 Good morning, everyone. I'm Barbara Vogelstein, Chairman of the Brooklyn Museum's Board of Trustees. I couldn't be more excited to welcome you to this year's program, which we've aptly named Trail Blazers, Women in the Arts. Believe it or not, it's the 14th year of this incredible event. We have so much to celebrate and so much to say yes to this morning. I'd like to begin by celebrating all of you in the room with us today. As I look around the room, I see the faces of so many leaders in their fields working tirelessly every day to make our city, our country, and our world a better place. I see a group of passionate art lovers, professionals, and supporters who are here at the Brooklyn Museum to experience important conversations on women's leadership. Critical conversations at an important historical moment. I can't imagine a better group of peers to join us today. As you know, over the years, this event has honored many women who have made a significant contribution to the arts. Yoko Ono, Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, and Marina Abramovic, just to name a few. And this year is no exception. We have an equally remarkable lineup this morning. Starting with Sarah Erison, the mover, shaker, and young arts philanthropist, Lowry Stoke Sims, the ceiling-crasher curator, Mi Young Lee, trailblazing arts leader and our good friend, Ellen Gallagher, the visionary artist, and Janet Mock, cultural change agent and best-selling author. Let's give them all a round of applause. These women are remarkable in what they have accomplished and in the ways they have transformed and are continuing to transform our cultural landscape. The timing couldn't be more right for this celebration. Not only is it an exciting election year, to say the least, but it marks the 10- 2016 marks the 10th anniversary of our own Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The Brooklyn Museum is proud to house the only center at a major museum dedicated to the past, present, and future of feminism. Thank you for kicking off the anniversary with us today. I applaud those of you who have been involved throughout the years and I welcome the enthusiastic new supporters who are joining us for the first time. Today's event supports the Sackler Centers and the Brooklyn Museum's exceptional education activities and groundbreaking programs, and we're so grateful for your help with this. And speaking of exceptional, it's now my great pleasure to introduce our beloved trustee, Elizabeth Sackler. Elizabeth has been one of the greatest friends of the Brooklyn Museum, from her donation of the iconic dinner party to her establishment of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art to her generous contributions to the museum over the years. We're delighted to be with you today Elizabeth to celebrate 10 wonderful years of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art and to help launch the year of yes. Elizabeth. That's terrific. Thank you very much. I feel like I've died and gone backwards into the Miss America pageant. I love when, when wins, as most of you know or some of you may know. And today it really is. We honor extraordinary artists and leaders. We have a fabulous event that is going to support, as Barbara has said, the educational programming and other programming that goes on at the Sackler Center throughout the year. And this is a very important event for the center. And I want to thank you all for participating in it. While we make her story, I need to go back and review history. And the history is my gratitude to Bob Reuven and Arnold Lehman. Bob was chair and Arnold was director when I brought the vision of the Sackler Center to them. And the Board of Trustees during the entire time of our, of our creation of the center, both physical and in terms of its content, the Board of Trustees from 2001 to 2006 was extraordinarily supportive in this. And I want to thank them because without these people this day, 10 years later, which is kind of extraordinary. And we're, how we arrived at this moment, but here we are. And it's wonderful. It's taken hundreds of people to help get us here. And it's taken our Council for Feminist Art, other supporters throughout the city actually who have come and you, who will go with our mantra equal pay, equal wall space. So today we begin. Yeah. Today we do begin our 10th anniversary, the year of yes. And Catherine Morris, the Sackler family curator for the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art envisioned this two years ago. And with Arnold's blessing and with the Penn Museum curatorial agreement and Pasternak, our director and also Nancy Spector, our new chief curator have embraced it and created us as the year of yes. And I thank you very much for this wonderful start to an incredible year of celebrations for the Sackler Center. Right from the beginning, our mission was to get the exhibition of feminist art up so that we could understand the influence of the art on the political and on the artistic landscape of the city of this world and to uncover as well the feminist content in art going back to antiquity. As well, of course, the dinner party gives us an opportunity to learn about the 1038 women whose shoulders, on whose shoulders we stand. And what their contributions were, they were trailblazers in their own time and in fact are all too often overlooked. And many of them suffered and indeed were murdered for some of their work. So we have some learning to do about our history. The 10th anniversary year of yes will be presenting, and this is, it's described exactly this when, I think it's marvelous, so I'm going to read it to you, to present a multiplicity of voices from the history, I will say herstory, of feminism and feminist art while also showcasing innovative thinking and contemporary artistic practices to recognize feminism as a driving force for progressive change and considering the transformative contributions of feminist art during the last half century and it pushes back against conventional barriers to expand the canon. It is here to expand feminist thinking from its roots in the struggle for gender parity to embrace broader social justice issues of tolerance, inclusion and diversity. So we have arrived, often I am asked how and why the Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and I've been asked to just say a few words about this now before our program. I wanted to partner with the museum that was committed to education, that was committed to women, that was committed to or is committed to history, history, community, and also to our future. And I needed to partner with a museum that was willing to take risks to see beyond the status quo and a museum that would be ready to be a leader in all things women. And the Brooklyn Museum was the only museum in this entire city that met all my criteria and it still is the only museum that meets all these criteria. I thank the Brooklyn Museum, I thank the board and I thank our Anne and as she brings us forward and I would like then to introduce her because that's our history and here is our herstory, our brilliant fierce feisty feminist director Anne Pasternak. Elizabeth, your vision has been transformative. It was you who first imagined that a feminist center could transform not only a museum but culture and society. It was you who saw that the Brooklyn Museum was the perfect institution to support that vision. And it was you who led this effort which we have now all gathered to celebrate for the 10th anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art with a year of exhibits and public programs and even a conference that reimagines feminism for the future. We launch our celebration today by launching five truly, truly extraordinary inspiring women who use their power for real good in the world. Collectively they represent the best of our arts ecosystem. Each in her own right is a true dynamo and we are profoundly grateful that they've joined us today to share their work and their life's passions. Before I introduce them I want to recognize a few dear friends who always champion the role art plays in shaping a more beautiful empathetic thoughtful and civil society. Friends who have supported today's event because of you our noble historic institution can bring encounters with the world's great art and open us up to new visions of ourselves, our times, and our possibilities. So Elizabeth, thank you. Mary Jo and Ted Shen, thank you. The Taylor Foundation and Annette Bloom, thank you. All of you have joined together to support leadership for the year of yes programming. And I thank you for your constant major support in our work. I want to thank our contemporary art acquisitions committee for their support of our Beverly Buchanan show which is opening today just for you. We want to thank our Council for Feminist Art that's always right here with us. And we want to say welcome aboard to our new corporate sponsor Bank of America. You're hearing it first now. Thank you Bank of America. They are the best partners. I also want to thank my very dear friend and previous honoree Kiki Smith for our honorees. She has made you a beautiful, wonderful necklace, each one unique for you. I know. Me Young's really happy. And I want to thank our hardworking, devoted, super chic and always incredible board of trustees. Stephanie, Carla, Ellen, who's here? Stand up board of trustees. Stand up Stephanie. Leslie, thank you. Did I tell you they're super chic and brilliant? And of course I want to thank the Brooklyn Museum staff for putting this event together. All of you have helped to make this the most successful women in the arts event ever. We've raised over $250,000 thanks to you to support the Sackler Center programming. And this incredible show support means so much. It's going to build great momentum and excitement as we head into this very special year-long museum-wide celebration. It's actually more than a year, but don't tell anybody. And so without further ado, I am going to invite on stage our first honoree, the wonderful Sarah Erison. Sarah is a true shaker and a mover, and it is a thrill to introduce to you her life's passion and work. She is a driven arts leader, championing excellence and access in arts education and profoundly inspiring ways, which you're going to hear about. I want you to know that she is president of the Erison Arts Foundation, a trustee of the National Young Arts Foundation. She's on the board of the new world symphony, MoMA PS1, Americans for the Arts and American Ballet Theater. Most of all, she's just wonderful. And what can I say? Much to her surprise, the person who's going to be interviewing her is one of the great loves of my life, the brilliant, inspiring Bill T. Jones. Bill and Sarah, will you please come to the stage? Well, Ms. Erison, we meet in all the good places, don't we? Yes, we do. Well, it's my honor to be here with you today. I was wondering, because you know, I'm curious, we are in a time of yes, in a time of transition. What could you tell us about how you happen to be in the position now? Your grandmother was a force of nature. What your family's relationship is to this philanthropy and art? So, you know, I'm very lucky because I grew up surrounded by the arts and I wasn't even really conscious of how much it was a part of my life. You know, when I spent time with my grandparents, we would go to the symphony, we would go to the ballet. When I traveled with them, we were traveling to see museums and having that really changed my life and I think is so important and kind of the way that they started the National Young Arts Foundation and the New World Symphony was that when my grandfather was growing up in Tel Aviv, he wanted to be a concert pianist and he did not find the support from his family, from the educational community or from the community at large to pursue this passion. So, you know, he was told go get a real job, go be a businessman, go be a lawyer. And so he moved to the States and, you know, he started a number of businesses and when he reached a point where he was able to give back, he looked at my grandmother and said, I never want a young aspiring artist to go through what I went through. That, you know, if an artist says to their parents, to their teacher, to somebody in the community, I want to be an artist, that the response is, yes, okay, let's see how we can make that happen. And so that, from that, he started the National Young Arts Foundation, which identifies and supports the next great generation of emerging artists, visual, literary, performing and design arts and takes them at this critical juncture in their life when, you know, you're a high school student and you're trying to decide which way to go and there's not a lot of support for artists, you know, it is really, there's a traditional educational path. And so we look at how can we, what are all of the things that we can do to support a young young artist at that point, including giving them master classes with master teachers such as yourself. And, and, you know, I think it is actually up to us and there's so many people in this room who do so much of this work to provide that support, whether it's financial, whether it's guidance, whether it is, you know, guidance as to where do you even begin. And that, my grandparents started that and I'm hoping to continue that and to, to grow and change it even more. And while what they started was really that juncture between high school and college, I'm looking at that juncture between college and to the professional world because I think what we're seeing, and I've had discussions with so many people here, is that artists will go to college, they'll get their BFA, they'll get the MFA and then what? Then where do they go? And there's very little room to experiment, there's very little room to fail. And so I think it is on, you know, organizations such as Young Arts, such as the Brooklyn Museum, such as MoMA PS1, to give these artists the space to experiment and to fail and the support to do that. That's wonderful. We were obviously at a moment of, a critical moment in our country's thinking about itself. You are oftentimes in situations where you get to see a broad swath of the cultural community. I'm just curious from your position, seeing you're zooming over the cultural landscape, what are the trends and things that are happening? Other, your work, things like the cycler here, what are the trends that excite you most and encourage you most about the future in a time that can be seen as discouraging? I think, and this is with so many of the organizations that I work with, accessibility and how do you get the arts to everybody? You know, I'm on the board of Americans for the Arts and one of the things that we champion is the concept of arts and this is arts in every component of our society. This is arts in the military, this is arts in education, this is arts in medicine, this is how can the arts become a part of our everyday life and a part of our everyday conversation and not, you know, siloed over here as something that is, you know, a luxury. And so really making the arts a part of our everyday conversation and making it accessible to everybody, getting into every community and making sure that they have the exposure to learn about the arts. And that's a trend that you're seeing in many places? I think it's a trend that people that work in the arts are discussing and that people are really making an effort to move that forward, which I think is very important, that people have noticed that, you know, the arts are not a part of our everyday conversation. It is seen as a luxury. There is a certain kind of ivory tower component of it, which it, you know, should not be the case at all. You know, I would, like I said, I was extremely lucky that it was a part of my everyday life thanks to my grandparents, but that's not the norm. And so I don't think it's a trend yet, but I think it is something that has been identified by a lot of people who can actually move that needle. So, Sarah Erison, congratulations on this well-earned honor as a trailblazer and I'm inspired to be in a time where people like you are actually leading the charge into the future. Thanks, Sarah. Thank you so much, Bill. Okay. Well, you know, whenever I come up on stage, I get nervous, can you tell? And I always forget something, so I want to tell you a story. When I first came to the Brooklyn Museum, I went into conservation. It's one of the happiest places on the planet. For those of you who've never been into conservation, come with me sometime. And there in our conservation studio is this phenomenal DeLarobia piece that was being conserved. And it's a piece that you probably saw splashed big on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times because there's a giant DeLarobia survey exhibition at the MFA in Boston right now. And I want to thank the Antonori family. The DeLarobia actually has portraits of their family from the Renaissance. And it was at one time in their property. And now it's here in the States and it's newly restored and cleaned thanks to the Antonori family. And we want to thank the Antonori family also for sponsoring the museum and being such a great partner. And for those of you who are joining us at lunch today, we're going to have an Antonori wine. How great is that? So thank you, Antonoris. Alrighty. So next up, and by the way, you guys, we have 15 minutes. I am very excited to introduce you to a person who I just have to say wow. Wow, she's just amazing. Talk about ceiling shatters. From the Met to the Studio Museum and beyond, our next honoree, the great Lowry Stokes Sims. Not only shattered the ceiling, that's right. She rose to the stratosphere with her trailblazing visionary leadership working with countless artists changing their careers and expanding the horizons of what we consider to be great art in the world. She's inspired countless millions of visitors. And Lowry, I have to tell you, I wouldn't be the person and leader I am today in the arts if it weren't for the example that you set. Lowry is joined on stage with our new deputy director and chief curator, the one and only Nancy Spector. I'm so excited. This is so much like speed dating. Congratulations, Lowry. Thank you. I'm super excited to be here with you. My first question is what was the most formative experience that you had that led you to a career in the arts and wanting to be a curator? My parents. My father was an architect, came from Tennessee to New York, worked in architecture firms. And my mother was born in Jersey City, came to New York and during the Depression, despite a family of poverty, she, her mother had credentials to teach but couldn't because she was African-American and worked as a domestic. So she had very high aspirations for my mother. And my mother just, I have a suitcase of programs, play bills. She just created this kind of cultural life for herself. So fast forward she has three kids, we're living in Queens, and we grew up with the idea that we could go to museums because they were free then. We could get a library card. We could have standing room at the opera, the symphony, the ballet. And so we kind of grew up with that kind of situation. So formatively speaking, I would sort of say that when I was 16, I got a job, my mother got me a job as a sales girl at Woolworth's. And I think this was her plot to have me understand that that was not a career because I hated it. But one of the first things I did was I took out a membership at the Metropolitan. I was always a nerd. And I used to come to openings. And if it wasn't a boyfriend I could grab, my father would come. And so really growing up, who knew that fast forward seven years that the Metropolitan Museum would pay so much? But I had come there when I was 14 to see the Mona Lisa when it came. So in many ways, my parents taking us to drag us around to museums and places like that really led me to the Met, which became a very kind of formative place in my life. You've worked in three distinct cultural institutions in the city, in addition to all of your other projects. The Met, which of course is encyclopedic, like this. The Studio Museum, which is culturally specific, dedicated to the work of African American artists. And then most recently, the Museum of Arts and Design, which is devoted to craft and design. Can you quickly go through and just name, what are the, for you, your favorite curatorial projects that you were able to build and present at each of those places? Well at the Met, certainly with Stuart Davis. It was the first real big project that I had. And I worked on it with Bill Agee, who was working on the catalog resume at the time. And we decided that we were not going to curate the show from past catalogs. We were going to go out into the hinterlands. So we ended up, we went to Reno, Nevada. I went to Norman, Oklahoma. We went to New Orleans. Eating our way through the country. At one point we were leaving the Indianapolis Museum, taking a car back to the airport. And we're sitting there nibbling chocolates going over our nose. A fellow passenger said, what exactly is it that you do for a living? And he said, we're art historians. And he said, oh, is that what art historians do? I said, yeah, we eat chocolate and we look at art. So I think that that was really the important one. At the Studio Museum, I was really sort of engaged in revitalizing this museum that had meant so much to me, even when I was at the Met. But I did do an exhibition that had gotten a challenge grant that I was not going to do. So I negotiated with the NEA to change it around. That was challenge of the modern African-American artists. So I got a curatorial team together, Helen Shannon, LeBron Brooks, Leslie King Hammond. And we just sort of did this incredible exhibition that looked at the trajectory of African-American art between the two world wars. And I think that that was really, you know, a very important project for me. And then Mad, jeez, I think every project I did there was pretty cool. But certainly, Global Africa, the Global Africa project, was really important. And then even working on Second Lives, Dead or Alive, bringing Joy Scott to the museum. And then my sort of last show was the Territories, Laboratories for Art Design, Craft and Art in Latin America. And I think that with each of them, I worked with colleagues really bringing visions of the parts of the world that people still grossly stereotype, you know, into a really important venue. You've always been a champion of lesser known artists and have been an advocate for blurring the boundaries between high and low and different genres, obviously, craft and the fine arts. And you've spoken about this coming from a place of feminism and from working with communities of color. And I was hoping you could maybe just elaborate on that a bit for your experience. Well, how should I put this? Just Tuesday, today's Thursday. Yeah, Tuesday night I was part of a panel for Art of Justice that the Caribbean Cultural Center did with NYU's School of Public Policy. And Martin Vega, who's a longtime colleague of mine, who's the Caribbean Cultural Center, just opened a beautiful new space on 125th Street between Park and Lex. She said something to the effect at the end where there's a kind of call to action. She says, are you going to be in the problem or are you going to solve the problem? So as an African American woman coming into the art world, having the extraordinary opportunity to land at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I sort of, you know, I'm sort of basically a Nambi Pambi bourgeois black girl, but I have my panther, you know, side to me. So I took the heed of Bobby Seale, you know, if you don't go into Babylon without changing Babylon. So naturally, I'm going to like try to like make these museums reflect who I was. I mean, I couldn't help it, you know. So through a series of strategic misbehavior, as I call it. Can I quote you on that? Can I adopt that? I think I think that's just now, you know, the title of my memoirs. But anyway, you know, like also I came into the art world at an incredibly interesting time. You know, Susan Cahan has just published Mounting Frustrations, so it gave me a context for which I came into the museum. And it was just a great time. I was in community programs. We used to steal things from the Met, send them to community organizations. We pilfered, we stole, we lied, we, you know, we did everything to sort of really promote and work with our colleagues. And I think that that has been a thing that sort of really, you know, sort of really determined what my career was. Was it feminist? I can't think that I could help not be feminist. Was it about underlook artists? I mean, underlook artists was just people that the mainstream was not looking at. It's not that they weren't important, and it was not that they were any less talented. It was just that there was a cannon out there and nobody was looking at them. So my job was just to sort of bring them to four. And it's been really a compliment to me that within the last two years, younger colleagues have reproduced things that I did 20, 30 years ago, in regard to Jennifer Burris, and republished them. You know, so it really, you know, has verified that I was on the right track. Last question. Are there any unrealized projects, dreams, territorial dreams that you haven't yet been able to do but would in your, and I put retirement in quotes, would you still like to do? Well, I think there was a lingering desire to do a real retrospective of Robert Colescott, because we were longtime friends, and I really think he's a misunderstood artist, but I'm talking to the contemporary art center in Cincinnati. I've never been asked to do a biennial, but when I think about it, I don't think I want to do it too much work. More travel. More travel, but I can travel by myself, you know. So now I've had a good, I have a good run. I have in the works retrospective of Joyce Scott, which I'm working on with my cousin Patterson Sims for Grounds for Sculpture, and also next year a show called U.S. Mexico Border Place Imagination Possibility, which I'm working on with the Craft and Folk Art Museum in LA for PST 2017. Great. Well, thank you. We look forward to those projects. That's amazing. Congratulations again. Thank you. We want to hear more about that Colescott show. Bill T, are you still here? It's my turn to do an interview. So I am excited to introduce you to the passionate art collector, the champion of artists, and the philanthropist, Miang Lee. She worked for nine years as a vice president at J.P. Morgan and the Equity Capital Markets and Private Placements Division. Prior to J.P. Morgan, she worked at Bain & Company. She's a trustee of the Children's Museum of Manhattan, Grace Church School, where my daughter also went to school. The Whitney... Oh, Iska, are you here? Grace Church alumni. The Whitney Museum, where she is the acting chair of the Painting and Sculpture Committee, and very beloved. She serves on the acquisition committees of our favorite studio museum in Harlem and our most favorite Brooklyn Museum. And you should also know that this woman can really golf. Right, Stephanie? Okay, good. So Miang, come join me on stage. We're going to have some fun. Well, Miang, you ready? I'm ready as ever. Thank you. Thank you, really. Thank you so much for inviting me. Overwhelmed, actually. We love Miang, and we only complain about Miang because we don't get to see enough of her. You know, she has a family. She has many responsibilities. So we organize board trips to places like Brazil, where she can come for one day. She literally came to Brazil for one day. And we'll take it. Two, a day and a half, but again. All right, who's counting? So Miang, let us start from the beginning. Sure. I haven't asked you a question yet. Oh, sorry. But go ahead. You're all rewound up. Tell us about your life as a child, your exposure to art. Was there exposure to art? Actually, it's very interesting to hear Sarah's story because I was born in the States, but my parents weren't immigrants. My dad and mom just happened to be finishing up their education, and there was always the intention was to go back and live in Korea. So my mom and dad had me, my sister, but from age six on, I lived in Seoul, Korea, until college. So my four out of years were in Seoul, and this is the 70s, you know, this is a while back ago. And my parents had all the intentions to expose me to culture, but there wasn't that much culture to be exposed to. We would get one concert, a philharmonic from, I don't know, from Poland would come, or one traveling exhibit would come and come to our museums. But more than that, it wasn't really encouraged. Korea, even today, but way more so back when I was growing up, you know, you want to go on an educational path where creativity and culture wasn't so much the mainstream. So it wasn't really encouraged. It's surprising to me because, you know, I was just saying to you that I had seen Kim's Booth at the Frieze Art Fair, and it blew my mind that there were so many great artists making work in Korea at that time. I just got back from Korea yesterday, and as even as a Korean... Which, by the way, I just want you to know she got off the plane and had tea with me as soon as she got off the plane. Even as a Korean, I was surprised that there were so many artists working literally in the shadows during the 70s and 80s. And literally, these artists are now 80, 90 years old, and they are getting some overdue recognition. So that is very exciting as a Korean too. But fast forward, so I didn't get that much art exposure, if you will, growing up. But I guess there was something inherent. When I came to college, I do remember decorating my walls with the Klimt poster or the Chagall Dream or, you know, like, I guess we all did that. I had a Georgia O'Keefe flower. Okay. And then I guess this is my first memory of collecting. I did the backpacking trip around Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia was a country. It wasn't too country. And I remember going into a gallery and saw a painting that reminded me of the Chagall. And I'm really dating myself. I had to go to the American Express Traveler's Czechs office. Some people don't even know what I'm talking about. I do. But I actually had to go and get some traveler's checks to buy this little canvas, which I rolled up, put in my backpack, and brought back. Wait, that was your first art acquisition? That was my first. And Czechoslovakia. And Czechoslovakia. I don't even remember the ladies, but it was a woman. Do you still have the work? I still have the work. Are you actually hanging it? It's not hanging right now, but I will never part with it, though I do remember that. But again, I mean, I still am a little bit uncomfortable when you call me a collector. I always consider myself a hobbyist, actually. But again, fast forward. Now I'm living in New York. And I was just thinking about this. How did I start collecting? And it is a confluence, I think, of three things. Grace Church School. I don't want to underestimate that context. It's a school in South Union Square. There is a lot of artists, art professionals. Some people are here as my guests in the audience. I don't want to underestimate that because they were so welcoming. And so when I would walk into a gallery or a booth at Art Fair, it can be intimidating. But I was walking up and I would start chatting about with another fellow mother or father. That's how it was like. And so it was, that kind of got me over the initial kind of intimidation, if you will, of looking at art, I suppose. And then the second thing is, it is really important to me, there's two guys who I really like to say thank you, Gregory Miller and Michael Weiner. You may have heard of them. Gregory R. Miller does publish a beautiful art books. They are passionate collectors. They are just good friends. And because they actually put me onto, they introduced me to a guy named Glenn Ligon and a guy named Lyle Ashton Harris. And I started to talk to them and that actually started to, again, they're from my first pieces I collected. And that actually led me. One of the first pieces you collected was Lyle and Glenn. I know. One of the first pieces we acquired when I came to the museum was Glenn. There you go. And that is actually why, Laurie, I actually ended up me being on the Acquisition Committee of the Studio Museum. Actually, kind of one thing led to another there. But the third component is actually living in Manhattan and Brooklyn. I mean, living in New York, I should say, and having such access to galleries in Chelsea, Lower East Side, and the museum. So those are the things that kind of put me to the past. Do you recall your first epiphany with an artwork? I would actually have to say it may have been epiphany. There were so many. Oh, I actually do have one. I actually do have one. Yes. It actually was actually in your hall. I'm not saying this to suck up to Elizabeth. And I'm not. I actually came here to see- Do tell. Mickalene Thomas' show. Is Mickie, I don't know if she's going to be here or not. But again, a huge, huge fan of her work. And there was a show here. And you have this great, you have, you did this great thing where you can still wander through the other galleries. And the Elizabeth Sackler Center had Gada Amer's work hanging at the time. And again, Greg Miller had introduced me to Gada. So I kind of knew who she was. But to have the entire center have her work exhibited like that. I still get goosebumps because I remember that that was, it just really resonated with me at that time. And so then I became much more passionate about her work. And I'm not making that story yet. I really, it happened here when that show was out. You know, I'm glad you had an answer to that question. Because I ask it a lot of times. I remember my first epiphany with an artwork. I was four years old. But it's interesting to me how many people don't. So I'm just going to take, do you mind if I take a quick survey? If you remember your first epiphany with an artwork, please raise your hands. So, you know, that's probably two thirds of the audience. We'll talk to you about that later. So, okay. So then you start going to art fairs and meeting artists and talk to us a little bit about, you know, how you've taken your passion for art and philanthropy. How have you combined those two? Well, I do have to say I feel very fortunate. I do think I have two things. I have the time and a supportive husband. Neal's amazing. But she wouldn't let him come today. You know, he's been supportive of it. So, and I think, I do think, you know, passion is a word that people use and interest. And it, I guess if you want somebody at your table, it's nice to have somebody who is passionate and interested in the areas that you are. And a little bit having, I did work in Wall Street a while. So, again, because in these institutions, you're two things. You are a cultural institution, but you are also a business to some degree. And so we can underestimate those aspects. So that has helped me. And but, but also I guess really what you're doing, the mission, the mission of what the Brooklyn Museum is doing, the studio museum, the Whitney, those things do bring me to the table. Yeah. So you've been really wonderful to all of our institutions and not only do you support them, you also loan us work for exhibitions. We have a wonderful piece. Tell us about the piece that's hanging right now. Again, people do ask me, you know, what do I collect? And I, you know, I talked about, I do collect African American artists. I do collect actually, I looked around my walls. I think I have maybe 60, 70 percent more female artists than male artists. Again, not a conscious decision. It's just what I have. But the third sort of category I like to collect is I like to see my family in pieces of art, which do lead me to some quirky acquisitions. But occasionally there, I do get some home runs, if you will. And what Anne is referring to is a piece by the portrait artist, Lynette Yadom-Boachie, who Eugenie asked me to lend. And actually I think it's still hanging in the galleries. And so people, if you know, I think Lynette is, I think today one of the really strong portrait artists. Did she, was she a runner-up of the Turner? I think, I don't think she won it. But again, critically acclaimed your museum wanted to loan. So obviously important artist. But what I saw, I remember, I bought that piece as I was walking an art fair in New York. And I just, it just grabbed me. And what I saw was, if you see it, it's a man and a woman together. And the man is taking the glove, the white-gloved woman's hand and kind of kissing it gingerly. And Lynette does not draw from realities. Everybody is imaginative. So there's no, she's not drawing her friends or from models or anything. It's all in her head. So even the person who was selling me the painting said, I can't tell you if this is a love, two lovers or whatnot. But for me, it was a mother and a son. It was so clear to me, it was a mother and a son, because my son is a little bit of a kiss ass sometimes. And it's something that he would totally do. He would, if he wanted to get something from me, he would, you know, he would doubly say, Mom, you know, you look so pretty today. And oh, can I have, you know, $50 for my girlfriend? It's something that he would, he would totally do. And so that that piece, and if you do it, if the galleries are open, it's a gorgeous piece, period, in my opinion. But to me, it has a deeper connection because I just see myself and my son in there. And I have a, I have a piece like that with my daughter, I have a piece like that with my husband. So I have pieces like that. And no matter, those I will never, you know, part with, I mean, they're just going to be with me as long as I can. I asked if we were getting the piece, but she said no. So you can have it as long as you want. Thank you. Thank you. And we're very grateful. So I wanted to ask you what themes you have in your collection. So family is one. Family is definitely an important one. Like I said, again, having met Glenn and Lyle personally, it wasn't and their work is so strong. And I can never say that I've shared experiences of African American community. But I do say being a not, I mean, I'm not Caucasian and living in New York, you know, there's a little bit of the outsider feel I have or just someone who doesn't, who's living in a place that is not necessarily home. So that feeling did, I did connect with that in their art a little bit. And then again, female, female artists, I, something about mid career, female artists who I think are just doing their best work today. I have, I love Amy, Amy Stillman, Nicole Eisenman, Jacqueline Humphries. Iska Greenfield Sanders. Iska. Oh, yes. She's she's not mid career. I mean, I think she's still going up so strong. I don't want to offend her by, you know, by calling her. She's my goddaughter. So I just had to. But Iska, obviously Iska as well. There's there's really those really strong female artists. Jenny Jones is just one of recent acquisition, if you've seen her show at Sycamore Jenkins. And then the third part is then emerging artists, which is really fun. Again, because again, Lori side Chelsea, there's just so much young artists who are doing such interesting work. And I want to give a shout out to 47 canal, who it's a gallery, Margaret Lee. I don't know if she's here yet, but that gallery has interesting artists like Josh Klein, Anna Kaye. Elizabeth Yeager might be here. She's here. She's at this interesting sculpture, we just had a show at the Whitney. I think they're just doing such interesting creative work. It's it's also and then you had the extra pleasure of getting to meet the artist and getting to know them individually. I mean, that's really the fun of being in this world is to meet meeting these people. You know, we have at the museum, me young is a part of it, our contemporary art acquisitions council committee. And they go to so many studio visits and shows together with or without us. And I love following you all on Instagram because I've been working so hard in the past year that the museum I haven't seen enough. So I feel like I see everything because you guys are just devouring as much art as you possibly can. Yes. And I think this is one of the benefits of being connected with your institution. It's such a privilege to go sort of behind the curtain and to hear these brilliant artists. One thing I just wanted to add was Sarah mentioned that too is about supporting these artists. And that's something that if I am doing that indirectly, I'm very happy that I am. Korea, people lived very sort of sort of traditional sort of mainstream lives. And I like I said, it was discouraged to go off the track and because I personally kind of think I lived that way. And so it's again, maybe surreptitiously or just through the artists, I feel like I'm living a different life, if you will. I do too, actually. And that's again, very exciting. Yeah. Thank you, artist for that. So I also want final question. Yes. If you think about your collection, your love and support of artists emerging and established, and your devotion to institutions, what might you imagine your legacy to be? My I'm sorry, my legacy, my legacy. Well, like I said, I like to do more. I mean, you have I have teenagers at home, so I can't get to everything or do everything I would like to do. But hopefully, once they're out of the house, they're never out, I would like to, I guess they're never out of your head. But I mean, at least physically, if they're out of your house, I would like to be more involved with independent projects of young artists. I would like to get even more involved in that part. And the other thing that I was interesting at this is I don't have an answer. This is just something I've been toying in my head is, I mean, something in between the four walls of my house, and a private museum. There has to be a space somewhere in between because there I'd like to share my art. I like to share my art. I know there's I'm sure there's people here that have pieces that that you treasure, but would also like to share with the public. And it's not easy. Then they end up just being, you know, you can't there's there's no venue, if you will, to to share that art. And I don't know how you solve that problem because it does take resources and whatnot. But it'd be lovely to have some kind of system, if you will, where art could be more shared. This is something I've been noodling with. But in the meantime, I'm still like to collect and support artists as much as I can. Thank you, Mi Young, for being such a champion of art. Thank you, institutions. Back to being emcee. Here we go. Renowned for her paintings, her drawings, and her prints, Ellen Gallagher's work blows us away again and again. Examining race and gender and sexual identity through the prism of minimalism and process, the layered materiality of her paintings echoes the accretion of histories. She's had solo exhibitions at major institutions, institutions, including the Whitney and the Drawing Center, the ICA in Boston, the New Museum, the Tate Modern, the House to Coonston Munich, and the list goes on and on. And it is such an honor to have Ellen Gallagher and flown in from Rotterdam to join us here at the Brooklyn Museum. Ellen, welcome. We're so excited to have you. And I want you all to also welcome our Elizabeth A. Sackler Center Curator for Feminist Art, the wonderful Catherine Morris, who we all know and love. So Ellen, Catherine, welcome to the stage. Thank you for being here. Thank you, everybody. This is so exciting. I wanted to start with a brief anecdote. Imagine you get a phone call and somebody says, you get to interview Ellen Gallagher. And then the second sentence is, you have 15 minutes. And when that call came through, I immediately thought maybe we should talk about one work of art. You know, that would be a great way to spend 15 minutes really looking at something very closely. But there's this way in which there's a certain artist who I've met in my life and whose work I followed that I think of them as sort of pipe pipers. There are people that do things that fascinate me and capture me and I don't always quite understand what I'm seeing, but I just know I want to follow them. And your work has done that for me. And part of the reason it's done that and part of what I wanted to do today was show the creativity and extraordinary ambition and unique thought within somebody who can go from examining popular culture, wig advertisement in the back of everyday magazines to the organisms that ingest dead whales on the bottom of the ocean. How do you get from that to that? And it takes an artist to take us through that kind of conversation. So in that spirit, Ellen has valiantly agreed to probably do the impossible, which is cycle through about 15 slides and talk about that, I hope. And I thought one way to maybe start the conversation was I wanted to read this great quote from Robin Kelly, which was part of his essay Confounding Myths in the exhibition Axe Me, which was Ellen's show at the Tate, and he wrote, Ellen Gallagher employs and remixes history, historically burdened signs, ephemera, narratives, material to confound and challenge us to plumb the depths, whether it be the ocean, memory, skin or the layers that comprise her paintings. She makes us work, she makes us laugh, she makes us uncomfortable. So thank you, Ellen, for being here. And I thought we would start with an image. Thank you. Well, it doesn't really matter if it's there or not. It's hard to see. That's, oh, Susanna from 1993, we can look at details. But I mean, it's all these works are really hard to see, I mean, in a way, even from any kind of reproduction, which is strange because that's what moves me to think about in the work and reproduction in the sense of copying, but also in the sense of procreation. This painting comes from, it's sort of at the end of a series of paintings begun in 1992. And I was, so it was always part of a series. They never had any danger of becoming a singular work, which maybe freed me in a sense to make them. But they were always part of this web. So there was nothing, but their starting point maybe was me finding this crumbled up piece of penmanship paper, handwriting paper that I hope is outmoded now, but it was used for in Catholic schools to where people would sort of practice script and learn to make letters sort of A through Z as opposed to like whole language the way we work now. But I found this crumbled up piece of penmanship paper around 1991 or beginning of 92 in the sort of abandoned playground in my father's neighborhood. And I opened it up and it said, we are a drug-free school. Have a nice day. And it was a smiley face. And this was like right at the end of Nancy Reagan's war on drugs. And the playground had been really important for me. I came up in Providence, Rhode Island in the 70s. And the playgrounds were really these active sites then. For me, they were these turquoise rectangles. And you would go from one neighborhood pool to another neighborhood pool. And my cousin was a lifeguard at this pool. And so now this had all been that by 91 these were kind of abandoned sites and they would derelict. So spining this like cheerful note sort of centered on this paper and which was yellowing, so for me was a kind of flesh toned implication. And it just seemed really absurd. You know, it just seemed like this completely absurd thing. And I thought, you know, and so I am someone that reacts to materials. So I started like buying up this penmanship paper from Walgreens and gluing it down. It's also a really cheap art material. And it created this really poignant skin for me. And into that skin I started marking these signs that I had found through looking at Bert Williams, the American blackface minstrel, who for me was something other. And it was other because of the use of time in his work and timing to create space. And I wanted to think about how he could take such an ugly limiting sign, the blackface minstrel, the sort of the eclipse of the African body into American blackface, how one man with his movement and his sense of time could create this infinite space and sort of create a way in which those signs were had in fact reproduced into a kind of mutant that was destabilizing, that like created something else. And for me, so what I began to do was to glue these pages down on the canvas. This canvas is about like my, would feel like my body size, about, you know, 60 by 36 across, you know, sort of this abstract kind of human scale. And I would try to get a detail here, the next slide. Yeah. So I glued each page down and working in kind of this glific way, left to right, top to bottom, created these signs, these blonde wig ladies that weren't actually the next slide, please. Oh, well, I'll keep talking. Maybe we get lucky or not. Oh, and we've got another even closer. Yeah. Yeah. So so these these wig ladies, which you can't see here, they they from a distance, they would just appear like light in the painting. But they were actually for me, they start with a list. And they were not all the characters on the list were blonde ladies. They they so the list would start with in 1993, when I made this, it would go anywhere from like Shirley Temple to Madonna to Lisa Bonet to Chardonnay to Iggy Pop to Ian Curtis. And so what I found is as I kept working through the form, top to bottom, something else besides this one to one reading of a sign started to happen. They created, and you can see here, they sort of created a flow or disturbance, where they they started to become mutate into something more than just themselves. So on the one hand, they read, they became more abstract. And in a sense, what was it was almost like there was this back reflection that got implied through the accumulation, you know, so they they they started to become they started to have this life and have this specificity. And I was really excited that they could have this. Yeah, this kind of presence that was more than the sign, more than the glyph, you know, the subjectivity became like a living form, as I got to the bottom of the canvas. So we have the next slide, please. So this is the same painting. This is would have been the top of it, the one we were looking at previously would be the bottom. And that's what we see throughout the course of the slides that we'll be seeing in the body of the work is the sort of toggling between that sort of overall impression that one gets and then the sort of digging down into the layers of content that sort of become more apparent. And we've sort of but not just not just content. It's more something that happens. I mean, this was made in over three three week period in a kind of translike state. So I think it was more that the forms themselves get a life become like living matter to me. And even and that and and for me even the page, the penmanship paper itself because it will yellow because it's fugitive, it's not a fine paper. It has this sort of life form and to bring and I guess it was about this kind of unfinished business I felt I had with looking at Bert Williams and and these signs and creating a kind of space that was a living space that that actually kept those signs off of me and and off and I felt like that I needed to always find that sort of space or that freedom um through this sort of portal, you know, which was, you know, and at this point what were these signs? Even when you describe the paper, it sounds like skin. It's like a very living porous work working on. Can we have the next slide please? So this is perhaps the work that that I think you in some ways sort of are best known for. Maybe I'm wrong, but it certainly maybe I should say it's the work that I first really came to know. I think in the States this is the one. I think the work that precedes this is a group of large 16-foot yellow paintings like Exilento or Frilich and they were in Francesco Bonami's 2003 Biennial. So over there that's more the work that people knew me for. I don't think this has shown much. It's up now in Paris, but it hasn't shown much in Europe, but in this was the Whitney was really supportive of this. David Keele at the Whitney would come and visit me while I was working on this project. So they were the first museum to support this and they actually premiered it in an exhibition dedicated to the work. And this also comes out of not just those earlier paintings but also an exhibition I did at the drawing center called Preserve where I worked directly on top of mid-century African-American magazines. And I would draw into those magazines and looking through them and would sort of collage onto them to the point of kind of inscrutability. They would be almost become like boli forms where you knew there was this encrusted matter underneath it, but it sort of all of the signs in some ways became buried. And what I found really exciting about working with Deluxe is the intervention of the plate meant that I could build up all these stories. So I saw each page. So this is a grid of 60 pages and they're faked. I mean some of them would be recognizable, but mostly they're faked. This is Wiglet and Feminine Hygiene. I don't know why you chose that one, but okay. But anyway. But Wiglet was, I actually used Photographure which is a 19th century printmaking technique to, what's interesting to me is it had this all over tone. So I would build up this collage or all these like run-on sentences and texts. And the models vary from like everyday people to glamour models, you know, because this Wig was this sort of protective device you needed to have to get out the door. But there was also in the ads themselves there was this language that travels back in time. So I'm looking at ads say in this maybe from the 60s or 50s, but there were references to La Shiba and they were these and highly Salasi, a Salasi swirl. So there is this reference to this earlier black press, you know, opportunity or the liberator, you know, this, which was such an again another portal for me. Something where I felt there was some unfinished business there that if this could travel from, you know, Du Bois into Ebony Magazine in 1950, there was something there for me to continue to build from. So each piece of each page for me became a kind of theatre or a stage that I could build these stories into. But because of the photograph or because of the plate, I would build up these forms and just at the point of inscrutability, they would flatten out again onto the plate. And I could. So what it meant was that the kind of signs between or the meanings between the stories got more and more elastic, and I could build more and more into them. So in the same way that in O Susanna, the time or the sort of like the trance like state creates this mutant slip. This that here was actually the plate, the infinite plate, you know, created this space that could be really elastic. And the way you describe portals and narrative and sort of building up of bodies of work, there's a very narrative component, even though it's not necessarily always, it's abstracted a bit in a lot of this work, but the idea of narratives feels very present and the idea of stories and characters. And you talk about ideas of characters being consensual or not consensual. I think that's a very interesting part of this. Well, I consider like these characters didn't know they were, you know, they maybe modeled for these wigs and, you know, and I've repeated this woman quite a bit in the fifties, and she didn't agree to become in an Ellen Gallagher painting, but, but, you know, so she's a conscript in that sense. And so that she, so I feel like whereas in O Susanna, that there was, I would say those are consensual marks because I've pushed them through paint and graphite, they're not actually real printed matter. But what was exciting to me about this unfinished business of the black press as well is that with deluxe there is no original. You know, each page was already, you know, a found in circulation image that I could then pick up at some point in its circulation, whether it's forgotten or not, and recirculate it again. And so in a sense there is no original. There is everything, is a copy, but then everything is infinitely reproducible. And for me that is a kind of play on natural history, but also I think I'm not, I don't think of myself as making narrative so much as being really interested in the potentials of like literary form and also because it's, you know, for example, when looking at the ocean, I'm always interested in those liminal spaces on these early maps. So tell us about the ocean. Could we have the next slide please? Yeah, this is a water ecstatic series begun in 2001 ongoing. I actually became, I actually had the courage to go to art school because of a time spent aboard a sea semester after Oberlin. I did this thing out of Woods Hole, Massachusetts where you study oceanography and celestial navigation for half a semester and then you sail and we did this Caribbean loop. And I was reading César at the time so this was really an exciting thing to me and I, I wasn't, I didn't have a science background and so my project I thought up pretty last minute but it turned, which was to study terrapods, these wing-footed snails but which was a terrible project because it meant I didn't realize they were microscopic. I misread a slideshow and I saw a professor from someone, a scientist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute showed these, he had just done this research on terrapods and they looked like beautiful sea butterflies so I thought well I'll do that. I'll catch those but in fact I, they were like magnified by 20 times and what it meant was in reality I was on this boat doing these nufstan nettoes you know three times a day because they diurnally migrate and looking at these things and then it's a sailboat so and I had never been on a sailboat before so it's so, so the lab was on the sailboat and I would look in one eye at these terrapods and then try to draw them and it's those drawings that I applied to art school with I'm getting seasick just hearing that story. No it was exciting because actually that, my project wasn't exciting I had this idea that I would capture these things and because they were only partially mobile I would see the circulatory flow of the Caribbean but there actually isn't much circulatory flow of the Caribbean it's kind of a locked sea so but it became as a metaphor interesting but I also what I got to see doing those toes was that this idea of the water column and that there were all these disparate bodies that made up what appears as this seething hole you know this one thing is made up of rivers and lakes and secret passageways and different temperatures and secret seas you know salinity maximum water you know all of a sudden you would get a spike in sea there's like a sea within the Caribbean sea floating at a higher saltier level and that just for me I felt it was the idea of the ocean as this literary form had existed before but also for we first start to approach things that are unknown and scary I think as literary forms and map them out because we we didn't have the the knowledge to or or the but also because it's terrifying to think about the ocean as this as so disparate and so laden with cultures and cultures whale cultures and and various cultures that live both metaphorically and really in in the ocean so we succeeded on getting to the ocean yeah we failed on getting through all these slides oh i'm getting the wrap up sign oh i'm getting it oh okay no we get the next slide i want to get to the um to the osa deck at least at least to tell people a little bit about what it is because i think it's so fascinating this was uh a project i made with Edgar Kleiner and i most of the film projects are with him he comes from more of a documentary background and he's Dutch so this was made actually off of the coast starting off of the coast of block island road island where we saw a shipwreck but and and it seemed to be just being left to disintegrate into the sea and at the same time we had come across this discovery of this osa decks this worm that actually exceeds on whalefall and um this and this idea of whalefall and this descent of of of the whale and so as the whale moves through the water columns they become a really important food resource for the rest of the ocean um so whalefall is a scientific term but it's a very literary term in some ways well it because we didn't know about it so so when so whalefall uh this osa decks worm actually was discovered at around i think 2007 out of scripts um and when they first came across this uh worm they they they actually didn't know what they were they thought they were taking a hunk of uh canyon from the ocean floor and what it turned out to be was a part of a whale carcass and the worm had completely devoured it and has no mouth and no um but but was able to somehow just digest through the bones boring into this uh whale um and and it was just about this like life forms that exist again recirculating on this kind of passage and i was also thinking of the obsolescence of the the whales that have this culture and have all this knowledge and the secret passageways they say through the oceans and and all this scarring of the whales uh flesh was was also really interesting to me and it's you know obviously interesting to melville has a whole in moby dick there's a a chapter on the the flesh of the whale and the and i was thinking about the markings of the whale that would have been lost in all of and so um part of the film it's the it's the slides as uh glass slides and 16 millimeter film we we would i would make these drawings uh paintings on glass slides and then um what you're seeing there and then we would make a 3d model for it and travel these uh travel through what would be a blob of ink i'm always interested in you know it could have blob of paint actually register a feeling or a story or um and and so in this case we literally made a 3d model and traveled through these blobs and created this sort of um underwater space that you see that is so you're moving between the synced slides and and uh 16 millimeter film thank you to see it yeah thank you alan i have a whole new vocabulary to work on so uh that was incredible so uh bill sarah i'm gonna ask you to come back up on the stage i think we should continue the interview right we got a few more minutes and we could talk about the expansion of arts education around the country so i actually was continuing as i was sitting there to think about um trends and what we all need to focus on and what we all need to think about and i think that collaboration is something that needs to be a a much larger discussion amongst everybody from institutions from universities um from programs around the country and there was i think in the past a mentality of you know this is my organization this is my programs these are my donors these are my um you know my artists and i'm starting to have a lot of conversations about collaborating um and about sharing resources and i think it is a way that you know so many more institutions and organizations could be successful so thinking about if there's a program a fellowship for example that's trying to find talent it is really difficult to you know get the word out there to get applications to to go through all of this material you know we we go through twelve thousand five hundred applications a year at young arts um and you know we do it really well we we have a proven record for identifying this talent why can't we share you know for those for other for the um scholastic awards if they're trying to find this talent like come to us we we have this handle we've doing this really well and put your time and money and energy into something that you can take ownership of and that you can do really well and so i think that um collaborating and discussing and really everybody speaking to people from other institutions could move move the needle for it a lot you know when i we emerged um my company with uh the workshop we can one thing that was discussed during the deal at that time was that there is a always two imperatives one is there are lots and lots of people who need an opportunity to show work not in the performing arts world and then there was a sense that there's only a handful of masterpieces and so a lot of presenters are vying for the same artists all the time and yet there is all this need so um you have a very uh positive and um a non-threatening approach to this what do you think of this idea are there are there masterpieces and then what do we do with the glut of product and how is it absorbed that is an interesting and difficult question it was actually in an american valley theater meeting yesterday um talking about you know for the ballet swan lake or the nutcracker that is that's kind of the meat of what your of your revenue every year um but you know so we have there's you know a number of of ballets that are established in that you know a company has to show every year but what about creating new work and how do we allow you know alexa rotmansky who is the the choreographer at um at american valley theater how do we allow him the freedom to create these new works while still making sure that we have you know make our operating operating revenue and it's a it's a very difficult discussion and i think it's a balance and so you know abt it will do the swan lakes and the nutcrackers and the um you know jazels and then you know we're starting to find to allow for alexa to create one new work a year and so it's there's a balance i think of um of you know having the masterpieces but then allowing for the experimentation uh you know i'm on the board of moma ps one which is amazing because we have the flexibility to um to try things you know we we just turned the museum over to ryan macamara for a night and said curate the entire museum bring in artists bring in performers and see what you can do and i think that it's very difficult for um universities are really really large cultural institutions to be flexible like that but i think there are a number of organizations and institutions that can have that flexibility and take those risks and allow space for those artists to experiment so you can envision a world where there would be no needy artists i don't know about that well i'm being i'm being provocative because the assumption is that there will that there is enough for everybody and i don't think those in the art world we have the sense that there is never enough and uh and yet here you are a major philanthropist and you have a very positive feeling if you think if we play our cards right if we collaborate there should be enough for everybody i think that the first step to that is what i was discussing before about making the arts accessible and bringing the arts to everybody and into every you know sector of our society and so that is step one in achieving you know a world where there is no needy artists is you know step one is making sure that the arts are part of our everyday discussion are part of everybody's everyday life and once you have that you know they will be you know large companies small companies um and and everything in between and there will there will be space for not maybe not every artist but a lot more than there is today well i want to buy into your world because i'm i'm a half empty kind of person but i'm speaking to a half full one i'm i well you know it's there's so many people in the room here today who are working on projects or with institutions or organizations that are incredibly inspiring and i think that they all have the same view um of communicating and collaborating and the fact that we're all working towards a common goal of a world where you know the arts are part of everyday life that artists are supported and encouraged and that it's continuing you know everybody here should talk today at lunch and about what we all can do together to make that happen thank you so much don't make me do my fiance uh bill and sarah thank you for being spontaneous and you know you never know i might call you up again another wow last but not least we are in for a real treat with our final round of interview the trailblazing author and activist who many of us believe is one of the great modern day civil rights icons is with us janet mock she's a new york time bestselling author and a host of msnbc's so popular a weekly series about popular culture politics identity and representation could go on and on about her credentials but let me just say she's among the most influential change makers of our times i'm a planet and we are honored to be with her today welcome back to the brooklyn museum janet mock and she is she's she's being joined by a very dear friend american writer and poet professor public servant curator arts professional extraordinaire my very dear friend tom haley tom created our new brooklyn talk series here at the brooklyn museum moderating insightful and super fun conversations between artists so for example we've had sellout crowds to tom sacks and quest love and david burn and uh steve powers we have iggy pop uh i'll mention iggy and jerry delroy conversation another week or two um tom i want you to know that opera has already interviewed janet so the competition is welcome to the stage hi janet hello thank you for having me so i'm doing that i appreciate it this will probably be a bit of a surprise to you and your husband but i've been living with you for about a week now i've been uh reading and rereading and actually listening to your first book which is just an extraordinary work and there are the punches in the gut there are all the emotions of what it means to be in someone else's life and so go read this book extraordinary a brilliant so thank you thanks for being here thank you did you use the audio version did you do the audio book yeah yeah it must be a lot more intimate i know just even reading it um reading the book into the recording you know in the recording studio was uh as a writer someone that wrote it i was surprised by the book if that makes sense so i think that must also come through for the the listener of the book so your book opens with something i think is at the core of what it requires to be a good artist you have this uh scenario where a big article is just coming out about to reclare and you describe everything so perfectly that so it's going to be a kind of coming out and the editor sends it to you and is really proud of herself that you're going to love it we're so proud of you and and it's a great favorable piece of things and a part of you says this isn't me you know this is in a certain way it's not complicated enough and what i think happens is for most of us if somebody thinks well of us or puts us in a good light thinks that's enough right that's great we're thought of in a good way and maybe even it's honest but how you describe there the need to write this first book is about telling a deeper and more complicated truth could you talk about that a little of that that impulse need well every time that i'm told to speak from personal experience i always feel as if i instantly at times as a reflex maybe a survival mechanism i immediately kind of editorialize the way in which i will tell that story like very personal even traumatic experience a very happy experiences some of the most intimate pieces i don't often share right or i don't often um give to the world and so that first piece where i was 26 years old made the decision to step forward and finally in this life that i've created for myself and in this world that i've created for myself step forward as a young black trans woman right with these very unique experiences and there's particulars of that experience that i didn't feel safe giving to a magazine which at the time was like most mainstream publications struggling to even just tell women of color stories right so it was a white women's fashion magazine not necessarily a magazine that represented anyone outside of that right and then you think about body diversity and disabilities and queer intersection and trans intersections right so i'm stepping into this space that's not necessarily built for me and so of course i immediately go in and i protect myself and i cocoon myself and i um split off or siphon off parts of myself and i think that the book with a book allowed me to do was not to necessarily do that or to give myself more space to be as honest as possible and i was only able to be vulnerable in that public space because i thought of the girl that i was sitting in the library looking searching crying needing stealing hoping for some kind of semblance of reflection in books and in those shelves i found books from black women who wrote themselves into history you know i think about the first time that i sat and read the color purple and not being someone who comes from any kind of religious or faith community sitting there and thinking about wow this book is a prayer and it's a prayer to some kind of existence to say that i need someone to hear me write sealy sitting there and saying dear god and then ending it with amen right she sat and had the audacity to say that i am this young young girl child in the world all these things have happened to me i've had this life and i still have the audacity to say that i have voice and i deserve to sit and speak to someone about my experiences and so as a young trans girl i had that similar kind of calling i guess to write myself into history and you know everyone calls me a lot of different things but i think at the root of it what i am as a writer and i am i sit in spaces alone and i tell stories to myself about myself oftentimes so i wanted to follow up with that so writing is a very solitary act and uh much of what we're honoring here today of people who are leading and have this very public role um there's one moment in your book where you see something that is really starting and and almost ruthlessly true if you said that kindness and compassion are sisters but they're not twins that one you can actually can buy of this crisis and so i do think that you the public role is is about this compassion for for others could you talk about that and how you see that as as part of responsibility and where you felt it um that i wrote that from a space of you know being a teenager who engaged in underground economy specifically in sex work in the sex trade to get the medical access and the resources that needed to have medical care that often is not seen as like vitally necessary for trans communities and i thought about the interactions of intimacy that i was having with particular with men right in secret um for transaction and how this was a radical act of taking care of myself in a world that was not taking care of me right and that still isn't necessarily taking care of um folks like myself and so i think about so often you know i'm charged to do this work and i knew i was very conscious as i was writing this book and every time that i stepped forward to tell my story i was conscious of first of all my privilege right in the luck that i've just had the luck to be able to be to look the way that i do to present in the way that i do to have educational access to speak in the right kind of ways that don't necessarily threaten people and make people feel safe and familiar and all of these things that enable me to be seen and heard on the levels that i'm seen and heard and then at the same time i'm like so it's easy oftentimes for people or i'm an accessible body an accessible story for people to feel compassion for trans people right and when i'm speaking in particular is to feel compassion for trans women of color right that's what my work is centered around um and so thinking about that um i you know using my own grandfather as an example i think about my mother telling me that you know she's this native Hawaiian woman grew up in hawaii her entire life she meets this black man from texas and she brings him home and blackness is not something that's necessarily that was talked about in her household she grew up with the jackson five her first crush was michael jackson all of these things but her father who presents this kind of white beneath portuguese um they talk about whiteness in the home all the time in hawaii right which is colonized and there's tourists and farming um occupation and military occupation there and my mom says you know my grandfather didn't say anything when my father was there the kind thing for him to do was to be silent while my father was around and that's how he showed his disapproval but he thought that he was not being like the white men he saw on television who were overtly being unkind and so he thought by being kind that he was being accepting right by being silent that he was being accepting in some way of my father my father my mother knew intimately that my father my grandfather did not accept at their of their union or the children that they had and all these kind of things he eventually you know grew out of it and grew to love us blah blah blah but thinking about like kindness and compassion and who we feel for and who are you know I can't help but to think of like who we say are the perfect victims right the perfect victims that we call for and every movement has the perfect victims that we call for right thinking about you know we know certain names you know John Benet Ramsey 20 years now there's all these specials about her life story and this is just one little girl right and there I know that there's thousands and thousands of women who are being killed every single day right and a lot of them are sex workers right and we say that those women are disposable women we don't care for those women we say that those women don't deserve rights right um thinking about even in you know the movement for um you know criminalization of black bodies the perfect victim is a cisgender straight has a lot of potential in his life black male victim right like that's who we rally around and so thinking about the work that I'm doing always trying to complicate um and challenge the conversations that we're having about who we say we care for who do we have compassion for I think a lot of that has to come through empathy and a lot of that does come through I think storytelling and hearing people's stories but at the same time realizing that the concept telling of one's stories and the trauma is to get people to care is also part of the problem too right so you're just getting a sense of how philosophically complicated and how much extraordinary virtues is there and you know it just made me think about the root of the word compassion because people think about passion as just love and lust and desire and things but it's about suffering and so compassion really means suffering together and being able to respect the person not as a victim but as an individual that share with you talk about that actually with your husband Aaron late in the book uh about him understanding you and and identifying that can you talk about that a little about romance oh yeah I think you know growing up the way that I did transitioning in middle school and high school I had always had you know as fed um romantic comedy images from Nora Efron and all of the greats and thought like this is what I want I want some kind of love I want someone to want me I want someone to want me and to accept me for who I am knowing everything about me and so when I finally got to the stage where I felt safe enough to open up to someone which was Aaron um and him to treat me with such compassion and kindness and to also realize that it was difficult for me to open up to someone period like how hard it was for me to do that at that particular time of my life and for him to then go to the next level and the reason why I love him is that he went to the next level of it seeing himself in my own experience seeing the points of intersection in our experiences you know he's this um biracial black boy who grew up in North Dakota with a white mother an entire white family and everyone doesn't acknowledge the fact that he's different and he knows he's different but he's playing along with that and they're all midwestern and all of that stuff and the ways in which he had to perform so that people as he got older as he grew out of his boyhood and became a young black man the ways in which he had to perform to make people feel safe right the reason why my husband is charming is because he had to train himself to be charming to disarm right and so I think that as I was telling him that story he was understanding that about me and then it took me a while to understand that about him right and so I so much of the work that I do around storytelling is knowing that it doesn't only transform ourselves but it transforms the people around us right like it's the story sharing process not just the telling because my telling my story to have enabled him to share with me and do his own telling right which is like the the exchange so we are in a museum and I think the sexiest kiss that I've ever read about taking place in museum is early in your book with that when you're at the new museum like I think it's like one of your first dates and it's just a really wonderful wonderful scene but it made me think about we're we're here and almost everything we're talking about is scene you know work we see but as a writer you're always using the other senses too and so and and you often you can in the you you're there as a leader in your story because you can smell the McDonald's burger or you can feel the fabric or something or whatever it is what senses matter most to you which ones is it sight or is it hearing speech touch oh my god I don't think I've ever been asked that before or I'm in the midst of writing my next book and so I've been trying to challenge myself to go beyond just vision because I think that for me it largely is hearing and seeing and going to what does something feel like and smells are also something to that I think I wrote about a lot in the book like remembering him smelling like cilantro and like sweat you know smelling those two things on him in that Brazilian restaurant and so yeah I think because I have abilities to do that I think largely it's been visual and in hearing it's a great question I'm still thinking about it so there's your own life trajectory and the extraordinary response to your work and and the leadership you feel for people to have compassion and not be victims but to for us to suffer together but we're also in this very powerful moment of issues of identity and sexuality gender what do you think is happening that wasn't true say when you were a teenager or when you were first a girl you know as a real as a kid what's different you know what's going on now with our society where trans is becoming so visible and such a powerful force what does it mean for identity as we go forward in 25 years from now yeah you know I was a child that grew up you know in the 80s at the height of you know Alan talking about Nancy Reagan I was one of those just say no kids you know the dare program all of that stuff at the height of the crack epidemic in Oakland and having those experiences and then coming up seeing right I saw the AIDS crisis I saw it through the prism of you know Magic Johnson I grew up seeing the bodies and stories of queer folk on television right I came of age you know first election was the 2004 campaign right feeling cheated in this way and you know going into college at post 9-11 my classmates getting you know going to Iraq and Afghanistan graduating with student loan debt and the recession but at the same time we also had these powerful tools and we were able to connect with each other and see each other and I think one of the biggest things that that changed I think with my compared to me being a older millennial compared to younger millennials is that I didn't necessarily broadcast my life and I think that a lot of young people are broadcasting their lives in ways that enables people to really see like some of the biggest youtuber youtube stars are queer people and trans people right and like the fact that they have their own little mini talk shows and can talk to their audiences in a way that enables and I'm not saying that they're not just talking to queer and trans people they're talking to all young people right and so I think the visual speaking back to senses the visual medium with transness enables trans words have always been told they've always been out there and it's largely just been the before and after transition body stories people have loved that it's the modern day freak show that's just what people want right and so trans stories lend to the media in a way that is so like you also have this generation that is hungry to see more diversity a generation that is online watching it and speaking back at mainstream coverage and then you have the visual element of all the fascination and sensationalizing of trans stories so all of that I think comes together and then knowing that to the footprint of having this huge lgbt movement which had gotten great victories with marriage equality right that is now say what's next and so all of that comes together with pop cultural figures like Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner and Chaz Bono and there's many many many people now right and so the work that I think that what I hope to see be done is that no longer are we just artists for hire as actors or dancers but creating the content of our stories that reflect our stories in our lives right so it's great that Jill Soloway exists yay for Jill Soloway great that you have a trans character a couple on your show but we need to ensure that trans people are at the helm of telling those stories right so like I will be overjoyed when I see a trans showrunner not a consultant slash producer right right but like so for me it's like how do we get more and more to the core the authenticity of that particular trans story and not just necessary to have trans bodies be this kind of like heightened visibility of commodification but become this deeply engaged raw portrait of someone's life I'm not saying that cis people can't do that I'm not saying that but to say that you've been doing that for a long time so now it's time for someone else to kind of come in and do that work and for me it's what I always do is try to ingrain within the story contextualizing it beyond my own personal scope and experience realizing that the barriers to access to just living safely and freely is difficult for a lot of for a lot of people right access to a safe home not hostile schools welcoming environments that don't push queer and trans youth out of these institutions that then don't enable them to have college education zone able to be able to figure out what they want to do and who they are getting them beyond just survival but thriving in the world and so constantly being aware of these hurdles and barriers to access to just being safe in the world one last question and I think we have lunch but Ellen mentioned something that thought was so interesting about the image of the woman being she didn't she didn't come into that picture herself and brought in by Ellen and for writers that often happens with their families right your family didn't ask to be brought into this book and there there they are and you write about that I think with a lot of great sensitivity even though they're harsh things and truths about everyone that said your mom none of us got here without our mom so I wanted to just ask find a question a little bit about her and say a really really beautiful thing about just by the limitations in your relationship that she wasn't there and a lot of it you said that in her quiet way the gift that she gave you was this way not to impose herself that she got out of your way and that there was a kind of gift in that absence it's sort of you make her seem like she has extraordinary dignity in whatever uh failing she might have had for that could you just talk about and end a little bit with that mother and daughter well it's I love that you say that um at the time when I was experiencing that that's not what I was thinking I was like the the bitch is absent right she's going through some stuff why she's choosing this man over us um but with growth um and a little bit of therapy um I was I was able to see that my mother was her own person right with this uh with people who failed her just as much as he failed me right with people's limitations people who tried and cared and loved but didn't do the thing that she needed to thrive in the world right my mom was a team mom she graduated with a baby on her hip you know what I mean and so knowing that and being cognizant of that I was like how much could have someone that was able that at 16 years old had this experience and had to figure out how to survive in the world starting from that alone enabled me to see my mother differently whereas I wasn't able to probably see her that way when I was a kid um but what my mom did that a lot of people asked me like what advice would you give to parents and it's like you know my mom did a great job she was really there to just like not get in the way she let me lead um she had her own fears and nobody's getting in your way she had her own fears you know like she told me when I interviewed her because I approached my life story to as a journalist asking my parents questions about their own lives but also their interactions with me and their own memories of certain experiences with me and my mom said her constant worry was will someone hurt my child and she goes my job wasn't to tell you that my job was to create a safe enough environment so that you felt you didn't have to hide yourself at home because if you don't feel like you have to hide yourself at home you can be out in the world and be yourself right and so that was probably the greatest gift she's given me and I think that I stole this from Maya Angelou but she said her own mother wasn't a great mother to young children but she was a fantastic parent to adults and like I said on yeah I face had my mom every single day you know and we had this amazing relationship um she got me into the John Bene thing which kind of passed over me but she's all into the ID channel and all that stuff and so she's always trying to she's trying to convince me to wash the wives with knives and I'm like I'm not watching that but so like yeah we're now I think that we have we've been able to forgive one another and see one another has enabled us to kind of heal and have like this very real vulnerable funny problematic relationship yeah I think that's an awesome way for us to end modes of dollars oh sure yeah so speaking of um projects this is something you know as someone that has been asked a lot of questions and is no longer as comfortable being asked questions um I collaborated with director Timothy Greenfield Sanders which is the reason why I believe Ann knows my work and because they have a personal relationship and the reason why I'm here today um we collaborated on the trans list I was a subject of the outlist um Bill T. Jones was in the blacklist um and so the trans list is the latest um iteration of the identity kind of portrait documentary series and I um conducted all the interviews and I introduced the film it features 11 trans people I believe it's the best of the film because there's less subjects meaning that there's more space for you to see someone and really have them go deep into their lives in five minutes um on piece and um it comes on in December on HBO exactly yes thank you thank you so much Janet it was Timothy that introduced us but you're here because you are amazing thank you so thank you Bill thank you Tom thank you Nancy Catherine thank you honoree Sarah and Young and Lowry and Alan and Janet thank all of you for your support of the museum and the important work of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for feminist art for those of you who want to get more involved hope are you here hope stand hope can tell you all about her year of yes she can tell you about the council for feminist art uh she can tell you about the contemporary art acquisitions council and she'll entice you to get more involved with team Brooklyn although she's only been here for months so she doesn't know everything be understanding and finally for those of you who are not joining us for lunch we do invite you to preview the newest Sackler Center exhibition art show Beverly Buchanan Ruins and Rituals the first exhibition of the little known artist whose work will expand the history of land and American art we believe very proud of this exhibition it's a beautiful installation curators are here and I'm glad you get to preview that and for those of you who are with us for lunch please join us in the bows our court and meanwhile honorees interviewers please come to the stage so we can have a photo thank you thank you everybody