[ Music playing ] Woman: Tonight's event celebrates Nell Irvin Painter's brand-new book "I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays."

This book gathers more than 40 essays and dozens of visual works from Dr. Painter's academic and artistic career.

Painter: You all know about Huey Newton, right?

Woman: Yes.

Painter: I was in high school with Huey Newton.

[ Laughter ] Woman: I love it.

Narrator: Nell Irvin Painter is a sought-after scholar, a guest on everything from "The Colbert Report" to Ken Burns' "The U.S. and the Holocaust."

Painter: And we are a democracy.

And in our better moments, we are very good people.

Narrator: She chairs the board of the prestigious MacDowell artist colony in New Hampshire.

Now the writer, historian, and artist is on the road for her new book, "I Just Keep Talking."

Painter: I'm going to Maplewood.

I'm going to Princeton.

I'm going to Brooklyn.

I'm going to Philadelphia.

I have the Columbia Journalism School.

I have Claire Potter's podcast.

I have the Newark Public Library.

Narrator: The acclaimed "Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol," written while Nell was a professor of history at Princeton University, has just been reissued.

Now Nell focuses on some of the same issues in her art.

Painter: So often, when we think about Black lives in the United States, we think about hardship, even trauma.

And on the one hand, I was spared that.

That's why I say I had a charmed life.

And I was recognized for the work I did.

Not every woman can say that.

Not every Black woman, especially, can say that.

Narrator: After decades as an esteemed professor of American history at Princeton University, Nell Painter embarked on a new chapter -- to become a practicing artist.

Her PhD from Harvard alone couldn't get her into a good MFA program, so at the age of 64, the author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling "The History of White People," enrolled as an undergraduate at the Mason Gross School of the Arts.

She followed that up by getting her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and writing about it in "Old in Art School."

Painter: I work in two different ways -- as an artist and as a historian.

I don't toggle from one to the other.

I do visual things because it takes a while to loosen up the relationship between the hand and the eye.

It's not like I could write for a few hours and then turn around and make some art for a few.

It really means shifting gears.

So, in the last years or so, I have been writing, but I took time out in '22.

I had a month's residency at Yaddo, and I made some new images to go with Sojourner Truth.

Sojourner Truth taught me to heed and love visual images.

So, everything we know about her in words comes from other people.

It's what we call mediated.

And it's all over the place.

"Oh, she was terribly smart."

"Oh, she was just a quaint little darky."

"Oh, she was powerful."

"Oh, she was just religious."

So, I'm trying to figure out, how does she think of herself?

What does Sojourner Truth want us -- How does Sojourner Truth want us to see her and think about her?

And the answer was in the photographs.

She had her photographs taken, and she sold them.

And the legend is, "I sell the shadow to support the substance."

So, it started with the failure of words, and it got into the pleasure of images.

What so many Americans know about Sojourner Truth is "Ain't I a Woman?"

Most people know "ain't" instead of "aren't," and she didn't say that.

If you want to remember Sojourner Truth, remember her as the patron saint of self-published authors, as the patron saint of knitters, as a great American activist.

But don't sum her up in words she didn't say.

In 2020, I came out of the closet as a knitter.

We were stuck up in the Adirondacks for a really extended period and missing my friends in Newark, like Adrienne Wheeler.

So I made Adrienne a pair of socks, and I made an art piece called "I Knit Socks for Adrienne," which combines text and image.

"'I Knit Socks for Adrienne "is the most personally declarative piece of art "I have ever made, "more personal even than self-portraits, "precisely because it's personally declarative in words "that wrench the artist Nail Painter "out of the closet as a knitter.

"For a long time, I stayed closeted as a knitter.

"I previously thought, 'Let you see me as an artist, "'as a historian, as an artist who uses history, "'not let you see me as a knitter, a craftswoman, "'an old lady sitting around with her needles and yarn.'

"That mental image wasn't one I had been able to expose.

"But 2020 opened my closet door "to reveal me knitting to hold myself together.

"There was all the death, "searing, painful deaths by the hundreds of thousands, especially of Black people."

And then returning to Sojourner Truth, and the image that I used on "Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol" and that you see very, very often is Sojourner Truth holding her knitting.

Just the ability to see, to focus on, to talk about Sojourner Truth as a knitter is something I can do now that I couldn't do in the '90s.

When I was a little kid, my teachers told my parents, "Nell talks too much!"

[ Laughs ] I just keep talking.

As a historian, I got my PhD in 1974 at Harvard.

And I was very productive.

I've written books.

You know, I've done everything you need to do.

But for a long time, I felt like I wasn't being read.

Part of this is because of the -- well, I'll call it a prejudice against citing Black women.

It got enough of a reception to get me promoted and tenured in three years and a full professor again in another three years.

So, it worked out.

But to have the feeling that I was reaching people -- I didn't have that.

But rather than just say, "Well, I'm not getting through," I just kept talking.

I just kept writing.

I just kept publishing.

And finally, I'm getting through.