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

(audience applauding) - Andrew Rogers, Andrew Rogers on the Barton, Oregon, everyone.

Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

My name is Christina Hamilton, the series director, and today is a very special day.

We are kicking off the 10th anniversary celebration of the naming of the Stamps School.

And to do that, we are presenting one of our very own successful alumna, artist, designer, author, and ecologist, Michele Oka Doner.

On this momentous occasion, we also welcome some very important persons in our midst.

And first I want to just point out a few folks to you, so if we could just have little house light.

We are welcoming a new dean, dean Carlos Francisco Jackson.

If you could just wave, Carlos.

(audience cheering) This man has sincerity and strength of purpose, and I think he will serve us very well in the years ahead on the next chapter of our journey, so welcome, Carlos.

Also with us today, our dean's advisory council, an illustrious group of our alumni, whom we have come to depend on over the years for their knowledge and dedication in helping to guide us.

So dean's advisory folks deserve our round of applause.

(audience applauding) And then perhaps most significantly, we also welcome Roe Stamps, one of our champions and the husband of our friend and advocate and dearly departed patroness, Penny Stamps.

Roe, yes, wonderful to have you here, sir.

All of us here today are the lucky beneficiaries of the Stamps family's generosity and their commitment to young people and the progress of future generations.

And you can join us tomorrow, Friday at 3:00 PM at the Stamps School, in the courtyard for festivities where you can meet all of these important people.

So do that.

Okay, we can bring the house down again now.

I have just a few thoughts for you on how we got here.

Many of you will remember, and many of you won't, but Penny charged our students with her big idea challenge.

This is now a keystone of the Stamps School, and this here, everything here today is part of Penny's big idea.

She saw a critical need for art and design students to connect directly with successful artists and designers beyond the walls of the academy.

She began working towards this vision with the Stamps family's first gift to art and design in 1998.

And through a process of evolution, the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series took shape and was born and has now called the Michigan theater our home for 18 years.

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a big deal, folks.

(audience applauding) I have a few photos.

Annie Stamps wanted all the folks here who never got an opportunity to meet her mother.

Here's Penny and Roe, many moons ago I must add, at some point in that 18 years.

Penny and Roe inspired us all by their dedication to helping us connect and grow, and then in 2012, Penny gave us her name.

And we became the first and the only, still the only school on campus named for a woman.

We- (audience cheering) Significant.

We became Stamps and we had a flag to fly.

And now under that banner 10 years hence, her confidence in us propels us forward and gives us the confidence to face the future.

And while we do miss her presence, here she is among us.

There was much to miss, her practical, straightforward presence, her elegance and indelible style, her wonderful sense of humor, and most of all, her savvy and her grace.

The good news is that her legacy persists, and we continue to enjoy the bounty of her big idea when we gather each week here in her name.

And for this festive occasion, Penny and Roe's daughter, Annie Stamps, who is fully engaged and working with us on the Stamps School cause has sent a note, which she wanted me to share with you.

She very much wanted to be here today, but it was impossible.

She writes, "I know so many of the people in this room today did not have the privilege of meeting my mom.

I can hear her now saying "go blue" from up above.

She was a Wolverine to the core.

The only times I ever heard her swear were during Michigan football games.

She loved to be on campus, to eat at Zingerman's and to be at the Stamps School and in this very theater.

She especially loved talking to students, and was an unwavering champion of the University of Michigan past, present and future.

I'm so grateful that her legacy lives on at the Stamps School, and I'm thrilled to join all of you in forging the path ahead.

Yours, Annie Stamps."

(audience applauding) And now to our speaker, Michele Oka Doner, chosen specifically for this occasion as she is a fellow alum, a fellow classmate even, and a great friend of Penny Stamps, on top of which she is an internationally renowned artist whose career spans six decades.

The breadth of her creative practice includes sculpture, drawing, public art, functional objects, video, artist books, costume, and set design.

She's known for creating many permanent art installations, which you may have seen throughout the United States, including Reagan International Airport, the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan, and the mile and a quarter bronze and toraso concourse at the Miami International Airport.

Oka Doner's work is found in collections around the globe, and she has received numerous awards, honors and residencies.

In 2016, she received an honorary doctor of fine arts from our very own University of Michigan.

And of course, this is where she earned both her undergraduate and MFA degrees.

We will not be hosting a Q and A today because we have to whisk Michele off for other events, but we have something else in store for you, which you'll see.

And now, please join me in welcoming to the stage Michele Oka Doner.

(audience applauding) - Thank you, very good.

Thank you so much, that was such a lovely introduction.

And I don't see where Roe is in the new dean, but I will discover them as the afternoon, the evening goes on.

It's wonderful to be here.

60 years ago, I arrived here for the first time.

I know that sounds astounding, but walking around today brought back so many wonderful memories, including watching the Beatles' Yellow Submarine here at the Michigan theater.

I came from far away to a place I didn't know anybody and had never seen, and landed at Willow Run airport.

Let's see, oh, we're going backwards, but that's good here.

Whoops, there we go.

I was born and raised in Miami Beach, Florida, and it was a place that was beautiful.

When I think back, the city was only incorporated in 1915 and I was born 30 years later, so you can imagine it wasn't all built up as it was today.

And this was the big banyan tree that was across the street from my house where I played and climbed.

It wasn't that big, it was just probably one stalk, but it was still a little bit overwhelming.

And I show you this and as well as this is a group of trees I could walk to also in my childhood, they're Australian pine, because as I was walking the campus today, I thought about, saw the business school and Steven Ross's name, and both Steven and I went to Miami Beach high school.

We were inducted into the Miami Beach high school hall of fame, which meant that you got to give a scholarship for somebody to go to college.

It was a very smart idea and it's working very well.

So we were both on a stage, and afterwards in the auditorium of the high school, they could line up in the aisle and ask questions.

So the first question was to Mr. Ross from the cheerleaders who welcomed us.

And they said, she said, "Mr. Ross, how can I be a cheerleader for the Miami dolphins?"

'Cause he owned the team, and he thought for a minute.

and he said, "Well I guess you can try out," and then the next question somebody said, "I've got a question for the lady."

That was me and the only one on stage.

And he said, "How did you get from here," Meaning in the aisle, "To there," meaning on stage.

So I said, "Well, I went from Miami Beach to the University of Michigan.

And if you're a good student and I can see what you're doing, I'll write a recommendation for you and I'll share this experience."

So as I was walking, I thought, how did I get from here to there?

And so the beginning was learning a language, and my language I brought with me here was nature, mother nature.

This was and still is, everything I'm showing you was there still exists.

I can even go home, and it was one of my homes.

This is one of my homes, and New York is the literal home at the moment, and find all the things that inspired me, taught me, and really made me fall in love.

These are, my grandfather planted, that's a flamboyant tree.

That's Fairgreen Drive, the street.

And you have a sense of just how beautiful, and in a way there was something sacred about it.

The trees were only all 25 years old or 40 years old or not so old.

This is, you can see a scattergram of leaves and there's another one coming up of seeds.

And I really understand when I walk and I look even in New York with the leaves come, or in Ann Arbor when the leaves fall, that how I arranged things always had to do with what I saw early on.

This bridge was one of the earliest walking bridges.

And I could take this as a child.

And those are the original mangroves, the last left.

And I could walk over the bridge and go to the beach.

It was a small town.

I felt very free in the ability to look everywhere, and there was no television yet.

In fact, the first time I saw television, 1953 was the Queen's current coronation, which is so interesting because that's such a bookend at this moment.

These sea grapes are so beautiful and I walk over still.

That's the Collins Canal.

All of this really is two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes from where I spent my first 17 years before I came here.

Even the shadows of the trees, the shade, sitting outdoors.

We all lived outdoors, and there was no air conditioning either.

So no television, no air conditioning, it sounds like summer camp and it felt like it.

These are the palm seeds and they're just so beautiful.

And these are glorious.

What I would do, what do you do on a long June day before camp starts?

So I would pull from the trees these pods and open them up.

And these were all compacted, I learned so much about compression, about how things grow and they're so radiant.

That's just available for anybody still to this day.

Of course I have to be careful not to get arrested 'cause I don't own any trees, so when I am out and about I'm basically on other people's properties, and life is changed.

My younger sister said, "You can't do that.

People have camp cameras, you're gonna get arrested and I'm not gonna come and bail you out."

She's always threatening me when I come back to her house where I've been staying recently with a bag of things, she goes, "I don't know what you've done.

I mean, where did you go?

Who saw you?

I think I know them."

So now this I love, this is a painting from Egyptian tomb, and it is the goddess Nut being nurtured by a tree.

So I am not the only crazy, nutty person.

This is one of the most beautiful paintings.

I have a book of Egyptian painting that was created at the Detroit Institute by the Pecks when I lived here.

So I've had that book about 45 years, and I always go back to this wonderful painting.

It was also, we had no tall buildings.

If you had a four story building, it was painted white and the sky was everywhere.

So this is the earliest piece.

I'm five years old, it's kindergarten.

And I guess my head was in the sky, but as somebody pointed out, I think I ate it also.

The other influence, so to speak, was the ocean and the coral.

And I crawled around, and there's like pictures of me crawling all the time.

And what did I see, but I saw the most beautiful lytic limestone.

So here you go back, so these dolls all have the texture.

These were a little bit later, I think it's going on automatic, it's moving without me touching it.

But these are like wave patterns.

But if you look at palm trees, you see the lines and the rhythm.

So I was soaking it up, but then I came to Ann Arbor and I was able to begin to express it.

We really didn't have any art schools, art lessons or museums in Miami, my first 18 years.

So I would go to other cities, but it wasn't the kind of situation you could linger and you really could spend time.

So I fell in love with Ann Arbor.

I was in the Kelsey Museum all the time and Alumni Memorial Hall and then into Detroit.

So what you see on the other side and with these torsos is the graduation poster.

And for those of you who know anything about old Ann Arbor, meaning 50 years ago, George Frame, who was Commander Cody, was in my graduating class.

Also the Lottis, Adi Lotti and his brother Alexis were here.

And the father, his father taught industrial design.

At 17, I didn't know what industrial design meant, but I learned pretty quickly because he gave his sons when they wanted a car a couple parts and told them to build it.

So they would go around Ann Arbor in this experimental car.

And it was joyful, really joyful until the insurance company decided it wasn't so joyful and they had to give it up.

But we had a lot of fun.

These pieces are in a private collection, and I kind of miss them because, and I don't miss very much, but they were the first ones I made where the wave, the sense of waves and movement was really palpable for me.

I studied with John Stevenson and he studied with Maya Grotel, and Maya Grotel came from Finland with cedanin.

And he brought with him a silversmith, a metal smith, a weaver, a ceramist a painter, architects, everything you needed to build a life.

And the other tradition like that, of course, was the Bahows.

And they fled to Chicago to IIT, and we had some professors here also that brought that tradition.

So then John Stevenson, who went from learning from Maya Grotel, he got a full bright and went to Japan and studied with Sotsi Hamata, who in 1955, his hands were registered as national treasures.

So I show up in 1963 and I was the recipient really of three extraordinary cultures, plus the unistrut had been built, which was a strange building, an experiment that was outside of our old Lorich Hall.

It was so rich and it was so exciting.

It was a great time.

So I made these strange pieces.

Now to be truthful, the assignment was to throw three jars with lids, but I really wasn't good at it and I had this idea.

So imagine the day where the assignments were due and everybody brought their three jars with lids.

And I showed up with that.

And somehow though, John Stevenson didn't say no, he didn't say yes either, but I continued and became part of a real change in what clay was used for and what the art world began to call the 60s.

This is generation magazine, that's I think 1967, and I had made a mask, and we had the Vietnam war going on.

So some of my work became politicized, but we weren't a big group.

We were 350 people and there were very few fine arts majors.

So anything you did do, people would come through the building and it was noticed.

So the ones on the other side, the dolls, those are on the, I think that's from the Financial Times, they were on the front page.

And Alene Sarnen, who had the Today Show, also put them on the Today Show and spoke about them and how bizarre and strange they were and how interesting.

So that was so grateful that John Stevenson didn't say much, but he gave me a license and there was the license here.

It evolved, it was a wonderful time.

So you saw the palm seeds and you saw how they, how they charmed me, I guess, is the best way to say it, and seduced me.

These are seeds.

This is a large bronze seed called Gnomen, G-N-O-M-E-N, which is Greek for something that replicates itself and you can't see where it began and ended, which is true for a lot of structures.

And that was taking the small clay ones I made in bronze.

And this is from my first exhibition in New York.

What happened with the clay, as much as I loved it is I was making them bigger and they would break.

And so in New York I couldn't bring my kiln.

So this was a leap for me to try to see if I could translate the texture and the feeling of life into a material that had to go through a process other than me touching it.

But that was before I went to bronze instilled here and made the seeds, I built a kiln.

Now I didn't really know what I was doing, but I thought I might.

So I read a book on how to build the raku kiln.

And it was scary when I first turned on the propane.

I thought I could blow my whole neighborhood out, but somehow it worked, and that's the smoking pit.

I can't believe now that I had the ability to pull these huge things out of that kiln and put 'em in the pit and not get burned, but I did.

And it resulted in this exhibition called "Burial Pieces".

Now, when I left Ann Arbor, I moved to Detroit and I showed with Gertrude Castle gallery, which was a wonderful gallery, and she was a wonderful, wonderful mentor and a fine lady.

And she was showing all the greats in New York, Philip Gustin, and she had Jenkins Colorfield, all the things that were being done.

And they were a lot of canvas and color and chrome and glass, right?

Well, that's not what was happening here.

So down the hall was Charles McGee's gallery, gallery seven, and the guys would come from Africa.

These interesting people with gunny sacks filled with all kinds of trader beads.

So Gertrude and I would go down the hall to look at the glass beads and the beautiful beads they had.

And one day I said to Gertrude, "You know, I think my work looks more like this than that."

So I had this show at gallery seven, and Claes Oldenberg was visiting Detroit, the Detroit Institute, and the curator at the time, John Neff brought him into the Fisher Building, up to the third floor, took him to Gertrude's gallery and then to gallery seven, and Claes scratched his head and said, "Who did this?

This is very original.

I've never seen anything like it."

And I get a call from the Detroit Institute of Art, and they said, "Are you Canadian?"

I said, "No, why?"

He said, "Well, I have a grant to do an artist from Canada, but would you come up anyway?

Come over and bring your slides."

So that's how I got a show at the Detroit Institute of Art in 1977, which was really 10 years, not even 10 years after I graduated, but I was really working at quite a pace.

These were models for what went into the raku, but I started working with a series of bones, because during college, I never had the opportunity to study anatomy, really.

So I bought an anatomy book the same way I learned how to build a kiln from a book, and I started a library.

So this is Detroit Institute of Art.

Most of these pieces came from the smoking pit, and it went on to, these are in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Art.

And then this drawing was for another exhibition that went to New York to PS1 Moma.

And it's now in the Gilbert Silverman Fluxus Collection, or no, instruction drawings.

What he put in his Fluxus Collection is something I sent him and gift wrapped and he saved the gift wrapping 'cause I had drawn on it.

So he was very, he was also very thoughtful, unusual, and another mentor when I lived in Detroit.

And there's the altar, that's called altar two.

This is the first public art piece.

I was asked today, "How did I begin a career in public art?"

Well, I received an notice from the local cemetery they were gonna honor the war dead because they had every war but the American revolution.

And so I said, "Well, you need a fallen leaf because all the elms were going too."

And so this is, I'm working in clay on the leaf and the cemetery association said, "Okay, this is a great idea," and they gave me four plots.

So I moved to New York in 1981, and in 1987, I submitted for a national competition for the busiest transit intersection in the world, Herald Square under Macy's.

And this was a drawing, again, hearkening back to Detroit and what I knew, Pewabic tiles, 11,000 gold luster tiles.

And I won this competition because, with just a paragraph, I said, "I wanted to create an inversion.

I want to descend into light instead of darkness."

So I called it "Radiant Sight", and it's still there after 30 years, and it's really been a joyful project.

I also was interested in, as they say the sky, but astronomy, and that's a science notebook from junior high school.

And then I saw how messy the exit entrance to the Hayden Planetarium was.

And I proposed, this is an architectural model, that they do something that looked better.

And I remembered how Cranbrook had such a nice planetarium.

So they got a patron to pay for it, and Celestial Plaza was installed, a very magical piece.

So that was the first time I imagined a floor as a canvas.

And this is from Miami Airport.

So you see the spiral motif, and this is working there to put the mother of pearl in.

I'm a working artist, I mean, I really often say I'm a blue collar artist because I really have to go on construction sites and I really understand how things are made.

It's looking down, so this started 1990 and it took 30 years because they kept adding more concourses, more gates.

These are weather patterns, and with the galaxy, that black and white one, and the weather patterns, I did get a call from the county asking me if I was promoting the notion of hurricanes, so.

And this is salt, I couldn't say we're in salt water.

It's called a walk on the beach, but I represented the salt from a book of microscopic photography that showed how the crystals line up on the axis.

And these are seeds, this goes back to the seeds.

And palms, remember the shade.

So all these things I saw have been following me and I have been playing with them really, I guess I could say they're all in my sandbox, and this form, which I love too, is spiral, the movement.

It's such a wonderful, universal kind of energy, which comes from a center.

Now these pieces, this is an ancient kiln from the Nymphenburg Palace.

And I was invited to, they were decommissioned 'cause they were peat, to do installations, and I made soul catchers.

And it was a very interesting project.

I think that's Sculpture Magazine here, yes, they were the cover of Sculpture Magazine.

and this was the other kiln.

I called it "Distraught Goddess and her Prophecy" because everything, everybody looked so frightened, But it was also frightening, there were things about the kilns.

They were used by the Nazis not for the making the gloves, the models, they basically said, "Make a transformation, do something."

And so, and I thought of the Hellman, the philosopher, and how he said that the world has a soul, and that's how the soul catchers came, and then we have the prophets.

And this is a piece that's in the Biza, I made for Gila Liberte, the Circ de Sole magician, was fun working for him.

He asked me to make a table and a bench where he could sit outside and with a scrim.

And I thought I can make a scrim, but he's gonna go outside.

It's the same thing every night, he's not gonna like that.

So I, so you can see what it looked like.

I said, "Well, why don't we plant?"

They have these old carene trees, these were cut back so they could be transplanted.

And I said, "But you know what?

Give me a design fee, very small, and I'll make you have an idea.

And if you don't like it, I'll take it back."

So I made these lanterns.

I figured he can have a dinner party one night and hang one in the tree or he can put, I made him 110.

And so he liked them, and he commissioned me to do some work for his house in Hawaii.

And this was a very interesting project.

This was, way up there is a round.

I'll show you what this is.

That was a hurricane tower in the Keys.

The problem was the man who bought the property had his house there, put the guest house here, and he was stuck with this concrete hurricane tower, which Monroe county told him he couldn't take down.

It was historic.

These are the calls I get, fix the kiln, take care of the tower, it is interesting.

So he said, "What would you do with it?"

So he kept saying, "What would you paint it?

What are you gonna paint it?"

I didn't know what to do with it, really.

But then I said, "It's enchanted, let's grow a trellis right out of the the fairy tales, the sleeping beauty."

So those are native cactus, snake cactus, and vanilla.

Really was very successful.

And then we found this piece of driftwood, which we stuck in there, and it survived Irma when nothing else did, it's really stuck in there.

And we called it the shaman's hut.

And inside all the shells that were excavated when he was digging were there in the turtle bones.

And now Monroe county calls him again, but they call him because he can do a turtle count, a tortoise count.

So he's now attached to the county, and you see the roots growing.

They love, the roots just love the way the stone we put in for the floor has moisture.

These are the cactus roots, and these roots are on the ceiling of the Noya Gallery.

They had exhibition called "Before the Fall".

It was about the 30s and very sad paintings.

And the director, who's a friend of mine 'cause I've done some work for their design shop, Renee Price, said, "The room is just sad and everything.

I just, I'm imagining like a tree is on the fifth floor and the roots are coming down and it's rooted."

I said, "Well, when are you imagining this is happening?"

"Six weeks."

I said, "Renee, what can I do in six weeks?"

I said, "What are you doing Sunday?"

So I got a car and we went with her dog out to the Hamptons, and I said, "Let me find some roots."

Again, it was like, who's gonna arrest us this time?

But she was up for it.

So we then found, they had pulled down all these vines from Medu, which was this garden preserve.

And the curator there actually came out and helped us.

Then they went, we had to drive them to the Bronx, leave them so they could be fumigated because she couldn't put them in the museum.

So I had about 10 days to paint them, get them wired together, and that was a fun project.

And this is an 18 foot drawing that was for glass in Miami Beach.

And it's based on seaweed, sargassum seaweed.

And here was the proposal, this is the kind of drawing I do when I do a proposal.

You have to kind of show the idea, that it doesn't go too far, and you can see I learned all these little balls, all the little bladders that make it float.

So it was very beautiful and here is the glass, and it's the intermodal center.

And even the shadows are really beautiful.

So, fossils, these are Arcona.

Cranbrook had a few, and my older son, when he was a boy, found one little brachiopod in some gravel being dumped in the neighborhood.

So we called, there was no internet yet.

We called the Ontario state police in Windsor and asked them, "Where's Arcona?"

And they said off route seven, go to Sarnia.

So we went fossil hunting.

And then this is a drawing of these fossils that we found.

And it's in a glass at the Mott Hospital here in Ann Arbor.

And this is from a book that was published by the Friends of Invertebrate Paleontology at the Mott Hospital, we're now in the 1970s.

So I come back all the time for different things.

And this is a wonderful piece of sculpture that also functions as a band shell.

This is in Dorell, Florida, and it's acoustic, and that was all done with technology.

In fact, there's been a lot of technology running through here, even though you see the hand.

The drawing that was translated to the glass all went through the computer, to the glass people.

And then this, we really took two pieces of bark, and we kept scaling them up.

And then we cut them in Merit Island, Florida, where they do all the work for Disney.

And this is the stage curtain for the ballet, Miami City Ballet.

They asked me to do sets and costumes for Midsummer, and I set it underwater thinking that the Bavarian woods was not the place anymore that people really wanted to go to in Miami.

So you'll see the sets came from the Miami Invertebrate Museum.

I did a book called "Into the Mysterium".

I went into the jars and I was allowed to take out the creatures and put them in Petri dishes and take photographs.

And that's coral castle, that was the end, the second act when there's a castle, it looked like a European castle.

So I was trying to make it Miami specific.

There's Puck wearing seaweed.

And there he is, and there's the sea, the horses, they have horses, and I used the sea horse, and there they are.

And oh, the bow, Hepilida's bow.

So that was a piece of bamboo I found in south Miami, which I cleaned up and gilded.

And there is the curtain call.

And you see what's that on top is this algae that's in the port of Miami.

When they were dredging it, somebody took photographs under water and sent me a slide.

Now, as well as the sculpture that I do, this is, wait to go back a second.

Oh no, not doing, not listening, but these are heritage projects.

That's Tiffany in Soho.

And I did 300 chandeliers, but I didn't make them all after I made the original ones.

They're all over the world, and that was a very interesting project.

So that's a partnership with Heritage Brands.

I went too fast past the Steuben reef bowl, but that was a very big success for Steuben.

And they made 55 in addition, I never thought they'd sell 'em, but they did.

And they really, I have the prototypes and I still have that's 20 years already.

I'm still playing with my fish every day.

I really love them, and then here's the chandelier.

This was for Christoffel, it's called the frond necklace, like a palm frond.

I did two collections for them, and the prototype for this is in the Louvre.

And then these are Nymphenburg where we did the kilns.

These were a commission for 50 plates for a 50th birthday.

And then I just did this this summer, I'm in Florence at Genori, they have a reborn project.

And so they had lots of stock that nobody wanted, it was outta date, it didn't sell, changes were made.

And so they sent me a lot of material, and I then went over for a week and painted for five days.

That's coming out, they have an open kiln, which was amazing.

You can see how big, big, big, big the place was.

And then that's my dining room table, because those are Pewabic plates that I made once I did Herald Square.

And that was back to 1990, but I made a set of plates there And the Candle Cerebella.

The company just had its 160th anniversary in Barcelona.

And I've worked with them 25 years and they are beautiful.

They ask me to do something for the anniversary, but I really have been so busy that I haven't been able to finish them.

And I said I would get them there, the year is a long year.

So I'm still working on that.

This is how I caught a swallow in midair.

Now, how did I do that?

That's the siano type.

I did it so long ago I can't remember how I did it.

So that was the name of the exhibition at the Perez.

And there was a video of the airport and some sculpture, and behind me is an eight foot wonderful handmade paper and then prints that I did in St. Louis.

They have eight foot presses there and it's wonderful to go work there for a week.

There's another one of these eight foot pieces, that one's in the Whitney.

You can see the early Ann Arbor doll.

And this is the first piece I made in ceramics, 1964 that piece is.

The curator said, "Why don't you choose 40 pieces that you feel represent your studio?"

So I can't believe I could go back to 1964, and yet that was just one of those things that I made it and I understood that I could make that translation.

So what I've kept for myself over the years are what I call the aha moments, and that's what's here.

So in the exhibition, he chose 40 pieces, but he said, "You've got all this stuff all over the studio.

Can't we just like bring in a shadow exhibition?

'Cause if I go past 40 pieces, you're gonna give the registrar a nervous breakdown."

So I packed up all kinds of things and I did a shadow exhibition.

So this was a glyph.

And remember, there may be lots of slides, but when I did the Detroit Institute, I had page one and page two, these glyphs on the floor.

So someone I knew came by and saw it and called me up and said, "I'm starting a publishing company in Miami and this looks like a story.

And can you write a story and I'll publish it?"

I said, "Well, I can do it, but not 'till January."

"No," she said, "I need to get going."

So I said, "Well, find a writer.

I'm very happy to let you use it as an illustration."

So she commissioned a story and then she didn't like it.

I thought it was great.

And I said, "I'm so busy right now, but I tell you what I can do for you.

F is for face, M is for mask, S for skull."

So it became the intuitive alphabet.

When I tell you this book, 20 minutes I sat with her, started pulling out these images, and we got stuck on J, K and L, but otherwise I had everything.

And I love the B is for body, I have a lot of bodies, but they look like Greek sculpture to me, they're so beautiful.

And then the E is for eagle, and just giving you a taste of it.

And what happened with the book is she printed a beautiful edition and a special edition.

And it's now in Oxford at the Bodleian Library with the Sumerian alphabet, the hieroglyphics, the Cuneiform, every alphabet, because it's the intuitive alphabet.

So when I was there about three years ago, I gave a master class and they had laid out all the alphabets, and it was really wonderful to see the intuitive alphabet find its place.

And this was an exhibition in Detroit, at Wassermann projects, 2018.

And again, back to the writing, and you can see it was a wonderful thing to come back, and it was the 40th anniversary of the exhibition at the DIA.

So I reinstalled that piece and added a piece.

And these are the wild wood press, the ones in St. Louis.

So you see them not as background, but to work on an eight foot press is just so exciting.

And what I do is I use organic material, and I'm kind of fearless with and ferocious sometimes and just play with it.

And the pieces of are very, they hold their ground and they've gone all over the world.

Now this is also Wassermann, the exhibition.

And you see there's a doll we put in.

And then this was Marsha Music.

Do you know who she was?

She was in the wonderful Detroit presence.

She was in "The Valkyrie", which just was brilliant in the Detroit Garage Opera.

But she somehow been following me, so I met her.

And when I came to Detroit to look at the space, and then she wanted, she said, "I'm a writer, I'm a poet, I'm a musician."

So she wrote a beautiful piece and she called me the root woman, bears the imprint of this place of river, earthen structure, and unencumbered sky.

Now, she didn't see all the slides you did, but she could read that fossils of worldliness, the dialogues of Detroit.

And I thought it was such a wonderful tribute.

And this is more recent, like the last, right before COVID.

There's a drawing and it became a wax, and they are ceremonial doors that were done for Yana Peil, who was director of the serpentine.

And you can see the site, it's a house on McDougal, and it's a historic house and the doors were very small.

And so they left that entrance legally.

And then they had to do something really more ceremonial.

I also tried to do a threshold.

When I look at some of these project commissions, I see how far I could have gone with them.

But I've learned how to be flexible and to just enjoy how far some of these can go with these ideas.

This was just installed yesterday without me, because this talk was on the books and they rented the cranes when they could get them.

And it's a seven foot drawing of the cross section of an aspen tree.

And we translated it, I had to paint the wall.

I went out once, I went out twice, and there's the truck leaving.

And I'll be leaving tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM on a plane following that truck.

And then here is something that I go to in two weeks, I'm working on a wax in the foundry, and they're putting the patina on.

And what this is, it's a commission for the main square of Malta.

And so it'll be installed in Valletta, and the ceremony there is October 14th.

So now you're kind of right up to date.

And these you can recognize if you hang out in Ann Arbor.

And these were the, in a way, the first of the large sculptures.

And the bench, we all recognize, it's an Ann Arbor bench.

And I have friends on the bench, and I had a friend in Penny Stamps.

And my friend Penny Stamps loved the Michigan marching band.

So I think that, in honor of Roe being here, and Penny and Roe's great generosity, we are gonna have a treat, thank you.

(audience applauding) (marching band playing upbeat music) (marching band playing frantic, upbeat music) (marching band playing exciting music) (audience cheering) (marching band playing cheery music) (audience cheering) (marching band playing upbeat music) (audience cheering) (marching band playing upbeat music) (audience cheering) - Yeah, what, yeah, what, yeah!

(marching band playing exciting music) (marching band exclaiming) (audience cheering) (marching band playing upbeat music) (audience cheering) (marching band playing gentle upbeat music) (marching band playing upbeat music) (audience cheering) (audience murmuring)