 Curating Elijah Pierce as America Together has been such fun and we hope very much that you enjoy the exhibition too. We're going to talk you through some of the highlights of the show and some of the key themes. One of the first points that I think we have to make actually starts with the fact that prior to embarking on this research and Nancy having come across the work of Mr. Pierce in Columbus, Ohio, neither of us were familiar with the artist. And this in itself is fascinating for both of us in terms of a way to start a project curatorially. You normally know the artist's work well before you begin, but actually by nature of the fact that Elijah Pierce was self-taught and was not part of what we might think of as, you know, the quote-unquote canon of American art An artist who by all accounts having worked for the better part of seven decades really should have been known to both of us given that his of spans both the 19th century and Nancy's area of expertise into the early 20th century and mine covering the later part of the 20th century to the present day. How is it that an artist like Paul Gauguin can be considered, you know, a modernist master and yet there are others who are only thought of as folk artists or outsider artists? We aren't interested in labels. We're not interested in taking them away or replacing them with new labels. But in introducing you to artists that we're excited about and certainly what we found in Elijah Pierce's wood carvings was a wonderful insight into not only the whole of the 20th century of the United States but also a very unique vision for how wood carving could create such a singular way of representing someone's own way of understanding the world around them. It's true that the exhibition Elijah Pierce is America has a real resonance at the Barnes Foundation because of our founder's passion for championing an artist regardless of their background. He was a great believer in social equality. He was somebody who wrote for Harlem Renaissance journals and in his factory in West Philadelphia he hired women and he hired African American men. When we look at Pierce's work we see a real determination and the exhibition starts out with him looking at his biography. Elijah Pierce was many things, certainly we call him an artist but above all I feel that he'd probably be most comfortable with the title of storyteller and using his art and his carvings to tell stories. The way he's able to convert through the use of his carving knife a deft retelling of so many stories, Bible stories that may be familiar to us, stories from recent history such as the Watergate scandal and many stories from his own personal upbringing. The fact that all of these can be presented in one exhibition is a joy for us to present to all of you. One of the most poignant, gripping and frankly painful and frightening stories is taken from his own autobiography and that is the carving called Elijah Escapes the Mob. It's a very important loan from the Columbus Museum of Art who have been very generous in lending to this exhibition and it tells of a very terrifying moment in Pierce's personal history where after playing baseball as a young man he was mistaken for a murderer and he was chased by a white mob and he was actually arrested and it was only because a witness managed to exonerate him to say that effectively you have the wrong person that he was freed. Things like that aren't just stories, they're lived experience and what we want to do with this exhibition is to bring people closer to all aspects of American history both those that we hope would be firmly in the past and then those that are all too relevant today. I think that he made some very bold choices in some of the juxtapositions he makes in relation to say depicting the White House and then having tanks on the White House lawn or a massacre taking place or a mugging. The fact that all of these things are roiling is certainly something that I think people will feel is very topical now but then I hasten to add that it does take years of planning for exhibitions to come together so while this exhibition might feel exactly right for right now it has been something that we've been working on for a while. What's been so interesting about this project is not to impose a contemporary reading on historic material but to actually meet that material where and how it was made. So what we are doing is trying to recast Pierce for instance as an activist with a capital A in a way that he might not have been but it's so important and something that the Barnes Foundation does so well is to understand an artist's role in society and how an artist can actually have many different roles that they are also human beings so they're not separate from the society in which they're part but they're often very active within it. He really had a huge sense of how he presented himself and the power of how he presented himself that he could choose particular narratives to draw our attention to and through that teach us because not only was he an artist, he was also a preacher and he was somebody who really had a certain standing within his community. He ran a barbershop and people would go to the barbershop to hear news, to gossip dare we say even though Pierce did not approve of gossip and really people who knew him remembered him teasing out particular stories that would potentially resonate with them and their lives. The Book of Wood is one of the real highlights of the exhibition. It takes a very prominent place within the first main room and the book consists of large carved pages that were presented as a book in Pierce's shop but in his earlier life in the 1930s when he was having a hard time you know depression had hit the business he and Cornelia had the very bright idea of touring America with it. Another piece that I find really moving is the doll's house that Pierce made for his mother. It's a really wonderful object and we are so thrilled to have it in the exhibition because it's seen very rarely. What we have is a two story doll's house and in the upper room we have a little figure that represents Pierce's mother. It may even have been that he made the doll's house posthumously but at a moment where he was building his business, building his reputation within the middle class community perhaps we get a sense of him aspiring to be able to provide a kind of luxury for his family that perhaps wasn't the reality at that moment. This is a testimony to love and Pierce tells us that he would have done anything for his mother. It's a very moving piece and it also tells us a little bit about his connection with Prince Hall Freemasonry. There's a little carving of an ark just above the upper room and so this might be a reference to the Ark of the Covenant and the sense of protection. We do get these symbols within Pierce's art the all-seeing eye, the red rose, masonic symbols that give us a little indication of that aspect of his life. One of the things that we often talk about, especially as curators is the notion of a visual language the fact that there are times you see something and recognize it as being a work by Picasso or Jean Michel Basquiat. What really struck me right from the start was how distinctive Pierce's visual language was and the ways in which he reuses certain imagery you talked about some of the Prince Hall Freemason motifs such as the rose or the all-seeing eye he's got another beautiful one that comes from biblical references which is this kind of spotted heart the way that he plays with the clean heart and a number of works include messages that he includes such as Elijah your life is a book and every day is a page that he tells us are direct messages from God so there's ways in which he's able to think about both the every day from lived experience and then also bring in these transcendent experiences that relate to spiritual conversion belief and faith are really important one of the reasons why we have organized the exhibition thematically is because for Pierce there's no distinction between the sacred and the secular works so exactly those same themes are being looked at in a work such as presidents and convicts and that work was based on Pierce's own observation during a trip to Georgia when he was able to watch the backbreaking work that men were carrying out under the very close threat of a shotgun wielded by a police officer because they were part of a prison chain gang there's a really strong threat of redemption throughout Pierce's work visually one of the most dynamic pieces he creates is called a conversion of Saul it shows Saul on the road to Damascus but this time in contemporary dress Pierce's Saul wears a suit and a bolt of light from heaven strikes him and really you get this sense of Pierce recasting biblical stories to make them relevant to the here and now one of the most touching pieces in the exhibition is one of the most modest perhaps if you're walking through the show quickly you might not even recognize it but it is a very small elephant that you could really hold in your hand and it was made in 1923 as a gift for Pierce's second wife Cornelia Pierce and Pierce said that he had given us to his wife with a little bow on it and she loved it and she'd put it on the mantelpiece and essentially he said if you like that ugly thing so much I will carve you a zoo and so one of the little nods that we've made to this in the exhibition is if you like an animal menagerie we have all sorts of wonderful carved creatures that Pierce made and often he would give these pieces as gifts sometimes he would sell them a lot of the works within the barbershop were for sale and his figures did get greater as his success grew after he showed in New York in the 1970s some of his works were making sums that were in the thousands so he did have a sense of the economic value of his pieces but he also knew that there was a sentimental value to them the last room of the exhibition is called Death a New Beginning it's a wonderful way of us showing how for Pierce the end of earthly life was not the end there is a sense of of an afterlife and also a warning of an afterlife Pierce approaches death sometimes with a sense of humour in one image we have people trying to outrace far the time there is very much a sense that death isn't necessarily something to be afraid of and so that as a way of of ending the exhibition felt like doing so in a way that would hopefully allow people to leave not with a sense of morbid finality but going back out into the wider world once you've finished seeing the exhibition with a newfound appreciation for a whole range of images and the world around us the histories that we've inherited and the ways that we can move forward in the world with open-heartedness and with kindness and mostly with a spirit of optimism