 Okay, I'm in live on YouTube. All quiet on set. Here we go. And now it's gonna be, I'll let you know when we're live live. All right, I'm gonna open the doors. Doors are open. Welcome friends. We'll get started just momentarily. Welcome, welcome. Thank you for being here. Welcome YouTube friends. Thank you for being here. And happy Mardi Gras. Yay. This is where the party's at right now tonight. Letting folks in. Welcome. All right, it is now 7 p.m. Cheryl, do you think I could get you to keep an eye on let folks in the admit while I do the intro? Welcome everybody. Tonight you are in for a special treat. This is part of our more than a month celebration, which is SFPL's version of Black History Month running from January throughout February. And tonight we have Cheryl Dericote and Ramakan Oristers. And they're gonna be talking in conversation about Black folk art and Black art and their influences in art and share some art with them. Share some art with us, I should say. So just some quick library updates and other information to share with you about what's happening. We want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Ohlone Tribal people and acknowledge the many Romutush Ohlone Tribal groups and families as the rifle stewards of the lands in which we live and reside and work here in the Bay Area. SFPL is committed to uplifting the names of these lands and community members from these nations with whom we live. We encourage you to learn more about first-person culture and land rights and are committed to hosting events and providing factual and useful information which the library does so well. We also want to acknowledge that SFPL is not a neutral institution and stands in solidarity with Black Lives Matter movement and ending our own systemic and structural institutional racism within the library, within our city. Something that we've been working on really hard, our racial equity committee recently has a new commitment plan and you can find that on our website. I will also, you can see I shared a link to a document. We'll have all of those resources about Black Lives Matter and Indigenous culture and I'll put the link for the racial equity commitment. It will also have lots of information about Sheryl and Ramacon and other great things we have happening at the library. We do have our library to go and you can place all your materials on hold and a reminder when you go to that library to pick up your holds and all your materials and anywhere you're going, grocery stores, food, all of it, please mask up. We are still trying to keep safe, trying to keep healthy. This beautiful art is by Samuel Rodriguez and you can find him on Instagram. We are celebrating Women's History Month and we are partnering with the McAvoy Foundation for the Arts and part of Isaac Julian's ongoing exhibition about Frederick Douglass. If you have not seen it, it is ending in March 3 by appointment. You can go see it screens, multimedia exhibition. He's gonna be in conversation with none other than Judith Butler. So that is just mind blowing. She's a, if you don't know, she's a gender scholar and just amazing work. And also with Celeste Marie Bernier who is a Frederick Douglass scholar. So it's gonna be a really well worthy conversation and I worry about those noontime events. So please come out for the event and show some support on this one. I booked the Gorilla Girls, which I'm so excited about and this is part of our One City One Book Campaign which we are celebrating Chanel Miller and we book a lot of events around the One City One Book Campaign. So come out through March and April to celebrate Women's History Month as well as Sexual Violence Awareness Month which is what Chanel Miller's book is about. We will be, we're celebrating Namwali Serpell and I just finished this book last night. Very interesting and a long span of history but also with a weird twist of science fiction. So really interesting book, Book Club on Monday. Please purchase your books from our local bookstores. We are supporting and celebrating Marcus Books, the nation's oldest black independent bookstore as well as borderland books these two months. And I mentioned it's more than a month. We still have a lot of events both for adults and all ages, multi-generational. Our famous Effie Lee Morris lecture coming up with, why doesn't it say his name? Jason Reynolds, everybody. And so he'll be talking about the transformativeness of reading and writing and towards youth. Tomorrow night, Melissa Valentine who is Oakland native, now living in New York, will be in conversation with Amber Butts. Her book is so wonderful and talking about grief. She lost her brother, it's a memoir. Grief, police violence, but also it just is so relatable and family dynamic. So come to that tomorrow night and we have a partnership with Moad on Friday. I have loved our art partnerships with Moad. Such a wonderful afternoon just to spend some time doing art and we're gonna be doing mail art workshop on Friday. So come check that out. And some more history. And now without further ado, tonight's event, Cheryl Dericote and Remicant Orders. And I'm just gonna give a quick bio to the two of them. First up, Cheryl Dericote is a visual artist. Her favorite mediums are glass and paper. Her recent awards include being named one of the 2020 YBCA 100 and the Los San Francisco's French Consulate Michael Residency, the Windgate Craft Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center Residency and the Athena Paper Machine Residency in New Orleans. She is an active leader in the arts and serves as the Chief Mindfulness Officer of Crux, a nationwide cooperative of black artists working at the intersection of art and technology through immersive storytelling. Cheryl is represented by Rery Riddle Gallery in San Francisco. Remicant growing up in Jim Crow, South during civil war, civil rights movement. Remicant had a safe haven quilting with his grandmother where he was embraced, important and special. He continued to paint and draw throughout high school, college, graduate school and while living in Tokyo from 1986 to 1991. Currently he weaves textiles around large broken ceramics as stand-ins for his feelings of anxiety, fear, anger and despair associated with the permanence of racism, white body supremacy and homophobia. Also, Remicant is the founder of Crochet Jam, a nine-year-old community arts project infused with the black folk art tradition that fosters a creative culture and cooperative relationships, relaxation and liberation. And both Cheryl and Remicant are associated with a 3.9 art collective here in San Francisco. And I'm gonna put those links into the chat box and anything else that comes up tonight that Remicant and Cheryl talk about, I will link those back to wherever I possibly can, hopefully SFPL. And we will have time for questions and answers. So get those questions ready and that will be towards the end. And now without further ado, I'm turning it over to Cheryl and Remicant. Thank you Anissa for that generous introduction. Thank you San Francisco Public Library for hosting us and hello Remicant. Hello there. How are you? I wanna ditto all that too. So thank you everyone for being here and for the library hosting us, it's great. So shall we jump right in Cheryl? Let us jump in, take it away. Okay, so talking about some of your early influences, folk art influences on your work, your family or friends or others. So let's just start right there. We'll open it right there, how about that? That's great. So I came from not a big family, but an extended family. I had great grandparents into my 20s. So on my mother's side of the family, my great-grandmother lived to be 100. And on my father's side, my great-grandmother lived to be 90. So I was always with them. I would say my first craft was cast iron cooking. I also learned how to sew. I learned how to crochet from my grandmother on my father's side. I know we share a love of crochet and that's something I learned from her. And so work with the hand was really important in our family. And some of it was necessity. I mean, I had a single mother and so growing up, my mother did make a lot of our clothes. It was the 70s, so it was really fun to have match and dashikis in the black power days. And she would make those for us. So there was constantly a culture in my family of the hand and working with the hand. We share that, you're right. Because it's all matrilineal because my mother, my grandmother, they all were working with fabric. My mother worked as a piece mill worker in a factory in a cotton factory called Haines Knit. It was when it was in North Carolina. And so she taught me how to sew by hand and how to use a sewing machine, which I'm sure caught the attention of the other men and young men in my family because I was the only one that she taught how to do that. And as we mentioned before, my grandmother taught me how to quilt. So the whole idea of their influences on me, I think the biggest influence has been their creativity because no one in my family used oil paint or on canvas or acrylic on canvas, none of those traditional materials, they used to express their emotions and feelings and pain and anguish through fabric, through sewing, which I thought in modern terms, that isn't what people would usually assume that would be something that would be valued. But in the black folk art tradition, those things are valued. And the stories are told either visually and some may even, you know, in broader or their stories into the quilts or other materials. But I never thought it was important until I decided, you know, like, you know, how much time am I gonna spend on trying to get into a fine art tradition when that isn't my background, it isn't how I, my worldview, right? You know, how do we accept our own experience outside of the dominant culture or the field that we're in that negates or doesn't appreciate that experience? Yeah, no, I totally resonate with that, you know, because I think as a person who makes political art and you also make political art, I think it's been really important to retain that voice in my art making, you know, and that is not always a voice that's welcomed in the mainstream art world. I think it's more welcomed right now than it has been in a while. And there's certainly examples of, you know, wonderful black artists that have crossed into the stratosphere, whether it's, you know, somebody like a Theaster Gates or, you know, Dred Scott, but it's not the norm, so to speak, of what one would associate with fine art. Well, you know, and I think that's interesting because now craft and fine art, those categories among people who are really, you know, open their minds to that idea are no longer, they're no longer valid in a way, you know. They're not, yeah, they're, you know, they're not, they're being less valued as a way of describing the importance of craft and its role throughout history, you know, and see when it comes to fine art. So did we forget to do the images? Well, you jumped in. We can still do some images? No, I mean, this is, okay, we are, we're, we're doing it. Okay. So you wanna go first, you wanna show your images? Okay, all right. I will show some images. Okay, here we go. Let me try and share screen everybody before we're on Zoom. And look, I'm seeing the names, it's so much fun. Thank you, New York City and DC home people for staying up for me and hello, San Francisco friend. I see you. All right, let me share the screen. So I'm gonna start with the old piece. This was actually like the first sculpture I made back in 2002 at the Washington Glass School, which is where I first learned glass. And, you know, this piece, it was so interesting because I just was at a place in my life where I was kind of tired of talking to people about homelessness, which was the line of work I was in. They really were not getting it anymore. And I just sort of said, maybe if I make a sculpture about all of this, that's a different way for people to engage. And so I made this piece in like the second workshop I took at Washington Glass Studio. And unbeknownst to me, there was a Washington Post reporter embedded in the class to cover this new glass bowl. So she immediately was like following me around and Erwin, one of the three owners now, Erwin, Tim and Michael who owned the glass studio. She was following me and Erwin around. And she wrote about this piece. And I was like, wow. And then, you know, to the spirit of artists not waiting for opportunities, we used to hang our own shows wherever we could find space in DC. So we did a show in DC in an old school that had been converted to an art center and the Washington Post art critic at that time wrote about my piece. And at that moment, Tim, Tim Tate who's one of the co-owners of Washington Glass said, you know, kind of funny you in the Washington Post twice first time out. I think you might have a future and you might wanna settle down. And I had not thought about glass. I hadn't thought really about a visual arts career. It was something I was doing, you know to let off the steam of anti-poverty work. And he very smartly said, I want you to go to this place that I learned how to blow glass and I want you to go right away because there's a class being taught by a man named Furman Statham who is the most famous black glass artist on the planet. And I want you to see somebody that looks like you right away that's having a go at it. So yeah, so that's what's going on with that piece. And you know, we can talk about later, it's a little rough. And then let me go. So now I'm just gonna jump and show some work on my website. This is more recent glass that I've made in the past few years. This is actually screen print with enamel on glass showing slaves and former slaves. And in the case of the children those are actually an image of grandchildren of slaves. And so people can sort of see how my glass work has grown over the years. And I also make work on paper which we'll talk about since I am in the home studio in the kitchen. So works like these digital collages and G clay prints. And we can also talk about Tom later because that's a whole nother thing. But yeah, so this is the kind of work that through the pandemic I've really been making a lot more of work on paper. And then the last image I am gonna show you is actually some work that's up now. This is public art. This is a billboard that's in Los Angeles right now at Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox avenues as part of a show called Whistling in the Dark. Save Art Space is a nonprofit that does calls for artists, curated shows and all of the work goes on billboards. And so they have right now this show in LA, New York and Philadelphia. And I know it's kind of hard to read the red text. So the text says 6.7 million black people live in the 91 US counties with an oil refinery. And the image is one of my photographs of Richmond. And I know a lot of San Francisco folks, Bay Area folks know the Richmond Chevron refinery very well for those who don't literally, I just walked down the street to the fence there and took that picture, which is the whole point of people living on the fence line. And so the quote is drawn from an NAACP and Clean Air Task Force report in 2017. So I am gonna stop there. And I think people understand that the work has always been political. Fantastic. Thank you. You know, thank you for that, Cheryl. So I'm gonna reciprocate and show a few of my images. These are, there we go. Great. These are images on my gallery website, which is the Frito Gallery. And what you see here is, there's ceramics and fabric. So the idea is, you know, and I'm very grateful for the ceramics that come from teachers and professors and students at the California State University Long Beach, where they donated their shards. And the whole idea of using shards and fabric remnants, you know, usually shards are thrown away and discarded and remnants are usually, you know, they usually isn't enough to make a garment or whatever. And they too may be thrown away and discarded. So I just, you know, moving away from the idea of using traditional materials to tell my story, I decided to use, you know, objects that were discarded and that are thrown away. And all this has come about through my residency at the, at Recology, Artificial Intelligence Program in 2016 after I graduated from my full-time job. But the idea is to, you know, that ceramics are a stand-in. And this is the whole beginning of a new series, a current series called Cheesecake there, you know. And so for me, the idea is to create work that, you know, Cheesecake number 13 is about, you know, the idea is to create work that no one has seen before. Like how do you create something that no one has seen, you know, and the idea of using materials that are discarded because we don't, you know, we don't respect them, you know, in a way that they can be seen as something viable, something positive, you know, to create something positive that can have a profound impact on a positive impact on one's, on other people and your own creativity. So here's just a range of how those pieces can be, you know, can be imagined. So I don't start with a plan. I mean, I let the material just, you know, transform in front of me and I just make sure that I wear gloves and that I don't get too excited because shards, they are sharp and dangerous and sometimes they can be, well, they're sharp, they can be sharp and they're unforgiving. So now I'm able to use the gloves so that I can get even closer to the ceramics so that they take on a shape of their own, you know, that I don't have to, I don't have to try to force them into anything, you know, like I just, I go with my, I trust my creativity. I just trust, I feel like so that there's very little in life that I can trust, to be honest. And as you know, as you know, as an artist, we have to trust our creativity, you know, and everything else seems to be, you know, on the edge, on the edge, as it were, as it were. So these are, you know, you can see more images, you know, on the gallery website, which is a street show gallery, but I just wanted to give people a general idea of the current work and how I take folk art traditions because, you know, they're adding quilting, sewing, crocheting, obviously. And I just don't worry about what's gonna happen. I just let it happen, right? So I'm gonna stop there and then we can, and you know, I can continue. Fantastic, thank you for sharing, Revacot. Well, and I gotta say cheers on, you know, the graduation back there in 2016 from the full-time job, because I always say hashtag real artists have day jobs. So I am glad you are free to make more of that beautiful work. Well, yes, I mean, yes, it is a luxury to have the time. But even, you know, even when I had a full-time job, I still made the work. I still found ways to make, you know, because I don't think I would be where I am now if I did not have the continuity of the practice, which I'm sure you would, you know, the continuity of the practice is very important. It is, you know, I think you fit on a key thing there because even though the pandemic has been really difficult and I haven't, you know, been in my studio with glasses much through the pandemic, you know, to figure out ways to make work on paper that still has the point of view and people know that's my work, you know, I think is like, in some ways, artists were built for this moment. You know, we constantly shift and adapt and see what is needed in every moment. Well, you know, the idea of being able to be that conscious because we usually want to like, you know, you know, working with art, working with materials that aren't usually seen in the art market or whatever, you'll be able to stay focused knowing that, well, it may not be seen now, it may not be seen later, but it still doesn't matter. What's more important is that you stay focused on, on, for me, that is then focused on taking something out of one context and putting it in another context for an entirely different purpose. You know, the whole idea of taking ceramics, broken ceramics and fabric remnants out of one context and crochet and quilting and sewing out of a domestic, you know, and then putting it in another context, you know, the idea of sculpture and, you know, and also the idea of, in crochet jam, the idea of a public art event. And then for another purpose, the whole idea of sculpture or in a fine art context as in a gallery or museum. No, I mean, you definitely, there's so much about the work that I love. I mean, first off, it's clearly environmental, you know, to use the materials that are discarded. I mean, it's a great service to the environment. And I love that you've developed a partnership as well with, you know, a California college that, you know, that's wonderful. Through the students there at California State University Long Beach and with Tony Marsh, you know, phenomenal work and Chris Miles as well, phenomenal work. And the idea that, you know, that looking at, you know, looking in different categories, like, you know, I don't pretend to be a ceramic artist. I'm not a ceramic artist. I don't know, I know folk traditions about weaving, but I don't have the skills of weaving on a loom. Right. Right. So I'm not pretending to be any of those things. I'm just bringing these pieces together and people around me, you know, through the fabric or whatever, they celebrate these things out of different fields. Yes. You know? And so, you know, and in the black tradition, the whole idea of improvising, you know, well, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm not a painter. I'm not. Right. So where do I find my voice? You know, where do you find your voice? Where do you find your voice, Cheryl? You know, text is important and that's something I wanted to circle back with you about, you know, a lot of times my work has a title before I make the work. I am very driven by text. Yeah, I call it the tyranny of title. I mean, like a phrase will get stuck with me and I will write the phrase down in the journal and at some point come back to it when the time is right, because it's just been there, you know, and I just have to make something about it. You know, it's like, there's a lot, I would say, that's intuitive to some degree in that sense. When you talk about trusting the process and not having a plan, you know, I feel like that's what's happening when I get the phrase or the initial concept, it's like, okay, I'm gonna build the right work to go along with what I'm hearing. So where do you find those, where do they just, do they wake you up in them, you know, and you see them and where do you find these? Yeah, you know, it's funny, sometimes, sometimes, yes. I mean, I always say the news is like a wonderful place for me. Like I can be reading the newspaper and a turn of phrase will strike me or, you know, something about a contemporary event will strike me, and that might be a phrase that I jot down. I know, because you graciously came to my show. When I had my first solo show at Moed, one of the pieces was a woman, hands up, don't shoot. And so we were hearing that phrase so much in the news that when I was contemplating the work, you know, I had jotted down, hands up, don't shoot. And then in looking at the historical images, I saw all of these images of black people in fiction with their hands up in this position, you know? So that's just one example of like a phrase from the contemporary lexicon that gets stuck in my head. There was a point, and I still, you know, I keep them until I think that's the part about, you know, the freedom that comes when you graduate from the day job is that sometimes I go back to work that I may have started years before because I don't feel like it's been brought fully to fruition or a show. So I was making some work a few years ago along the theme of We Buy Houses. And so I was seeing all those signs. I was living in Oakland when I first moved here 10 years ago and We Buy Houses, We Buy Houses, everywhere, you know, jotted it down. One day I literally came out the front door of my apartment. There was a van parked in front of the apartment and the whole back bumper had a sign, We Buy Houses with the number. I was like, all right, universe, I'm gonna settle down in the studio when I get there. We Buy Houses, so. Yeah, but I also liked the, you know, the story behind the piece that you made for the young exhibition. Yeah, tell us again, talk about that. I like that story, tell us about it. Okay, I will. So I had been, again, with the news, I had been following the two different newspaper accounts that were keeping track of people killed by the police. The Guardian UK had a project called The Counted and they were keeping track of people killed by the police in the US. And the Washington Post also had a project called Fatal Force. And so I started really diving into those numbers. I had the opportunity to go away for a one week residency in 2016. And I really started diving into those numbers while I was in Maine at this place, the Gardarev Center. And I had a big calendar and I started hand stamping bullets on the calendar because I was beginning to see, it wasn't just one person that would get killed on any given day. It might be multiple people in multiple states and we really weren't processing that. And so the piece that I made, you know, a couple of years later again, which was shown in the D'Young this past fall in their show was called 2017 Year at a Glance, 214 Dead Black Men. And I hand stamped a bullet for each day that a black man had been killed in the US. And one of my great joys about that work is that, as we said earlier, when things come at the right time, it was the right time for people to have a bigger conversation about police brutality in America. And so the D'Young really embraced that piece and we talked about it a lot when newspaper articles came up. And then ultimately they acquired the piece for their permanent collection this winter. You know, that's tremendous. You know, and what it brings to mind is a whole idea of how black folk art and black art and black tradition can be subversive, right? So your piece speaks to that, you know, to, you know, what role does it have, you know, in subverting the narrative? For me, the idea of taking something that already has, you know, just thrown away, discarded, whatever and putting it in a different context or revering it, right, is a way of subverting because the idea of fabric and ceramics, broken ceramics, anything that isn't within the traditional fine art tradition, you know? And after a while, you know, we don't, you know, that tradition may not value our experience, right? So instead of having to say, well, instead of having to get into that rarefied field, another way of looking at it is we know what? I'm just going to take, I'm just going to be authentic to my tradition, right? And let that carry the day, you know? So yes, you know, I feel connected to, I feel broken, thrown away, whatever. How can I make that beautiful? I mean, just seductively beautiful. And with, you know, and with the fabric and the shards, you know, whole idea of danger and allure, sensation and, you know, relaxation, the whole idea of like these, this ying and yang of back and forth, for me, it's very exciting. And it's also outside of a tradition that isn't valuing art in that way, you know? And the same is true of the piece that, you know, that isn't usually what people would see in a museum, the work, the piece that you made for the D.O., right? Yeah. So I feel in some ways, you may have your, I would like to hear your point of view on it, is that at least currently museums and galleries are looking at artwork from black artists in ways that they may not have before. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I think that is part of, you know, I say we've been in twin pandemics right now. We've been in COVID-19 and we've been in racism, you know, we could call it V5. I mean, it's like version six, whatever, you know, twin pandemics of COVID and racism. And I think that because the two came together with Shelter in Place, it's a moment where the museum space, the gallery space wants to be involved in this contemporary dialogue that is very much a movement dialogue. Okay, it's a movement dialogue that Black Lives Matter is having and it's not lost on us that it's a movement run by queer black women, all of whom are authors, one of whom is a performance artist, you know? So there's already this built-in relationship of movement and art that has always existed in the black community and now museum is catching up. Yes, yes, you know, you know, hopefully that, and they will stay kissed up, you know? Yes, that's what we hope. Just stay, you know, we don't know, but we would hope that that is the future, you know? And the idea that, you know, black art and black traditions, you know, I feel as though if we don't tell our story, either as artists, whether we're writers, performance artists or visual artists or glass art, whatever we are, if we don't tell our story, other people will and it won't be the story we want to hear that we want to hear. That's right, yeah. No, it's very important. It is very important, you know, representation still matters. And I think that's what is interesting to me about the work that Anisa mentioned in the introduction, if people have not seen the Isaac Julian work about Frederick Douglass, it's stunning and it's so important because you see in Douglass's time through that work, how much Douglass understood that representation mattered and his embrace of the daguerreotype as a way to be a messenger of the abolitionist movement was incredible, you know? Yes, he was subverting that, you know, because, you know, before then the culture was showing these racist images of black people. That's right. And once black people got their hands on means of photography themselves, you know, they were able to put into the world images of themselves that were, you know, elegant, sophisticated, you know, that was undermining all the negative images that the dominant culture was spewing out over the, you know, yes, and that too was subversive. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, and it continued, you know, from the daguerreotype all the way, you know, I think about van der Zee who had such a long and storied photographic career in New York and the way, you know, he took everyday life and captured everyday life when people came to sit for him, you know, in DC, it was Skirlock who was the black photographer that captured everyday life, you know? So I have photos from my grandparents and great-grandparents where they sat for Skirlock. Yes. Because it was important to show yourself. Yes. You know, here, I mean, he's in his 90s now. David Johnson, you heard of him? I have, I think I have. You know, he's the only African-American photographer who studied with Ansel Adams. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You know, and I have a photograph of, you know, my wall here that I got as a graduation present from the museum that has, you know, a protester, still protesting. Okay. And on the front of it, it says, you know, we demand. You know, and the whole idea of like, you know, the continuity of black artists and black folk art traditions that have gone through, the whole idea of we're still demanding. Yes. Yes. Yeah. No, I mean, you know, it is a continuous cycle and I think it's important for people to understand that like, for better or for worse, you don't get a break. You know what I mean? It's like struggle is something that has to continue until we reach the place of a just society, you know? And I think that, unfortunately, because we'll see some progress, then people get comfortable again. And then there's this huge terrible backlash like we saw in the last four years. And it feels like we've taken two steps forward and three steps back. Yeah, so how do we inspire? How do we inspire, you know, other artists, you know, young artists, you know, of color to, you know, to do their work? You know, how do we, you know, I mean, I think the best way to do that, you know, is just to, for ourselves, to do it so that they can see us. Absolutely. You know, with the good, the bad and the ugly of it. That's right. All right, because it's important to us. If it's important to us, we will do it regardless. Yeah, no. And I mean, that's what I think is great about, you know, groups like 3.9, which you are a member of. I just became emeritus after four years. Crux, you know, the organization I'm involved with as volunteer mindfulness officer, because it's always important, I think, to bring mindfulness into the space of work, particularly when you're dealing with difficult topics in your work. I think, you know, we can go off on that tangent too, but we'll get back to the stay with protest and then go back to mindfulness. But, you know, I think it's to the point of what Tim did for me when he sent me to Pendlin right away to take class with Thurman. It's like every generation needs to see those in the generation before them and how they made it. You know, one of my favorite stories that Thurman told at Pendlin, and I'm not talking out of school because he tells people this, it was years, he did not quit his job at UPS because that was a union job. He was like, I ain't letting a union job go until... I didn't either. Right, he's like, I didn't let that go until I was really sure, you know, that we were on the path, you know, to like making it full time as an artist, you know? And so I agree with you that it's really important for people to continue to do their work. And I also think, and you've named this, and I just wanna, you know, sort of put a period on it, and plan your career. Don't plan somebody else's career. Don't plan, you know, what you're hearing should be the career, you know, especially now when the internet has changed the game, okay? It's changed the game completely. So to the extent that people can have a very different online platform, a very different and younger collector base because that's how they engage with the world, you know? It's through Instagram. It's like, don't limit yourself exclusively to one thing or the other. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you gotta find creative ways to be visible. And creative ways to make your work important, you know? How do we make it important? You know, that's what we like. So what do we do? Like, do we, you know, follow a traditional path? You know, like in the old school, you take slides of your work, right? And send them out to everybody, right? And then the problem with that is, well, unless you really know where you're sending them, it's more or less a miss and rarely a hit. That's right. Right? So, you know, it's better to know all the venues around and then, you know, understand how they're operating and what ways your work fits into there if it fits at all. That's right. Right? Yeah. Or create your own venue. Like, you know, I think that for me, the whole idea of crochet jam was, you know, allowing me to like, well, okay, so the galleries aren't paying me any attention. You know, why do I keep going in these places that are negating my creativity? Why not just figure out, well, what do I, what am I really asking from, you know, from these organizations, these curators and, you know, do I want to be heard? Do I want to be respected? Do I want to have financial, you know, means from my art? Do I want to have a community? You know, so instead of, you know, always taking my hat and my hand at these organizations, why not just give to others what I need, right? Give to others what I need. So if I want a community, then build one, right? If you want to be heard, then do it in a way that is positive and creative and allow other people to express themselves and do it in a way that, you know, that's, you know, that's traditionally marginalized, book art traditions, right? So instead of me wanting something from music, from these organizations, maybe I have been able to feel a need that, you know, and that's how I've been able to, you know, just stay relevant in a way in a social, in a community art practice. How do you, you know, how do you, how do you make your work important and how did you stay relevant? And a lot of that now, as you mentioned, can be done, you know, like online, like we're doing right here. Mm-hmm. That's right. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, plus one to everything you said, I mean, anything that begins with service is always a wonderful thing. And, you know, I want you to tell people more about Crochet Jam, because not everybody knows what Crochet Jam is. I have been to Crochet Jam and everything about Crochet Jam is an art form. I mean, the crochet hooks are made as many sculptures for the hand. Tell people how Crochet Jam. Yes. I mean, Crochet Jam, you know, it's just a way of using, thank you, just a way of using a full-guard tradition of weaving, you know, crocheting with a wooden hook, you know, and, but not focused on a finished product so that you can, you know, you allow the material to inform you about what it wants to become. So it's a whole process of letting go of expectations, you know, so in the event I have the fabric there and you can pick out any color and any strip of fabric that you want. So I'm not dictating the creative process. I'm not telling you what you're making. I'm not saying we're making a rag rug or a scarf or a pot holder. If you want to, you can make one. I'm saying that, you know, allow the material to become whatever it wants and you're just the conduit for that transformation. And you don't judge it. Whatever happens, these are all your colors. So I want to be in a place where I'm not judged. I'm not told what to do, right? You know, and there are no expectations, you know, there's no expectations, you know. So I'm really speaking to, you know, I'm addressing my unconsciousness. Like I, you know, when I am in these events, I'm not worrying about what they make. I'm not worrying about the fabric. I'm trying to get them a few milliseconds if possible, where they don't have to worry about being judged or told what to do. And there's nowhere else you can go. Like where, it's rare, where can one go and not be told what to do and not be judged? And from the womb, we are hardwired to please others and want to be told what to do and want to be judged. And we can't be who we are if we're always being told what to do if we're always being critiqued. No, that's... To me, it's a black American experience. So the black America, we're always told what to do. And we're always being judged. So you know, your hair is too kinky, your hair is too long, your hair is too this, you know, you're talking too loud, you know, you're too, there's always some category or any culture where you're marginalized, you know, gay, queer, lesbian, whatever, you know, the whole transgender is always these rules. And in crochet jam, you can break the rules. And I like that's breaking the rules. Yes. I love it. No, it's totally fun. And I hope everybody here, you know, when we come through the pandemic, I know you've been doing some online too, but I hope, you know, in a year or so that people will be able to attend one in person because it's just so much fun to hang out with other people and make something together. And you know, there is such, as you said, a community feeling about it. It's a way that people who haven't engaged with each other suddenly by working on this piece together are a community in that moment, which is very powerful. And we need that feeling, particularly now, you know, with the pandemic, I don't think that many people feel since everything is so virtual. What is community? And how do we define it? You know, so when you say I speak to the community and I'm, you know, or I'm a museum or an art center or whatever, you know, reflecting the needs and concerns of the community, what does that mean? Yeah. Well, I think it means a lot of different things depending on which institution, you know? I mean, yeah. And you know, I'm a real fan. Listen, let me tell people right now, I'll say it to you, I'm a museum artist. I have been a museum artist my whole career and that's why I take it like Baldwin because I love America so much, I'm gonna criticize her because I love the museum so much, I'm gonna criticize her. You know, I wanna see us get to a place where instead of having $30 museum entrance fees, we have $5 museum entrance fees. I mean, what would happen then to the concept of membership in a museum if people could get in the door a little easier, you know? And it's not just about, oh, we have a community day and let people in for free or we do a certain amount of things with school kids. But like, you know, to the point of subversive, we rethink membership in the museum context to broaden the inclusion. Well, one way is to make it, you know, to lower the, otherwise it becomes elitist and exclusive, right? Right, right, and that's not what we want. And that's not embracing the community when you're elitist and exclusive. No, and it's, you know, and it's too much because we see when there's, you know, I mean, of course it's the pandemic now, but when there are community days at museums, the line is around the block. That should be telling everybody something, you know? I mean, and this is not just in San Francisco. I mean, I remember being around the block in New York City because those museums, good gosh, $35 to roll in Met, you know, $35 to roll in Guggenheim, you know? So, you know, yeah, please. So if the fees are high to enter, then who is the community they're serving? Right, right, we need to broaden, broaden the community at every turn, you know? And so I think that if anything, you know, I kind of call them pandemic pluses, I think one of the great pandemic pluses is opportunities like this, you know, to the extent that things are available on Zoom, free or at very low price points is opening it up for people to have more access to programming than ever before. With the caveat, let me just say the caveat, provided that people have the computer, that they have the wifi, you know, in place to make that happen. But to the extent that a lot of technologies now work on the mobile phone, that's given more people access as well that otherwise wouldn't have had access. You know, here's a, well, we all have crazy ideas, but here's one. So how about the idea of like, you know, redefining what a museum is, you know? So saying that, you know, it's a neighborhood and everyone in that neighborhood, you go from one room, one home to the next when we're able to do this, right? And then there's an art show in someone's home. And it's the museum of the community where artists, either in their home or their gallery, either in their home or their studio, have people go to there and see the work, you know, not in a rare defied off somewhere else space, but, you know, in the community. You know, so say for example, like there's 10 people or five people who wanna like, you know, I'm gonna open up my house, you know, or another venue that people can bring their work to, you know? But the idea of redefining what a museum is, because if we are, you know, because like, you know, me and my house, so if, you know, like, how do I wanna, how do, what do I want in my house, you know, as opposed to like, going to somebody else's house under their rules, under their criteria, you know, that may be very different than what the neighborhood or other people who've been traditionally excluded don't feel welcome. Like I remember when Mike restored, my mother came to visit, she'd been in many times and I was able to get tickets to go to SF MoMA. So we went there and then she came back a few years later and I said, you know, mom, I have tickets to SF MoMA and we can go to the museum. And she said, there's nothing there for me. And I've never, you know, I'm in the museum world. My mother says, no, let's go over here. And I'm thinking, so something in there, I didn't reflect her experience. Right, right, right. You know, so that woke me up to like, well, am I reflecting my experience as an artist or am I reflecting somebody else's experience? So where's my authenticity? Yeah. Well, see, I also think you're speaking to why there is still a need for black institutions why there's still a need for women's institutions, why there's still a need for every possible combination of people to have also their own space, you know? I think of like the role the studio museum in Harlem has played, yeah, to elevate black art, you know? So there has to be a combination of a mainstream space that's a majority white space, but then there also still needs to be a place that is a black space that, you know, is directed by black people, has black people on the board, all the things, you know? Because we're not at the place yet. And this gives back to your point about hope. We're not there yet in terms of that full, free and just society we want. So we need to hold both institutions in high regard and make sure they have what they need to be successful. Yes, yeah, I, yes. Yes, it's a lot of work. Yes, yes, it is. But you know, I mean, we're up for it, okay? We up for it, Grandma Conn. And we're still there and we're still doing it, you know? We're still, you know, we're still up for it, you know? I mean, it's great. I mean, and also I think, you know, to your point, I think about all the artists that, you know, participate in open studio, for example. I mean, that's a way for people to have direct access to the artist beyond the gallery setting, beyond the museum setting, you know? And there's certainly like people who open their homes because that's where their studio is, you know, at that time. And so I do agree that it's really important for people to be able to like get close to the artist, get close to the place, you know, aside from these larger venues. Yes, you know, so, you know, you know, the idea that does my art matter if it isn't in a venue, right? So, and I say yes, because I was, you know, and we both have been making work that, you know, that didn't make it to the museum, they didn't make it to the venue. Yeah. And we still made the work. I mean, I really like the, what's it called, the vernacular, African-American vernacular art, where, you know, there's a folk art tradition and they're making art out of anything to put the hands on. Yeah. I mean, it could be from a tire, you know, or a rock or a tree or whatever. And I find great inspiration. I'm talking great inspiration from souls grown deep. The book, the book, the two-volume book about African-American vernacular artists who weren't worried about showing their work anywhere other than in the yard or in their house. Yeah. And so they're so liberated. They're not worrying about the audience. So they're just cultivating, and I really like that, the cultivating your vision and not be burdened by, you know, the art historical perspective. Right. Or what the neighbors are gonna think or what your mama's gonna think about. You know, if you do this, you know, you get this concept, but not worrying about what it's gonna, where it's gonna go. Just be liberated enough to liberate the materials and yourself. Yeah. Now, and I mean, that's the end game. I think that's always the end game is liberation, you know, in any form. I mean, whether you had a place to show art or not, I believe you would make sculpture, you know. And I mean, I certainly make things, whether I have a place to show them or not. And I gotta say that nine times out of 10, the last thing, I mean, usually after I've made work, then I go, hmm, I doubt anybody, it's gonna take a special person to buy that. You know, I mean, that's not gonna, that didn't stop me from making the work. You know, I never say I'm making this work because I want this work to sell. It's like, I'm making this work because I'm interested in the topic or there's been a curatorial vision presented to me for a show and I wanna make work for that. And like, you know, the cherry on the Sunday is if somebody buys it, that's wonderful. Yes, you know, I agree with that, someone, that's right. Someone buys it, yes. I mean, it's not, you know, cause it's too much to risk, you know, worrying about if it's gonna sell because you're not able to be freed up to have a vision or to cultivate your vision if it's only, if you're only focused as well, what does it, what does it, what meaning does it have? It doesn't have a monetary meaning, but I think it's a personal, like I don't, I would not be who I am if it wasn't for my creativity. I, you know, I wouldn't be who I am. I agree. I know I wouldn't be who I am. There's no way, you know. There's no way. No, cause I mean, and I think you shared it too from your childhood, you know, my family knew I was an artist. They didn't like it in the beginning, you know, cause I came from a nice working class black family with a single mother that really wanted a lawyer or a doctor. But, you know, over time, once you understood, well, I got an artist. And by the way, you know, me and your father was musicians. Hello, you know, it's like, you see that it's gonna be okay. But I, you know, it was rooted in whatever the vision of financial security was supposed to be out of a certain professional stream, you know? Yes. They didn't know, they didn't know any artists who have been able to survive, not much less thrive. No. So they were frightened to think, well, we don't know how to protect. It's one thing to raise black children. Right. Another thing to be able to, and if they're like, you know, black and gay or black and lesbian or whatever, it's another, you know, which it also throws them off because they don't know, because they don't know how to navigate that. And then on top of that, you're an artist. Right. So we don't know how, so they're not, they wanna be able to say, how can we help you? But we don't know how because you're moving in an area that is unfamiliar to us and so many levels. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's what, you know. Right. And then my father said, you know what? Just, you know, you wanna go to Japan? Well, get a ticket and go. What else can I, well, I can't tell you what it's like to be in Japan because I haven't been there, but if you wanna go, you know, go. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, ultimately, you know, it was the same thing with, I mean, my mother was like, okay, I thought we got rid of this art thing years ago on the musical side, but it's back with the visual arts. So I gotta let it go, you know. And we made peace with it. So it was all good. But so we're gonna turn to, I know we're gonna got some questions coming in from YouTube. So we'll do a speed round with these final questions. All right. So I know we both value meditation. Are there any other vital practices? Do you wanna talk about meditation and any other vital practices that sustain your creativity? I usually keep a dream journal. I write my dreams down and I have a, you know, on and off currently, book of affirmations. Nice. Nice. Yeah, I try to have a very structured morning, you know, that involves like some meditation, some journaling, you know, not jumping on the phone at all right away to deal with the emails or the slacks or any of that, but really kind of be structured and mantra is important to me how I like get into my day. It is Mardi Gras. Have you been to New Orleans from Mardi Gras or any place else? I've only been to New Orleans only to hear, I went with friends to hear Lenny Kravitz. Ooh. Wow. Okay. I've seen Lenny. That was, ooh. That was hot. And it was really hot. It was really hot that summer. Yes. Really? Okay. That is very cool. Yeah, I've been a few times and I'm going at some point, if all goes well this fall for a residency that was delayed, but I did make a mocktail. So when we take questions, I have a mocktail in this beautiful, it's a whiskey sipper that actually you know this person, the great maker, Jerry Kung. Yes. Jerry did this beautiful mold blown glass. Beautiful. And they're only available, I think they're in shops in LA and Tokyo to your point, but I made a little mocktail for tonight in my beautiful glass. And then I think the last question, did we get through all the questions? Oh, where can people see more of your work? You have a talk coming up. UC Davis, yes? UC Davis, that's on, I think that's the fourth, March 4th, right? Okay, great. You're great. And in the gallery, you can arrange to meet there. Oh, good. At Patricia's Frito Gallery, it's probably the best place to see the work, the current work there. Okay, great. Great, great. And then this Friday, I am doing an Instagram live with Savoir Fair. Some of you may know the wonderful art supply company, Savoir Fair. So we're doing a little chat and that is gonna be at 2 p.m. Fantastic. Yeah. Ramacan, thank you so much for doing this. This has been so much fun. I agree. Thank you. And let's open it up for questions. Anisa, you have questions for us? Let me see if I see. Oh, hi, Ramacan. I'm here. Be just voice. Okay. So I do have a couple from our YouTube viewers, which we have quite a few out there. Hi YouTube. I know, hi YouTube. Ramacan, how do you get the recycling? How did you get the recycling fellowship and what surprised you most with that body of work? Thank you for that question. I applied for the recology residency, I think two or three times before I got it. So I applied and I finally was successful. And what was great about the experience is that the staff is wonderful and the access to the materials. And the materials aren't, the materials that come from the Dipsey dumpsters, they're the materials that people pay to have recycled. So it's a range of everything. Everything that everything, even things that have never been opened and have their labels on it. And it's overwhelming to see how much stuff is there. And being able to look at actually, we put so much value and power and objects. We don't remember that the objects have no power. We give objects power and meaning. You know, for example, the flag, it has meaning because we give it, but in and of itself it's red, red ink or dye, red, white and blue on cloth. In and of itself, it's just an object. But what I was there, I learned that how we can transform everyday objects to have powerful meaning. And I don't think that I would be where I am now with the idea of ceramics and fabric, if it wasn't for my experience at recology. That's wonderful. All right, and one for Cheryl from YouTube. Can you talk about your piece that was bought by the DeYoung and the response to it and what inspired you to create it? Sure, so the piece 2017 year at a glance, 214 dead black men had a really good reception. A lot of people reached out to me through my social media about it. The piece was featured in a couple of articles about the DeYoung show. And so that also brought the dialogue to a bigger audience. It was written up in the San Francisco Chronicle and also in the Guardian US edition. I think the thing that inspired me most to make the piece and continues to inspire me to work with the dataset around police brutality is that we don't really understand the magnitude of the problem. We can all say whatever names we have heard over and over again in the press and it becomes just dreadful. It's a dreadful list. When I start thinking about the names, it just, it breaks my heart. It's like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and Tamir Rice. And it just goes on and on with these names. And I can go farther and say, I'm a do diallo. Eleanor Bumpers, Michael Stewart, because I was a kid of the 1980s in New York City. I mean, it just, this legacy of police brutality and not just black people being killed by the police who are disproportionately killed by the police, but the amount of people killed by the police, we have a problem with policing. And so I am inspired to make the work and continue to show the work in ways that help viewers understand, it's not just the five names we heard in the news in 2020. It's really, 214 black men in one year that were part of 1,000 people who were killed by the police in that same year. So helping us as a society grapple with the magnitude of the problem. And move to the place of defunding the police and investing in the types of community services that are desperately needed. We don't need police handling mental health challenges. We don't need police handling domestic violence challenges. We need trained professionals. We don't need police with military weapons. Thank you, Cheryl. That is true story. Cheryl, can you talk about how your images, where you find your images or how they find you? So a lot of my images are either historical images that I source through public domain collections at libraries or my own photographs. So like the billboard I showed that's up now, that's my own photograph of Richmond. The images on my website of former slaves were actually sourced from the digital collection of New York Public Library. I always say one day, I don't know when, but I am gonna have a show at the British Library one day because I've worked a lot with historical images from their digital collection. So public domain images, I really enjoy putting historical images into contemporary dialogues again. So we see not new, not special, been dealing with a lot of the same issues for a long time. Yes, you can always find inspiration at the library. Ramakan, can you talk about Crochet Jam a little more and what inspired you to start that and of any other projects you work with in community-based? Well, thank you for that question. You know, Crochet Jam started around nine years ago, but before that it was called Stitch where I invite my friends to come over to my place here and we would just sew rag rugs together, sew rag rugs together. And I did that for like maybe two years. So Crochet Jam will be 10 years in August in person and virtually. And before that, it was two years before that, it was Stitch. So how did it change from Stitch to Crochet Jam was at the D'Young, when the D'Young had the artist emergency programs there, which was a fabulous program. And Renee Balbachi did a fantastic job there so I applied for the residency there and Renee loved the idea, but she also made me aware of the fact that sewing required needles. And sewing needles may have to be, we don't wanna have to teach little kids how to clean needles. Because anything that would draw blood and would prick and draw blood was not a good idea. So I mentioned it to one of my colleagues at SFO Museum where I used to work. And she said, well, if you're sewing rag rugs, you also can crochet rag rugs. Oh wow. So she showed me how to crochet. And then that's how it moved. And then I was able to, because I didn't wanna teach people how to clean needles. I didn't wanna use sewing needles in a public space. So these transitions, first it was at the D'Young with the artist program there. And then later it was another transition when I graduated from my day job at Recology. So but the whole idea of my grandmother allowed me to break the pattern of her quilt making. So she had a quilt. I was struggling with the idea of being queer and black and growing up in the Jim Crow South in the 60s and 70s, late 60s. And she just said, come here and help me with this quilt. And I thought, the last thing I wanna be doing as adolescent male is sewing with my grandmother. And I was all, the whole idea of a black power movement. And so over the top male masculinity was oppressive in many ways and offensive in many ways. Because the whole idea of having enough, being powerful to confront the white power structure. And being black and being queer and homosexual kind of like through a whole another problem to that. And my grandmother just said, I'll show you any color, any pattern you want. I'll show you how to add it to my quilt. Wasn't like you're gonna follow this pattern, do as I say, these are the colors, I'll show you how to add it. So that whole idea of being embracing, breaking the rules had this roots with my grandmother who was being subversive. I mean, the pattern already had a, that quilt already had a pattern. So when I stopped worrying about trying to be an artist in a traditional standpoint, no working in paint or whatever, and started, well, let this be my art as a social practice and give to others what my grandmother gave to me. Where you're embraced, you're accepted, it's a safe environment. And you're able to, now you're not being judged. That's how it, that's, you know, that's. Thank you, Ramakana, it was wonderful. And we can open it up to anyone that wants to unmute and ask a question, but I don't see any more questions happening. And that is our time, but we definitely don't cut people off here. So if anyone wanted to unmute and ask a question, we can make that happen. YouTube friends, we thank you for your interesting question. Oh, you know what? I did have a question Ramakana. You mentioned David Johnson. Is he the same David Johnson from Harlem of the West photographs? Yes. Okay, I wanna make sure I got that in the links correctly. And he's gonna run and go get a photograph. So I love that. Ramakana is on the moon. Don't leave, this is good. Don't leave. And the photos are just a little hot yet gorgeous. Beautiful. So you can check out Harlem of the West from the library, beautiful book. Or we also had a presentation. So you can check that out. And I put it in the links with all of the links to tonight's talk or maybe hopefully all, sometimes they get talking and I can't keep up. But I think I got everybody and all the links to the artists tonight. We thank you so much for your time. And you know, I wanna think this is a community. So library community, we miss you. We love you. Happy Mardi Gras. Come back next week, come back tomorrow night. Same place, same, not the same time, 6 p.m. Ramakana, Cheryl, thank you so much. We appreciate the love you've given to the library community tonight. And I will see you both soon. And what, sorry, not letting you go yet. We're not viewing who is our artist spotlight for more than a month. We'll be in the virtual library next week. Please check out his artwork. It is beautiful. And he utilized a lot of stuff from the San Francisco's Public Library's archive. So check that out. And now, yes, unmute, unhide. Let's give it up, everybody. Yay. Thank you. Ramakana, thank you so much. Ramakana, yay. Thank you. Yay. This is awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so glad you came. Happy Mardi Gras every day, everybody. I got my mocktail too. Okay, good, mocktail. Cheers. Happy Mardi Gras. Cheers.