 Good evening and welcome to this month's Virtual Amherst Arts Night Plus. I'm Elizabeth Bradley, co-chair of Amherst Monthly Art Walk. Even as Amherst reopens, many of our vibrant arts venues remain closed or are inaccessible to those in our community who are high-risk. We recognize art as an essential part of Amherst, especially during this pandemic when it's so important to not lose touch with what uplifts our spirits and inspires us. So, for the past few months, Amherst Arts Night Plus has offered virtual presentations so that you may enjoy local artists and performers while you shelter in place. Thank you for attending this virtual event and know that we look forward to seeing you again in our galleries and museums in person as soon as it is safe to do so. I hope you enjoy the program. My shop by day teaches young people the medium of metalworking using the medium of the plasma cutter, the angle grinder and the mig welder to kind of teach a little bit of math, science and history to young people who might be having a hard time. In my other spare time, I do a lot of commercial and residential work for places like the High Horse and Amherst Mass or the plan which is a hair salon going in over my shop. I'll do a mixture of woodworking and metalworking to create desks and tables and shelving and things of that sort. I found by doing bars and restaurants and hair salons and things of that sort it served, yes, an artistic but very functional nature. My first summer at Hampshire, I ended up procuring an apprenticeship with a guy named Charles Winkler down in Fells Point, Baltimore. He taught me a lot of his secrets, I'm sure, that he had more but the art of using the weld to join two pieces together and then blend it to create one continuous piece. To create sculptures that seemed to be one solid piece when they could be made out of hundreds of pieces of that. After my time with him, I came back and I just really, I had the bug, you know, so I'd call him and ask questions. It sort of set me on a path of destruction in the world of metal. There was also another guy named Julius Joel Ford who just helped me get on the right path and so I think without him I wouldn't necessarily have given it as hard of a shot in community college to then turn around and end up getting a scholarship at Hampshire College. There was another guy named Wesley Montgomery who I worked at Project 2050 with and it was the same sort of deal, you know, having an older male that was just there for advice, was there as somebody to go to if needed. I think you get lucky to have mentors like that in your life. As I've now come into a position of mentorship, I feel as part of my obligation as a teacher to give what I can back to young people that come through my space. The first thing I made was a meat flipper. It's just this sort of a strange hook that you kind of hook under a large piece of meat and you can flip it over, but you have to forge it. It got me so interested that I led to my first commission that I didn't even weld together because at that point I didn't know how to weld, but I hand hammered like 200 leaves for this podium and welded them all on as very ornate and intricate of what I thought ornate and intricate was at the time. And that sort of showed me that I could make money doing this. But it really happened with Charles Winkler and after I was with him for a little bit we ended up making this large praying mantis. That sort of work is what really opened up the floodgates to say you are creating sculpture. You are putting multiple pieces together and building something that I then realized is virtually immortal in a lot of ways. Ronan, that's a very important story. So that's a piece I never get rid of. That's based on my mentor Julius Ford. He passed suddenly and the day I found out I didn't really know how to deal so I went into the shop and just started working. The whole time I thought I was making him homage to my mentor, but then when I finished it he had this song called Ronan that he wrote and it was a parallel of the Japanese samurai who lost his teacher to young black men in America today who grew up without fathers. And just how that is an interesting, a perfect parallel because you are great, you can learn many things but to not have that father figure really is a harsh setback in a lot of ways. Many people make it without fathers. I pulled it off alright. But as I was finishing the piece I realized with that song I was making a self-portrait. You know, the legs are too heavy to let me take flight but he taught me to turn my nothingness, the nothingness of me into something. So that's these, once again these many parts become one solid beautiful form in the top taught you to grow wings, but you've got to still work on them. The arms wrapping around in opposite direction or in the same direction I guess represent I call it the self-love hug. It represents the double helix which in turn could be infinite. So giving that much care to yourself and having learned that through somebody I think is important. A lot of people are doing stuff that simplify the purpose of functionality and I see it as an opportunity to use my sculptural background and create more of an artistic flair behind it with the steel. But then the wood is naturally beautiful. It does what it does on its own. You know metal you have to cut and get angles and turn into something. The bare tube isn't as appealing as a tube that's juxtaposed in many different ways and welded together and you know but still functions as a leg. Whereas the wood comes with this wood grain if you burn it it stands out a little more just the sheer weight of it you know really speaks to what it once was so the conference table coming from 200 year old beams that then were virtually cryogenically saved in these mill buildings to then get the old paint off of them and bring it back to life it's already telling a story there on its own but to then keep the weight of that story I like to make the wood a little thicker because it served this purpose of holding up a building so I want you to see its history in its functionality now so that's southern reclamation wood after you know emancipation proclamation and the south lost the north started taking a bunch of stuff back and one of the things that we started taking was this pine tree that grows up very tall very straight and very wide around so a lot of that wood was shipped back up here and it's built most of the buildings in Holyoke but all over the place I fully understand that part of being an artist is taking your process with the same seriousness as a scientist you have to remember different chemical mixes in order to have certain results and if you don't write them down then you have to come back to stuff and be like oh man how do I get that cut it's starting to come together a lot more the propane tank mass that I create since college I've probably done about 700 of them so the mask really became an identity based exploration where looking at the past and seeing that number one the mask is in every culture and if it's not in a culture there was some form of face painting or scarification but to live as humans and see all these faces and the only one you don't see as your own what that generates is a means of personifying yourself through an object or some type of coloring or scarification that expresses how you feel on the inside since you can't necessarily project what you see on your outside it was to me very awesome to see how many different cultures use a mask for a death mask, for a life mask to immortalize somebody to pay homage to somebody to know that 99% of that 700 is out and around the world somewhere in someone's house on their wall who knows maybe gone but I sold it at a show and they're out and around to be able to find them again yeah my name's on it but my expression my heart, my soul is put into that piece you get this I wouldn't call it godly that's a little far-fetched but you get this feeling of being a creator and leaving things behind that people will cherish as a metal worker, as a sculptor as a mentor, as anything else I always picture myself up when I was 17 because it's to remind me that at one point somebody looked at that dude and said ah, he's a loser he's not gonna make it he's not gonna become anything and so it reminds me to say to these young guys I'll never do that to you and I'll always put forth the best foot I can whether you wanna be here or not and welcome to Gallery A3 on this virtual art walk take a look at our new exhibit Encounters until we can resume our regular exhibition schedule we're moving to this new mode to display work from walls to windows and here's Val hi it's my name is Val Gilman all of us here are members of Gallery A3 which is a co-op gallery in Amherst and this is a very exciting moment where we not only are showing you things here virtually but we also finally have a place to show in the window of our gallery space so we're hoping that you'll come by and I just wanted to give you a little bit of behind the scenes it's kind of fun to hear what happens so what happened is I do craft shows also and I brought my booth panels lined up on top of my car it's really hilarious to see my car driving down with all these booth panels on them brought them in and Sue and I spent some time arranging them in front of the windows so they look good and seem stable and GK Kulsa also a member of the gallery is going to clean them up paint them up and then Keith is going to keep going for it he's going to hang the show and I got to tell you there are more pieces in the show in the window than you're going to see than you're seeing right now in this virtual thing so again please do come by and see what we have and this is Laura Hi I'm Laura Holland I'm going to show you behind the scenes with the panel I want to kind of bring you around in front of the scenes and talk about what we will see in looking at encounters so encounters, the name of the show what we were thinking was really about finding well making connections and finding ways to connect in different ways so some of the works are really looking for and especially looking for the intimacy that a lot of us found we were missing in these weeks and months of the pandemic induced isolation but other works are really looking more towards confrontation and were inspired by the protests against police brutality and the cries for racial justice that were initially sparked by the murder of George Floyd but of course not all the encounters are literal some of them are metaphorical mystical, magical even abstract can think of color and maybe blue bumping up against warm earth tones or a circle can confront a square and that can be another kind of encounter and in the realm of our imagination a perhaps a sentient fish may encounter a young woman underwater in the Deerfield river so then all of these different kinds of interpretations all of these different takes then come together and encounter each other on the front of the panels that Val and others have been working to prepare and set up and now back to Sue gallery A3 is a contemporary artist run gallery in downtown Amherst we are supported in part by a grant from the Amherst cultural council a local agency supported by the mass cultural council a state agency for July's virtual art walk we thank Amy Crawley and Amherst arts night plus and Amherst media also thanks to GK Calza for his work with Valerie Gillman for setting up the panels for the windows special thanks to Mary Ann Connolly for her inspiration and expertise in working with zoom and also thanks to you for watching this small preview of our exhibit encounters and the complete exhibit opens July 2nd to August 1st with more works by more artists displayed in front of the windows of gallery A3 so we hope you take a stroll downtown and look and see thank you music one of the things that strikes me the most about Du Bois was he was proud of being African American he wanted to be African American and American the word Negro he fought to have it capitalized in the Encyclopedia Britannica and for me that is such a powerful statement idea to have this word capitalized he really understood I guess the power of art to make people understand race and in particular like human relations he died on the eve of the march to Washington he died on the eve of the civil rights movement and I think that Du Bois was potentially such a powerful figure and the government was terrified of him for that reason I look at Du Bois as more like a deity his practice as it being important to me there's several different people who I kind of put in that little pantheon of individuals or things that move me it's from musicians to grandparents to best friends and people who have come and gone and I try to carry whatever I may have gotten from their presence it's almost like the fuel for the work for me how do you honor this person in a way my work has always been about honor pride celebrating who I am and then the one with the double consciousness piece that I was playing I was really playing with this ideal this mirrored image and in many ways it's kind of like a self-portrait as an African-American artist operating in different worlds making work it's difficult to talk about the process because it's a lot of things my studio becomes more like my church I go to my studio and I ask questions the past but then also the present what would Du Bois say if he came to Braddock and saw the reality of what we were facing in the 1980s all the still mills had collapsed and so what was left was a very small population predominantly African-American families but not much of an infrastructure or any type of economic stability at that time Braddock was pretty much abandoned by the local state and government support so as a child I didn't realize the magnitude of how heavily we were impacted by disinvestment but I knew that I was born into poverty and that it was a hard life Braddock, Pennsylvania is located nine miles outside of Pittsburgh along the Monongahela river the family migrated there in the early 1900s to work in Andrew Carnegie still mill I was able to start building the body of work that I have been doing for over 11 years now on Braddock and I saw you know speech by Du Bois at his high school in 1930 about the condition of the Housatonic River I just started smiling because I knew like this was it this is what would help me figure out the theories that I needed to produce and he goes on to say the town the whole valley has turned its back upon the river they have sought to get away from it they have neglected it they have used it as a sewer a drain a place for throwing their waste and they're awful and so I wanted to parallel my personal and autobiographical experience of living along the river with the way Du Bois felt about what had happened to the Housatonic River from since he was a boy and then became an adult and I was thinking you know for 10 years I've been on foot photographing Braddock I'm gonna get up in the air and I go up into the air to get this aerial view of Braddock here we are looking at it in real time real color like the flesh and the makeup of this town along this river I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills five years after the emancipation proclamation and the house was quaint with clapboards running up and down neatly trimmed and there were five rooms a tiny porch that we wanted to be a master class to study the life and the legacy of Du Bois we read the credo they wrote their own credo they illustrated their own credo just to get the sense of entering the inspiration of Du Bois I was inspired to write about what I believed in and here is our very dark water it took a long time to dry what was very important was their own interpretation that's uniquely theirs of the credo from Dark Lord when it came to Du Bois I was really thinking about some of his essays just about women and African American women in particular and sort of our place and sort of the importance of African American women the course of my trajectory and sort of my studio practice begins from my experimentation and exploration with using craft materials and taking those craft materials and trying to integrate a low art into sort of a high art dialogue the perception of hair that has its own sort of like long history for African Americans sort of the acceptance of your really fine course curly hair to your straight hair how that sort of defines how people perceive you and so for me I wanted to sort of bring some of that to the forefront as the idea of portraiture my name is Trulene Meritou I was born in Ottawa, Ethiopia in 1970 lived here until 1995 when I went to graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design since 2007 I've been living part-time in Berlin but there's this ground work of foundation that was laid out by someone like Du Bois understanding himself and perspective and possibility and so this comes I think that in trying to negotiate all of these realities there's a certain place of locating or finding possibility or different possibility for who you can be and how you can be so these etchings are made trying to make sense or excavate my own mark making and language Art has to be more about kind of wrestling with truths with Du Bois and what I want to know about is the truth I want to know about how this work is going to further and progress people's understanding of race and race relations I'm interested in the Star of Ethiopia for a lot of different reasons for me what really was most interesting is the idea of Du Bois the scholar as being like a creative force being able to produce a pageant in 1913 that was about the 10,000 year history of the black race and to be able to have enough resources to have costumes made to have dancers, to have a director of dramatics it's a narrative in a form that I'm not used to dealing with it's a pageant which means it's about postures, it's about gestures it's about music, it's about going on stage and not necessarily saying it but being that character and then walking off stage and allowing this processional of costumes and music and people as a 21st century artist it's like what is a pageant and I started thinking about music videos these small moments these characterizations Du Bois has one of the protagonists as the veiled woman and so what I'm working on today is exploring this idea of like Negro womanhood through the veiled woman when a time period was extremely hard for African Americans to live he was collecting 10,000 dollars from people to be able to mount this play and showcasing it in ball parks in major cities one of the greatest attributes of Du Bois is he really could understand what it was like to be black in America but also he took that dangerous step to be curious to say what are white people thinking about me interpreting blackness I prepared the work in my studio for a few weeks in London packed everything together and shipped it here the work was installed by Heidi Johnson a professional paper hanger I kind of freaked out a little bit because I've never done this before I've never, ever had somebody else install my work I was kind of trying to plan the piece that every single thing that I sent Heidi had to be where I said it was going to be I found it so difficult but it worked out I sent her a visual map this piece is called held February the 23rd the initial inspiration came from a trip to Ghana in 2005 and the transatlantic slave trade has long been in the interest of mine and I've long wanted to actually travel to the sites on my return from that trip this piece of work Hold came about and basically it is a hold a holding space for Africans before they were transported and in this exhibition held I wanted to make something life-sized so that my audience the viewer is literally held and pulled in I consider the figures in my piece of work in held the 23rd of February in some ways as the souls of Blackfoot they are they're ciphers, they're kind of ghosts of African peoples Du Bois was indicted for not having registered as an agent of a foreign power he received the indictment on his 83rd birthday and Du Bois his position along with the other members of the peace information center was that they were not agents of a foreign power they're five files they're predominantly centered between his 83rd year and his 94th year the files are redacted which means blacked out so my coming to terms was to remove them to point them out by cutting them out and I built an audio narrative which in my mind really has to do with the influence of Du Bois and then there is a third component a tabloid the idea is for it to be distributed across campus it does form a narrative so very publicly indicted very quietly found innocent in a lot of people's minds forever guilty and ultimately he moved to Ghana when he was 93 94 and died within a year it occurred to me that I could name a flower for Du Bois and that I could have thousands of people participate with me in remembrance of Du Bois and in thinking about this idea I had actually a P&E name for Du Bois and it's been registered with the American P&E society it's called the W.E.B. Du Bois P&E but it's common name will be the Hope P&E sort of an amazing moment in time historically you know you produce this work and it's about race well it's partly about race but it's considerably more and that's the thing that really interests me that considerably more how do we begin to approach blackness and understand blackness as something that is much more complex and complicated than merely blackness I'm always thinking about you know how to activate the space how to activate the wall so that the movement you have to look down and I've sort of done some exploration around the P&E and its development and I have photographs at the site and photographs of complimentary florals who along with this P&E in order to anchor our garden so my garden for Du Bois it's a garden so that people will remember the legacy of an extraordinary man and I realized at a certain point while looking at another memorial site that I couldn't think of a really great contemplative space for an African American and then the question was you know Du Bois in our time so how does that then manifest within you know specifically for me right now currently so the ideas of civil rights and movements that he was fighting for I grew up in Nairobi Kenya and in 1989 my family emigrated to Canada we are of many generations in Kenya we go in background go in Indian background so kind of this sort of hybrid identity I've created a symbolic version of the encyclopedia for the Negro and that is a handmade book with black paper so there's no actual typing or script or writing in the book I'm having the university color guard march from the Du Bois library marching with this book in a procession giving it its sort of how does the performer's body produce a gesture of political movement in my practice I've looked at the power of language the idea of how does one forget a language growing up in Kenya I spoke Swahili moving to Canada that language became lost to me because I wasn't using it I'm kind of curious about the process of becoming the process of being the ideas of like what would this book be Du Bois struggled to make it it could never exist so I've placed my encyclopedia in the space as an intervention because it kind of like a question of like well that wasn't made but then it is here and it's sitting in this place of historic account which then makes it kind of become an artifact and then kind of like also further you know heightens it to become something different you know is it art work or is it an artifact and it plays within that liminal space so within my piece I have created sort of a wall mural using the sort of colors of the Kenyan flag which for me symbolizes a home that symbolizes Kenya which is very specific to me but also kind of this sort of idea of Africa and so and that was a place that you know Du Bois also kind of mentions and reflects on throughout his work the idea of like again about a pan-Africanism and so I've created a series of banners that are talking about an end and in the end we find a new beginning