 So hi everyone, good morning, so I know some but not all of you I'm Elizabeth Alexander and I am the director of I have a great title I'm the director of creativity and free expression here at the Ford Foundation which I always still this is very new I've just been here for two months so every time I say my title I might hear my mother saying you know oh dear that's a very very good title for you free expression and so I'm really really happy to be the one to welcome you here today you're joining us for this amazing workshop on art and social engagement planned as you know by the great Carrie May Weems yes one of the Ford Foundation's art of change fellows and so on behalf of all of my colleagues here I want to thank you Carrie I took off my glasses where did you go there you are I took them off in order to read for organizing such an amazing day of presentations and discussions which are designed to advance a conversation about art and social change and what we all know is that only someone who has earned the artistic and community respect that you have Carrie could have brought this gathering of you amazing amazing makers and thinkers and dreamers and visioners together I think what we also all know is that the alchemist and high priestess has summoned us together and that's why we've all come so thank you so so much for doing what really truly only you could do I mean that quite explicitly the transfer of knowledge and ideas about art and social change across generation is the key to our long-term success and as an artist myself and I'm gonna say more also about my own full lifetime engagement with Carrie's amazing work I'm not surprised that we've all decided that this conversation was an important one to do together and I appreciate that you took the time everybody's busy everybody's got commitment so I appreciate that you took the time to come I want to give you a tiny bit of context for the art of change the art of change is the Ford Foundation's year-long coming to an end most multifaceted exploration of the interplay of art and social justice around the world today so I came into the tail end of this really amazing project and these really amazing fellows it has three components a fellowship program which honored 13 distinguished artists and cultural leaders around the world whose work exemplified the fusion of art and social justice whose work I should say because this is very important to me exemplified the fusion of art and social justice in a very very rich and complex fashion very rich and complex fashion because these are difficult and complicated engagements and questions and Carrie is one of our art of change fellows and this is part of her project over her year at the foundation art of change has also included a variety of gatherings and convenings in June for example there was a gathering on the theme of art identity and movements for change which brought together about 80 artists activist journalists cultural leaders and educators to look at the intersections of art and movement building in September we hosted close to 200 people for a convening entitled beyond the hashtag using art and technology to combat the criminalization of our communities organized by Toshi Reagan another of our fellows in partnership with the Estrella Foundation as part of the word rock and sword festival and last month we invited 25 diverse innovators artists sociologists economists psychologists musicologists and others to think with us about the role of beauty beauty as such in advancing social justice and the essential value of beauty in everyday life no matter a person circumstance and this was a quite riveting conversation and one that will come continue and then a third component of the art of change is a curated website hosting conversations and content about the connection of art and culture to social justice the programming has set the stage for the next phase of Ford's work in creativity arts and expression and the foundation as you know is a social justice funder with a central focus on inequality and our work in creativity and free expression will be addressing these profound questions of inequality in the ways that art culture and expression disrupt the drivers of inequality here in the United States and around the world and one of the aspects of that that we're very excited about is amplifying creative voices and seeing where that takes us so enough then about what we're doing at the foundation but I want to really turn things over to Carrie and turn things over to you all for the day I do want to say hello Darren I just have to say hi so our Darren Walker our fearless leader is here so we're very happy so many many other things are happening today so I'm with you for for much of the day in and out but not all of the day and I'm so glad that Darren could come in with many many other things happening here today and to think that this foundation is led by someone who understands the heart and soul and necessity of art is something that just blows me away every day so we're very glad that you are here with us so I want to introduce Carrie May Weems just to take a minute and it's wonderful to have the opportunity to do it not with the facts which we all know but with some thoughts about the work that you've made over these decades work that's been influential and inspiring to generations of artists myself included I think of how it felt to first look at the kitchen table series and maybe we could even all take a moment and think about do you remember the first time you saw the kitchen table series and how it seemed that artistic possibility was suddenly blown wide open I think about how you showed us a domestic life in episodes an epic film in stills all that could pass between lovers in those images all the capacity between mother and child between sisters and ultimately between a woman in conversation with herself the formal miracle of composition that contains the entire emotional and relational universes that you put into that work still blows me away so like the lives inside Gwendolyn Brooks kitchenette poems that are echoed in that work or I think about some of your historical work like the Hampton project where the history of Native American students at that black campus is so aptly represented through the gauzy scrims imprinted with the fading and lost and recovered historical images your use of language and image is unmatched I consider you a visual poet and again I think that the way that you find ways with your language with your use of words as well as images to voice historical erasure listening in spaces that have been silent is the conjuration of an extraordinary extraordinary ancestral legacy when I first saw at first I saw what happened when I cried and saw what you did and saw how you displayed ancestral tenacity when you brought back those ancestral voices that were imprisoned in Agassiz world in the Peabody Museum and faced a lawsuit to make sure that we could see that work and that those voices that was ancestral work passing through you and and that was really extraordinary and there's so many more series and so much more work and magical films and bringing us together and all that you do could we put up I didn't know what to put up because there were so many things and then I thought I wanted the blue black boy with me for a minute and so you know just to conclude and to welcome you up here Carrie I wanted to look at blue black boy because it illustrates so many of the qualities that I've named the extraordinary visual poetics in your work the immaculate formal elegance in your work the essential and knowing use of language and more in blue black we see the black vernacular just shy of the humor that you explore in something like black man with watermelon but an understanding that black vernacular is our linguistic heritage and our excellence we see the absurdity of racial classification and we see most moving to me the deep unknowable mystery and beauty of black people and all that power that you bring forward and that you understand the might of that power the blues that color our condition wide-ranging blues so a master artist is in our midst and with all of your power I'm so glad that you're here so welcome Carrie May I've been in the storm so long with a hung down head and a breaking your heart give me a little time so for the four town foundation thank you very much for this extraordinary opportunity to gather of course to Elizabeth to the phenomenal Darren Walker who none of us actually would be here today if not for the vision the compassion the understanding the scope and the imagination of Darren Walker I hope that many of you had a chance this week to read the New Yorker article profiling Darren and the Ford Foundation in the most recent issue if you haven't I think you should absolutely though I'm not sure that that the profile itself really advanced our deep understanding of Darren I think it fell a little short I was a little shocked by the New Yorker frankly and then of course I really want to think Holly sit dirt for doing all of the work to make sure that everybody got here today and Holly would you please stand up and let us acknowledge you thank you thank you so much it really does mean I don't need both right and of course of course all of you thank you really thank you for thank you for coming because I know how difficult your lives are and what you have to do and what you're engaged in and how far you have to travel and so I really am very thankful I'm really grateful that you are here spending time with me because we both want something you want something and I want something and so I thought that you know I want to talk a little bit about a few things first and then we'll talk a little bit about sort of the structure of the day it's pretty simple it's really simple it's not it's it's not you know I mean you know we're artists we're imaginative thinkers and beings we have ideas and we have projects and we have programs and we want to talk about what those projects and programs are I mean I sort of thought that it would be really absurd and and an almost obscene that if I had this sort of extraordinary time at the Ford Foundation and not use this platform to invite in a group of young talented artists to have a conversation with older artists who've been working in this capacity for many years then that would be sort of like a crime that you know that you couldn't that I couldn't use this this time to simply be in my my my home working that I needed to figure out a way to bring us together in a way where we might be able to share some important ideas in exchange I also know that this is a very very short and truncated day how that happened I'm not really quite sure because I really started out thinking about this project it's being a thing that would last for two or three days because we need two or three days together in order to really sort of push through a lot of the ideas that I think will be brought up today you know you leave when you come back to the next day with ideas and more discussion and more argument well of course we're hoping that we'll convene once again hopefully that this is simply the beginning this is just one day one moment where we can come together start to understand what we're doing around the sort of intersection of art and civic dialogue social practice whatever you want to call it right and use this time to sort of figure out ways we might want to come together and we're sustained in an important way later but that will be of course up to everybody in the room so you know the only thing that I can do is just to convene it right to bring it all together in some small way and then allow us to the chance to make some decisions about how we want to move forward in the future so keep that in mind convening again maybe in the summer maybe we might convene with the aster at Dorchester project maybe Rick might invite us to a project row house maybe Suzanne might have us out in California at at at Cal you know Maya might have us at Monterey right or maybe somebody else will think of something else to do right so that these these are these are our possibilities but it really is quite up to us to decide how we want to move forward okay I'm going to I'm going to read some things and it's sort of kind of my my thoughts my meanderings my thinking right now and I hope I hope you don't mind and and then after after that I'm actually going to ask you all to do something and at a certain point so I'm going to start with this table for instance I'm going to say I call your name and all I want you to do is to say your name go around this table right to the next table I call your name Rupert Jenkins I call your name right I call your name just give me your name tell me your name shout your name say your name let's hear you that will happen so I thought that if I didn't write some things down that I would meander for much too long so forgive me we know something very important is happening in the United States the United States is shifting it's changing the minority will soon be the majority and this fact actually was made clear to me sometime back in 1980 82 1984 when I went to a lecture by the president of the Bank of America who in his address talked about the changing face of America and by 2025 or so the majority or in the minority would be the majority and he wanted to know at that moment what this was going to mean who it was going to mean something to and what we were going to do about it that was 1982 of course that shift is just about to happen this massive shift from minority becoming the majority will have profound consequences in the year ahead and everybody knows it and if they don't know it they can feel it the political right for instance is intensely fighting for instance for the Latino vote in the upcoming election of 2016 a vote that absolutely did not matter in 2000 or 1996 when 2016 has huge political consequences there's serious money circulating around art and social practice universities and colleges have developed new programs and art and community practice and dialogue it's become its own little engine but it's been coming for years and it's linked I think also to this phenomenal shift this profound shift that's taking place in American culture the state the corporate state the political state has a vested interest in knowing what these communities are these new communities are who they are what their values are how those values are expressed they want to know if those values can be brought in line to with current values and current traditions they want to know if if American culture is being threatened by this by this change and by this shift and by the rise of people of color what is this going to mean practically in the coming years in the coming decades the America that we've known absolutely is collapsing and it's collapsing and it's desperate to hold on to what America has been historically and what America will be and again or the right if there's probably no better place to sort of understand this and nobody understands it more than the right itself its think tanks and its organizations are all deeply focused on ways in which they will maintain power in the coming years as we make this profound shift it's really quite amazing but we do have a rendezvous with destiny as Reagan and those forces that have been unleashed by capital can't be stopped it's really is quite amazing the genie is out of the bottle and again everybody knows it I work on all these various projects and I see a number of dots that are connecting all these things I'm producing concerts creating book projects making exhibitions I do lectures I work in my classroom I work on events like this one for instance this is a part of my practice in my imagination this day is connected to all the other projects that I make so this event this convening is linked to my work or the work that for instance I've done at the Guggenheim where I invited over a hundred artists and writers and thinkers to the museum and as the first African-American to be given a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim I really thought it was important for me to do that to sort of open that door to reveal to the museum itself what had been so long historically kept out by bringing together this sort of extraordinary group of artists I was very honored that so many people participated along with me that Guggenheim project though is really linked to the kind of work that I do in my classroom the teaching that I do around art and social practice and that's linked to the small collective social studies that I work on which is linked to the performance that I'm currently developing around the role of grace in the pursuit of democracy which is you know further linked to the the the lectures and the lecture series that I'm producing that's related to a book project that I'm working on with Yale University Press all of these things for me are really sort of bundled together they're really not simply an art project they're really very much about my life in 2011 I started the Institute of Sound and Style for instance it's a job training program for young people and that grew out of my billboard campaign as I was really sort of addressing like the extraordinary manifestations of violence that was taking place in my own community and through my online postings people started to hear about what I was doing in Syracuse and so young artists would come to me or they would write me and they would ask me if I might be able to come to their cities and their communities and produce my own billboard projects for their communities but of course that wasn't possible now I've been really interested in artists for a really long time and occurred to me you know not long ago that you know I've spent most of my life really interviewing artists writing about artists interviewing artists convening artists working with artists in some capacity or another and so and so it only made sense then when I started to sort of think about these sort of possibilities of of this day you know that that you know that I see myself really in context I see myself not isolated but in context with you even when I don't know your practice right that I'm not isolated and completely alone now how this day really came to be is really sort of linked to this idea about my concern for other artists and my deep curiosity because I'm really nosy I mean I really want to know what people are doing I'm just deeply curious I want to know what people are doing I want to know know what that work looks like I don't want to know what it means to them but but this day came about you know again I am as Elizabeth said you know one of the first Ford fellows here in the art of change is important when the first Ford fellows here in the art of change is an artist one of the few artists working in this capacity right this is a resource for you this is a resource for you and I think that it's really important to understand that this is a resource for you right that it's a platform for you and that this whole initiative that has been developed here offers great great great possibility for you right you know for us you know for you and I together perhaps so I thought it was important to to do this project I had come up with a number of projects that I really wanted to work on while I was here but this project particularly sparked you know my imagination in the Ford's imagination and Holly and I agreed that we would really sort of push through on this particular initiative and so what I thought would be really interesting because I want to know I thought I'm gonna invite four or five senior artists who have been doing this thing for a really long time and they're going to invite two artists younger artists who have shown incredible promise in terms of the work that they are doing right and then we would all come together across this sort of generational thing and we would have a kind of conversation so I invited people like of course as you know Rick Lowe Susan Lacey the Astragates Amaya Mesa Bains Lonnie Graham etc and so each of them of course asked two of you to come and to be with us so so so that's really how this day came about we are we are growing right we grow in cities and towns that seem to have developed for no rhyme or reason but they are there and they are resting and bleeding these small citadels of capital expressing their last grasp and gasp of their being their energy fading their housing crumbling their communities exhausted their universities focused on foreign exchange because that's where the money is their infrastructure built at odd angles their local governments standing on last legs fighting larger forces that no longer see them as viable or even capable of managing the manageable their poor growing ever poor and the death rate always rising their police forces corrupt incompetent and riding rough shard over the disenfranchised wielding their feeble power over people who believe that they no longer have a voice or anything to say they are the perfect target and the shattered debris left behind are the artist artist of all colors and stripes struggling through and coming through the slaughter square toad and flat-footed we've arrived into a new century looking over our shoulders with fingers crossed hoping against hope that we can find a way out of no way the classic conundrum the classic conundrum to push through and to make life and to make work that has meaning to more than oneself over the centuries over the centuries and the decades and the years artists have been responding to their historical moment and these artists activists have been working at the intersections of art and civic dialogue art and politics art and practice art and social engagement art and revolution each meaning something different from the other which one for instance are you working on what is your angle sometimes these concerns are the same sometimes they are not they represent big and small projects minor and major varied simple complex models for building making living working trying some of these projects are misguided and others are absolutely on target some of us are known and some of us are unknown some of us have national recognition and some of us of course have none and in our attempt to save ourselves from ourselves while we can some of us are seeking and searching some of us are opposed to nothing at all some of us only want nice trees and lovely flowers and a better block a better neighborhood a more responsive city county and state some of us are working with groups and some of us are isolated and alone some of us are working and thinking and producing important works and publishing books and making exhibitions some of us are designing neighborhoods and some of us are designing shop windows some of us are working around animal rights human rights gay rights social rights political rights voting rights privacy rights some of us are opposed to capital and its enterprise some of us are opposed to the power of the corporate state and we define ourselves as such some of us are working on environment and the melting ice caps and the rising temperatures some of us are working around media rights and uncovering the vast tools or surveillance that have been set in motion the disturbing results really of social media and inventive and creative technology some of us are young and some of us are old some of us have been around the block more than once we were to hang up the hat some of us are parts of larger organizations some of us are not from arctic by wall street to black lives matter and all the entities in between working around water food disease around the redistribution of wealth and geopolitics global politics some of us are working in classrooms and board rooms and some of us have institutional support some of us are creating new institutions and new organizations and collectives and programs some of us are marching and protesting and sleeping in the streets occupying wall street waving banners carrying flags some of us are women some of us are men some of us are non-gender specific some of us have money many of us don't and we wonder why when we're working our asses off and just like every place else men seem to be faring better than women in this economic arrangement in this non-hierarchical space of art and social practice men still seem to be getting the larger slice of the pie and then many of us even in the sort of progressive era this progressive arena of art and politics remain in our individual silos where there is little exchange really between white people and people of color perplexing crazy this time we're still talking about these kinds of things these kinds of separations but through it all we are all and all of these some of us are doings right we're all attempting to make these tiny little incremental steps towards a fuller expression of freedom and democracy struggling through i think on some way to keep this promise at least to ourselves that we do what we can do in order to expand some idea about what democracy is and what social justice might be so we're here today so we're here today you know even though this program is short even though it's truncated even though it's just the beginning we are here today to look at oh good i was hoping that it wasn't a plane you know that we're here today to really sort of look at the sort of core of what these practices are what are you doing in your practice what are you doing in your practice what are you doing in your practice what do you want from your practice what do you want from your practice what do you want from your practice how can we talk about assisting one another in our practice, you know, and to consider, I think, very importantly, very importantly, to consider the strategies of our work, the concerns, the types of projects that are being made now, that in some small measure, we're doing the work that the government has refused to do or it cannot do. So we're here today to sort of think about that. Each of us have come, I think, to think about that, to think this through. And so what I want you to do, what I want you to do, I just want to very simply and quickly have the room, have the room as artists I want us to introduce ourselves. So don't be shy, we're going to start here, and okay, please just shout out your name, please just start. My name and anything else about me? Just your name, just your name. My name is Bayate Ross Smith. Adaku Uta. Jessica Carmona. I call your name. Alex. I call your name. Ada Smith. I call your name. Tanya Ingram. I call your name. Carol Doe. I call your name. Christina Sanchez Juarez. I call your name. Alexis Fraz. I call your name. Rupert Jenkins. I call your name. Christina Sanchez Juarez. I call your name. Keir Jonston. I call your name. Tomia O'Ri. I call your name. Molly Missa Bates. I call your name. Angela Camero. I call your name. Greg Chalette. I call your name. Milani Graham. I call your name. Nato Thompson. I call your name. Ernau Martinez. I call your name. Anula Shetty. I call your name. Oluwa Kemi Elisame. I call your name. Gail Issa. I call your name. Christine Lakata. I call your name. Jasmine Murrow. I call your name. Elizabeth Hamby. I call your name. Valerie Pereno. I call your name. Jason Gregory Isaacs. I call your name. Margaret C. I call your name. Rick Lowe. I call your name. Maria Gaspar. I call your name. The Ostergates. I call your name. Isis Ferguson. I call your name. Yao Ajiman. I call your name. Suzanne Lacey. I call your name. Lindsay McClung. I call your name. Janelino Mipig. I call your name. Janelino Mipig. I call your name. Francis Lucerna. I call your name. Camila Janan Rashid. I call your name. You got me. I'm Valerie. Did we get through the whole room? Is there anybody missing? All right. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, good morning, good morning. So, I think what's gonna happen now, you know, we have a lovely day that's coming. Amaya Mesa-Baines is going to be really sort of holding us through the afternoon, and Amaya, would you like to come up and say a few words, please? Should we leading us through the afternoon? We have, again, three. Rick Lowe will follow me. That'll be followed by Suzanne Lacey, and then The Ostergates this morning. Then we'll break for a lovely lunch, and then we'll come back, and all of you young people, all of you young people who are in the room, the 15 of you, I think, 10 of you will be doing your presentations this afternoon, and then we'll open it up to a conversation. I really want you to think of the day as a day of your day, a strategy day. I want you to ask important questions of all of us, of yourself, and of the senior artists that are here. You should take the opportunity to make it critical and important and useful to you as much as possible, okay? And then we'll have a reception. We'll get drunk some more. Okay, here's Amaya. I just want to say how happy I am to be here. I've known Carrie for quite a number of years, and some of you also, in various ways. What I think is possible today really is the next shift as Carrie has outlined it. Some of us have been here long enough to have gone through. Civic dialogue, community engagement, diversity, all the buzzwords. We've been through them many, many, many times before. Different think tanks, different organizations, mounting them. Some of us are original founders of social media and ethnic movements in this country. But I think we all know that something different is happening. Maybe it's the practice of social media and how it intervenes in the way we make and become community. Maybe it has to do with the complexity of life and some of the disengagement that we face as a result of social media. But I think we know that we're at a turning point and a time in which we have to claim whatever is left of that possibility. And for myself, because I am of an older generation, the possibility lies within the intergenerational dialogue. Many years ago when I received my MacArthur in 92, I started a project called Regeneration at the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco. And what I learned from that, and I followed many of the young people that came to our gatherings and took over parts of the Galerías projects, is that some 25 years later, many of them are in places in which they can enact the vision that we're talking about. So I think today has that same moment of possibility, the beginning, whether it's network building, whether it's exchange of projects, whether it's just the intimacy of finding that the things you face and the problems that be set you are something that others can share with you. And I think that besides strategies, motivations, possibilities, we have to examine the obstacles. What keeps us from being able to do the work we do, whether that's a municipal world that we have to wend our way through, whether that's how we raise funds to do the work that others haven't been willing to do. However those things come about, I think today has that potential. And the intergenerational dialogue for me is the way in which senior artists can talk about what they do, but also listen to what other people are doing. Because you're doing something we either couldn't do, wouldn't do, didn't do. And that's why we're here. Because there's a lot left to be done. And so the potential really lies within our willingness not to simply speak, but to listen and to be changed by what can come. So I'm very grateful to Kerry and I hope that I can be of some help this afternoon. And I look forward to being with you. So I think we're going to invite Rick Lowe to the podium. I don't have formal introductions for people, but Rick Lowe will talk about his incredible project, Project Row House. Rick. One, pair of very nice boots from The Astor. Thank you, brother. The other, to start the party a little early for my colleague, Carol. So we can get going. Fine boots, man. Can't wait to get in those. Anyway, okay, so I, when Kerry, how long do I have here? What is this? This is like 45 minutes. 45 minutes, ooh, that's a long time. Especially when you decide, as Suzanne said, that we're kind of, Suzanne and I've worked a lot together and she knows me pretty well and I saw her this morning and she goes, oh my God, I've over prepared again. Then she looked at me and she goes, I know you've underprepared. Which is usually the case. And I did, underprepare. And I even, even, it's even worse because I did write some notes, but I forgot them, so anyway. So what I'm going to do is, I guess I'm going to get at what the essence of this thing is all about and what I'm really interested in is learning, right? I mean, that's what we're here to do. And so I'm going to use my time to learn with you all and so we can ask each other questions and just have a conversation. But I will tell you that, I want to tell you just a few things that have got me excited and inspired. Coming through 2015 into 2016. And it's basically, there's three things that I've been involved, that's been really promising for me. The first one is, it's obviously Project Row Houses. It's been, I've been fortunate to be able to work on that project for over 20 years. It's pretty amazing. It's a long, long time. And the good thing about that is that working on a project for so long, it gives you time to see the fruits of the labor. And so over the holidays, just kind of greeting people coming in or getting emails, a text from people who are checking in, right? So Frances Olagere is checking in with me. She was one of the children of one of our young mothers who's now getting her PhD at Harvard. And she was in Thailand, doing her studies, her research work there. Having other young mothers who are entering law school and that kind of stuff. So it's always, it's an interesting and exciting time to be able to reflect and see some of that stuff come back. And what it is though, is really, all that is tied into something that I learned very early through focusing on John Bigger's work when I first started Project Throw Houses, I was trying to figure out how to conceptually frame it. And I used John Bigger's work to frame it because he had such a great sense of what community is and he reflected it in his work. He talked about the importance of architecture, art, education and social networks and social safety nets. And so the thing that's really coming to the forefront for me right now is the notion of education. And how we educate those that come after us and how we figure out how to share and make it possible for them to kind of take where we've made it to and kind of keep moving it. And so I've been very fortunate to see that happen a lot through Project Throw Houses over the years. One of the great ones that I'm inspired by there is Asada Richards who was a young mother at Project Throw Houses. She got her PhD at Penn State. She came back and she worked with our young mothers in social service programs. She later was appointed a commissioner on the housing authority of the city of Houston. And she's just been very inspiring, right? She can do the things that I can't do, right? I'm generally one that doesn't like to boast of what the work that I do. But having someone like Asada who has been impacted by it and she's all about talking about the value of it. So as we moved into the last year with a serious flurry of gentrification efforts in the Third Ward where we are, there was a real call for how do we deal with this? And so I was a little hesitant to try to stick Project Throw Houses in the forefront of that movement because I've come to understand that it's so much better to be invited than to insert yourself. And so I decided to sit back and see what would happen but I managed to get a group of fellows from MIT to come to help us look at some planning around Project Throw Houses. And I was shocked that Asada said to me, she says, everybody in the community need to be a part of this and they need to know about it. And I was a little shy about it but she went and she talked to everybody. Next thing I knew, we had churches, we had businesses and everybody coming to us with these fellows looking for a vision to how we organize ourselves around the gentrification movement which has been really great now to not have to ask or not try to insert ourselves into that leadership position but actually to be pushed into it by the community because of the relevance of what we're doing. So that's been really exciting and inspiring for me. And then the second thing is I started a project in Dallas a few years ago, almost three years ago, through an exhibition and I didn't know where the project would go or if it would have legs to sustain itself after the exhibition timeframe or after I've kind of done everything I could do in that process. But Suzanne again actually contacted me at some point and said I have a student that's from Austin and she's very interested in your work and working with you. And I said, well send her down. So she came to visit the project translation in Dallas and then she started every time she came home she would come and visit. So then I actually was able to figure out a way to create a fellowship and a residency for her at translation. And that's Carol, Carol's out. And it's been amazing to watch her work. Her working style is very different than mine which is really, which is really good for me because the whole point is not to have everybody working in the same way because we don't get to learn that way. So to be able to see people work in different ways become very important. And so it was interesting for me to see her come in in the way that she, well one thing that she has going for that I didn't have was that she speak multiple languages. So in translation is all about that diverse population there and I mean that's why we call it translation. But I'm not gonna talk about that because she's gonna probably talk about that during her time. But the last thing I wanna just point out is I had one of those incredibly learning experience working on a project with Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia and I'm glad Gail is here today. It's, you know, we all like to think of, you know, the work as being, you know, well when we see the presentations of work we don't see the struggle in the formation of that work and the test of character, the growth of personalities. I mean, it's pretty amazing. And so, you know, I worked, I was invited to work with Asian Arts Initiative. I guess that residency's been going almost two years and it started and it was just, oh God, we had a lot of challenges and so on and so forth. And then it kind of occurred to me, one of the things was that I was not spending enough time there. And that's when I started to realize the real extreme importance of time. Time is so important. And I said, and I had to question, how can I get more time? How can I get more time? And I said, well, the only way I can really get more time is to duplicate myself. But that's not really possible. So I said, well, let's just find somebody who I can learn from, you know, and who I can, you know, help them. And I pulled in these two young women from, that were graduating from MICA and we got the resources to place them in that neighborhood in Chinatown North. They lived there full time and that was their full-time work. And I'm not gonna go into details about that project, either, but I'll just tell you, the one thing that was so amazing to me was, I was there last, I don't know, maybe it was a week before Christmas and we had a little conversation about the work with the two of them there, Alithia Shen and Emily Chowblook. And we had this conversation and I talked to them, we had been working with a homeless population and I asked them, I said, well, do you think any of the guys gonna show up? And they were like, you know, maybe one or two, they said, you know, and when you're thinking about, you know, on a Saturday homeless population, they're not really that interested in going to an art conversation, right? But it was so interesting that we were sitting there and we were talking, having a little conversation and in come, you know, this crew of men, you know, it was, I guess it must have been about eight or nine of them, you know, that just came in with such pride, you know, and such dignity about the role that they played in this project. And that, you know, and to me, those are the kind of things that become really, that suggests that there's some value, you know, in what we're doing and that we have something to offer. So those are the three things that kind of, you know, encourage me and keep me going and, you know, keep me thinking that this is actually, because in reality, you know, when I do this work, sometimes I wake up and I ask the question, is it really worth it? You know, I mean, what contribution is this really having? You know, and that happens when you're kind of in the trenches for long periods of time. So you have to find those moments in time where you can look and reflect and say, this is why it's done, you know, and that's, so that's kind of where, anybody gonna, any water? Can I get a bottle of water or something? I'm getting a little caught in my mouth here. Anyway, so those are the things that kind of get me going and make me think about, you know, this as being something important. So, so I'm not gonna go on more than that, because the thing that I have learned over time is that, that we learn through questions, I tried to write some of my other questions down that I didn't bring with me, but we learn through ask, through formulating questions, and we learn through answering questions, you know, and answering questions is just basically because we have to force ourselves to say it, you know, and as we say it, we think about it, you know. So oftentimes when I'm talking to people and they ask me questions, it may, I'm giving them an answer that they may think that I know and I believe, but I'm actually giving them an answer that I can learn from, for myself, and that answer may change over time. And so what I like for everybody here to do is just to think of a question, a question that you may have for me, or a question that you may have in general of the role of artists in society now, and particularly artists that are interested in social and community engaged art. So if you would ask that question, I may answer if I can, or I may look for someone else to answer. Some of you I know really well, so I may just point you out, because I know, you know, I know where you are. So take a second, formulate a question and I'm gonna get the mic and I'm gonna come around. This on? Yeah. So I wanna frame the question around this idea of know-where-ness and somewhere-ness in relationship to you mentioning that there's this kind of gentrification thing happening in the Third Ward. If you were to think about what the Third Ward was 20 years ago, or 25 years ago, in the trends of poor people who were either stuck there, imagining that they were stuck, or were very quickly trying to move away, how do you talk about the change in a place over time when a place had been stigmatized as not being somewhere you wanna be, and then it slowly becomes a place you wanna be, and then it becomes a place that lots of other people wanna be. So that the population of folk that were there 25 years ago doesn't look like that there's this dynamic of people coming and going, and I just wanna hear you talk more about the city over time in relationship to this moment of gentrification. What was the Third Ward when you started? And I'm really asking a question about the dynamics of cities more than I am about displacement or anything. Yeah, that's an interesting question and it's very complex, right? I think that, first of all, there are a couple of things that I've learned over the past year, dealing with this broader planning initiative in our neighborhood was that the first, the one thing I learned is that when we say things like gentrification and we use that as a buzzword to just kind of mean, oh bad, you know, kind of thing, we might be cheating ourselves, right? So the thing that we ended up finding out with our new group that Asada helped form called the Emancipation Economic Development Council was that we were making some assumptions, right? There were all these new townhouses coming in and all these new people moving in and we were just unilaterally labeling them all bad people, right? But then all of a sudden we started to realize, well, we don't even know who they are. You know, I mean, we were attaching a word to something, I mean, to everybody that moved in without really knowing who they were. And then we started to realize that there were a lot of people that were moving in who were really curious about being a part of the neighborhood. We actually found that there were real estate brokers, actually they start contacting us once we set up this group, contacting us to help us figure out how to market to African Americans because they understood the context of the neighborhood and wanted to contribute to making it better. And of course they wanted to make the money, but they still had a consciousness about the neighborhood and its quality. We actually even had developers that we kind of were able to shift their thinking on the development products that they were giving because they understood what we were trying to do. So I think, first, my first thing is that I had to really kind of recalibrate my thinking about the notion of change and to understand that there are nuances that we oftentimes kind of overlook because we're just kind of being a little bit knee-jerk, I guess. And then there's another little story there, I'll tell you that was kind of interesting about a scenario that happened a few months ago. There's an older woman who has been, I mean she has latched herself onto the Emancipation Economic Development Council in like no other, I mean she's lived there for 50 years and she's retired, she's like, I'm gonna be at every meeting, I'm gonna be at everything you guys do because this is my neighborhood. So we went and we visited with our council member. And she showed up with us and she said, she was telling him about the challenges that she's having in the neighborhood now. She told this funny story, she said that she usually drives, she didn't drive a lot, she didn't go out a lot, but when she leaves, she usually go to the south on her street and she comes back that way. But this one instance, she had to go to the north and she says when she was driving back, she couldn't find her house because the developers are all developing to the sight line and her house was behind it and she passed it. She thought she was going crazy because she could not find her house until she turned around and she came back the other way. And she was talking about what that means to her and the threat of that. And the council member said, well, Ms. Volosia, I'm gonna give you a piece of friendly advice, that when the next real estate person comes up to you and start waving $400,000 or so in front of your face for your house, you take that and you go down to sunny side and get yourself a new house. And Ms. Volosia said, she said, well, Mr. Councilman, she said, you know what, when I bought this house here, 40 years ago, I had a dream that I would live in a neighborhood where there was a coffee shop nearby and there was a this and that nearby and so on and so forth. He said, and now you're telling me that it's coming, that I need to leave? You know, she was like, that's not the answer that I want to hear, you know? And so, you know, so you just kind of, you know, for me, you know, I don't know the answer to your question, but there are just these experiences that I have that help shape and frame my thinking about the work that I'm trying to do. Question over here. I guess this is sort of a follow-up question. You once stated that, and forgive me if I misquoting you, that gentrification, socially engaged art was a gentrification of community art. And I've heard that quoted so many times in so many different ways. No, no, she got it right. Socially engaged art was a gentrification of community art. And I was wondering if you could just elaborate a little bit about that. Okay, well, let me give some, let me add something to that publicly, right? Because I've had this conversation privately with Reese Wilson. You know, I was talking to Reese one day, and she basically, I mean, she said to me that, we were talking, somehow she said that Pippon Osorio had said that at a meeting at Asian Arts Initiative. And I was like, really? I mean, because I didn't, I mean, anyway, I remember saying that in a conversation with NATO, but I don't know where its origin came from, and I don't know if it came out of me or out of Pippon or some other person, whatever. However, I would want to pitch that question to the person sitting next to you who has lived that and know how words are used to marginalize people, you know, how labels are used to marginalize people to disinvest them. And so I would be curious to have here, Amalia, talk about that. When you said it, I got this jumping in my body because I have lived through much of it. When we first started working communities in the Chicano and Latino communities back in the late 60s to mid-70s, it was very organic and people had to make the things they wanted. You had to make the art to change the way people looked at your community. Then you had to build the institutions to show the art so that your community could come there. And then you had to write about that very same art and that cultural expression to educate those who didn't understand you. And so on and so forth. And all those years was an organic movement of change. Then it became institutionalized in language. So I remember, somebody help me with it, Suzanne probably remembers it. The one about civic dialogue, what was it, democracy? Civic dialogue was another term. When we started the visual and public art at CSUMB, we were using terms like community engagement and our idea of public art wasn't the same as I was a commissioner for the city of San Francisco. So I know that kind. And then we began to form consortiums. So Micah was one of our partners, Xavier Cooper Union, CCA, all of these different ones. They were all working in that and then the language shifted again. And then, I will not say any names because you might know them, but something started to happen at the San Francisco Art Institute when someone from a global perspective was brought in and all of the faculty that had been working community arts were essentially shoved out and global artists were brought in. And then they started using terms like public practice. And the public practice was basically, to some degree, a slight disengagement. So I think that the language keeps changing to distance people from their real lived experience, their needs, the desire to change, the transformative tools, and the really internal expression of culture that comes from people's lives and communities, their histories, their legacies, their heritage, until it becomes so distanced that the language that's being used can be used by people who have no knowledge of that lived experience and they become itinerant public community artists who move from community to community, getting large grants, forming a sort of community engagement like I wouldn't call them corporations, they're too small. But when we did the second go round of the CAP grants, the community arts practices one, and it transformed to the projects we were doing at MICA and all of the writing and dialogue, I saw for the first time particular key individuals, not always whites, I'm not laying a race trip on it, but people who were no longer nor may ever have been part of a lived community who had the cachet, who had the reputation, who had the access to move from place to place until they finally managed to somehow shove out of the way the very people that had built those real practices in their own communities. So that language assisted in that disengagement, in that shifting away from the realness of it to the simulacrum of it. And I think that that's what I meant when I said we're now at another turning point. We've gone as far as we can go with that model and we've got to get back. Yep, so you know, one of the, thank you for that. Because, you know, one of the things I've learned is being a social or community engaged artist is that you find people that can do it better than you and you let them do it. So thank you. So anyway, but you know, one of the challenges though that I think that this notion of gentrification of community arts provide for us is the same as, you know, gentrification on a neighborhood level. I remember working on a project in a little town in Korea and the project was, well, we were looking at a place that where they were gonna take out an entire 25 blocks of what was a very vibrant neighborhood, but they wanted to add more density. They wanted to generate more density. And so I was, Suzanne actually worked on a project there at the same time and Keon Park was leading that effort. And what was interesting about it was that, you know, most people were concerned about the displacement of, you know, where were people gonna live and so on and so forth. But I got attached to the notion of that, you know, maybe to shift your, where you live is hard, but it's not gonna be nearly as hard as to shift your livelihood, your business, right? Because most of those folks had little mind pop shops and so on and so forth that were sustaining them. And so, you know, I kind of, you know, I started kind of pondering that and thinking about, you know, so what happens when, you know, a neighborhood is moving and why do the people have to get, you know, just kind of pushed out from a business standpoint, right? And the thing that kind of occurred to me, they're the obvious things, right? That small businesses and individuals that are doing community-engaged work or whatever, they don't have access to the capital, generally, to stay in the game, right? But one of the barriers to the capital, though, is, you know, is how we approach it, you know, how do we, you know, like in case, in the instance of community arts and social practice stuff, is that, you know, people that are doing community-engaged work, we're not, traditionally, the folks that are doing it are not keeping up with the language and they're not playing, you know, you have to understand the language. Even the people in the art world are pushing the language and that's how they move to the forefront, right? So, you know, so I started to apply that in this situation in Korea, was that part of the problem with the small businesses, the reason they were being pushed out, was that they were not offering an alternative for their existence within the new context. And so we set up this little thing of business competitions and so on and so forth to challenge the small businesses to figure out, to make a statement, to say, you know, we can figure out how to exist in this new economy. We just need an opening to do it. And so I think that a lot of community-based practice, a lot of times, is that we're not pushing it. We're not pushing ourselves to be relevant enough to get the invitation to be in. Huh? You're confused. Okay, let me, and I'll give you what I consider just a pretty straightforward example, right? If I started with Project Row Houses, and if I come up with that idea at Project Row Houses in, you know, 1993 and just said, okay, I'm doing this community-engaged project. I'm gonna, you know, redevelop these houses and so on and so forth and blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't think anybody would have heard me. But it was, I think it was because of my training in the kind of traditional art world and knowing that talk, the reference points and so on and so forth, that when I was able to say that I'm gonna do this project, and it's an extension of Joseph Boyd's social sculpture, then all of a sudden it had some relevance that, you know, people could, you know, would allow the opportunity to listen because it connected to their reality and what they were interested in. Had I not been able to use that, I don't think it would've, does anybody agree, or disagree with that? Award saying you wanna renovate some houses and you went to the city government and said, hey, I live down the street and I really wanna change these buildings, you know. Well, I would've been in line with everybody else there that's kinda getting pushed around in the political scenario, right? I agree with Amalia in the spirit and the politics of what she's saying, but I don't lay the burden of these shifts at the foot of language. I think that we've always had a dual practice, most of us working for a while in this world, which is that we're addressing an attempt to change the visual arts at the same time we're attempting to contribute to our communities. And I think that the shifts in language, social practice, public practice right now simply represents that we've had some level of success in shifting what was a very traditional public art discourse into a process-based, politically-based activity. However, having said that, I would lay the kind of cultural hegemony that she's talking about more at the foot of education in the art market. And both of those vehicles are ones that we have to deal with as people operating within the visual arts, like the after you weren't very successfully within a certain aspect of the visual arts world and you use that as a leverage to promote community change and I think offer an opportunity for younger artists moving forward to embrace this kind of dual, I mean, I don't know if you'd call it dual, probably you wouldn't call it dual, but I would call it still a kind of a bifurcated world that we live in. I think we have to be really, really careful about the ways in which social practice at this moment in time are co-opted by major institutions and so on. And we have to work rigorously to return the kind of deep political engagement and the materiality of what we do into the discourse. You know, I have to go with Amalia on the language. Now, you know, I mean, and just to give another example of that, I've been making these presentations about things that look like art, that may be art, but nobody calls it art and things that are art that didn't look like art that whatever, whatever. And there's this one image that I like to show is like, you know, of course, William Pope Bale doing his crawling, you know, down the street, whatever, whatever. And then one day I was in Philly and I was walking down the street and I saw this guy walking with a bunch of stuff in his arm, but he had like this kind of harness over his back with a train that was about 25 feet with a plastic container at the back. And he was just walking. And what was so cool about it, when you cross the streets, he would cross the street and people just had to watch, wait and watch him go across. It was an amazing performance. And if that guy knew how to say, you know, William Pope L, if he could just say William Pope L, then somebody would say, oh my God, you know, whatever. You know, but because he doesn't have the language, you know, he's just the guy that's carrying this stuff in his, you know, quirky way, but. One of the things that comes to mind, I definitely think language particularly matters around these issues. And as it relates to power, fault lines and how those relate to issues of race and class. So someone who's running a person of color run organization, I'm very aware of what using words like community, engaged art or community, art or community based art, how that lines up against using words like social practice or socially engaged, et cetera, public art that happens to involve people and how to be strategic about that and how to also be bilingual, right? And code switching in different moments and how important that is in being able to do the work. And in the end, it's about trying to serve the ability to do the work and be recognized and to be part of conversations and being able to do that code switching becomes really important when talking to funders or talking to the community that you're actually working with or talking to other artists. And I definitely think it correlates with where we fall different of us on those power fault lines as they interconnect with race and gender or class and all those kind of intersectional moments. So yeah, I agree with the language thing, but that said, language is very complicated. So it doesn't exactly answer a lot, but it does answer some things, which is to say language is coded in power and race and capital and that to trace anything is to trace all that, but that's a messy road. But just to say something else on a different level, I wanna talk about revolutionary politics for a second. And it's because I've been haunted by this strange thought and it seems like a good room to have this kind of 2016 epiphany, which is I think never before historically have more people been working on social change than ever. That is to say more people got jobs working on changing the world, more people are working to fight climate change, more people, I think more artists are working to help people. I think in just the everyday life, a lot of people are working to help the world, which is I guess good news, but the weird thing about it is I think wealth inequity has never been worse. Rights seem to be going down the drain, so it does seem to me in some ways a strategic approach to power does imply a certain kind of digging into revolutionary politics, or at least taking it on. And I was gonna put it to you, Rick, because in some ways, a lot of social engaged art stuff is beautiful because it's problem solving as opposed to pointing. But do you ever have this kind of revolutionary thinking in your mind or is there ever a moment where you think, I'm just putting my thumb in the hole in the dam. And I really, to really get at this, I have to take seriously a revolutionary politics. Does that, how does that work in your thinking? Well, it's risky business, right? Because there's not too many people that wanna fund the revolution, right? I mean, it's a big challenge. And then the other challenge, and I think this is a hurdle that the arts have to get over, though, is that the people that are interested in funding the revolution, many of them have not found a way to really connect with artists, right? Some of you might have been involved at some point in time in the Open Society Institute in their dialogues where they were trying to figure out how to connect artists and activists, right? And I think they found it really challenging. And I think basically a lot of the challenge, to me, was connected to, they didn't know who the artists were that they should be working with. I mean, I won't get into the artists that were involved when I was there, but it was just kind of a, I just could see how they could not find that a very productive conversation. So I think we have to do a better job at figuring out how to connect ourselves and how to align ourselves with progressive and revolutionary thinkers, right? And some of the time, so I think it becomes, we hinder ourselves from doing that because we come at things from this artist's perspective of being initiators of things as opposed to attaching ourselves to things. I give just a small, tiny example of that that I learned on the project in Philadelphia at Asian Arts Initiative. We were focusing on this street, Pearl Street. And I had this notion that we'd have to start by showing some care for the street and we have to start cleaning the street. We have to just do this as an act on a regular basis. And so, you know, we started and we were doing it and it was kind of going okay, but it just wasn't catching on, right? And then there was a guy who worked with the homeless shelter down the street. He suggested this to me one time and it's so interesting how I didn't hear it. But he said, well, you know, the men at Sunday Breakfast, the homeless shelter, they have to clean their block every morning. Why don't you come down and clean with them? And I just kind of missed that, right? Because that was not my thing. You know, that was their thing. And then it was really interesting when Emily and Aletheia came, the first thing that they did was they got up every morning and they went to clean with the men, right? And then all of a sudden, the men extended from their block to the next block. You know, there was a different kind of buy-in sometimes, you know, if we can allow ourselves to go there and to work with the revolutionaries without necessarily having to, you know, to be the leader, you know, we have to check the ego in a little bit. And I don't think we do that well enough. I think we always feel like we have to, you know, we're artists and we're project-driven, we have to be the ones that are doing the thing and we miss out on those opportunities to tap into people who are really kind of pushing that agenda that you're talking about. So I'm gonna go back to language a little bit. And Rick, we talked about this a few months back, but so we're talking about like legibility. I'm also thinking about illegibility, sort of. Are there also freedoms to be illegible? You know, there was this really great talk by Arthur Jaffa at PRH a few months back and he was talking a lot about that. So I wonder if you have any thoughts on that kind of moment of being illegible. Is there a freedom to do so as well? You know, I think that's probably one of the most important things that art bring to the conversation, right? Is that we bring mystery. We bring, you know, an element of poetry that it takes time to think about. It takes, it's not so readily accessible. And I think that, while it's tough and it's painful, you know, to engage in those situations and people that are working on a community level are looking to be expedient, you know, and they wanna get things done, right? But what they miss out on is that level of growth in the effort that happens when you have to stop and ponder things, you know, and sometimes those things can like take you off in a different direction, you know, which is amazing, which is so amazing. I have a good friend, a friend I've known for one, God, since the early 80s. And most of you probably have never heard of him, but he's huge in his field. His name is Joe Davis. He's, anybody know Joe Davis? Artist, MIT, well, anyway. You know, the guy asserted himself some 30 years ago in the Department of Advanced Visual Studies at MIT as an artist to challenge scientists. You know, and I just saw this great quote of Joe on a documentary that he's, that's about him, he was giving a lecture and he says, and we're trying to coat the DNA of an apple to attempt the devil, you know? I mean, you know, so he's in there with scientists doing the stuff that apparently, I mean, at some point to them, make no sense whatsoever. So they have to think about it. And then it offers them opportunities to kind of depart. So consequently, he's sustained his career in that environment for 30 years because of the way that, you know, he challenges him. And they've learned to embrace that. And I think that that's the thing that we offer in a community context. And we have to keep pushing forward. It all, it can't all be legible. And it all can't be about expediency. Hi, my question centered around sustainability. And when I've been thinking about a lot of your careers, many of you who I've had the pleasure to work with at least briefly, I think about how certain projects became sustainable over a period of time, particularly when I think of project row houses, in your case, Rick. And I was just curious about some thoughts. This isn't a simple like question we're necessarily gonna answer in a few minutes. But how do we create work that is sustainable over a period of time that continues to make impact when we do the work that we do? Or is that even important? Is it something that is temporary and is momentary in terms of its impact? And what would be some, I guess, philosophical approaches to achieving that sustainability in addition to obviously figuring out funding sources, obviously helps make something more sustainable because you can throw money at it, but that's not necessarily at the core of what creating sustainable work would mean. Kind of like on a project basis, but possibly in other spheres too, if you have any thoughts on that. My feelings about sustainability is that, you know, I just, I try to approach it from the standpoint of life. Everything has a lifespan, right? And so, you know, it's great if things sustain for long periods of time, but if they don't, it doesn't diminish the value of what it brought. And in fact, I mean, you know, just, you know, to be able to conceptualize a project that is short-term is of value, you know, to be able to conceptualize one that is long-term is of value. And if the long-term falls, turns into short-term, there's not an issue with that. And sometimes the short-terms may, you know, may move into long-term. So, you know, I don't really try to, you know, I don't try to pressure myself around that. My thing is always to just say, do the work in earnest, right? I mean, you know, and I always tell people, like when I show up to work on a project, I generally tell people that, you know, and it's just my personality, right? I mean, I go from the standpoint of saying, I don't know if I can do anything. I don't know if there's anything possible here, but I will work in earnest, you know? And that's, you know, and to me, that's the most, you know, I can offer in a situation because I, you know, I don't like to, I don't approach it from the standpoint I have a magic wand that I can come and I can make things happen and so on and so forth. It's like, but I can work, you know, I can work really hard and really honestly with the people that I'm working with. And that's, you know, and that's it. I don't follow up the time, but I'm just curious. I mean, that's a great way to start off working, but I'm curious if how you, how you maybe adapt as different things arise during the process in terms of determining what needs to be longer term, what needs to be shorter term and what have those projects to manifest themselves? I mean, one thing I personally struggle with is, I'll work on a project and then I wonder, does this need to be carried on more extensively or more done in a more elaborate fashion or was doing it, you know, in those initial steps that were smaller, is that significant enough? And I'm always trying to gauge that and then have strategies for then building upon what appears to need more focus and energy over a longer timeframe. Well, I will say that what I've learned in my practice though, and I'm trying to apply this more is to think of what I do in terms of projects, even within project row houses, right? That an initiative that started should be a project and not a program because the difference between projects and programs, I think, is that, you know, projects, you know, you intend to work them until they don't work any longer, you know, you're testing or something. Programs people get attached to and they wanna like kind of, you know, it needs to sustain itself over time and sometimes those things can become burdensome, you know, and problematic. So I'm struggling even at this moment with project row houses on some of those issues, right? I mean, we have this transitional housing for single mothers and, you know, and we've done this program for almost 20 years and it's been great and the question is, you know, is it something that we continue to do or is it something that we pass on to someone else? We actually did that with our Housing and Community Development Corporation. I mean, at a certain point, we realized that, you know what? If, as this thing grows, it's gonna strangle us and we're gonna lose our agility and our ability to kind of respond to other things around. So we like moved it on and it was, but it's very painful for people when you make those decisions. Last one, I think. Question about creative placemaking and whether that's part of the lexicon of language, I think for you and for Amalia, that is limiting, constricting. It's obviously a term that somewhat you exemplify. It's been used very powerfully among funders to a degree of science, but love to know your perspective about that language around creative placemaking. I find it personally restrictive. And then any thoughts about Detroit and what's going on there in your perspective? Yeah, okay, so the creative placemaking, question is, I, you know, what? No, I mean, it's just, I don't, language is tricky, right? Because words can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. And I think the current interpretation of placemaking is one that is attached more to physical place than people in the place. And that was, that was really, my thoughts on that were substantiated when I was once had a, Projector Hazard's had a site visit from one of the leading placemaking funders called Art Place. And the person asked me at the end of the visit, they said, so are you, do you consider yourself an architect, a planner, or an artist or something? You know, I said, well, I'm an artist. And she said, well, you know, it's interesting because our most successful placemaking grantees have been either architects or planners. And she said, because architects think, and planners think about the broadness of a place and artists just think about the people in the place. And people move, but the place stays there. And I'm like, but the people make the place. So it was really interesting. And that kind of, to me, that kind of defined the whole idea of placemaking for me, that the way that it's being used now. But it didn't always, I mean, there are other people that use it in different ways and that's fine. And as far as Detroit, I've learned my lesson. It takes time to be in a place. I don't have the time to be in Detroit to really have to have an opinion about stuff. In fact, I was just invited by somebody to come to Detroit for something they're doing. And I've responded to them very respectfully and said, you know what, what you're doing, it sounds great, but I don't think I have the time to give to what you're doing. And it won't be a service for me or that community. So sometimes I think it's, I'm learning that now that you just have to say no and keep your nose out of folks' business if it's not right. All right, that's it. Thank you. Thank you all for helping me out. You know, there are some interesting things that are going on in the room. We have choice, you know. We're supposed to be taking a break, but we could also not take a break. But before we make that decision, I just wanted to just kind of reiterate a couple of things that I was really trying to get to and I think, Nato, this kind of speaks also to your point. We really don't all agree. We come from many different places. We want many different things. Some of us are really confused around ideas of politics. Some of us are really confused around ideas of revolution. Some of us are not interested in revolutions, right? You know, we're interested in maintaining exactly what we have, but we want to see it sort of shift to the right or to the left or to, right? I mean, I think that these are really important ideas that really need to be sort of flushed out, which is one of the reasons that I sort of thought about this idea, you know, that there are artists that are working with art and civic engagement and art and social engagement and art and civic dialogue and art and revolution and art and practice. And I think asking ourselves critically where we are, who we are within this thing, I think is actually very, very important and it's one of the most critical things that we can do. So it's sustainability. Well, what do you want? Why are you involved in the practice? Why does it need to grow? Or why does it need to survive? You know, is it a practice or is it a way of life, right? Is it something that really grows organically out of the depth of really your work? And if it does, then it means that in part, your responsibility is to get out of the way of yourself so that the project can actually live. And I think that in part is what Rick is talking about. You really have to get out of the way of the work. All of us as artists have to get out of the way of the work so that we can see what the work actually is. But I think, you know, this idea about defining, I don't think that of course we won't be doing that today, but I think the terms of the discussion, defining the terms of the discussion of what art and practice is contemporarily is absolutely key and I really am hoping that we will convene again, that we will start having sort of larger critical dialogue. So the work that Gary, that Gregory, and Shalette has done, the new book that NATO has on art and power, we're putting together actually a bibliography. I'm hoping that all of you will contribute to that bibliography. What are some of the seminal texts that you're looking at and reading that we need to compile and pull together in an interesting way, right? And disseminate to one another. You know, so there are many places, then there are many ways in which we are intersecting with this discussion and with this practice. So the other things that came up this morning, again, this idea around language, use of language to get at what we are. Maya, thank you for your laying out this idea, this sort of tensioned around language and yet there's this really interesting discussion that's going on between Amaya and Suzanne, around what this means, what this really is defining. I mean, these are really sort of extraordinary, extraordinary questions. And you know, again, one of the ways that I think about working a lot is these sort of building these relationships, making these sort of networks. That's why I thought, okay, all right. So I'm interested in these particular artists. I'm interested in bringing them together, convening them. And then I got a phone call from Yale about doing a book. They wanted to do a book with me. And I thought, well, I want to do two books. And so, you know, I want to do my own book. I want a big glossy, you know, I've never had a kitchen table, you know. You know, I want one of those big old glossy things that's sort of heavy to turn, you know. Like everything I've ever done, everything I've ever said. You know, and then I thought, but I also want like a case study. I want a case study. I want a case study of this sort of moment. And I thought, okay, the five artists that I invite, I'll make a proposal to Yale that they give me a case study. And I'll be able to invite five artists to participate in my case study. And the five volumes will go actually in a case and they will come together as a sort of interconnecting, interlaced way of looking at a group of artists who are working at this moment in time. And so I pitched that to Yale and they said, that's fabulous, you know. And then I lied and I said, and you'll be the first to do it. So, we'll see that book is being worked on now and some of the issues and ideas that are being brought up in this room, hopefully will be ingested in some way, in some format into this group of books. Hopefully some aspect of today and some of your bodies and faces and ideas will also show up in one of the volumes of this book. Rupert Jenkins is here looking at and thinking about and writing a bit about this. I'm hoping that maybe Nato and Greg may also decide to contribute to this text as well. So, I think what we'll do now, we'll go ahead and we'll take just a little bit of a break. Stretch, get some water. Use the bathroom if you'd like. And then we'll come back and Suzanne will start us into the next part of the program. Okay, so I see you in a bit.