
I Was Here
Clip: Season 3 Episode 225 | 4m 24sVideo has Closed Captions
"I Was Here" blends history, technology, and the arts.
Lexington exhibit bringing a new understanding to the concept of Nation Building.
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I Was Here
Clip: Season 3 Episode 225 | 4m 24sVideo has Closed Captions
Lexington exhibit bringing a new understanding to the concept of Nation Building.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipIt's a project that began almost a decade ago, but recently started generating a lot of attention.
The I Was Here project on display and the Lexus building is a blend of history, technology and the arts.
And tonight's arts segment we call tapestry.
See how it's bringing a new understanding to the concept of nation building?
I got a studio at the intersection of Short and North Upper Street.
I knew nothing about the history of Lexington.
I'm not a historian, but I am a receiver, and I spent 25 years in that spot, and I believe that I absorbed the history of place.
Just unknowingly, I was put into an eagle's nest on top of.
A wound in the middle of our city.
And what happened was, in November of 2016, late November, I looked out my window and I had a vision of an African mother and child that moved like points of light from window to window in the old courthouse.
So I have said from the beginning that this really is a spirit project.
It's talking about people who were here.
We were trying to change the narrative of the nation as concerning black people, black and brown people, and what we have contributed to the nation.
So we are trying our best to rewrite those narratives.
I found this photographer that I did not know named Patrick Mitchell.
We had auditions at my studio, which was the same place where I had had the vision.
So all these different people came up, but all the people that were asked were told that when Patrick was photographed, he said, or I said, either way, you are at once yourself and all of those who have come before you.
So that thing of like within us, we carry this long line of souls that that's what was being called forward.
We were here.
But this is really not a local story.
It's a story of America, of Europe, of Africa.
The contributions that we have made in America to change that narrative from being descendants of slaves to being the sins of nation builders.
Because the truth be told, that's what we are.
Our independence has continually be stolen from us, and we continually to try to do things as a people to regain independence.
We went to people who were property owners who could say yes or no because they had dominion over their space.
I would say they were probably to begin with 25, and probably now there's probably 40.
The Sisters of Loreto and the Dominican nuns were really the first ones that called us before public Art Award.
Africans built the mother houses of the Sisters of Loreto and the Dominican nuns.
And, so they have tapestry pieces.
Then Clark County commissioned us to do an installation of spirit portraits there.
And then we were invited by the Muhammad Ali Center to do an exhibition.
The expansion of it happened because we got an international award for public art in 2019 for the project Got Wings National Wings, because immediately after that, the Octagon Museum, which is two blocks from the nation's capital, reached out to us.
This project is is really about is doing an acknowledgment.
It is creating an acknowledgment of the co-founders of the country.
And it took me a long time to realize that that was really what had been asked that day when I had the vision that, it was to create a paradigm shift in how we see each other.
The I Was Here project could soon be on exhibit in Florida, and there are plans to have it an exhibit in all 50 states.
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