't a step up on us in terms of being able to reach out to people you don't necessarily have to be in a museum you can put it out on facebook or youtube and reach millions of people where we will confine to whatever we can do in the streets and basically in the museums and galleries churches so oh i was something that is sort of uh rippling through um made me think of something Leslie said earlier was she and hopefully i get a right to collect the personal this idea that we i think of it with a life in which the notion of biography is not a singularity we have described our consensus it was a period where i was outside of new york for a long time and one of the things that was most taxing was that i had to reassert who i was every couple months because i was a stranger nobody knew me you know like there was nothing like i was no history and the understanding of myself i realized was not only based on what was in my mind my memories and such but like the next day of being like hey you broke my window when you were six years old the person been like oh i remember all of these different things i know when you come in the back so this idea that there's a collective personal also leads me to there's a collective responsibility and i think when you talked about the active the sort of charter of today's artist it's to really i i remember it's to remind sort of our market our world that we're not our experts on ourselves and no should be being that the parameters of how we are described how we understood how we exist both in policy in the mythic space and in understanding of history is something that everyone has to sort of take that truck up so to be more sort of specific because i feel like that's the way i think of it is kind of nebulae but this idea that the work should have a political or always has a very particular political position as opposed to a multi-valent political position a temporal political position a complicated and sometimes not always affirming political position it's something that oftentimes artists of color are not afforded in these arenas and that's the every day you see that we didn't make it into the future and what political looks like but what i'm wondering is something that's so good i want to give jay an opportunity to ask her question if you have a question for these people who are coming after you working in in art or in the kind of intersection also for people out there with fashion but i would like to to ask what is it that that you could do to reflect the past but in uprising to our spirits in order to make a voice for for today since you looked right at that as best as i can there are a few things i want to say in regards to things that were said earlier and words that were used earlier it's it's nice to hear um language like responsibility and charter um it's you know in whenever these conversations take place the word of political politics the word political in politics is used over and over again and what i feel is never defined is that what what are the politics you know um that we're speaking to that we're moving towards it we can assume as artists as institutions as curators as historians as scholars etc that we're up to good that we're doing good because we make art uh because we go to museums because we create collections in many ways those actions are actions to reaffirm power to reshape existing power structures but they do not necessarily dismantle them so in a way what i hear you saying is what do we do with the material of the past to create a kind of future dynamic that actually allows us to imagine something that is productive and whole something that creates a space where we can not be simply surviving but where we can be you know to use a kind of generic phrase where we can be thriving um is that a part of what you're speaking towards yes um i i often hear reference to um the actual um experiences that have occurred in uh in in segregation and and as though one doesn't get it if you propose as an arts you know you've got art is a visionary so um to be able to go to the next level to be able to um express something that would be classic and lasting but a good principle to uh to swallow and take with you to the future and and i have a real problem with um articulating the actual instance um the mission of our group african was to uplift to restate to direct as as a visionary like many artists have in the past for their people it hasn't been the strife that they they uh may have illustrated and they they may have but the point is that you recognize it and you may that there may be a way to uplift to an extent where you know that this is change this is not the usual this is the future and future lives and and thrives and impress us and makes want you know those you know want to envelop it and so that's what i'm wondering about your vision when your choice in many ways hopefully if when you're a visionary you don't know what you're looking at you know you're kind of looking at um a kind of blank space in in my view a kind of unmarved space um and this is why it's so important and my work that you know i am attempting to create a space where performative gestures can play themselves out you know where those actions can play you know be it a painting what have you um but i also do you know very literal things where i sort of think of the work as some making work retroactively um you know you're sort of talking about the future but in many ways i'm sort of fascinated by influencing the future by sort of thinking about making something now that i'm sort of inserting into a a time or space that has already passed so i make a work in 2007 but i think oh this should have been made in 1970 and so i think of it as a kind of historical insert um and that influence hopefully influences my you know vision as an artist but also sort of moves and sort of shifts how we look back at something that already has occurred and you just insert one question and then we can go to questions after people answer because i'm burning questions out there i can tell um the kind of basic question that i have is um do materials matter you talked about materials on the last panel um maybe adam can start by telling us what we're looking at but you all have worked all of you have worked a variety of different materials and i think bringing different materials um two different um aspects of your practice or into different sites of activism or different places um of display so do materials matter is there something about the type of materials you would use in one space that you would not use in another and so on so what is the importance of materials or do materials not matter at all um in in how you're making work they're just going through one after another and maybe adam you can start with this because i think everybody talked about what they were looking at except for you of course materials matter um but you know they matter and just in a very practical sense um what does it do you know what can it do you know what what does a moving image do what does a still image do what does paint do what can it do um anyway so what we're looking at is actually a a still from a piece that i shot in 2011 in uh oakland california and it's a portrait of the former chief of staff the black panther party by the name uh david hillard and uh david i believe was it is in his 70s i think he was in his maybe 76 now was 70 a little younger when the piece was actually shot and i went to shoot this piece because i was asking my question um the question that i continue to ask myself today what is a relevant politics you know um and i wanted to do that by entering into a conversation with david um and the conversation that i entered into with david was one that sort of looked at the borders of representation and abstraction and relationship to creating a portrait of an individual who has or has and had a very tangible and specific political past as one who participated um in the forming and conceiving the idea of what the black panthers are so david gives these tours these black panther tours in oakland where he takes you to different sites that are of important importance to the panthers like where the first breakfast program was where they set up a crossing zone for children to go to school to get to school safely and so i'm basically riding around in the car uh with the david as he's giving this tour and when he's not talking about the sites i'm attempting to have a conversation with him which took about 11 hours for him to finally sort of open up and to talk to me and not just simply reveal facts or things that i could you know find in other other places to show me some idea of who he might be and that immediate moment so this still is actually an image of where we went to a house in oakland where there were um remnants from a shootout that took place two days after martin luther king was killed and this is the owner of the house showing us where a bullet struck the um gosh i can't think of the word not the siding but when you go up the stairs you have the thing on the side railing yeah the railings to the stairs so that's that's what we're looking at but this this piece of mini it's a three channel video piece and in many ways it is it's a it's a documentary but it plays with the idea of anything being a fact a historical fact an actual fact so what you're looking at and what you're hearing those two things don't often come together so david might be talking about the first panther office but you're actually looking at the house of of a panther so there's kind of um so it challenges the idea of how we sort of record things and how we create a kind of historical record i love i love these materials i feel like it's a great platform i mean you can you know what if that afro tile was made ice cream that's just a new world you know so the material is a a point of con of content you know you can make reference to historical materials as well as like what it does like the physicality of you know time based work versus you know bronze so i think materials is in great a great place um and i always get on myself and trying to think about it like is this really the right material um and it's a constant um questioning and you never you know you could have made it i like texture i think texture three dimensionality you know tends to because i think of the human side so you know you want to touch it you want to rest it experience it so i love the texture one of the things that uh make it seminar together uh the one of the pieces is called that i wanted to show today was called reclamation site number two where i actually was able to go on the site of what is the current Harlem state office building uh and pick up dirt and soil and wood chips actually integrate them into the total uh so but uh calligraphs i love the medium of calligraphs i don't know if we had any of that so the experience really you know for making the experience is really full of just texture well we're going to go to the q and a now so i know you've got all those questions stored up people so please come forward and get to the mic thank you uh hello hi baby yes uh first i just want to say this is a wonderful experience and if we're talking about what was and what is this is good that we have this chance to get together and have this conversation because we're having different opinions different approach and it's all part of what is life you're never going to satisfy everybody and everybody got their own mind everybody creates in their own way but i just wanted to say this that if anybody create anything piece of work and you put it somewhere it's up to me when i see it to get the energy from it get the spiritual from it get my own opinion about it i say don't follow work so for me to get an essay on it sounds like you're questioning yourself and answering yourself because whenever you put a piece of work whoever sees it at the energy stand they get it okay is there a question you have all right thank you i'm not sure how well i mean articulate this question um but do you find yourselves i mean this goes out to all artists on stage um do you find yourselves um wanting to call yourselves specifically black artists um out of the whole industry of being an artist or um do you find yourself just wanting to be considered as an artist if you're in a room um with a whole bunch of artists um do you have to call yourself or be defined as a black artist we went through a whole decade of that of questioning what is black art and are you black artists my simple answer is no i do not want to be labeled as a black artist i want to be identified as an artist who happens to be black but it has nothing to do with who i am in a total sense of art itself and the production part that's my personal i i'd like to say something to that effect too um with regard um animal uh too much of the work that you do is in in reverence um to sculpture um and and some of the artifacts of african cultures but i mean i've seen something you know i learned some stuff the thing that is really um fantastic is that um there are a number of um cultures in africa that do sculpture or three-dimensional pieces and and they are really really classic and really are at the root of modern art so to speak so uh they have they're timeless and um and that's an interesting place to be you know it's not a labeling of of the um culture it it was simply the art and as we see it we appreciate it and we see that it lasts forever yeah um thank you for answering that um the reason why i ask is because um i go to bar in high school early college and um although the basis for the school was to incorporate um a population more um living in minority areas my school is based in the lower east side right across the street from the projects it's very much um a predominantly white school and so oftentimes like myself there's a small black population and i see a correlation with people seeing me or my friends who happen to be of color as being black intellectuals not so much like intellectuals so i thought that um i was wondering if the same thing applied in the art industry thank you i think stefanie had you were going to say something and then we'll get to the next question thank you very much going to say something which is maybe just responding to the structure of the question um and the idea and i think that you recognize this of course the idea that black is a kind of as a kind of inflection of of artists um and that and that and that other art that it's possible to be first of all a racially uninflected or or a mutual artist or a politically uninflected mutual artist um and that black artists alone bear the burden of negotiating um that inflection of course that of course that is a is a it's false um uh i think it's really important for you and your your colleagues that um barter in the collective where did you go oh there you are she's you're blocked by leslie i think it's really important for you and your colleagues to recognize um um and assert the um i guess the what what troubles me and what troubles me a little bit about your question is that it seems to suggest that it it it creates this sort of impossible it's impossible to uh overcome this conflict between being like an artist and a black artist you never deny your blackness right and at the same time you want to you you want to be recognized as you know equally um you know mutually racially as a meaningful artist in a racially mutual context and i think it's important to um to reject those terms those distinctions and even even it's just for you and your friends you know personally conceptually that you understand um that um it's a kind of it's a kind of false uh distinction or dichotomy it's not and it's um as you grow as an intellectual and i think latoya spoke earlier really beautifully about the sort of opportunity for artists to navigate among discourses um and serve as as as public intellectuals or um as intellectuals who have the kind of flexibility to um work across multiple domains it's as as you as you continue to grow it's important to take precisely that pressure um and dismantle it um that that is an important part of our project i think thank you thank you um this question is for the contemporary or i guess newer generation of artists um by way of the legacy of this older generation if i can use that term if that's okay um first i just want to say thank you so much for being here um i think the witness exhibition is just amazing and dr jones another wonderfully curated exhibition um so my question is how these these newer artists um uh i guess grapple with the legacy of groups such as africobra um because the way i see it in amongst kind of many um many effects of uh groups such as africobra during the sixties is that not only are black artists um allowed into the institution but they also forge their own spaces alternative to the institution as such and i'm wondering on how you guys find your own artistic uh how your careers benefit from this legacy and do you see that you are um as equally invested in institutional representation um as you are these kind of alternative spaces or where do you see your artwork um working really and it's essentially are you to recommend to me oh i'm she was she was asking it to the contemporary generation how how basically do you see yourself invested in alternatives histories and spaces as well as mainstream spaces um and you can also answer it but i think she was answering it to uh you guys i mean i think that others have worked across institutional and alternative spaces um and find that there are uh one of you know because groups because previous generations of artists have created created uh institutional spaces within which we can work uh it's um uh it's inevitable that we you know we benefit from those opportunities that have been created at the same time i think at the same time i think many of us have also chosen to um to uh there's i think there's a kind of privilege associated with um operating as as an artist as Lutoy described it um as an intellectual in our um in our cultural context and one of those privileges is the ability to move among different kinds of spaces from the spaces of our families the spaces of our home communities uh institutional education spaces as well as museums and one of our opportunities and responsibilities i think is to uh is to is to bring our um is to speak um and across all of those domains i don't know if that's a good answer to your question but it's a little bit planned. I also think the sort of expectations of what the institution how institutions serve is is sort of the question to ask um or that i ask myself as a question i feel like my um colleagues do too where the institutions afford an opportunity uh opportunity can exist physically here or it can become a film a publication it can extend out and also still incorporating partnerships with other um institutions within the community and alternate communities um at great distance whether it's like partnerships with uh institutions in Nairobi or just down the street i feel like the the way i come to understand institutions constantly grow from like visiting the museum as a kid this museum as a kid regularly to working in after school programs that teach the the idea of the institution was like it just showed up on the wall but i've learned that these talks the uh programs that teach children things is senior but this the institution is as mountable as you force it to be and as it wants to i like as you make it and i think that's something that's distinctly different in our time especially with hindsight being 2020 seeing the way that certain institutions or people or individuals were traumatized attacked misunderstood um you know i think part of perhaps not wanting to answer i don't know where you are now um that or yes that uh it's part of when you asked that question there was part of me that didn't want to answer it because i felt that it would lock me into one strategy and i think part of it um which i think was referred to by Stephanie and concludes that fluidity is actually a part of it like moving through various spaces i also work collaboratively where my name is completely dissolved and i rarely talk about that work because i feel like the work needs to operate without the branding of my my individuality which is what happens often in our context i'm also an educator i also write also write about other artists works so i think it was hard for me to just all of a sudden solidify that and think about that in relation to the historical strategy because the historical strategy also um was dismantled in various ways which i think even Adam's uh piece is speaking to you know um the in tragic but also in beautiful and amazing ways so i think fluidity is something that i i just wanted to point out as um maybe a nuance that's added to the way which artists strategize to address institutions so we have our last question thank you thank you hello i wanted that my question also is for the emerging next gen artist it's a follow-up question i felt that was it was asked for that completely answered about the um post civil rights issues in terms of raising in um and access for the post so there was a time when you were not allowed into the building at home and now you are there as an individual maybe or as well and i think what i heard in that question was that somehow the challenges today are less than the challenges that were there in the past and i wonder what are the challenges today that's what i heard the question of you what are your challenges today as individuals as artists as people i think i think some of the challenges are and um brought up by all of us in fluidity like this notion of um so there was a moment left to sort of use the language where you weren't allowed into the building or you weren't seen on the walls that there was a lack of representation within an institution or a series of institutions but as there's been development in that way what that expectation of that image is what that what how you can operate within those institutions um where your historical position like um often in relationship to try as opposed to a projection of future like those are challenges today uh a kind of i think of it as a a a myriad of of present description and also the allowance the allowance i guess for future projections the idea that you can exist beyond history and then you can live in myth and sort of um have this fluidity i think that's a kind of challenge that's at the core of most of the challenges that i i just and i mean all of this in an optimistic way but you know i i feel as though we're we're all talking as though uh we have arrived and i'm not talking about african americans or anybody but but i'm simply and i again i mean this in an optimistic way you know things are really bad i mean if the goal is or was to get you know into the quote institution then that's really sad you know and there's so much more that we have to do and oh we weren't allowed in the institution and now we're allowed in the institution i mean in my mind and in many ways i really don't care you know i really just don't you know in the sense oh i'm here i wasn't there because the stakes are much broader than that you know they were and they are i mean what's interesting you know i think when we let's say we look at the 60s the 60s is that you know these were questions that we weren't even supposed to ask ourselves for example am i an artist am i conceptual artist am i this you know we didn't no one had the kind of um the the privilege or the luxury to sit around and ask those questions and i still don't think we should have the privilege or the luxury to sit around and ask ourselves those questions today there are more urgent things and i think that's sort of what i was speaking about you know when i said you know what is the difference between being an artist an activist and a citizen and i think we have to think about you know sort of how those things can influence each other instead of again assuming that as artists we are doing good that as institutions we're up to good because the truth of the matter is we're probably not we're probably not you know helping move things along you know we're probably just you know in other words you know you had a period like when you talk to a person like david hillard you you know you realize that these guys were under real directs you know you had the fbi trying to tear them down nobody cares if you know i hang you know a black dot a painting at moment no one you know the fbi doesn't investigate me you know so in a in a real way i am perpetually as an artist saying i have failed you know and i became an artist because i thought it was in fact an activist position but that was 12 years ago and now the more i you know sort of become involved in the structures that the art world has established i often feel as though my efforts are futile and i would be better served to doing something else um but i mean that in an optimistic way