 Good evening. I'm Arnold Lehmann, Shelby Wyden-Leon Levy, director of the Brooklyn Museum and I'm and I am truly delighted to welcome you to the 2014 Sackler Center First Awards. It is a pleasure to have you here for this celebration honoring women who are first in their fields. Indeed, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is a first in itself. The first center for feminist art, the first center for feminist art in any museum in this country or any place else that I know. And this would not have been possible without the leadership of our great friend and museum trustee Elizabeth A. Sackler. As the founding benefactor of the Sackler Center seven years ago, Elizabeth Sackler conceived of this event with the same vision and commitment she displayed when she first approached me about establishing a home for Judy Chicago's pivotal work, the Dinner Party. To continue in that wonderful collaborative history, Judy designed the beautiful award our honoree will receive this evening. The museum's galleries will be open all evening so that you can see current exhibitions including Chicago and LA, Judy Chicago's early work 1963 to 1974, and witness art and civil rights in the 1960s. This year, as you know, we are thrilled to add Anita Hill to our list of honorees and to present Frida Lemak's documentary, Anita. We're also joined this evening by the incomparable Gloria Steinem. Gloria's great enthusiasm for the Sackler Center's work from the very beginning is so greatly appreciated by all of us here at the museum. Thank you so much, Gloria. And another big thank you to Anita, to Frida, and Gloria, and Elizabeth Sackler. Before I introduce the visionary force behind all of this, I'd like to ask you to please turn off your cell phones. I can promise you, you won't want to miss a minute or word of what is happening on the stage here this evening. So now, without further ado, please help me welcome to the stage Elizabeth A. Sackler. Thank you. Thank you very much. New York City's first lady, Sherlaine McCrae, Anita F. Hill, Gloria Steinem, colleagues, friends, and family. Welcome to the third annual Sackler Center First Awards. Hashtag Anita Hill. Hashtag Sackler Center Firsts. That is the most formal introduction other than the hashtags that I have done in the eight years that I have been doing introductions. And as I was writing that, I was wondering, why am I being so formal this evening? And I wondered, and I thought, it's because this is an evening of true royalty. This is our royalty here for us to celebrate. Our women revolutionaries, whether by chance or de facto, are at least my royalty. And we've come together this evening as we have said to honor Anita Hill for speaking truth to power. In so doing, in so doing, we honor and celebrate change and reunite in solidarity to finish the work, still incomplete. Anita F. Hill has changed the lives of not just hundreds or even millions of women, but of all women for all time. Anita Hill changed this nation in doing what no one had done before. She changed the lives of women and girls in the workplace, in the classroom, in the halls of institutions, and in the privacy of our homes and our bedrooms. That voice, her voice, began the end of a status quo. We are able, as a result of her truth, to stand and fiercely fight against all forms of abuse, whether in the bedroom, in commerce, or in war. Anita may say she is not the first to speak truth to power, and that's probably true. But she was the first to speak unspeakable truths in the halls of our nation's capital, and that is what changed our world. Anita tells us her agenda was to tell the truth, and that truth will prevail. Well, these are holy words, in that she stands side by side with Socrates, at least Anita Hill stands side by side with Socrates as far as I'm concerned. Anita, you exemplify Audre Lorde's words, when I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, it becomes less and less important whether I'm afraid. And the wondrous Maya Angelou's words always will resonate. We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty. I'd like to thank our host committee for their commitment in bringing us to this evening, to members of the Council for Feminist Art, to Frida Limog, director of Anita Speaking Truth to Power, and her executive producer, Gerlaine Dreyfus, as well as Samuel Goldwyn Films. A special shout out to my cousin, Annie Sackler, who is here, whose phone call to me two summers ago about Anita the documentary began the bull rolling towards this evening. Thank you, Annie. I am most grateful we all are. Our community neighbors, Brooklyn's Girls for Gender Equity. Joanne Smith, executive director, and girls in the program who are here today, please stand. We're the girls, Girls for Gender Equity. The Brooklyn Museum is thrilled to share this occasion with you, and I am delighted that you are here. Three of our first awardees are also with us. Linda Nocklin is here. Please stand. Jesse Norman is here. Please stand. And Julie Tamor is here. Please stand. The Sackler Center first awardees are a permanent part of the Sackler Center, and are the virtual fourth wing, fourth millennium wing, or the 21st century, of the dinner party by Judy Chicago. The awardees now join the 1038 women from pre-history to the 20th century, whose lives and work changed the course of history and paved the way for all women. The Sackler Center celebrates all things women and defends against erasure, ensuring that future generations learn about our foremothers on whose shoulders we stand. And as New Yorkers, we are very lucky because we have a very great New York City first lady, and it is my privilege, it is my privilege and my joy to introduce her and ask you to join me in welcoming New York City's first lady, Shirley McRae. Good evening, everyone. I'm so pleased to be here at my home museum. This place symbolizes so much for me. Everything I love about Brooklyn Heights, our energy, our boldness, our creativity, everything. Just a few weeks ago, I brought a few guests from out of town to visit, and they loved everything. I think we spent hours here. But I have to say, one of the highlights was Judy Chicago's the dinner party, and although I've seen the exhibit many times, it never fails to get me thinking about the many different paths to leadership for women and what it means to be a female leader. I take great comfort in knowing that thanks to Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the dinner party will always be here, and it will always be complemented by other thought-provoking exhibitions. We can cheer for her. I just want to tell you that sometime after moving to New York in 1977, I worked for a small organization called Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, which was committed to publishing works by women of color. Kitchen Table just happened to be in the same building as Working Women's Institute, which is one of the very first organizations in the entire country to focus on combating sexual harassment. Because we were all doing women's work in this building, going up and down the stairs, and helping each other out from time to time, at some point I started doing some work for them. One of the jobs I had was responding to letters from women who were suffering from sexual harassment and asking for advice from this organization. Some of the women who wrote these letters were so fearful. They didn't want the institute to do anything. They were too afraid. They were just desperate to have someone to talk to, and they poured their hearts out. I was so appalled to learn how complicated, how frustrating, how humiliating it is to be dependent on a job where you are constantly harassed, especially when the behavior is accepted as totally normal. The institute did amazing work and was a lifeline for the women who found them. And I also gained a sharpened sensitivity to a world with far too many women suffering in silence were afraid of what would happen if they ever spoke out. I mention this to all of you to give you a sense of where my head was at when Anita Hill sat down in front of 14 white male senators and forever changed the conversation about sexual harassment. To say that I was riveted is an understatement. All of the issues I had been discussing with my fellow activists for the last years were playing out on national TV in real time. It was truly astonishing. I watched with increasing awe as Ms. Hill with superhuman poise spoke truth to power about so many women, what so many women were suffering through every single day. They tried to embarrass her. They tried to crack her poise. They tried to call her character in question. And Ms. Hill rose above it all and in the process won a historic victory for all of us. Suddenly sexual harassment was at the forefront of the national conversation and while that conversation was messy and remains unfinished, there is no question that it led to real and measurable improvements in the workplace for women. Today, more than 20 years later, Ms. Hill is a feminist icon standing alongside pioneers like Gloria Steinem who I'm so happy to see here tonight. In Frieda Mock, Ms. Hill found a filmmaker committed to telling her story with her same honesty. And we're all looking forward to seeing the documentary so I'll close with a few words of gratitude. Ms. Hill, as a result of your bravery, all of our daughters, all of our daughters expect to be respected in a way that they never did before. They know it's right to speak. They know it's right to speak up when someone violates that expectation. And we just, we thank you for not running away, not hiding. We thank you for your courage, your persistence, and your dedication. And I hope everyone enjoys the film. Thank you, everyone. Anita Hill was a miracle in our lives. She is a miracle in our lives. And I just want to thank Frieda Mock for making her a portable miracle in our lives. And you should know that Frieda has a lifetime of work and that can be another award for each of us here. She's especially great, I think, at bringing us whole human beings. She has done playwright Tony Kushner, author Annie Lamott, and very moving history, histories of Native Americans and Chinese Americans and so much more. So I urge you to unwrap more of this gift of her work. Now, now, now. The award we're so proud to give tonight. Only time and experience have begun to set straight the huge injustice of those Senate hearings. Injustice, injustice, Thomas. How about that? Injustice, Thomas. From now on, I'm going to think of him that way, right? Injustice, Thomas is still on the court, though elected with the most negative votes of any successful nominee in history. And he has arguably been the deciding vote that kept Florida voters votes from being counted, that kept Gore from being president, that impeded global warming would have been in a different place, right? We wouldn't have invaded Iraq for non-existent weapons and so much more. Since Senator Danforth brought him to Washington, where he previously worked in St. Louis for what's the name of the corporation that's always giving us genetically altered seeds? Monsanto. He worked, Justice Thomas worked as a lawyer for Monsanto before he came to Washington. You can't make this stuff up. If Senator Danforth had been defeated by Harriet Woods in Missouri, who some of us remember here came within, I believe, 700 votes of winning, and that loss was so much the result of a lot of money at the last minute that it was the reason Emily's list was born. If Harriet Woods had defeated Danforth, think of all that would have been different. I often used this hole for one of a nail, the horseshoe was lost for one of a horseshoe, the horse, the battle, and so on as a reason why every single one of our votes counts. But Anita Hill's bravery and speaking truth to power has a sanity saving and even life saving ripple effect that you've seen, and I'm so glad that we end on young people, some of them in this room. Even if people didn't know what women witnesses who could have supported Anita's testimony, why they weren't called, or that Thomas had to be sworn in early and privately before evidence of his use of pornography surfaced, which it did, after he was sworn in, and he could no longer be assailed because he was already on the court. Nonetheless, there has been an ever-growing understanding of the truth. Yet since this was now an amazing 23 years ago, and not everyone in this audience remembers 23 years ago, I just want to offer my personal testimony to what Anita Hill was up against that I also witnessed here in New York. When this first became public and the forces of white conservatism were making charges of racism to protect Clarence Thomas. Though black women had long suffered harassment even more than white women, and the first two cases of sexual harassment were brought by Paulette Barnes and Pamela Price, two names we should also remember, even before there was formally sexual harassment law. They were brought as sex discrimination cases. There was an effort to divide and conquer all of us by portraying sexual harassment law as a frivolous invention of white feminists and being used to prevent a black man from ascending to power. It was one of the most painful times of my life, and I was only here navigating in New York, not in the glare of television cameras in the Senate hearing room. That truth prevailed was only because thousands and then millions of women of every race and economic situation, and many men too, and every part of the country began to tell the truth. It symbolized for me by a full page newspaper ad that was hundreds, maybe thousands of women's names, African American women in defense of ourselves, and we owe each one of them a vote of thanks for writing down their names and making this truth visible everywhere. Now we are in a museum, so there is yet another significance I think to what we are doing. This may seem like a long trip to you, but stick with me. Once museums were a colonial invention. European nations invaded, captured, and brought back treasures to be displayed in a museum. It was what they had rated. That's where museums began. Soon they displayed painting, sculptures, and other tributes too, but mostly also to the power of royalty and the power of the church. Even after that art was defined as what was done by men in the European tradition, and crafts was what was done by women and natives, but it was all the same stuff. It was all the same glory of human creation. I certainly remember the first big demonstrations in New York against museums that displayed virtually no works of art by women, fewest of all by women of color. I remember marching with the guerrilla girls, we remember, right? Outside the Museum of Modern Art with big signs that said, does a woman have to be nude to get into a museum? And my favorite, MoMA is a female impersonator. That's the one I was scared. Needless to say, we still have a little way to go, but the Brooklyn Museum was among the first to welcome the whole human community as artists and as visitors. What other museum has dances? If you can dance at a museum, Emma Goldman would surely have understood, it's our museum. And now the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art has advanced this by light years with works by women from all over the world. And did you know that Liz started many years ago by buying back the looted sacred objects of Native Americans and returning them to the people with whom they belong? So I rest my case and I think it's kind of a harmonic convergence that we are giving tonight to Anita Hill, a woman who helped us know that our bodies and our dignity and our words and our jobs are our own. And an award in the name of a woman who has helped us know that creativity is ours too. So I want you to meet the only woman from whose hand I believe Anita Hill should get this award, Liz. And me in welcoming Anita F. Hill. Can we say it all together? Say it all together. The 2014 Sackler Center first award goes to Anita Hill for speaking truth to power. This is just amazing. It is just amazing to be in this beautiful place with two icons. Liz and Gloria, thank you so much. I just don't even, I can't really even begin to know how to say how I feel this evening. I'm indebted to a lot of people. Of course the museum for welcoming all of you for being here tonight. I know some of you have seen this film and I thank you for coming back and sharing it with your friends and being here in the moment tonight to celebrate with me this event. I can start to name names. I just will leave out people and I will apologize in advance for doing that. Of course I want to thank everyone at the museum, in particular Jess Wilcox and Director Lemon who have really made me feel a part of this great experience of the Brooklyn Museum which is a bit overwhelming when you read about it, but it's even more overwhelming when you're actually here and see what is going on and learn about what is happening here. I want to thank the first lady, McCrae. You know it's just amazing. I look at her and I hear from her all of the exciting things that she's doing, realizing how much in demand she is and also really spending the time to come here and give me such encouragement and make such generous and moving remarks about. I think you are as a city are just fortunate to have her and I know that she feels quite fortunate to have you as well. She's really a role model for girls and women throughout the country and she serves really all of us well and she is what we imagine equality in the role of the mayor's office and the mayor's wife will look like. I always learned something from Gloria and I've learned a new term, a new phrase, in Justice Thomas. She teaches me something every time I make notes and I try to replicate it. Of course I try to give it my own little flourish, but that's, you know, or not. We all know that tonight is only possible because of Elizabeth Sackler. The vision really that she has of equality, for equality, for women's work, and this award, the first for artists, women in doing things that no one else has done creating. When I was first approached about this, I said, you do know I'm not an artist, don't you? Nobody, she had not seen the sketches. The first person to make really bad art. But, you know, it really, I think I was humbled not only to be in the company of women like Jesse Norman and Linda and Julie. I think you're all three here tonight, so thank you for coming. I hope this means that I will get invited back next year to be here, so this is wonderful. But I'm also humbled because I know that, you know, in my heart, I know that I was not the artist for this film, that Frida Lee Mock is the artist and Gloria gave you a sense of what her work is and how valuable she is. But she really is what, I saw the film the first time, like two days before it premiered at Sundance. That was when I saw it the first time before, you know, I had no control over the film. But, and that wasn't always, always so much fun for someone who has been teaching and is used to at least having control over the classroom, you know, but it was, it was, it was good. It was the way it was supposed to be, because you find an artist like Frida and you trust her. And if you don't trust her, then you go to another artist and you find someone with integrity to do the work and then you hand the story to them. And I can't imagine anyone who could have told the story better than Frida. So I am a long way, as you saw from the film, from Oklahoma. This is, so how did I get here in Brooklyn with Elizabeth Sackler and Gloria Steinem and the First Lady of New York? I don't know, exactly. But I can give you sort of a rundown of how I think I got here. And, and I hope I don't scare you because I'll tell you I started 50 years ago. We are just now on the eve of an anniversary of a momentous occasion in the life of this country, the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 50 years, 50 years. And the inclusion of women in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was actually an afterthought. And by some representations, it was a cynical afterthought. But however, women got included in the protections of the law in 1964. I have to say that for an eight-year-old girl in rural Oklahoma, it was the first time where I could actually imagine what equality was like when it could be enforced by the law. And I think that is in part what allowed me to really dream of being a lawyer, because I felt that real deep connection to the law and what the law could do for people who looked like me and who lived like me in rural Oklahoma, which I often say is sort of the near south, if not the south itself. I was the first African-American to graduate, to be tenured at the University of Oklahoma Law School. And that was ironic because, that was ironic because in about, it was 1949, there was a wonderful individual, Ada Lois Sipio Fisher, who sued the University of Oklahoma for admission. She had been denied admission because of her race. And when I received tenure in 1989, Ada Lois Sipio Fisher was there as a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma. So that's not the first that we're recognizing here tonight. 23 years later, or 23 years ago or so, I gave the testimony that has changed my life. And for a lot more reasons, people still ask, you know, why did I come forward? And the short answer to the question is, because I believed as a lawyer and as a citizen, that the integrity of the court was at stake. The integrity of the court was at stake. I knew what laws, what the laws and the interpretations of the laws had meant to me in my life. And I knew that the court, the integrity of the court is only as strong as the integrity of the individuals who sit on the court. And that was why I testified. It's a simple answer, if you think about it. Despite all of the things that have happened since, and maybe because of some, I would, in fact, do it again. It was after that testimony that I said I'm going to make a two-year commitment. I'm going to go out and I'm going to talk about sexual harassment for two years. At the end of the two years, it's going to be over with, and then I'm going to be able to get back to my life. And that didn't happen. And it's 20-something and counting now. Fortunately, I've had many friends who have been with me along the way. And one of my friends who I've known for almost all of those 23 years is here with me tonight, my friend Ann Moore, who is a member of your community, and now embarked on her second career as a curator and a gallery owner. And so the art theme, I guess, continues. So here I am now. And one of the questions people asked, why did you agree to make this film? Well, it was 2010. It was a year before the 20th anniversary of the hearings. And I knew that we still had a lot of work to do, that there were so many parts of our government processes that were taking place and women's voices were not being heard. Moreover, I knew that there was a generation of women and men who were going to grow up, that were going to go into schools, that were going to go into workplaces, and they were going to be facing some of the same issues that we faced and perhaps some of the same processes that you saw exhibited in this film. And that if we were going to move the dial any further, we were going to have to do more. We were going to have to have a new conversation or a renewed conversation, because it was that conversation that all of you, each of you engaged in, really, that changed things in 1991. And so I knew that it was time for me to get back in and really think about how to do that. And Frida Ma came along and we decided to do the film. I'm fortunate to have had at that point in my life a wonderful life partner, Chuck Malone, who is here, who has helped me shape my understanding and really get me through that experience of reliving those hearings 23 years ago. So where we are with the film is that we are trying to chronicle the advances, but we don't want to sugarcoat things. We realize that there are so many ways that we have not reached the goal of equality that was first articulated in 1964 in the Civil Rights Act, that we sort of renewed and rethought and reconsidered in 1991 when we decided that our lives and our experiences must matter when government decisions are making choices about our lives and experiences. You only have to read the newspapers to read about what's going on in college campuses, to read about what's going on in terms of gender violence, to read about what's going on in our military forces, to know that we haven't even solved the problem of sexual harassment. And that, in fact, the thing that I fear, that people were going through processes similar to what I had gone through in 1991, and their voices were still not being heard. And so we have to continue, we have to continue to fight the two-year deal that I made with myself has expired, but my commitment has not. And I consider myself to be quite fortunate to be here tonight to receive this award. But I'm also fortunate because in those 23 years, and actually in the 50 years since the Civil Rights Act, I have had the privilege of working on equality. I've had the privilege of teaching young people and I've had the privilege of actually reimagining what equality is going to look like for another generation of people. Some of those young people who I really keep in mind when I think about where we need to be are here tonight with Joanne Smith from Girls for Gender Equity, one of your Brooklyn community partners. And Joanne is doing wonderful work leading young women, and of course she is a young woman herself, so I think they relate to her very well. But I'm also encouraged by some of the things that I hear and I see, and I'll just name a few things. We have to have our voices heard, and it's going to happen differently than it happened in 1991. It's going to happen differently than a film even. The Twitter campaign, yes, all women, was an amazing event, I believe, an amazing statement in women's voices being heard. This was a moment, and one of the things that I am very cognizant of was it was one of the first times that I heard spoken out loud the term sexual harassment and gender-based or gender motivated murder spoken in the same sentence in public. Now I can tell you that 1991, I heard from women who were saying those things, but they weren't part of the public discussion. So we have moved really, and social media really helped us to understand what our lives are about. They helped the world to see that some of the problems that we have, that we thought decided long ago, still exist, and they still dog our country, and they still keep us from reaching full equality. I could go on and talk about my vision and my imagination of what equality should be like. I think some of the greatest words, at least for me as a lawyer, have come from Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she writes her eloquent dissents on many of the Supreme Court cases where the other eight justices, or at least four or five of them, don't seem to comprehend the lives of women in the workplace when they're making decisions. So she advocates for policies like equal pay under the law through her role as justice, policies that in fact reflect the reality of our experiences, and the experiences of one woman in particular, Lily Ladbetter, who was really unjustly denied equal pay for years before she even discovered it. I can look to women like, as I like to call her, the wise Latina, Sonia Sotomayor, who talks to us about laws that are overcoming vestiges of this history that has stymied our participation in the political process. And she really does articulate quite clearly how we can get there. So we will need, of our voices, we will need policies, we will need laws. But we will also need women's leadership. We need women in the policymaking positions. We need women on the courts. We need women in all corporate settings. We need women in media. And yes, we need a woman editor of the New York Times. So I could go on and I could quote the law, but I'm going to do something that's a little latter character, and Chuck will know this is true. I'm going to actually tell you why I'm here, and I'm going to start with a quote from an NBA player. Kevin Durant, when he accepted the most valuable player award dedicated to his mother and said the words, we weren't supposed to be here. I wasn't supposed to be here. After 1991, they thought that they had driven a stake in my heart and that I was going to go away. And if not die, certainly be silenced. I wasn't supposed to be here because I was born poor and black and female in rural Oklahoma to a woman who had given birth by that time to 13 children who had been born in 1911 poor in rural Arkansas. I wasn't supposed to be here here with you in Brooklyn. But why am I here? You saw on that film my mother. I am here because she is who she is who she was. And I think it's just miraculous that a film can bring her back to life and show an example of what a wonderful supportive mother could be and that she becomes a star as she was in my life. She taught me. She taught me to wake up every day ready to work hard. As you imagine, she did every day with 13 children to help raise with my father. She also said that the hard work is not always going to be for you, but it will in fact sometimes be for another generation. But that doesn't mean that you don't continue to work. You have to realize and to believe in the future. She taught me to love learning, which is why I am here today and I believe it was that learning that enabled me to testify before the Supreme Court of the Judiciary Committee for the Supreme Court. But I don't believe that it is anything that any of you could not have done if you have the right support, if you have the right commitment. She told me to have a passion and to pursue my belief with honesty and fairness, even when my opponents cheat. But most importantly, she taught me to be grateful for those who helped me along the way. And so tonight, I am grateful to all of you, to each of you, to Elizabeth Sackler. I'm grateful to Gloria Steinem. I'm grateful to everyone associated with the Brooklyn Museum. You have all become, like it or not, a part of my community and I will thank you forever. Thank you. Thank you all very much, Anita. Thank you very much for accepting the award, giving us your time and your brilliance. And I look forward to seeing everybody next year for the 2015 Sackler Center first awards. Thank you and good night.