 Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Irene Sunwoo. I'm the director of exhibitions here at GSAP. I'm the director of architecture, planning, and preservation. And I'm also the curator of the Arboros Architecture Gallery just across the lobby. And we're really pleased to have you all here tonight on the occasion of Tokwasi Dyson's exhibition, 1919 Blackwater. Tokwasi is a multi-disciplinary artist based in New York by way of Chicago. And she works across sculpture, drawing, and performance with a commitment to and passion for painting. And I've really witnessed this over the past couple of months and I can testify she's really a machine when it comes to painting. And at the core of her artistic grant as a whole is an intellectual investment in forms of environmental justice. Both interestingly from a historical perspective, but also importantly with a view to potential futures. Her work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Wooden Museum of American Art, the Grand Foundation, the Drawing Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and also the Cincinnati National Museum of African Art. This past spring, she was the Robert Quothney Chair at Cooper Union, rotating interdisciplinary professorship in art and architecture. And she continues to teach at Cooper today and is also currently a critic at the Yale School of Art. In 2016, she joined the board of the architectural league of New York as vice president of visual arts. So over the past few years, the Extension Program at Ross Gallery has prioritized developing new projects for architects and artists, offering them resources and space to test arguments and launch new investigations, which in turn augment and expand the research, conversations, and design experiments that are continuously unfolding at GSAP. We're incredibly proud to support and present this new body of work, like Quothney, which I'm confident will prompt us to re-evaluate how we as architects, historians, teachers, and students understand the agency and limitations of representation, the scope of repercussions of climate change, and the power of geometric abstraction as a visual language. And while it may at first seem curious that an architecture gallery has invited a painter to do a show, in fact, Turquoise has allowed to teach us as a discipline about the built environment and space. And really, I can't express how much I've learned from Turquoise interacting with her over the past few months. Now I can't take full credit for pulling Turquoise into this crazy vortex that is GSAP. I post her from a few of my colleagues, namely Mario Gooden, professor in the architecture program here, and who joins us as moderator tonight, and also Laila Patelier, director of events. So Mario and Laila have been trying to coordinate a drawing performance, masterminded by Turquoise, and are trying to find a space that the school has proposed for them. Having come across her work through her solo exhibition at the Graham Foundation, and also her project at the drawing center, which was the inspiration for the Graham exhibition, I kind of concerted myself, uninvited into the conversation that Mario and Laila were having, and inquired what was going to happen to the drawings after the performance, and maybe with Turquoise wanted to exhibit these in the gallery. And soon after, she was essentially in residence at the gallery, really set up shop, and the space really became her studio, her oratory, classroom, and think tank throughout this past summer. And for those of you who know Turquoise, you know that she was truly a force of nature, able to crystallize critical thinking and creative production in mysterious and breathtaking and beautiful ways. And that convergence of intelligence and poetry surfaced in her proposal for the gallery to tackle the 100th anniversary of the red summer of 1919, a period of sweeping racial violence across the United States. And in particular, she emphasized the desire to focus on a specific act of violence that took place in the segregated waters of Chicago or hometown. So I'll leave it to her to speak about the significance of this historical case study in more detail during her discussion with Laurent Rooks and Mario Gooden, and also to discuss how it was offered a lens to think through more contemporary issues concerning race, climate, migration, and the architectural imagination, and the quasi-certainlyness of architectural imagination. So we're delighted that Laurent Rooks has joined us this evening to participate in this conversation. He is currently the Associate Curator for Modern and Contemporary Collections, specializing in African American collections at the Getty Research Institute. And prior to working at the Getty, he was an assistant professor of Africana studies at Lehman College and a curator for the Racial Imaginary Institute. And serving as a moderator is Mario Gooden, Associate Professor of Practice here at G.C. and Principal at the Huff and Gooden Architects. And he also directs the Global Africa Lab with Mabel Wilson. His work writing and lectures frequently examine architecture and the translation of cultural landscapes defined by the standards of technology, race, class, gender, and sexuality. Before I turn it over to our state speakers, a few other things are in order. For her continued support of the Gallery's programming and her consistent recognition of exhibitions as an integral part of G.C.F.'s intellectual and creative culture, I wanted to thank our dean, Amal Andros. And I'd also like to thank Mabel Wilson, also a professor here at G.C.F. and Ayama Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist based in New York. Each of them generously engaged for quasi-important conversations that are included in our exhibition pamphlet. And I really encourage you to pick this up and take a read. It's really an amazing set of conversations. And last but not least, our amazing student team who contributed to the formation and the realization of 1919 Blackwater, including Tommy Nguyen, Alexander Tell, Andrew Shea, Ira Bae, and especially Fernanda Karlovich, I don't know where you are, but you were really an MVP. We got there early today and we didn't show up until two minutes ago because you were working hard to make this happen. Thank you so much. And a big thank you to Paola Veliklana, Laila Katelier, and everyone else on April 4, 15 who helped make this event possible. So with that, we'll turn it over to Tuvalé Mario. And just straight off the bat, I want to thank Tuvalase for the work that you all are going to see next door in the gallery. It's truly a pleasure and a gift really to have your work here at G.C.F. and to be having this conversation in this school at this time 400 years after 1619 and the arrival of the first Africans on this continent. Probably not the first Africans, but the first enslaved persons on this continent. So I'd just like to start perhaps with Tuvalase if you could maybe just tell us a little bit about the story that you're using for the historical framework of the paintings. For those who haven't had a chance to perhaps read about it in the pamphlet or the wall copy of the style. Sure. Thank you. First of all, thank you for inviting me and me from the starting of this year's conversation. All the students and all of you who are joining us tonight. I really appreciate you making that said. What I was interested in in 1919 particularly was in a bit that happened in Lake Michigan. And this event was personal to me because I grew up in Chicago swimming in Lake Michigan on the south side of Chicago living very close to the water. So as I got to swimming in Lake Michigan I had the story of a young man named June Williams but bit killed in the lake. And it really triggered my whole sort of rubric of water and politics in the body. So this event for young pregnant had been swimming in the lake and there were segregated waters of course, segregated beaches in Chicago and they had found the space in between the Black Beach and the White Beach. And they had built this raft, right? So they had built this, I don't know, what I consider as an architectural object to be in play in existing between these two spaces. So I was very interested in that raft, the moment that they decided to collect the materials, decide to be able to leave segregated spaces and live there or there. And also understanding the heat of Chicago in that time and look up to the rights of the land across the country. You know, black people were really vibrating to Chicago, the water was over, white people were coming back and there was a lot of conflict around the city, around labor and space and segregation. So when the four men one day, the five men were, my boys, there were playing in rafts while white Chicago had thrown rocks at them and hit Virginia and Virginia drowned. So I was really interested in their imagination and just thinking about that day of play, the water, the horizon, the making, the genius of creating a space in a nonsense, right? And thinking about ways to resist being told where to go and what to do or how to live. So it's really interesting in that impulse and I can't pretend to be interested in the sort of impulse to create a place of freedom in between the sort of second game of the castle. So I made an exhibition about it. You know, what gets me about the process of work is that, you know, every day, you know, I look on Instagram, every day you look on the internet and I see the danger of black bodies in space and to come up with a term called black oppositional thought in which black people are in some particular way navigating or making objects or making space for themselves to be safe or to navigate or to navigate between spaces in which they are not built, right? And so the connection for me in terms of your work, I mean, it's not in the past, it's actually in the present. It's when I'm on the train, I'm on the sidewalk just as a black man. It's me in public space and I constantly think about the space I hold and the space around me. Am I safe? I constantly think about it, am I safe? And so, you know, just in terms of this work, these young men just made a raft. You know, they made a raft out of what was around them to actually go out into the water and to feel safe out in the water. But they weren't. I mean, that's what makes me do it. And to make work around that idea and to use abstraction to bring that work across. But there's no figuration. I'm not saying it's easy, but we're late to it easier. But to work with the principal ideas of the spaces that black people have historically named to be safe and to use the sort of ideas that they created as thinkers. They're the thinkers. And to make all work out of that is to move on. I'll follow up with that. Because of the wrong notion of figuration, but it'll work. And I think I read somewhere recently that abstraction is perhaps the tool of the mechanism to deal with these issues. So it's not about the kind of literal representation, but abstraction and translation at the same time. So I'm wondering if you might sort of talk to us about the, what it is that you're sort of translating or the particular elements of the story that you're interested in translating or how that relates sort of architecturally to your broader interests. I've come to abstraction as very much a tool. So if you can imagine thinking about these histories of black body self-liberating over time. And today, I am trying to understand that condition of both inventing under the duress, inventing with materials around you, and inventing while the sort of systemic order of degradation is always happening, right? So there's some simultaneity in the, I think, genius of black people who can really create a similar space. So they have to know infrastructure. They have to know material. They have to know their own body weight. They have to know that even, it's acting like over time, how things work, right? Material in relationship to their body. So abstraction allows me to understand the system that they create in relationships and the system that they are trying to navigate, negotiate and critique and be free in, right? So it's a way of thinking about Eugene and the young man, thinking about the horizon, right? Thinking about the rav below, above. Thinking about the distance from taking materials from the train tracks and moving them to the water. Thinking about buoyancies. They're understanding how buoyancy works and ties. They have to figure that out, right? So the idea of transparency, opacity, movement, distance, space, I am interested in abstraction and getting closer to understanding how really they work, right? In these different ecosystems. And then that same understanding that genius, despite that research, almost in all the other systems, right? So in that decision, they are always center subject. They are always the center of the beauty of it all, right? And the tragedy of it all. But that's what abstraction does for me. And it's interesting what Meek-Prom is in the audience and I was thinking about this maybe in 2014 when I was making all of these architectural objects that I didn't think about as architectural objects. I was in the solar panel at the time trying to provide pretty solar energy and think of solar technology and get off the grid. I wasn't thinking about me. So I was making all of these crazy architectural objects just to hold the solar system, right? It's got this battery bank. It's got the systems. It's got the solar panels. So architecture just became to me as something that would hold the solar systems, right? So then one day, Donga and he was like, I can draw something and then somebody built the thing that I draw. Is that the thing? So it clicked. If I could do that, then I could un-make things too. So I started un-making slave castles, right? Or architectural buildings that were built to transport materials. Then we built to transport bodies. So I was like, whoa. I've been in Elmina with my mother when she was a full-bright scholar in Ghana. I was like, whoa, I could take those stairs away where they would bring in slave women up to wait. Like, I could get rid of the stairs. I could get rid of the door with no return, right? So for me, thinking abstractly through architecture allowed me to understand, to engage those systems. Right now, I'm like, okay, it's a way to understand things. That's great. It seems also to me that one of the things that strikes me about this new body of work, and I read an introduction mentioned the force of painting. That makes you a painter. But the paintings, I would describe the paintings as constructions. Not paintings in a traditional sense. And even though you started with the story of the boys, the paintings are not representing the story. But it seems to me that you have constructed a history or constructed a telling of that story. And so the paintings exist between, yes, painting, but also architecture. In the way that they're constructed, I'll call them found objects, but perhaps there are objects which begin to index certain things, but it's very much a kind of constructed condition. And so I think that that's something that we in the architecture group are asking, take away in terms of thinking about narrative and how we translate that in terms of architecture, if that is a tool or a structure and how we translate that in terms of narrative. What gets me too is where do you fit into the narrative? Where do you start to think of narration and story telling? How do you understand the source material in terms of the story you're feeding from and then where do you come in? And so the paintings are paintings, but they're not paintings. They're also telling of an interaction between artists and a history, because you space a faker meaning fakers. One of the things that we do, the way in which you gave those young men the dignity and the respect to respect them as thinkers, those young black men to respect them as people who can make a wrap. And if I made the wrap, I would not take it out into the water. But they did and they were having fun and it was a space for them to exist in the world and on the water and they're looking at the horizon and it's dark and looking at the stars. It's a whole condition of thinking that you're interacting that you're engaging and that you're repositioning and instructing an environment for us to then enter that space. I think that's amazing. That's very true and I say that because I think it's exactly my politic right around using geometric abstraction in particular because I'm not sure you know, thinking about those five men and of course I talk about Fox Brown a lot and Harriet Jacobs how would they figure all of that out? The genius around figuring those things out over time, moment by moment and to engage their cognitive ability through my own imagination because there's no image of the raft. It's talked about maybe over twice but when I heard that they had built this object on the water and I'm a diver so I know that you should be afraid of it and to understand that that space and getting at those histories and making paintings about it it really gets me closer to them it is an homage to their engineering sales their architectural sales, their creative sales their poet sales I guess my paintings are a way to think about how they did that as a creative strategy to think about what we're going to have to do so there's a history of say black composition of God and these people were using a kind of genius around space and maturity and movement in real time and on their bodies and imagining places imagining things how are we going to figure out motion and movement and kind of movement as the waters rise so in a way both building space motion and movement and migration is to enter the history of painting to say well we need to be thinking about these kinds of tools to figure out what's going to happen to our physical environment but also how do we figure that out? I think we look at the history of black spatial genius to figure that out so it's a way to you know not necessarily translate but it is a translation but it's a way to really understand or take notes or index or be in relationship to that kind of knowledge the only thing that can get me there is my imagination and then I make the objects and then there are visits that come in that's right you're trying to get to those is that part of that human perception of thinking genius that would happen in that way? but the paintings that constructions are all in my instructions they don't really reveal it they don't reveal it all I mean they really have clues and I think in terms of the layers of history and I think it's the boys went out to have a place of refuge to be liberated but we know the history of water and African-Americans going back to the transatlantic state so there is this trauma associated with water and I think that the constructions perhaps reveal some things but also leave some things to sort of question in terms of thinking about the but also the genius of how do you deal with that trauma? and so in a way and I was mentioning to you that we were a few of us were in conversation with Tina Camp today this idea of refusal of not sort of putting it all out there a practice of refusal that resists it seems to me that these constructions are also kind of operating in that liminal condition where some things are clues or are indices but other things are beneath all the layers of painted material on surface I think that is a product of that kind of thinking right so if we were to think about what you just said and lay it on any of those people they lay out self-illegration those same ideas right refusal things that are hidden things that are revealed things over time things that are strategized some things are given and some things are not so I think that kind of measurement or idea of refusal has many different sort of ontological conditions and what I mean by that is that when you look at these kinds of histories of becoming black in these ships in this water on this water I say in this water on this water simultaneously we think about how we got to where we are and then both in the trauma of dying death and I'll say death, dying quickly over time and refusing that kind of condition of a force death by figuring out how to self-illegrate like how is one how do we track that even beginning right how do we question that kind of impulse and when I think about that in terms of the constructions of the paintings it kind of ends up like that just in the process of researching these kinds of histories if I'm building a painting with the same kind of well if I'm building a painting thinking about each and every one inevitably there's going to be something hidden or not inevitably there's going to be ideas of distance and time and life and passing so the idea of where something comes from and where something is and how to make meaning of all of that inevitably things are going to be refused things are going to be welcome things are going to be negated things are going to be quiet so all of these things help me make the paintings so I think that's second question but I don't necessarily it's interesting to have this conversation because we collaborated before and I'm always I always wonder what architects are thinking about people who made constructions for who with the attention of um no no no um to your point the rap was made in secret yeah so the rap was made in secret until it was known and I'm sure the people I'm sure the people who didn't know these little these black boys can actually make something like that and when it was seen I'm sure it was a shock right and for me you know doing for people to make something often we have to do it in secret because the newness of it or the shock of seeing something made by like that you didn't expect made often what violence often what violence you know so the idea of black middle class right the idea of you know they have a piano and they're home they got a piano it was secret but once it's known they're in danger they're in proximity to like in a poor white community who who are angered at black people actually living in the American dream economically and culturally right and so the idea of secrets is something that's ingrained um in the culture because who wants to stay alive you know and to another degree the making of the rap their climate change right and I'm thinking we all may have to make a rap and some particular point and we think about climate change so the metaphor itself you know you beginning in blackness and invention and the danger of that invention being revealed but that being a signal to we're all going to be vulnerable and something we're going to be don't pay attention to climate change and what they metaphorically will be alright right so that's what the young boys were doing they were swimming in the beach in the beach again so all of this runoff of industry they named the place black white I'm sorry hot cold because at one moment the water would be hot well other moments the water would be cold from that industrial runoff right they still enter the water they still played there right this sort of determination again instead of sea to sea this they then they had to hide the rap every day they left right so they had to tie it up they had to make sure they could come back to it and I mean at least for 14, 15 the idea that we don't hunt these stories down after all the all the tragedy that's happening because of climate change and global warming and global stuff if we don't figure out those stories of trying and those stories of spatial negotiation and materiality as we're based on water and industry and infrastructure what are we doing right so by understanding these stories completely and their spatial significance we understand the science right we understand the material conditions right that water was wet it was water or wine what is it slippery you know it was of course algae forms and then the box flies and feeds on itself so you're getting up on it they're getting down on this slippery piece of wood that was made out of whatever they could find so in my mind stories like this we're going to have to we can't think about our roots the same we can't think about our furniture the same we can't think about the patients the same we can't think about these kinds of built environments the same and I mean now I don't need an existential threat I mean for people of color around the world the same thing yesterday or that 10 years ago talking about climate change as we look at it right now so I think that these stories have got to be exhibitions about them and you know around sort of mentioned you know what is significant enough to work is the sort of dignity that you've given to the boys and I mentioned that I think that the paintings are instructions I'm going to come back to this the paintings are instructions but in sort of let's say excavating the stories which have been suppressed or or hidden or even denied and making your instructions it also seems to have a point towards the future or at least the kind of optimism as it was and that you are constructing something new out of this it's not simply about the trauma of the past but even let's say the trauma you know or the risk of climate change but that you're constructing there's a creative process that comes out of this but creation seems to be about the kind of future you might sort of talk about if you're thinking about the future relative to climate change in a kind of positive way or in terms of what you're making now that to me the work is moving from painting becoming more and more architectural we've also talked about that and I should mention even everyone will see the people over there but the black glass pieces as well in a way in which they sort of change the condition of that existing space and point towards a different space or a future of that gallery I don't think I this is the way I think that I consider time when I'm making my work so there is no future that I'm working towards there is no in terms of the second linear thing between past present and future I'm really thinking about conditions of black death in a way in a way not in relationship to trauma but also in relationship to a kind of brilliance that happens because of that right I don't I don't like I said I don't think about climate change as an existential threat I don't think about it in terms of you know kind of years away I don't think about it as something that's not personal I think it's a very personal condition as a Katrina I have 30 people at my house I was teaching a settlement Katrina happened 6 days later I was feeding everybody so there's no I I don't think about it that way as something that I need to do to save our future I think about it climate change particular global one again people in the global south as a as a way to deal with the people who are around me right now in proximity people that I know in coastal cities now people that I know live in cities that where superhighways are making these hot zones people that I know are living and dying all in breath and water clean water, bad water so I think it's a kind of condition where we have to recalibrate right now how we think creatively in the arts with capital A as it relates to climate conditions so the paintings are a critical response to I think they're critical because I'm trying to get to a way where people deal with climate in different kinds of climate there's a climate industrialized by supremacists so that those boys were in multiple climate conditions it was the climate, the water that was coming from the industrial ways it was the races that threw rocks at them and killed one of those boys it was the climate of the water it was the material of the raft so they were existing in these kind of climate conditions where a black death occurred so in that way I am working spatially to figure out what I need to know right now that I don't know but the water moves yes and so the water does have to pass a future for migrating from does the water have to pass a future well there's a time element right in terms of maybe a motion element maybe a state change element a state change but the state change happens at a later time or in cycles so moving from Katrina or moving from New Orleans to Houston or to LA whether they come back or not but there is something like distance or maybe in terms of duration so maybe not future in terms of kind of futurism or optimism about the future but in terms of here and there I suppose particularly in terms of migration and water as geography right so I think the word I use is distance yes so I've been making these exhibitions thinking about distance and trying to replace the idea of distance because people do that to me about time and work and instead of using the word time I try to use the word distance and what distance allows me as another tool is to consider both the story of region both the stories of those people that were at my house and both the stories of people in Vietnam, both the stories of people in Houston and so I know that geographically they are far from me so I think about that distance I know that I have a memory of Katrina that for me is not time that's a distance in my memory so when I'm making paintings scale is very important so scale allows me to construct a sense of distance and I also know that when we think about scale in architecture, engineering and infrastructure how does the black genius someone like Eugene Wings and his friend then get scaled up as a way to deal with space so that was an incident that happened how do we scale up those kinds of conditions when we understand the waters are rising because they are in a constant state of change so that's what I'm thinking about in terms of constructing things that are to me measurable from buying this standpoint as a diver, as a swimmer in relationship to distance another thing about distance so when you're diving into like 50 feet or 100 feet, I think I've gone down to like 120 feet where you have this idea of visibility so visibility is a condition of distance I'm not thinking about time I'm not thinking about what I can see in front of me and what it's going on in my mind it's like those sharks I'm not thinking about sharks so I'm thinking about distance in that way in all conditions so I know that when someone is suffering from the aftermath of a tsunami I think about that distance how far are those people away from me how close of it to me how much do I know or don't know and how can I close that distance between what I know and what I don't know as fast as I can and I'm going to use abstraction to do the thing that this world has completely been unable to facilitate a kind of knowledge information of this world has completely been unable to facilitate such a tsunami defense so my distance is like how can I construct a kind of knowledge from black history to climate change to conditions of the global cloud south that will close that distance between what I know what I need to understand and what is happening right now in terms of day to day issues of death and dying no I mean so proximity proximity proximity to proximity to the sort of psychological duration, the physical duration to all of these other boys that think about let's not get too close to those white people so it's the psychological distance and then it's physical distance and so it gets me about the exhibition in and of itself is that we have all of the objects right, I did that in one moment we have all of the so we have all of the objects inside of the exhibition and then you have to figure out what is your proximity of body to body relationship to those particular objects and so if those boys are thinking about how to stay away from that side of the beach because they're safer being at a distance from those people who would likely attack them you know I mean so in the exhibition you have to sort of feel your way through the space because when you're down to the feet below the water you know vision is very important because there's a wall but there's also the body, there's a perceptual thing that the body has that can feel the space around it so when you're walking through the exhibition it's not just the paintings but it's the sculpture it's the orientation of the sculpture it is you are box brown kind of you are in a space in which you have to sort of navigate and negotiate when you turn but with a particular perspective and the paintings themselves they're not just looking at it straight and painting straight and you look at it from the side it's a different thing, the sculpture you look at it from the side it's a different thing and so that kind of navigation of the space sort of mirrors this idea of proximity you know to contrast yeah I think it mirrors the idea of proximity it also challenges the distance and particularly I think the black glass pieces we were talking about this when we walked through I think on yesterday in the way in which they visually sort of manipulates certain things about the space which by the way sort of collapse some corners of the room or they expand some corners of the room so there is this proximity, there is this distance and again I would think of rather than not paintings perhaps even the sculptures, not even as sculptures but as devices yes, yes, so being that idea of the history of people making devices to self liberate and that's what we could probably go on and I will have many more conversations but I think it really would be great for everyone to enjoy the exhibition I would really like to thank everyone for turning out on Friday evening during a happy hour I guess but again thank you so much for what you've given to Columbia GSTOP given to our community and for letting us be engaged in the conversation with you