(soft music) - [Speaker] Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(bright music) (audience clapping) - Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

We are thrilled to be here at UMMA with a full house for a homecoming for one of our alums, Ken Aptekar, class of 1973.

Yeah.

(audience claps) This event today is presented in partnership with the Wasserman Projects, which for those of you who don't already know and love the Wasserman Projects, Wasserman Projects is a gallery right in the center of Eastern Market in downtown Detroit on Russell Street.

And you should go because right now, Wasserman Projects is hosting an exhibition by none other than our guest speaker today, Ken Aptekar.

And it's a beautiful exhibition, so don't miss it.

You must, must, must go there.

So remember to silence your cell phones.

We are gonna have time for a few questions, we hope at the end, we'll see how time goes.

And now for a proper introduction of our guest, the amazing and wonderful engine behind Wasserman Projects, Alison Wong.

(audience cheers) - Thank you, Christina, and thank you to everyone for coming out tonight.

You're in for a real treat.

Ken Aptekar, as Christina mentioned, is an alum after leaving Michigan in '73, went on to receive his MFA from Pratt.

After that, the sky is the limit.

Ken is in numerous collections all over the US and abroad.

I am not going to list off all over the places that his work has been exhibited and collected, but I will name a few that can be seen right here in our region at the Flint Institute of Art and their permanent collection, as well as a phenomenal large scale piece that was commissioned at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

But please do come and see his exhibition in the Eastern Market at Wasserman Projects.

The show will be up on view through March 9th, but that's all I'll say because Ken has a fantastic presentation for you today.

He is a talented painter and incredibly beautiful writer and a dear, dear friend, one of the kindest people you'll get to know.

Ken.

(audience claps) - Thank you so much, Alison.

I hope I hold up my end here.

And thank you, Christina and UMMA and Brittany Barnes, if she's here, and the whole team at Wasserman Projects.

I'm really thrilled to be back here in Ann Arbor at UMMA.

The year is 1968 and I'm a freshman living in West Quad across the street.

And it was an exciting time.

ROTC protests, military research protests, Vietnam War resistance, bombs going off on campus.

What's a nice Jewish boy from Detroit supposed to do?

Hide out in the art museum.

Now I was set up to be able to go to art museums and think of that even by my childhood, going to the Detroit Institute of Art.

You see, my mom was an art teacher, but also my dad was a musician and a music teacher, which was in its own way, equally important to my becoming an artist whose mission is to make old new, but I'll get back to that in a little bit.

So how to reconcile all the turmoil and social changes of the late sixties with deciding to pursue a life making oil paintings?

Especially when other art forms were becoming hot at the time, video, photography installation, performance, painting just seemed to have one foot in the grave and I'm about to pursue a career in it?

So now I'm a few years in, having transferred in my senior year into the then School of Art and Architecture in Ann Arbor, And lo and behold, I'm hooked on painting, enough to wanna go to graduate school since what else can I do realistically to get anywhere as an artist at that point.

I'm not particularly confident really yet.

And I didn't know what that much about, what I really wanted to say either.

So cue now a visiting artist, lecture, and critique in Ann Arbor at the school, George McNeil.

George McNeil was the second string AbEx painter from Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, he taught there, and a hard boiled New Yorker, the real deal as an artist in my student view of things.

So I went to Pratt for two years to study with George McNeil.

Here he is with one of his paintings.

But I'm still left with the painting is dead problem.

Nevermind that I love going to museums, all the discoveries of great artists of the past, the sensuosity, the humanity, the calm.

I wasn't ready to give up on it.

At this point, I'm making paintings based on historic paintings like Raphael's George slaying the dragon, St. George slaying the dragon, for example.

I'm thinking about masculinity.

Well, toxic masculinity.

Oop, I think I hit the wrong, yeah.

So this is a painting of mine that has glass sandblasted with a text bolted over my interpretation of Rafael's painting.

And now I've realized I can make paintings and add a text to them that will transport them from the past to the present.

And since 1990, that's essentially what I've been doing in one form or another, responding to paintings from the past with words either from my own reactions or related thoughts, or those of others who I invite to respond.

Thinking back to the 1967 riots in Detroit, I found a painting in the DIA, in the Detroit Institute of Art, by Franz Kline that I responded to.

I'll read you the text.

"She was my friend.

So she made me a special card.

That year in 1967, there were riots in Detroit.

Only a few miles from Cooley High, the city was burning.

She said I should carry it on me at all times.

It read, 'This is to certify that Ken Aptekar is an honorary negro signed by Melba Swan, a real negro.'"

Here's the payoff.

This ploy of adding text to paintings offers me a direct way of declaring my interests, commitments, fears, anxieties, desires, uncertainties, wonder, disgust, pride.

In short, my values and words make it possible to jump right over what I took to be a major obstacle to paintings' viability.

The general visual illiteracy of contemporary viewers.

Most people don't have the language to talk about or understand what gives paintings meaning.

So right off they get nervous looking at them.

Institutions of art aren't all that helpful, though they've made lots of progress in recent years.

The perception that art is something for the wealthy, the privileged, the highly educated persists, all that was much more of a problem as I was starting out.

It inhibited people from doing the one thing I felt was most essential to paintings, viability, new or old, that only by talking back to paintings do they start to come alive.

This is The Night Watch in Amsterdam at the Rijksmuseum.

Everybody gets words.

If I introduced text into paintings, I figured, texts that really grabbed people enough to get them to continue reading and stick around long enough to continue looking, the conversation would begin.

To appreciate his great masterpiece, I studied its components.

Embarrassed by my interest in the trivial details of the men's appearance.

I struggled to grasp the overarching theme, the historical significance, the universal drama.

The magnitude of his accomplishment would only become clear, would become clear to me only after learning the truth about The Night Watch.

People go to movies, people who aren't expert in cinema, and they seem to have no difficulty talking about what they saw.

Yet somehow art, they often feel demands a knowledge of who, what, where, when, why, and how.

They're cowed, they give up all hope of getting anything out of the art experience without the guidance of a wall label or an art history degree.

So now I'm gonna show you four works and try to explain how I got from one to the other.

Here's a work of mine from 1955.

I was in kindergarten.

(audience laughs) The only reason I have this work even is because soon after I made it, it was framed at school and hung the wall in the hallway of the school where it remained until I left the school eight years later, whether 10 years later.

But why I'm showing it to you is because I realized in looking at it not that long ago, that it seemed to embody some themes that I have returned to.

For instance, the fact that the clown represents a kind of vulnerable figure.

And I associate that question of vulnerability with masculinity or a denial of vulnerability in many men.

But also the the body is sort of compartmentalized and it's made up of discrete parts here.

And there's a kind of directness about the presentation of the figure, which I can hope my work has, a kind of direct presentation.

There's a painting in the Louvre in Paris by a French 18th century artist Watteau of a clown Gilles, a character in the Commedia Dell'Arte.

And I always loved this painting.

And I had a friend from kindergarten actually, who had moved to Paris when I did, or when I was there actually.

And he was a clown.

He was a professional clown as well as an author.

And we were having a very hard time.

He was really kind of cruel to me, I won't go into details.

And I was transfixed by this painting in the Louvre, and I made a version of it called Divided Gilles, which also embodied a lot of the themes, then probably represented a certain kind of sublimated anger toward my friend.

But in isolating the parts of the body and highlighting the sort of gorgeous shoes with their pink bows and the vulnerability of that body, of that beautiful white coat he's wearing and then that sort of sad face, I was able to talk a lot about.

I was able to talk a lot about who I saw, what I saw as the possibility for men.

Also, I made it vertical.

I made a vertical painting horizontal, and I destroyed a, I'll go back to it.

I destroyed, in a way an icon of art history, the Watteau painting.

And then this painting is the source for the next painting I'm gonna show you, which is this painting is a painting by the contemporary artist Jennifer Bartlett.

It's from a series she did of The Hours.

And this one is entitled 5:00 AM and as you can see, there's kind of a children's drawing of a dancing couple.

And I'm showing it to you because I had an idea for how to make portraits that embodied the way we look at old paintings.

So what I did was I decided to make portraits of individuals by showing not how they looked, but rather how they looked at paintings.

And I decided that the way a person looks at a painting can tell you a lot about who they are.

And I invited certain people whose lives I was interested in to pose for their portrait in this way.

And among them was Ira Glass, who many of you may know about as the host of "This American Life", because I thought he had, his approach to radio was also largely built on others' responses to events in their lives and in the world in general.

And so I made this painting as a portrait of Ira Glass.

I invited him to come to a museum and we were gonna go to the Met where that Jennifer Bartlett painting was because he told me he knew already which painting he wanted to look at.

But because of scheduling problems, we ended up sitting in a restaurant in the Chelsea Hotel, the El Quijote restaurant and at the bar.

And I videotaped him at the bar looking at a reproduction of the painting and talking with me.

So I'll read you the text, it's a little hard to read in the photograph.

"Why the children's drawing in Jennifer Bartlett's painting?

Ira evades my question then gives in quote, 'You're in love, giddy.

You're dancing in the kitchen at 5:00 AM.

You feel like a child and that child part of you is alive.

If you're lucky, you have relationships where you can express yourself as you are at every age.

The 5-year-old, the 10-year-old, the 20-year-old in you comes alive again with certain people.

When you're in love, most of all, you want every part of you to live.

The 7-year-old is right there making the painting.

That's what expresses just how in love they are.'

Ira glances at me.

'All right,' he laughs, 'You dragged it out of me.'"

So I have to tell you, it took an hour to get to that, to that line that he gave me, but it was worth it.

This is from a new series of Illuminated Manuscripts, many of which are up now in Washington projects in Detroit.

And I'll read you the text.

It's a little hard to read while I show you a detail of the image.

It's in the form of a Facebook post that I've put on at 4:00 AM in the morning, that is.

"How could I not be awake now, Kyle Rittenhouse, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, White Power, Proud Boys, Q Anon, Trump, still, the big lie, Fox News, CRT ban, voting rights, gerrymandering, Supreme Court, Texas abortion ban, opioids, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, Koch Brothers, melting ice caps, paradise California, concealed carry, open carry, Columbine, Parkland, Newtown, Tree of Life, Mandalay Bay Hotel, Dylan Roof, Pulse Nightclub, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, income inequality.

And because I care about France, Eric Zemmour.

And here I'll come back now to how music contributed to my, fundamentally to my work.

As I mentioned earlier, my dad was a musician in Detroit.

As a kid, I went to concerts at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra every week.

My parents had a subscription series and there was music in the house all the time.

I studied piano, I sang in the choir.

Music was a very big part of my childhood.

I should have become a musician like my brother.

I realized not long ago that interpreting art of the past to make it come alive in the present is akin to what music performance is all about.

The big difference is live performance is ephemeral and paintings live on, though of course, recording and YouTube and streaming and all that, at least for now, remain available.

I made a number of works that directly engage my musical experience.

To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, I drew upon a painting by Orazio Gentileschi, which you see here that's in the Detroit Institute of Art.

It's a painting that he titled Saint Cecilia or The Muse of Music.

And he asked his daughter, his now more famous artist's daughter, Artemisia Gentileschi to pose for it.

And the painting is just down the street from where the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Hall is.

And my brief for the painting was to honor the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

"1959, I sit spellbound next to my parents in a darkened Detroit concert hall.

I hear an echo though I don't know where it comes from.

Eight o'clock October 23rd, 1919 Ossip Gabrilowitsch strides on stage to inaugurate orchestra hall.

He waits for silence, then sweeps his baton upward, his hand-picked musicians raise their instruments.

The maestro from Russia slices the air, a horn sounds the ascending first three notes of Weber's Overture to Oberon.

The strings whisper, the flutes reply, and the music begins."

Another sizable series of works I did were also based on music and for those, I used the music of Detroit Motown and Disco, which I took to be both forms of music that were intended to reach and be enjoyed by people of all stripes, of all ages, of all income levels, kind of popular music.

And I juxtaposed them with images of French royalty in paintings and for the French royalty, those kinds of pleasures, they were part of their lives, but they didn't feel that there was any need for them to be the part of the lives of people with less means than they.

So this is, I'll run through a few of these.

That's Madame de Pompadour's dog.

(audience laughs) And for the last one is you think of French royalty and their luxurious lives and just how happy they all are.

And then when you see the paintings, it's not altogether clear that that was the case.

They look like a pretty miserable lot to me.

(audience laughs) As the years unfolded, there were worldwide developments that changed how we live.

I was compelled by pressing questions about masculinity, gender identification, racial justice, Jewish identity, gun violence, white supremacy, homophobia, the rise of autocrats, plus a rising awareness of the sexism, entitlement, and exclusivity of high art.

I wanted my work to reflect my feelings about all of that.

From 1990, here are a few of the first works with words on glass.

This first one is a silver point drawing of armed armor.

And for me, armor represented a kind of futility of aggression that I found odious.

Open and closed.

That was the extent of the possibilities for emotions.

And then there was a painting that I made that had to do with an old master Rembrandt, who we all revere as an artist.

Yet as it turns out, he was really kind of a rat with women.

And he was married and he had a very big house.

He hired a maid and became involved with the maid and dumped the wife.

And then she became his sort of companion.

And then he blew her off for another maid.

And it was like that in his life.

So he had these two women who were working for him, who he painted.

And they were really magnificent paintings.

The paintings drip with love, with his love for these women.

And that that conflict between these two things, his taking advantage of them, exploiting them, and loving them at the same time felt worth talking about.

(audience laughs) Early on, I got the idea to invade the museum, not gluing my hands to a frame or tossing tomato soup on the Mona Lisa.

But in 1996 for the first of these museum exhibitions that I've been involved in, I proposed an exhibition built on my responses.

And those of groups I invited to the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington.

It was called Talking to Pictures.

This is an installation of my work alongside the source paintings that I drew upon to make the paintings that I presented in the exhibition.

What I did was I selected a group of works from the museum.

I had them brought down to an empty gallery and I invited groups of people, various groups of people, students, museum guards.

I had a group of, I think redheads, various kinds of groups to look at the paintings.

And we videotaped their responses and I got them talking using the techniques of market research where you kind of learn how to get people to say what they really think about a product in order to figure out how to pitch the product in the marketplace.

So I applied those techniques in trying to get people to really respond to the paintings.

And the exhibition was called Talking to Pictures.

"Bruce Holmes, 14.

If he wanted to be feminine, that's him.

I wouldn't deprive him of that.

For me personally, it's whatever floats your boat."

"'Maybe he's coming to the new land like New York,' the museum guard guesses, he's an immigrant and he has a long way to go.

She looks deep into the boys' eyes, 'I like that one.

It's very simple.'

Here's the painting that I was showing to this young woman, Carrie Parker.

And that's her response to the painting.

"'Is that you?'

The art student asks.

I tell him it's a self portrait by Walter Shirlaw from around 1880.

The art student tells me to forget about the Shirlaw.

'Boring,' he says."

"'I just look around and observe,' Fatoumata Parrish, a guard at the Corcoran Gallery of Art tells me.

'I wouldn't sit in any of the chairs in the painting because they look too pretty to sit in.'

'No, I wouldn't touch anything,' she says, 'I'd just observe.'"

And then there are these next ones, which include my own personal responses to the paintings that were in the museum.

And I intermingled my paintings with my responses with the paintings of others so that there would be a kind of lack of hierarchy between what I thought and what they thought.

"I'm 13 years old and my 20-year-old brother is home between stays at the hospital.

He doesn't like the psychiatric ward anymore than I like going there to visit him.

We're in the house by ourselves.

I'm doing my homework in the kitchen.

He decides to go down to the basement.

At the far end is dad's workbench with the saws and chisels and drills and screwdrivers.

Through the floor, I hear the pullchains on each ceiling light as he makes his way toward the bench.

My heart is racing.

What if he does something to himself or me?

He's standing under the light over the bench.

As I approach, I see the three hole punch and the the sheet music he's preparing to add to his book of songs."

This is a painting that was in the collection by Charles Elliot, a portrait of Thomas Lorraine McKenney from 1856.

And he was a commissioner of Indian Affairs in the government in Washington.

And he's wearing an Indian blanket that was given to him by a tribal chief.

But to me he was wearing a prayer shawl, a Jewish prayer shawl like I had worn.

when I got my Bar Mitzvah, had my Bar Mitzvah.

I made a painting, a large painting that's based on that one.

And there it is in the installation, I'll read you the text.

"It wasn't my brother who shot the rabbi to death before a packed synagogue in a wealthy suburb of Detroit.

The killer was some other kid's mentally ill older brother.

He strode up to the front of the sanctuary on that spring day in 1966, announced over the mic, 'This synagogue is an abomination and a travesty.'

Then faced Rabbi Morris Adler and pulled out his gun.

The beloved rabbi fell to the floor, his prayer shawl still draped around him.

The boy turned the gun on himself.

And a family secret became a public tragedy."

"I'm out in LA for an opening of a museum and I go to visit my brother.

He hands me a xerox from a book about George Gershwin.

'Artists do not need loving or supportive parents in order to succeed.

The author, Joan Peyser, names five famous composers whose fathers told them that they would never succeed if they went into music.

My brother plays trumpet with pickup bands, works the Chinese funeral circuit, does recording sessions every so often.

He rehearses with musicians who meet to play for their own pleasure.

Recently he told me, 'I know what I can do and what I can't.

My success is having a love of music.'"

"The lights dim in Henry Ford Auditorium."

For those of you who don't know, that was orchestra hall for the Detroit Symphony before they moved back into their historic home.

Was it kind of a crappy hall?

But that's where I went to hear them.

Walter Poole strides out to the podium in his crisp white shirt and tails.

At 10 years old, I have to sit up in my seat to see the maestro's baton.

The concert opens with Debussy's three Nocturnes.

and I fold my hands in my lap as the first clouds begin.

Motionless, I follow the musical line.

The strings take me away.

The timpani rumble, the skies darken.

A pleading oboe beckons.

My head is in the clouds.

Suddenly I the questionable intonation of a horn.

I shift in my seat.

A clarinet entrance is late.

The harp and flute are out of sync.

I'm being pulled down.

Between the first and second Nocturne, I am dismayed as listeners applaud.

I wish I could just be up in the clouds.

Debussy composed it after standing on a bridge over the river Seine, the Seine, the river.

He wrote, 'I was leaning on the railing.

Some clouds slowly pass, a number of clouds, not too heavy, not too light.

Some clouds that is all.'"

There it is, involved.

We look at paintings in museums here.

Here, Courbet's L'Immensite, Gustave Courbet, French 19th century, early 19th century realist and galleries.

We look at them in museums and galleries.

And inevitably questions arise.

Those questions have everything to do with who we are today, what's on our minds, and can be prompted by what we see on a wall.

So I came to put questions into my work.

I take this to be a kind of Jewish strategy, a sort of Talmudic gesture.

There was the Bible and then for centuries, Jewish scholars have continued to interpret and disagree about what was written.

In the same way, I brought my secular Jewish identity into my painting.

For an exhibition I did, a collection based audience involved exhibition I made in London at the Victorian Albert Museum, I had groups come in and look at the paintings also.

And I'm gonna show the project was called Q&A, V&A for Victorian Albert.

"I ask questions.

It's a Jewish thing.

Here's an example.

What detail of Gustave Courbet's seascape would you like me to cut out for you to take home?

Chris answers, 'A little square from the center.'

He explains, 'A bit of sea, a bit of sky.

I do like to go to the sea and stare out.'

'What,' I continue, 'Is on the other side of the horizon?'

'Who knows?'

Chris answers Jewish style, a question with a question.

'That's the reason I like the painting, it's empty.

A place to think nothing.'

I wonder what's that like."

There's another work related to a Rembrandt painting in the Louvre.

Struck by the only time I'd ever seen an image of an angel looking back over his shoulder, I might add.

"And what if you have a message to send back with the angel?

A terrible tragedy is in the making, can't you do something?

What use is a divine messenger who will not deliver?"

And I reached back into my family's history to consider more about how my Jewish identity could become a subtext for a painting about my two grandfathers.

This painting is based on four images by a Viennese artist named Isidor Kaufmann, who painted in Vienna around the turn of the century.

And he painted pictures of traditional Jews in the pale of settlement, Russia, Poland in there, and brought them to Vienna, where many Jews had left the ghetto to move to, to make a bigger life.

And were anxious about losing their connection to their culture in Vienna as assimilated Jews.

He was very successful.

"Abraham from Odessa changed his name.

He had to, if he wanted to get ahead at Ford where he got a job painting stripes on Model Ts.

50 years later, Albert retired, a vice president in the tractor division.

Abraham from a shtetl near Minsk never changed his name.

He lived in an apartment near the oldest synagogue in Detroit.

Ran a bicycle shop with my grandmother his whole life.

Kenneth was what my parents named me.

They said it was the closest they could come to my Jewish name, Chaim, Hebrew for life.

Abraham from the shtetl called me mein Kenny.

I was seven when I lost my grandpa Abe.

When he had to face a small claims judge, he collapsed from a heart attack on the floor of the courthouse.

Grandpa Al died much later.

I hate the name Kenneth.

"I am six years old and hiding behind my hands.

'The evil eye's gonna get you,' my big sister shrieks.

'It can see you.'

Of course I have to look.

After supper, I watch snowflakes fall and make the street slippery.

It's Saturday, I'm waiting at the kitchen table while mom helps dad get dressed for the Bar Mitzvah he's got tonight.

He plays cornet in a band.

After he drives off, she teaches us to make Hanukkah decorations with glitter and glue and colored cellophane.

She used to be an art teacher.

We taped them to the window, like Jewish stained glass.

I have a knack for it, but my mother seems worried.

I see it in her eye.

'Keynahora,' she says in Yiddish, meaning the evil eye should only not be watching.

'Such a surgeon you'll make with those hands Keynahora and on the weekend you can be artistic.'"

(audience laughs) And then there's this one about my mother's mother, my grandmother.

"She escaped when she was 16.

Her father had dragged her with a sewing machine from shtetl to shtetl.

She fashioned clothes for Jews, sewed them on the spot.

A marriage to an older man was arranged, but Mierle Pomerance knew what she wanted.

And an alter kocker, it wasn't."

That's Yiddish for an old fart.

"An uncle secretly arranged passage, arriving in Detroit with only Yiddish and a valise.

She found a job in two days.

Two weeks later, a boyfriend.

And when the relatives she stayed with disapproved, Mierle, now Mary, got herself a room.

I think about grandma drawing fashion illustrations for the paper, sneaking on the trolley to visit the Detroit art museum.

Learning to paint on her own, picturing the view from the tallest building in the world.

She'd board a train to New York promising in a note, taped to the icebox, never to forget my grandfather.

In a fabric store on Orchard Street, Mary would meet a seamstress for an uptown family with rich friends painting by day and sewing all night.

She could just pay for the studio on Union Square and some earth colors and scraps of canvas.

Nothing would've been left for frames, even if she really had gone to New York and become a painter.

Inevitably my attention to Jewish identity brought me to Germany and the Holocaust.

I was commissioned to make an exhibition in Lubeck, a gorgeous old city in the north of Germany.

Nachbarn, as the exhibition was titled, took in a remarkable situation.

It took place in a museum next to the only historic synagogue in the north of Germany that remained after the synagogues in 1938 in Kristallnacht.

That's how it looked before the Nazis desecrated the synagogue but didn't destroy it.

It's been restored and now it looks like this, a cleaned up version of the way it looked immediately after the desecration.

And the synagogue right next door to a museum of Christian altar pieces, the St. Annan Museum, which also includes (speaking foreign language) for contemporary art.

But, and temporary exhibitions obviously.

And the St. Annan Museum has all of the altar pieces that were contained and paintings that were contained in the five magnificent gothic churches throughout the city of Lubeck, which were removed when The Reformation took place.

And they didn't wanna have images in the churches in these Protestant churches.

So they put 'em in storage and then they became the collection of the St. Annan Museum.

Anyway, I was invited to do an exhibition in this museum.

And it turns out that the museum is now popular.

The museum is next door to this Christian, I mean to this synagogue.

And two blocks away are several mosques for the Turkish Muslim population in Lubeck.

And there's also now a Russian Jewish population, strictly Russian speaking practically, a population of Emigres from Russia in Lubeck.

So I made an exhibition called Nachbarn, neighbors, that looked at the connections between what happened in Germany and the current situation.

And in the end, I knew that I couldn't make the project about the victimization of Jews because what young Germans living in Lubeck today want to hear anything about all that now?

What they did to the Jews, it's all old news.

They're not interested in that, it's not their lives.

In any case, I had the good fortune to meet a man named Albrecht Schreiber, who was a journalist, a retired journalist.

But he took an intense interest in the Jewish community that had been decimated in the war in Lubeck and wrote books about it.

And he told me a story which solved a towel and a family of rabbis, the Carlebachs family and the synagogue where they served.

I made a suite of six paintings that used as the images, the paintings in the Museum of Christian Art to tell this particularly powerful story about a Jewish family and their Christian neighbors.

For those of you who can't read German, I will read the translations to you.

"1941.

Food rations for the Simson Carlebachs family are reduced.

Jews are not permitted to buy meat, milk, cigarettes, or white bread, and can shop only between the hours of 4:00 PM and 5:00 PM."

Stay with me, this is a little complicated.

After nightfall, neighbors provide the family with food that they secretly leave inside their garden gate, a crime severely punished by the Nazis.

When the Carlebachs's find out the Nazis are coming to pick them up, they tie a monogrammed kitchen towel to the garden gate, a final thank you and farewell.

Nearly five decades after the Nazis murdered most of the Lubeck Jews in the Bikerniecki forest in Riga, the Hanseatic City welcomes Simson Carlebachs's son Felix.

He managed to escape to England in 1939.

In the town hall near the synagogue where Solomon Carlebach was Rabbi from 1870 to 1919," almost 50 years, "Felix Carlebach and his family are honored by the people of Lubeck.

A woman approaches the guest of honor.

'Our parents were neighbors.

I brought you something that belongs to you,' she says, and hands him the monogrammed kitchen towel.

There's an old painting in Charlotte, North Carolina, a coronation portrait of Queen Charlotte by Sir Allan Ramsay from 1762.

It's in the Mint Museum there.

When the museum was preparing to move into a new building devoted to contemporary art, while keeping the old one for historic works, they commissioned me to make a work related to the Queen's portrait.

One that could act as a link between the two locations.

Mine would go into the new building.

So I arranged a meeting with a diverse group that included art students, general museum goers, politicians and staff at the museum.

For several hours, we met and I got them talking to Ramsay's portrait that you see here.

You see Queen Charlotte is something of a polarizing figure in Charlotte, North Carolina.

She was an innocent teenager when she was plucked from the north of Germany by King George's mother to wed her son in England.

She couldn't speak the language.

And what's more, she was a mixed racial heritage.

Her portrait is seen by some whites in Charlotte as evidence that she was actually white and with pride by most Black charlatan who notice her kinky hair and broad features as proof of her racial heritage.

From what people said in my meeting with them and from my research into her life, I produced a series of six paintings with text that taken together, equaled the exact dimension of the Ramsay painting.

She brought, by the way, the bird of paradise.

She was interested in botany and she started Q Gardens.

She started Q Gardens, she brought to London the Bird of Paradise for the first time.

So Bird of Paradise was not native to London.

She was a young girl, she was very vulnerable, take my hand.

So now we get to COVID, I'm gonna wrap things up soon, pretty soon.

(laughing) So now we get to COVID, as the pandemic was heating up, I was able to get outta New York City where I'd been watching ambulances pull up to my building for a few months as we huddled in confinement in our apartment studio in Greenwich Village.

For the next year, I holed up in my house in the country in Burgundy France, a region rich with the history of Dukes and bishops who commissioned many illuminated manuscripts.

In a corner of the vaulted furnace room of my house, I began working with Gwache tiny brushes, gold leaf and calligraphy pens standing in my own scriptorium in a little village in the Morvan Forest.

Glowing screens on cell phones, tablets, and laptops were, it dawned on me, the illuminated manuscripts of the digital age.

Back in medieval times, the best they could do to generate light was gold leaf.

We live in a fast-paced age, yet everything ground to a halt as a result of COVID.

Contact with others became difficult, even dangerous.

And these illuminated manuscripts seemed to be an invitation to slow down when the world is going a mile a minute.

"The code to validate Visa purchase at amazon.com of Clorox disinfectant wipes two pack fresh scent is $6.19 is 66581372."

The code will expire after 10 minutes following receipt Minnoli Aya was a 19-year-old girl whose mother was a healthcare worker in a hospital at the beginning of COVID.

And her mother caught COVID very quickly and was confined to the hospital when her daughter, who lived two blocks away with her, started to communicate with her via texts 'cause she couldn't go into the hospital.

Anyway, her mother died in the hospital without her daughter ever being able to see her again.

And Minnoli communicated with her mother via oops, via text and then after her mother died and she found out, she continued texting her, "Hi Mommy.

College is getting so much more stressful now that it's at home, praying for you.

And haven't gave up hope."

Two blank responses from her mother.

"I miss you," she sent after she knew her mother died.

And then she wrote, "Thank you for coming to me last night in my dream."

This is based on an Ethiopian manuscript of St. John and the symbol associated with St. John is the Eagle, also the logo for the United States Post Office.

"Hello, Kenneth R, your USPS tracking number package has been delivered to the mail room.

How was your delivery?"

It was great.

Not so great.

You all know what the number 45 refers to?

Our 45th president.

(audience clamors) "I know, I know, not good, but I just keep hoping I'll wake up tomorrow and that's it.

Game over.

Hashtag bad karma, hashtag deep six 45."

I am gonna jump ahead now to here.

Just jump ahead 'cause the time is short.

You (background chattering) Okay, two more and then we'll stop.

This is a ChatGPT conversation.

(audience laughs) Just so you know, this is me asking the question to ChatGPT.

Just so you know, I'm worried about the perils of AI, but I wanna make an illuminated manuscript about it.

So what do you think would be a good angle?

And then in Arabic you can see that's the heading over the next paragraph is Arabic for artificial intelligence.

And then ChatGPT's response, "Suggests that the future path lies in using technology as a tool to enhance human abilities rather than replace them entirely.

The manuscript's tone should be both contemplative and cautionary, inviting viewers to ponder the role of AI in their lives while appreciating the intricate beauty of the illuminated manuscript.

Remember, this is just a conceptual framework to inspire your illuminated manuscript.

Feel free to adjust and embellish the details to align with your artistic vision and the specific message you wish to convey."

And then in Arabic it says the real thing.

And my response is, "Yeah, sure."

(audience laughs) Okay, so this is, you may recognize something in this manuscript.

There's two pages here.

I'll read you the text on the side.

"Singing while Jewish in the chorus for Handle's 'Messiah', sneaking in a few word changes, my pathetic act of resistance."

And if you can, I don't know if you can notice in the background of the building's atop Hill Auditorium, it's raining.

Do you see that?

Okay.

I've crossed out certain words and changed them to others.

Can you all read that?

Yeah, okay.

So I can't end this talk without answering the question.

Why, as in why try to make old new?

I would say it's because my belief in understanding the past is a guide to the present because of the challenge of keeping something alive that I value, art, and specifically painting alive and well and useful.

Then there's also the joy of knocking fine art off its pedestal so anybody can relate to it and maybe even see their own lives better as a result.

And finally, because I can take an old master painting like this, Asher Durand's, The Old Oak, and get a laugh.

(audience laughs) Thank you.

(audience claps) So now we have a few minutes, I think.

- [Speaker] We have five.

We have five minutes, oh, was that all?

Oh, sorry, I cut things too close.

- [Speaker] You could do like probably one question.

- Well gimme a question.

Anybody have any questions they'd like to ask?

- [Speaker] What was your favorite painting you created?

- Oh I don't have a favorite, it's like asking who's your favorite child?

I can't answer that.

Anybody else have a question?

Yes.

- [Speaker] How has your Jewish identity influenced you as you've gone forward in your (indistinct).

- Well it seems to come in and go out as an issue.

I don't feel like I've ever left it behind.

It feels like it's part of who I am and part of my toolkit in a way thinking about who I am.

So periodically comes back.

I think I came to the Hill Auditorium manuscript just recently, that's the most recent work I showed you.

And I came to that, I think probably knowing I was gonna be in Ann Arbor, but also thinking about what's been going on in the world today.

And an assertion about that identity.

Anybody else?

Yes.

- [Speaker] You talked about like getting more into slow art forms during COVID.

I personally really feel that.

I'm curious like what drew you specifically to using illuminated manuscripts.

- Okay, the question was what drew me to using illuminated manuscripts now?

Such a slow form.

I think it had to do with the fact that I was living in a region where I saw them in everywhere, they were in all lots of collections in Burgundy and in Paris for that matter.

They were in New York too.

But also there was something meditative about working on that scale, so small for many, many hours, they're very time consuming to make, and that, and I had a lot of time on my hands because what else could you do?

What else was there to do?

We all had a lot of time on our hands, yes.

- [Speaker] Do you consider yourself a writer or is that just more of an embellishment?

- It's funny you ask, writing is a very important, I'm married to a writer, but it is a very important part of what I do, obviously.

But really, I considered writing part of my artwork.

I mean, I would say that writing is harder than making the images for one thing and I labor over a long period of time distilling the writing so that it will capture what I'm trying to do.

And in fact, I learned about what I'm trying to do from the writing often.

But the writing that I do has been described by a critic named Mika Ball as very, very short stories, that she thinks of me as a master of very, very short stories, which I'm flattered by.

Anybody else?

Yes.

- [Speaker] Do you have to (indistinct) permission?

- Do I have to get permission to use these images?

No, I mean, everything I'm using is in the public domain, even fairly recent paintings.

But even if it's not exactly in the, like maybe a more recent painting, like the Franz Kline I'm not reproducing it in a way that is going to fool anybody into thinking that it's that painting.

It's in the context of a changed artistic work.

Yes?

- [Speaker] Did you sell your works individually or did they always stay in a?

- Oh, no, no, no, no.

Everything gets sold individually, yeah.

I mean, like, but in the case of, for example, the painting of Queen Charlotte, that was a commission.

It was all one work, but there were six paintings.

But that's unusual.

Yes.

Yes.

Oh yes.

- [Speaker] How important would you say museums and being able to go to museums is?

- How important is it to be able to go to museums?

I can't think of anything more important.

(laughing) (audience claps) Well, thank you so much for coming.

(audience claps) (background chattering) (background chattering)