 Buddy, it's so great to see all you here. So I'm just the logistical person announcing the next thing, so don't get too excited. So we have next up a panel of three artists who are doing exactly what Jeff was talking about, who are all in their own ways through their work and through who they are in the world, challenging the way that we see identity, helping us see things in new ways, and helping create spaces where we can envision a different world in the future. And so they're gonna have a conversation together. We have Carrie Mae Weems, David Henry Huang, and Julio Salgado. And Gregory Rodriguez is going to moderate the panel, so if you guys can come up, that would be great. And just as they're coming up to the chairs, Gregory is the founder of Zocalo Public Square, which is an ideas exchange that blends events and journalism and creates a space for a younger generation that's more diverse to be able to have conversations that matter. And I can't think of a better person to moderate this panel. Thank you guys. David, sorry, coming. I'm losing my stuff. Hello, good morning. Is anybody as tired as I am? Just me. I'm happy to be here with these amazing artists who have a lot more knowledge and know about art, which I don't. So I'm trying to use my ignorance today as to be a good interviewer. But I wanna start with the idea when I got this invitation from Hilary, thank you. I was thinking about, I was on this boondoggle, the State Department sent me two years ago to Venice. And I just said, yes, because you're sending me to Venice to talk about American identity. And I thought I was fairly articulate during a panel. And a very eager and nervous, wiry Italian man came up and said, well, what is it? Are you Chicano? Are you Mexican-American? Are you Latino? And I felt a little bit assaulted and I said, well, it depends who I'm talking to. Well, I guess I'm all those things, but who am I talking to? And are you American? Yeah. And he said, but pick one. And I shouldn't have answered, but I was sort of in a corner here. I mean, he wasn't very big, but he was wiry. And I said, I'm an asthmatic. And we all have these identities. We've always had them. But the premise of this panel, and a lot of the premise of today, is the idea that the identity is more fluid, that we have a greater freedom to identify in multiple ways than we ever did before. In 2000, the US Census allowed Americans to pick more than one race. Imagine that. And we don't know what that means. Although it drives demographers crazy. He said, demography numbers no longer add up to 100 in America. And then yesterday, I get off the plane looking at the news from South Carolina. I was sort of struck, not knowing what the significance was, but it seems to me I wanted to start sort of today's discussion off with the first woman governor of South Carolina, the child of immigrants who both worships in a Methodist and a Sikh temple, declared essentially it time to move beyond the symbolism of a war that ended 150 years ago. That seems to suggest that this woman, the governor Haley's identity is very complex, dealing with a more archaic, if you will, primal divide that we have advanced and that we haven't. And I think Jeff was referring to this complexity and I wanna know from the panel first of all is, and I'm gonna pick on David first because I interviewed you years ago in a small dungeon-like room at the Center Theater in Los Angeles and you couldn't escape either. I was the small, why are you Italian guy? And you had just written and were presenting yellow face. And you were seemed at this point of your life in which you were sort of tired of identity. You wanted out, it seems to me. And I don't wanna quote you directly because I'll never find it. But you were talking about this notion of identity having something that comforted you at times, that belonging that gave you a place in the world, but it was also a place in which you can get stuck. Are you still there at that place? And if not, where are you? What do you think is happening to identity in America racial and otherwise? Yeah, well okay, at the time that we had that discussion, I finished yellow face where we were about to premiere it. And it's a play in which there's, one of the things that happens is there's a white guy who threw a series of mistakes orchestrated by a character named DHH, comes to be identified as Asian, as a mixed race Asian incorrectly, and then goes on to become a community role model and leader in ethnic identity movements until at some point he's exposed. And I think in that play I was struggling with both the joys and the limitations of identity politics of ethnic identity. And it had been something because I started my career, my first place produced in whatever, 1980. So I feel like a lot of my career kind of paralleled the growth of what we now, you know, multiculturalism. And I felt that it was kind of a cutting edge thing to be writing about in 1980. And by the time this play premiered in whatever, 2007, I thought, you know, it's kind of, that discussion has happened and that something that was once daring has now pretty much been incorporated into mainstream thought and they're people who are for it, they're people who are against it, but it's not a new idea. So I therefore felt, you know, I kind of want to get beyond that now and I was going to be more interested in internationalism for at least the next period of time. That is, how can some of these notions that we developed during multiculturalism be expanded outside our national borders and looked at in an international context? Which I still think is an interesting idea. However, at this point in whatever we're in 2015, I actually think America is really fascinating again. And because the degree of resistance that has erupted over the past whatever, seven or eight years, the degree of division and the re-ignition of the cultural war is something that I didn't think was necessarily going to happen in 2007. And so what is happening at the present moment? And for me it's a reaction to the demographic kind of shift where a Caucasian will be a plurality but not a majority, and how do you define it? But anyway, by whatever, 2040. And that the society is having a great deal of struggle to figure out what this means and white privilege and appropriation, all these discussions come back in a more charged fashion even I think than they did in the 80s. So I think this sort of fascinating moment for America dealing with issues of race and identity right now. And I'm working on plays or plays that are kind of about these issues again because there's a lot more territory to cover. Thank you. Kerry, does that resonate this notion of joys and limitations of identity? Does that resonate with you in any way? Oh, oh, absolutely. But first I have to say that I really love, I really love this paper, this presentation that Jeff made this morning. I just thought it was, thank you so much. It was really wonderful, so thoughtful. So, and I'm really interested in this idea. I mean, I'm really interested in this idea of institutions and institutes and think tanks and places where actually these sort of ideas can be sort of talked about in a more sustained way through across multiple platforms because I think that it's really sort of the most interesting way of doing it. And there was something that David just brought up as well. I mean, I think that, you know, I can remember, I can remember in the 1980s, about 1982, something like that, sitting in an audience and the president of Bank of America was speaking. And he said, part of his address was by the year 2040 or something. The white majority is actually going to be the minority in this country. And I think we need to think about what that means. He was speaking at a graduation ceremony at San Francisco State. And that idea really, really, really stuck with me. This idea that a man who represents the president of a Fortune 500 company was already deeply thinking about what it would mean for the demographic shifts that would take place in the country. What would be the consequence of this? And so, you know, often I struggle through my days of who I am living in this complex body, this complex skin, thinking about how to make work that builds a pathway through to my humanity. I'm generally not interested really in having discussions about diversity because I think that in this sort of format, because I think that it has been left primarily to brown people to negotiate these very complex issues. And so, I'm always really surprised that there are no dynamite white folks dealing with diversity since it's an American issue, it's a human issue. And so, there's something about a kind of racism, about a sustained racism that forces brown people to negotiate the struggles of white people, right? And by white people, I mean it in sort of a more specific way, you know, related to power and to privilege. And so, if you, if we are here, if we are stuck here in this place, constantly negotiating the straight jacket, the box, then we actually don't really have time to deal with the more dynamic aspects of life, right? Or at least that's the perception. So that we're always negotiating color as though those are the limits to the field of our vision and to the acts of our participation. That concerns me greatly. And so, I do see it as being a living in quality. I see it as being something that jackets us as much as of course I think that it's absolutely essential to break through to these sort of human questions. These are the diversity. We must because we are different, we do stand in some way as being different, but it's not, but my skin is really not the important difference. It's been simply made to appear that way. These ideas about perception I think are absolutely key and fundamental. And so, these are the kinds of questions that I'm sort of negotiating and thinking about and spending a lot of time writing about and spending a lot of time actually making work around. The way the work is built is really trying to work around this sort of limited box of diversity. Julio, you constantly negotiate the straight jacket. Now that goes to you. Well, what else can I say, right? I'm like, am I sure I'm the right? I should be here, I'm learning. So, I mean, what else can I add to what this genius has just said, but yeah, I think negotiating this identities in our art, it's been something that I'm constantly struggling with as an undocumented queer person. This sort of identities have been put on me, right? The documented part. And so, this sort of idea that as immigrants, we have to show how good we are. We have to show that we deserve to be in this country and we need to be perfect. And so, I think through my art, I try to mess around with that idea. I look at shows like, and I grew up in the 90s, I grew up in the 90s, I used to watch shows like Friends. And how easy it was for them to just be people. To just, you know, hang out at a coffee shop and like drink latte and like nothing, right? But when I make a comic strip, I have to talk about being undocumented, being queer and what it means to be all those things at the same time. And so, I decided to, sure I'm gonna talk about it, but I'm gonna talk about it in my own terms. And I'm also gonna talk about how I am not perfect, how I mess up, how I'm constantly making mistakes because then it is, when I do that, I sort of like let go of this idea of this expectation that I'm supposed to meet as an immigrant in this country. And so, my mother doesn't like that. She's like, why do you have to use curse words on whatever you do? But it's just, you know, something that I need to do to fight those sort of things that are put on me. But at the same time, sort of like, yes, I'm queer. You know, yes, I'm undocumented, but you know, that's not all I am. And so, I think we're really blessed to be able to, you know, sort of talk about that through art because we don't really have to, I don't have to write a paper about it, I just can't draw about it. So making fun of the category is a way to move beyond them on some level, right? But neither of you mentioned, David had said the joy is in limitation. And you mentioned joy a little bit, but is it no longer joy, is it something, is it something we're just working through to get to the greater sense of compassion for humanity? Well, I mean, I think that, you know, one has to have joy. You know, you have to embrace your life, right? You embrace your life. And you know, you embrace beauty. I mean, you know, that's why you get up in the morning. You know? I mean, I get up in the morning to solve these, you know, to solve my artistic problems. You know? I mean, they force me out of bed in the morning, even when I can't have hair like David's, right? Which I really want, you know? We can talk here about that. You know? I mean, it really is. It's one of the, you know, it's, you know, the, for me, for me, really, the joy is figuring out how to really make the work and how to make a work that is transcendent in some way and a work that speaks beyond the limits of myself. You know, to engage something that is larger, that is deep, that is complexed, that is warm, that is beautiful, that is provocative, and that gets to something about who we are as a people, as a culture, as a country. I mean, that's the joy of living, the joy of being able to culturally produce and then to be able to share that with my fellow artist and with an audience who is interested in that interaction. Also, let me, I mean, I think sometimes the artist doesn't necessarily get to pick his or her subject. The subject sort of chooses the artist. So, I mean, when I first started writing, I didn't know that I was gonna write about some of these things that I've ended up being my subject matters, but I just wanted to be a playwright. And then, as I started to learn to work more from my unconscious, I found that these themes started appearing on the page. Things that I didn't know I was interested in, like immigration and class of cultures and assimilation and stuff. So, clearly, some part of me was incredibly interested in these issues, but my conscious mind hadn't figured that out yet. And so, as an artist, I was sort of learning to kind of harvest my subconscious. And so, you look at most artists and they have a sort of area of interest, concern, obsession, whatever. And just to talk about playwrights, I mean, if you could talk about Sam Shepard writing about the American West or Tennessee Williams writing about the American South or whatever, there's some sort of soil from which we are nurtured. And that particular soil may be the result of things that we can't control, some of which may be social in context because our brains have sort of been colonized by the social circumstances that we grew up in. But, you know, this is just where I ended up. And that's the joy of it, too. The joy is that I want to explore these things. I find them fascinating. You make it sound as if it were purely an intellectual interest. Presumably, you were also grappling for... I hate it when people reference the Green Room Conversations, but I'm going to reference... David actually lived two blocks from his old child, a boy from my aunt, where she lives now. And you grew up in a place that's now about 80% Asian but when you were there, you were one of the few. Yeah, this is the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles and I grew up in a town called San Gabriel, which is now, like, way Asian. And when I go back, all the, you know, former Mexican restaurants are now Chinese restaurants. But when I was a kid, it was mostly white and Latino. So, but again, I didn't necessarily know I was grappling with these issues until I discovered it through art, through the work. Then I realized, oh, I guess I do care about this stuff. Because what happens ultimately is that, you know, you start to understand, again, what it is that gets you out of bed in the morning, what your sort of concerns are. And you know, and I'm always talking with the young people about, you know, sort of figuring out, you know, what matters, what they care about, right? You know, paying attention to that. And the thing that's also, I think, sort of interesting to me about the process of working, the creative process, is that often, the work actually tells you what you're really interested in. It's not really that you've decided that this is for you. It's like, as you said, right? It sort of evolves out of the work. And so if you're paying attention to the work, it actually tells you where you need to go and how maybe to do that. As you know, many musicians love to say, one of the most important things that you can do as a musician, as a composer, as a pianist, is to get out of the way of the work so that the work can do what it needs to do. Yes. Julio. This notion of getting beyond the limits of yourself, you've mentioned that a little bit. Can we actually put up some of Julio's slides and go to them now? I wonder if that, if at any, speak to that a little bit as you describe what we're seeing. Right. So this is an image that I made a couple of years ago about the narrative that we had as undocumented, as a child, as a child of immigrants who's undocumented myself. This narrative that we always have to say, as I mentioned, always being perfect, always sort of saying, it's not my fault that I'm in this country, my parents brought me. It's their fault, right? So what we were doing with that narrative was we're blaming our parents for a situation that it was beyond their control. But in looking back, it was like, that's a really messed up narrative because we were throwing our parents under the bus. Nobody just wakes up one day and says, you know what, I'm just gonna go to a different country and see what happens. YOLO. No, it doesn't work like that for, it didn't work like that for our parents. It didn't work like that for any of our parents. They took responsibility and they were like, we're gonna do what it takes. And so it took me sort of going, looking at the positive side of that. The fact that I'm sitting here in front of y'all, in New York, I took a flight to New York, it was because of there. Because of them currently telling me that we're in this situation, it's gonna work, however we're gonna work through it. And I found that inspiration and I wanted to pay homage through my art. In 2010, when a lot of folks were getting arrested to pass a Dream Act, I wanted to take ownership of the narrative that was being put up by journalists, which was this idea that, how dare these immigrants are wanting to get rights. And so I wanted to take ownership of those images and decided to put it back and throw it back in the, in somebody who's undocumented and living through this experience, putting this art in our own words. I sort of probably went off the question. No, perfect, go. But yeah, so I just, I wanted to bring images because I'm a visual artist. And so there's so much I can say, without showing the imagery. I think a lot of folks started using this word, undocumented queer, to sort of speak to this intersectionality, right? We hear intersectionality about being queer, being undocumented and what it means, right? As somebody who's from Southern California, there's some sort of privilege to being in Southern California and being undocumented and queer because there's a lot of us. But then I started talking to other folks who were from the South and their experiences were much, much different. And so I think that it was important for me to check myself and be like, all right, let's put this other stories into this art. David, does that term intersectionality mean anything to you at all? Or the concept? The concept is great, and the word is really nice. I think what's interesting at this moment is that we had fairly kind of, at a certain point, in the kind of growth of multiculturalism, there's the adoption of various categories and labels and the sense that these labels were fairly siloed and relatively impermeable. And I think that one of the things that has happened over the past 20, 30 years is the sense that actually all these categories are much more fluid and that certainly when we talk about multi-racialism or we talk about people who have grown up internationally or a lot of these different ideas, those are the most obvious ways in which there is fluidity between these categories. But actually, things can change and people can migrate and we sort of contain multitudes as it were. And I think that idea dovetails with this notion of intersectionality, that it's not one identity or even two and that it can shift, the things that you care about can evolve over the course of a lifetime. The thing that really interests me again about some of this that I have to, I'm just really taking this in. There are these ways, of course, we can talk about identity in very complex ways, right? We can talk about it in relationship to skin, to gender, sexuality, preference, desire. But I think they do know one of the things that's really sort of central to this debate. And one of the things that has been pushed out of the category that I think, again, Jeff sort of spoke to briefly is worker. Is worker. Is class. And that a lot of the conversation, the way that it's shaped and the way that it's been shaped over the last 30 years has been away from the sort of focus on class, on class struggle, on systematic organization, on systematic movement. So that we spend a great deal of time talking about these things, of course, it matters again. But it's not necessarily, I think again, it is important, but equally as important, I think, is our relationship to work. Our relationship to power. Our relationship to state power. And one of the things that I saw coming out of, much of the 80s movement and much of the sort of philosophical debate that was going on from there, to a full call and so forth, were really really focused around how do we, as nation states, really sort of solidify themselves, right? And presume and amass extraordinary power. How does the individual, right? The social individual respond to this alone, right? And the way in which we've responded to it, I think a lot alone, has been around the sort of, the way in which the divisive issues of diversity has become huge, that we're talking about at 30 years, 40 years, 50 years later, how do we become a more inclusive society, right? And so I think that in some ways, this discussion is being, not this discussion, but rather this question of diversity is being actually a divisive tool against really our ability to organize systematically. Is it a distraction? It is in some ways, I think, a very deep distraction. So I'm in San Francisco recently, last week, fabulous town. I grew up in this town. It was one of the most diverse cities I had experienced coming of age. There was a fabulous, wonderful provocative city. You know, I went to the Vietnamese market, the Chinese market, the Latino market, you know, the Filipino shoe shop. I mean, you know, like all within like a two block radius of my house. So I'm in San Francisco last week, which has become a completely, basically completely white town, right, being dominated by a group of young white boys who are some of the most antisocial people imaginable who have developed social media, right? I mean, their shit is so fucked up that Apple sends out messages to their staff saying, maybe you should go outside. Maybe I might want to go see who your neighbors are. I mean, you know, given that, you know, you've basically taken over the community because of the wealth that we've been able to sort of bring to the city. You can no longer live in San Francisco. It's an impossibility unless you are really a millionaire. This is true, you know, so, you know, West Oakland is the same way. They're giving vouchers to, you know, to black families to move to the, you know, to the equivalents in order to be able to, because they still need service workers in the hotels. You know, I mean, these are very, these are really sort of interesting questions. And so when I started thinking about this idea about otherness and diversity back in the 80s, I thought, what are we defining ourselves against? And it seemed to me, ultimately, that we were really defining ourselves against the state. Right? We were defining ourselves against the state and the power of the state to control our lives. And we were defining ourselves, in a way, against advanced, advanced capital. And one of the things that I love about Oakley & Worzer's Venice Biennale, All the World's Futures, is that it specifically looks for the first time in the arts and for a long time at the sort of the deep question of capital and the shifting global population and the shift in these sort of shifts that are happening in the colonies. No longer are these colonies sort of, you know, outposts. They are now internal organs and functions inside of the state or a side of a city or a country, you know, in the United States, in Britain, in London, in Paris, in these sort of, in their homes. And how to deal with that, of course, is now the question that has to be negotiated. So anyway, this is just something that I just had to say. My first question comes to mind is, if you were to be growing up in San Francisco today, what would be your concerns? Is gentrification of cities, is it destroying a deeper, richer urban and artistic life, potentially? All of you. I want to, I really appreciate what you're saying and I kind of wanted to kind of piggyback on it a little because I feel like, you know, there is a point of view that by discussing what we call diversity issues, we therefore distract from or are a way not to talk about issues of class. And I tend to believe that for the way that American history has evolved, talking about race becomes a sort of proxy and a way into talking about issues of class. Because even in the examples that you cite, when you talk about, oh, well they're giving vouchers to poor black families to move into West Oakland, the issue of race is inherently sort of contained or class is contained within race. So I feel like that's how we tend to discuss it in this country and I, yes, I suppose we could do it differently but the way that the history has developed here, I think that's a pretty effective way. I think we can talk about race and we can talk about class through race, number one. And number two, in terms of the sort of nation-state, I feel like, yeah, the nation-state is powerful but really, I think what's become powerful over the past 20, 30 years is the corporate-state. That the nation-state seems to me to be less important now than the sort of international corporate-state. And that that's if we're kind of having resistance or having to figure out what negotiate what our relationship is to power, we, to some extent, are figuring out how to negotiate with the corporate-state, with hyper-capitalism, with this moment we're living in now. And I think, I mean, you asked the question of the world of the artist, while that this is happening, there's a lot of people in these communities that are fighting back and they're doing stuff to make sure that they're hold on to their area, specifically like in the missionary in San Francisco. There's youth who are so knowledgeable about gentrification. So I'm gonna come to a 15-year-old high schooler and talking about how they're taking over other areas to create garden, community gardens. And so our job as artists is to how do we document this and highlight it in a bigger, you know, like make sure that people know that this is happening because a lot of the times we are seen as victims. We are seen as people who are being displaced, but there's things that are happening in our communities where people are fighting back. And so I think that it's important to keep that anger because, you know, that anger sort of feels that necessity to go and look into what our communities are doing and to highlight. In my case, or in our case, you know, as artists and I'm part of an organization called Culture Strike and we work with communities to bring in tools for youth to create this in a creative way and in art. We made a billboard in the mission area and the mission area with youth who are working against gentrification. And so you ask them, how do you want your community to be viewed in the rest of the country because you are seen as victims here. They're like, no, we're fighting back. And so I think it's the role of the artists to sort of highlight, you know, those actions. David, you mentioned corporate power and the need, perhaps, I think you suggested, go ahead, Kara, oh, and the need to resist it or to find oneself work against it. At the same time, it seems like millennials actually worship corporate power. Isn't there a sense that Google and Apple are these incredible, powerful brands, they've managed, like the robber barons of today have managed to pass themselves off as being cool? Yeah. And I'm wondering, could you speak to that a little bit, Kara? It's, I think it's fascinating. You know, I mean, again, I, Julius Wilson wrote a long goal about the declining significance of race. And I mean, I think there is absolutely something very important, but there is a difference between issues of diversity and issues of class. They really are not the same thing. I think that they have been made to appear that way, but I don't think that they are the same thing. And there are within ethnic groups, there are class divisions as well. I mean, so class divisions, I think, are really important to sort of look at and what they demand from us, I think, what they demand from intellectuals, artists, you know, as can be, can be a different kind of consideration, and again, one that, you know, again, I think about a great deal. Now, this idea that, you know, again, I was thinking about Apple the other day, you know, I mean, I bought their stock. I wish I'd bought more. I'd be like, Roland, I could really, you know, but, you know, and you know, I was thinking about like their first commercials. Their first commercials, like back in the eighties, they were fabulous, right? You know, these sort of, you know, thousands of drones marching into an arena, you know, with this giant talking head, you know, sort of, you know, and this sort of, and then, you know, this great athlete comes right, you know, running in, you know, and he sort of throws this wonderful spear and he shatters, you know, he shatters, you know, that, you know, this sort of drone behavior, which was IBM, which was IBM, and now, of course, Apple is IBM in that sort of way where we're all invested here. This idea that the individual has triumphed, I think, is really interesting, but some of their commercials, the way in which they branded themselves has been extraordinary, right? You know, from the, you know, the aesthetics of cool, they've really sort of figured that out, I think. You know, I love opening their packages. So you know what I mean? I mean, their whole, like, you know, their whole realms of videos is just, you know, just based on opening up your iPhone. You know, not using it, just unwrapping it, you know? So these things, I mean, I think that they, you know, it's really extraordinary, but you're absolutely right, under the aesthetics of cool, they've been able to sort of do sort of extraordinary work, and of course, you know, I mean, Facebook, of course, rose out of Mark's inability to get a date, you know? Therefore, you know, rage against the female population is in part why we have this sort of amazing technology, you know, and now that's grown into something else. But I think that these sort of new, these new positions I think are fascinating and really have to be looked at. But can I ask just sort of one question before you go? Because I'm sort of interested in the kind of work now that you're doing, but what are you actually producing and what are some of the core values sort of being looked at in your contemporary production as artists? Do you have artists there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's one thing, I can talk about two plays that I'm working on. One is an overdue commission for Bill Roush, so who has been incredibly gracious at Oregon Shakespeare Company. And... When are you gonna deliver it? Um... Phil said, whenever he wants to, which is incredibly kind. Anyway, you know, my mother's family is a Chinese from the Philippines. And so when I was a kid, I used to go to the Philippines a lot more than, of course, I would go to China because you couldn't go to China then. But I've never really written about it. So I'm working on a play about sort of the American colonial period in the Philippines. And one of the things I find fascinating is the degree to which America has been really as a colonial power was really not good at passing along democratic values, but really good at passing along pop culture. So, you know, it's a question like, what do we do well as Americans and what do we, you know, what are we poor at? So that's one show. And then I'm also working on something which is about what it means to see a piece of art that is completely incorrect in terms of getting all the facts wrong, but is really beautiful to look at. And I think a lot of us have this experience when we see works that are, I don't know, I'll just, like the current, I'll just get on this, the current revival of The King and I, which is, you know, there's so many things that are incorrect about that show and I always cry at the end. And so it's a very complicated experience seeing it. So I'm working on a show that's, you know, sort of where you see an incident that takes place in the present, that's a relatively benign China-U.S. interaction. And then you go 150 years into the future. And during that period, it's been iterated several different ways. So the Chinese guy told his daughter who wrote a book, the book became a musical, and they get everything wrong about the way we live today. But if we do the show right, it's also incredibly beautiful. So then what is it? And so that becomes, I guess, a play about how empires use culture to influence the way we see ourselves because the play that we'll be seeing is sort of a Chinese production, 150 years from now, and it's sort of denigrating of the U.S. and I think we should have very complicated feelings experiencing it. So those are a couple things I'm working on now. William, one of the things that I'm working on then, and we actually were having this conversation back, backstage, I was having this conversation with them, about identity and this idea or this sort of approach to creating characters who not necessarily, we don't know that experience, right? So I'm working on a comic strip called Liberty for All. And this comic strip sort of, I've been working on it for it since 2010, and it sort of has evolved into collaboration of sorts with different folks because this comic strip sort of touches on the transgender experience, to the black experience, to the Latino undocumented queer experience, so all the identities are in this little comic strip. Identities that a lot of them I can't really create or write, and so the approach that we've taken to this comic strip is to bring folks from those communities and create the characters because I feel that I can't write those or create those characters. Those are not my experiences. And so I feel that we are in a time where writers, specifically why writers have taken that sort of liberty to create and speak for us. And so the reason why we take that approach is because we don't wanna recreate what we're sort of against. And so, I don't know, I wanna sort of like bring back that conversation that we were having backstage and so, I just go explain the conversation they were having because Carrie asked David, would he write a play in which she could play one of the characters? Go ahead. And yeah, I would, but, and I think I have, but. Julio, I just meant to explain to the audience, would you have more? No, yeah, and I said that I couldn't because there's so much talent and there's so many writers that don't get the credit for the work that they're doing. And so I think that if there's a platform, we should collaborate more and bring this, this idea to not repeat what we're against. Carrie, you had some notions and thought about collaboration. I was just sort of, you know, wondering, you know, like at what point, like in your war, I understand this, of course, the notion of collaboration, I think it's a wonderful approach, really. I was sort of really wondering like, you know, what are the limits, what are the limits to what we are able to do now? You know, you know, and there's been a longstanding, you know, sort of debate, you know, kind of, you know, kind of, you know, a black female be Desmona. You know, you know, where are we in, you know, in the ways in which we sort of envision ourselves and allow us to sort of break through some of the divide to say, this is a human experience. And to that extent, then I should be, then can I play a Chinese woman from the 15th century? You know, can I be that? And can I be that in a real way, for instance? You know, so I'm sort of curious about this, right? You know, we've been battling it for a long time and the ways in which we think about Anglo-American theater, what about sort of, you know, ethnic theater? If I can use that word, what are we at liberty to do? And do we feel limited? Do we feel constrained by our, by the limits of our skin? You know, by the limits of our gender? Do we feel constrained by that? I think those questions are a perfect place to end. Oh, we're ending already. We're going to, we're going to open it up. I'm getting signals here and there to open up to the audience and think about Carrie Plain Desdemount. Q&A. Yes, questions for the artist? Actually, hi, Jeremy Lou with PolicyLink. And I'm really fascinated by the idea of empathy and want to actually pause it and get your responses to this idea that art may be serving a role to help us create empathy with ourselves. And the reason why is, you know, we spoke just touched briefly on gentrification and it's, there's been really, you know, really good studies that talk about how lots of, lots of folks who would benefit from social policy for the poor, for low income, whatever, actually don't recognize themselves as that, in that category. So this whole shrinking in the middle class is partially a self-driven sort of idea, right? That there is the middle class of shrinking because we're doing it to ourselves in some ways because we don't identify with what that means. Or with the poor or with the rich. And so just want to get your feedback on sort of thoughts on role of empathy with, but really the way art creates empathy with ourselves. Well, I personally started making art out of, I say selfish reasons, but I did it because I was not going to wait for somebody to give me money to, you know, make a book or create a comic strip. You know, I live in an era of technology. We talked about technology and so I'm like, I'm doing it because of me. I'm doing it because I need to tell the stories that affect me. And in turn it has become about folks seeing themselves in this, in this, in this art that, you know, we're all making and that's just sort of, you know, the cherry on top. But, but I think I mostly was thinking about myself when I was making art. I think when art works best, it is able to fulfill this dual function of expressing difference and commonality at the same moment. And so therefore you, as an audience member, you see the ways in which a character, say, of a different culture is superficially different and the way and you understand the humanity beneath that and empathize with that and it's that duality that potentially creates change. Yeah, beautiful. Hi, am I on? Yes. Okay, hi, thank you so much and I also want to applaud the opening speech. It was, it's all been fascinating. I just wanted to ask you if you could talk a little bit about the intergenerational sort of challenges that are there. You know, I've heard conversations about what the millennials do or do not do today. I've heard a lot about intersectionality in terms of our diversity, but an area that doesn't seem to find its way into much of our vocabulary today is this intergenerational challenge. And so I'm wondering, as artists, have you seen opportunities for that in a positive way or should all the old people just disappear? I mean, I just. That would mean that we would have to leave the stage immediately. We will at some point. We will exactly. I mean, you know, I was at some place recently with some wonderful, wonderful people and you know, it's sort of like we've got to have three generations at the table, right? And in my studio practice, I think about having generations in my, you know, in my studio because, you know, because I'm excited about what young people are doing, what they're thinking and of course, you know, the wisdom, there's nothing like the wisdom of age, you know, to keep me focused and to keep me grounded. So, you know, and now I guess I'm that, right? But yeah, I think that it's very important and I'm thinking about it more and more. In fact, I'm doing a piece that's called Swinging into 60 and it's a film that I've been working on for the last couple of years looking at actually a sort of question of age. And you know, somebody said the other day, you know, that women often trade on their youth and their beauty. And so, you know, if you haven't gathered more for yourself than that, you're in for like, you know, a rude awakening, you know, a few years down the road, that there has to be something else that's there and that something else is, you know, like the beauty of the wisdom that David articulates when he speaks. And it's necessary and I challenge it and want to be with young people hear what they are saying as well. Julio, did you have a response? Yeah, I think, I mean, I mentioned, you know, mentioned words like intersectionality and I mentioned the word undocumented queer. A couple of years ago, I was able to, you know, do a billboard in the Mission District in San Francisco and I, you know, I was able to put the undocumented queer images that I created. And so I wanted to be really intentional in creating messages in Spanish because there's a lot of, you know, grandmas, you know, migrant grandmas living in the area. And I was like, if we cannot explain what undocumented queer means to our abuelitas, we're doing something wrong. And so I think it was, it's really, you know, we have to be intentional in the sense of like, all right, we're coming up with new terms and, you know, we need to be really, really tried to think about our parents and our grandmas and our tias, you know, who might not understand that language, both English or, you know, that social, you know, justice language that we throw around and we need to be able to break it down. And I think art does that. I think art does, you know, does that in a way that our families can relate to that. Did you see yourself as, you know, see yourself as activist artist? Are you an activist, David? I mean, I see myself as an artist first because actually, if the art's not doing good work, then nobody really is gonna care what I say anyway. So, but, but again, you know, because I discovered these subject matters through the work, I mean, the artist creates the work, but the work recreates the artist. So I guess that sort of made me into a bit of something of an activist. Question? Yeah, I have a question. I was able, the last year I was able to be in Stockholm with Creative Time and Saskia Sassen mentioned that the need to create new language and new terms because many of the terms we use are outdated. And Carrie May, you kind of alluded to this, but I'm curious about how we inventor create new frames for us to attach ourselves to. So for example, with immigration, the protagonist or the anti-immigrants and the migrants, but we don't pay attention to the transnational companies or to the global elites. And just in terms of what that means for our challenges, like climate change or ecology and how we have to just expand our notions of who humans are. So I'm curious how you all deal with coming up with just new identities even that we can attach ourselves to that are not so, don't feel kind of dated. This is, I think this is a really interesting question. And again, that was something that Jeff is well brought up in his presentation and something that I think about often as well, this idea of language. How do you describe for now, for a new generation? And yet, it's so, I don't know. I mean, you know, I don't know. I'm just trying to figure it out, right? I mean, I have no new words. I feel like I need new words, but I have no new words in a way, in a way. But my sort of, I think the thing that I think about most is I think that, you know, that we're fearful of using language to really sort of describe what it is that we do and what it is that we think about. That, you know, that this is a greater sense. You know, so that we might be fearful. I don't really care if something is outmoded and outdated as long as it describes my experience, right? You know, as long as it describes my experience and how do you keep, you know, that alive? And it seems to me that, for instance, if you talk about, let's say, the term socialism, right? Communism, right? You know, these terms themselves have been sort of made vulgar, ugly, useless, meaningless. And at the same time, we can talk about social media all day long, right? So, I mean, I think that they're interesting things. And of course, in my work, I'm always thinking about this, but I fail miserably at it. But I know exactly what you're pointing to. Hi. Hi. Susan. Yes. I'm Giseli Regatau from WNYC. I have a question about, you're all as artists are addressing some of the issues we're talking about in your own work. But I feel artists often end up working in isolation in a way and working in your little worlds. Do you have any ideas on how to transform your work and to get to what Jeff was talking about earlier, the need of creating a new consensus, a national consensus that we used to have during the civil rights movement that we might need now? Like, how do we take this to another level? Is it through pop culture? David, as you were talking earlier, is it through social media, Kerry, as you refer? Like, how do we, do you have any ideas on how to get there? Thank you. I mean, I kind of think that's what the, you know, to some extent that's what this, we're spending today talking about. Because I do think artists necessarily tend to often work in isolation. I mean, it's just, there are certain art forms that are more collaborative and, you know, theater is more collaborative, for instance, but in general, like if you're a writer, there's a certain amount of time you have to spend by yourself writing. So that's just a prerequisite and it's important to be creating the work. But then it's, I think, also important to engage in discussion, to get together with one's peers to have discussions, you know, like this because that becomes a way of engaging people and developing ideas over and above the, just the artistic work that we do. But the artistic work, a lot of it's just gonna be done alone. That's, I think, at least for me, that's how it works. Question here. Hi, is this on? My name's Wasu, I guess I'm here primarily as a journalist and one thing that strikes me is it always seems as though art has helped the audience sort of imagine or bridge distance, whether it's just sort of the ability to imagine another. And, you know, there's been a lot of discussion about social media and, you know, even as a journalist when I write about super banal things and I'll get a torrent of sort of emails or tweets, things like that. I'm just wondering if the sort of age of social media or the new accessibility between sort of the audience and the artist has influenced the way you've conceptualized your work. Because, I mean, we're dealing with pretty heavy duty ideas here and, you know, at times I imagine from the perspective of the artist is frustrating when you're misread or misunderstood but I'm just wondering if that's something that's been sort of folded into your process or your philosophy. You should write that piece, that's a great idea. Are you gonna write that piece and quote them in it? Wow, Snapchat version. Anybody have an answer to this? I mean, I sort of started all the work that I do, I think on Instagram, I think on Twitter, I think on Facebook. I remember watching, oh God, what's the name of that documentary? Except for the gift shop. And so that came out when a lot of undocumented students were sort of doing all this mobilization and getting arrested and all that stuff. And so at the time I was like, I wanna go out into the streets and like pose, you know, or weed pace, you know, on the wall, so the artwork that I was creating but I was like, yeah, but I might get arrested and you know, I'll just stick to, you know, I wanted to use my Facebook wall as my wall, you know, to pose the art. And so, you know, it just became about that, about creating specifically for social media. As social media has become more popular, I sort of, and I'm a journal, I started journalism, I'm a backgroundist of journalism. And so I noticed how all of a sudden the work became about, oh, I'll just, the journalist will just reach out to you and we'll re-blog, and that's it. And you call that an article and you call that a story. What I'm doing now, I'm making sure that journal, so I made this sort of fake magazines with trans people of color in the cover. And so journalists are hitting me up and they're like, yo, can I re-blog that? Can I post that? I'm like, sure, yeah, you can do that, but make sure you reach out to people. So you can, just because you have social media, you have to do the work, you have to reach out to people. You have to call, you know, folks to make a story because I think, you know, the media has a lot to do with how this works get put out there. And so I like to play with media a lot in that sense and like, go do your work. Okay, so first of all, I just wanna thank all of you for making space because I think it's really important that we continue to carve out spaces for identity to be heard and seen. And I'm just sort of meditating on the question over here about returning to a sense of communal focus on a particular issue. One of the things we talk about a lot is that, you know, it's difficult to find the sort of momentum of the 60s because everything seems so diffuse. Our problems seem, you know, immediate and diffuse at the same time. And I'm wondering if part of the role of the artist at this moment is to clarify that we are not in a different moment, it seems that way because we are, what we're creating, our identities, ourselves are constantly being co-opted and commodified so quickly that we don't have a chance to reflect back, we don't have a chance to reflect on what we've put out there before it's taken. And so I'm just wondering if that might be a turn that artists could take, that to say, actually instead of over complicating these things, we make them more simple so that people can really see that even as we become more nuanced and complex in our identities, the issues we're facing and the dire need of our communities is so real and so immediate, does that make sense that that might be a different turn? I think it's, you know, I was up early this morning thinking about, you know, the way in which artists have operated for centuries. You know, what we do best is we speak to our historical moment. If we're vital, if we're living, if we're alive, that that's what we're responding to. And I mean, I don't necessarily think that there's one thing that artists do, right? There is no one anything, right? It's all multiple, it's all complicated, but I do think that, you know, that artists and that arts, that art helps us see the world that much more clearly. It helps us to define it, to shape it, no matter what it is, no matter what it is, right? These issues of change and diversity are the same in some ways as perspective and color and nuance. You know, you know, again, you know, I just had like the great privilege of being in Venice and I'm in this city and, you know, I'm looking at, you know, what extraordinary artists and architects have given us and the way in which they responded to, you know, notions of change, right? And how they developed churches and how they developed painting and how the Renaissance developed perspective and how they developed the Baroque and how the constructivist, you know, went on to, you know, fashion and form a very different way of, you know, describing, engaging, you know, the turn of the century, 1917 and the shifting, you know, perspective in the world, you know? And so I think artists in that way, many artists have been, you know, very consistently responding to their historical moment, the feelings, the inspirations, the ideas, changing same as Amir Baraka would say so eloquently. It's simply there. It's simply there. You have to make it or force it. It's simply there. It's a part, I think, of the DNA in the culture, you know, whether it's pop culture or fine art or high art or low art, you know? And some of it, of course, you know, again, is, you know, sort of steeped around sort of values, right? You know, certain artists, contemporary artists are very much interested in, you know, the world of abstraction and painting and color, right? Then there are other artists that are, you know, deeply interested in, you know, the juncture between art and social engagement, right? And being involved in community. To, you know, to such an extent that now we have, like, you know, art and community classes being taught in universities around the country that wanna stay in the forefront of what's happening, right? That it's a whole new area of investigation because it speaks very specifically to the moment in which we live, right? Art and civic engagement as a series of complex courses taught in curriculum. I just wanna add one thing to that question, which is, I think it helps if we're trying to say, okay, this moment is not that much different than the moments in the past. I think it's important to create works about history which show actually how complex those moments were. Because when things, when you look back at history, we tend to think of it as sort of a theta-complete and that it was, you know, just sort of inevitable and it happened. And, you know, I think Selma does that to some extent. I, you know, this new musical Hamilton is really great, I think, about the sort of founding of the American Republic kind of period and the American Revolutionary. So I think that's one way to show that the past was not that different than the moment we're dealing with today. Last question. Hi, this is mostly for David, I think. When you talk about the sort of the Sel-like quality of, you know, you're in your Sel writing, it's so essential to the beginning of a process, to making a play. And yet, I'm wondering, because I'm thinking a lot about this, at what point does who you wanna talk to with this work? Not who do you wanna talk about how you're making the work, but who you wanna talk to with this work? How does that invitation get made? And where does that fit in the sort of spectrum of creation? As opposed to writing the play, giving it to the theater, letting them figure out who should be invited, et cetera, does it enter your process, even a glimmer like who you wanna talk to when you get something coherent? I mean, I think the first thing I wanna do, and I think you were saying this also, is I'm kind of creating something that seems interesting to me. Because if I don't find it interesting, I can't expect anyone else to be interested in it. So that's the first priority. But then second, I guess I do tend to think about, well, because I work in the theater, what is, there's gonna be an audience, and the audience is going to bring something to this. And sometimes it's really fun to utilize those audience expectations. To like, I read a play called M-Butterfly that has sort of a man, an Asian man, in basically what we now call a transgender role through most of the show. And so I assume that the audience is going to bring a certain amount of cultural baggage about M-Butterfly, and about some Miss Evasion woman, everything, and then you can play with that. So that's another degree. And then where it comes to dealing with the theaters and the audience that you engage, then that's, I guess in a broader sense, a marketing issue and outreach to communities. And that's something that I think I try to, certainly in the first productions, when I'm around, work with the theater and collaborate and figure out, well exactly, how can we expand the audience because the theater wants to expand its audience? How can we reach new audiences through this work? I don't know if you meant, I don't know if that's exactly the question, but okay. And now I think we should all give a big thanks to Kerry, Julio, and David. Thank you all, and thank you, Gregory, also.