- [Announcer] Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(audience applauding) - Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

My name's Christina Hamilton, the series director, and today we bring you something a little bit different.

We have four presenters with us today who will take the stage in three separate segments as we explore radical conversations.

Conversations such as how do we take control of our own narrative through conversation and build the future that we want together?

How do we foster honest, caring and courageous conversations?

And how do artists respond to these questions with their work?

In a time that we find ourselves in a profound division, embracing diverse perspectives, becomes the catalyst that we need for change.

And as a democracy, conversation is essential to find a shared vision.

So, today our guests are going to guide us through from theory to practice to action in finding our way.

Big thank you to our partners today as this is presented in partnership with our dear partner UMMA or the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

This is also part of Vote 24 and the Creative Campus Voting Project with UMICH Votes and as part of the year of democracy, civic empowerment and global engagement.

And of course, we thank our series partners, Detroit, PBS, PBS Books, WNET's ALL ARTS, and Michigan Public.

Highlighting our great partner, UMMA today.

If you don't already know, UMMA is currently home to the campus Voting hub, which is open, and if you're Ann Arbor, you can register to vote there.

You can update your registration address.

Very important to students in the house who may have moved since last time.

You can get a ballot there and you can vote there on site.

Currently you can vote with an absentee ballot on site and soon it will be open for early voting.

And did we mention the Voting Hub is beautiful?

It was actually designed by the Campus Creative Voting Project, which is led by our very own Stamps faculty, Stephanie Rowden and Hannah Smotrich, along with many of our students who have worked with them on it.

So, you should definitely check it out.

It's open Monday through Friday, noon to six or you can go to govote.umesh.edu for more information.

One more little announcement here tonight, before we get started.

This is for all the Stamps students in the house.

Stamps, you now have a student-led exhibition committee and they're inviting all students tonight to a painting party from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM.

This is in the Art and Architecture Building in the Work Commons.

This is a newly informed group of students, aiming to create more opportunities for you undergrads to exhibit your work on campus.

Tonight's gatherings open to all of you.

You're gonna create some ink paintings that could become part of an exhibition at the Stamps Gallery later this year.

So, if you want your work up in the Stamps Gallery, show up at Art and Architecture at 8:00 PM tonight.

Supplies and food provided.

Please do remember to silence your cell phones.

Due to time constraints today with all of our robust guest, robust roster of guests, we are not gonna have our normal Q and A, but I do encourage you to visit Philippa Hughes's installation, Hey, we need to talk currently at the museum where you can ask lots of questions and now to orient you on how today is gonna roll out.

And for some words of introduction on each of our guests, please welcome UMMA's deputy director for public experience and learning and one of our very own as a Stamp school alum, Jim Leija.

(audience applauding) - Hi everybody.

Okay, raise your hand if you have a voting plan or you voted already, raise your hand.

Okay, look around.

Bravo, I am very proud of you, and if you're sitting next to someone who doesn't have their hand raised, help them figure out their voting plan.

And if you didn't raise your hand, come to UMMA tomorrow or Saturday or next week and figure out what you're gonna do.

Whether you vote here in Michigan or you want to vote in your home state, we can help you figure out how to do that, okay?

Alright.

So, I'm Jim and I'm here to tell you a little bit about the format for today's presentation.

First, we'll see U of M, professor of public policy, Jenna Bednar, who's gonna offer us a framing theory, about human flourishing, which is gonna guide the rest of the presentation.

Next we're gonna hear from socially engaged artist, Pablo Helguera.

And finally, artists, Philippa Pham Hughes and Lexa Walsh will bring us a call to action.

And all together they're gonna ask us to reflect on the essence of American identity.

What does it mean to be an American right now and to envision pathways to a flourishing society?

I've gotta give some words of introduction.

These are all really amazing folks that we're gonna hear from today.

Jenna Bednar, our very own here at U of M, is a political scientist whose work explores themes of civic engagement, institutional design and the interplay between individual agency and systemic structures.

Her research is on the analysis of institutions focusing on the theoretical underpinnings of the stability of federal states.

She's the faculty director of UMICH Votes and democratic engagement.

And in this role, she oversees the non-Partisan UMICH Votes Coalition, whose mission is to improve the accessibility of voting on campus.

And she's co-chair of the Year of Democracy Steering Committee.

Next, Pablo Helguera is a Mexico city born artist, now based in New York, who explores a wide array of mediums including installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance, often intertwining themes of history, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd.

His work spans from lectures and museum installations to musical performances and written fiction.

Notably his project, the School of Pan-American Unrest, exemplifies his blend of art and education, involving a 20,000 mile journey from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

Helguera has exhibited and performed globally from the Museum of Modern Art to Museo de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and has been recognized with a Guggenheim fellowship and grants from institutions, like creative capital and art matters.

He's the author of several books and writes a regular column called Beautiful Eccentrics.

Next, Philippa Hughes, who is UMMA's visiting artists for arts and civic engagement.

Her artistic endeavors celebrate human connection and dialogue, creating spaces that encourage diverse communities to engage in transformative experiences, her installations, events and curated environments, foster environments where honesty, empathy and courage can flourish.

Hughes draws inspiration from everyday interactions and collective storytelling by challenging boundaries and amplifying marginalized voices.

Her work provokes thought, sparks dialogue, and inspires action towards a more inclusive and compassionate society.

Her exhibition and social engagement platform, Hey, We Need to Talk, is open through January, 2025 at the museum.

And last, but certainly not least, is Lexa Walsh who uses her background in both sculpture and social practice to make site specific projects as exhibition, publications and objects, using an array of materials and employing social engagement, institutional critique and radical hospitality.

She creates platforms for interaction across hierarchies, representing multiple voices and inventing new ways of belonging.

Walsh has exhibited and performed internationally for over 25 years at institutions large and small and in public spaces.

And with that, we're gonna move on to the program and I'm gonna bring Jenna Bednar to the stage.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) - Well, hello.

Hello, Michigan Theater.

How are you all?

- [Audience] Woo.

- Oh, okay.

Woo.

That's that's good.

It's good to know you're out there, because I have to say, these lights make it impossible to see you, so I trust that people are there.

So, I'm gonna talk about human social flourishing and when I was invited, this was such an honor to be here, to give this, I was just thinking a little bit about who you all might be.

And I have a feeling that just because you're here today, you're also like me concerned about inequity and division in our society and our inability to make headway on the problems that are most important to us, like bolstering democracy, ending racism or most existentially sustaining our planet.

And there's a lot of anger in the air, even big hearted people.

And don't we all think that we're in that set of big hearted people, but even big hearted people like us, find ourselves reflexively disliking people that we've never met.

And most often it's because we hear that they vote differently than we do, because you decided to attend an event with the word radical in it, you may already be of the view that's what's needed is a shift in worldview.

So, we have a mindset of competition and scarcity, which has led to fear and distrust.

Our society has become transactional.

We value others for what we may gain, through that interaction with them.

And if we don't see the possibility of gain, then we have no interest in investing in others, in listening to them, in caring for them.

If we're going to move from this dissatisfying world to one that's better, it will take a shift in this worldview.

And that in turn requires a shift in our norms, in our sense of collective responsibility and the rebuilding of our innate human tendency to care for others.

So, it's not that the whole world is terrible, in fact, we could very easily, quickly generate a list of really amazing things.

But I don't know that any of us would say all is well with us despite that so much is well with us.

Many of us in Ann Arbor are well and yet we don't feel that way.

And so my job as a social scientist, before I can rush to a remedy, is to sort out what that problem is.

And there's all kinds of symptoms, right?

So when you say what's causing this malaise or worse, we people say, oh, it's the access to drugs, it's violent media, it's our sense of busyness, right?

It's what's happening on social media.

It's because of the people who are on social media, but it's possible that those are also symptoms.

And so in thinking about this, maybe it's possible that we're in a state of misplaced priorities and that could be driven by the way or is it really a question, could that be driven by the way that our political economy has shaped those priorities?

So, our political economy, which emphasizes efficiency, which emphasizes this drive to get the things we want at the lowest prices that has its advantages.

GDP per capita certainly is easy to measure and it's so it's easy to point to something and call it a success.

But does that capture what makes our lives meaningful?

And has this competitive mindset moved beyond the market, affecting our social selves and our democracy?

Have we become a transactional society where our interactions are based on what we as individuals and thinking as individuals might gain from it?

And then on our own end, committing as little as possible to that interaction, because that's like the lowest price analogy there.

So, if that's the case, let's think about what an alternative might be, right?

And here is where I encourage us to think about flourishing.

So sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, each in their own disciplinary way, give us clues to what makes our lives meaningful.

We long for two things to have agency and to belong.

We wanna be loved, we wanna feel needed.

And the market is surprisingly bad at providing these things.

It's not a conveyance of love and belonging and choice is not agency, right?

Being able to go to Kroger and and have all kinds of breakfast cereals that you can choose from, doesn't give anyone a sense of confident purpose.

So with flourishing, yes, it's about wellbeing, but the reason why I put social in front of it, because human flourishing is a fantastic field right now that's very alive, but it does tend to focus on an individual's, how an individual is doing, which is great.

I want to emphasize not just the I but the we, right?

Because I think it's the we that's really unwell.

And what's missing from that market frame is our relationships, our relationships to one another.

So, I propose, I just set up a frame for this to think about this building, this sense of agency and belonging in a variety of spheres of our relationships.

So dignity, community, sustainability and beauty.

These are spheres that capture the quality of our relationships to one another, our relationship to the planet and a spiritual sense in the most intimate and most grand way with beauty.

So, thinking about dignity, humans need, as we said to feel this sense of purpose and belonging, to be seen as equally valued without being identical and to be appreciated despite, and even because of our differences, I would love to get to a world where we value that difference, but humans have this need for dignity.

So, dignity begins with the relational equality.

And here I'm just gonna tip a hat to our University of Michigan colleague, Liz Anderson.

Those are the terms she put in, and where people are put at the same level, legally, socially, and morally.

And then you can take a step further and erase barriers to participation and to value and respect one another's agency.

So, in law, relational equality, means not prioritizing one person over another.

Socially, it's we a welcoming respect for others.

Morally it's the right and opportunity to be heard, as well as the moral obligation to listen.

Dignity is most clearly expressed when we include others in making decisions that affect our mutual interests.

Political dignity means respecting and valuing the participation of all qualified members of a society and not passing obstructive voting rules for example.

Pursuing dignity requires developing people's capacities to participate meaningfully, including providing quality public education.

And in the private sector, it means a stakeholder driven decision making.

Equality, especially equality of opportunity requires inclusion and integration.

So in some dignity, supports human agency through mutual respect and awareness of a shared fate and meaningful participation.

I'll go through the three other pillars a little bit more briefly.

So, if we think about community, if dignity is this quality of the relationship, between two people, community is the relationship we have with a group.

And these communities can be longstanding, they can be place-based.

We are a community in Ann Arbor.

You may have a community within your neighborhood, but you may not, right?

So, sharing location, doesn't automatically make you a community.

It can be ephemeral, it could be your participation this evening or if you're out on the diag one day, maybe participating in a protest, there's a sense of community that develops in that moment.

You may not even exchange names, but you will do things for one another.

You will support one another.

There is a sense of collective responsibility where you have agency and a sense of belonging.

Those are the kinds of communities that we are looking for.

With sustainability and this sense of respect and valuing the gifts that we have on this planet.

My concern is so that we have been told, oh, it's a global problem.

You as an individual can't make a difference.

Instead with this flourishing frame, we have agency, our actions matter, the way we navigate our lives matter and we can make choices individually and then working together to make a difference on behalf of our planet and one another in it.

And then if we think about beauty.

Beauty, which stands in for this sense of wonder, curiosity, awe, pride, even struggle, because when you are a purpose-driven agent, you feel like you're needed.

Sometimes the work is hard.

And if you come through that and you feel like you've been meaningful to someone, that's a real accomplishment.

That's beautiful.

That's a moment of beauty.

Beauty in what we construct shows respect.

I mean, this Michigan Theater is spectacular and it shows respect for what activities happen within it.

Beauty can also be disrespectful.

So, beauty can be excluding, it can convey a disregard for peoples and their pasts.

And so navigating the politics of beauty is an important thing to consider as we think about raising it up in the actions of our government.

So, and there, I just hit my hand, because I'm a public policy professor, so I like to think, okay, how can we incorporate this into what government does?

And the the first place to start is, there isn't any single way.

People say to me all the time, "Hey, how can we scale this?"

And the point really is maybe you don't scale, because we're talking about building relationships, between humans that is very context dependent and letting people find their own paths, but recognizing the how much they value these four elements of a meaningful life.

So, I'll just give you some examples though.

Two from actual public policy and then two from public policy students.

So the first, my friend Hilary Cottam, based in Britain had an opportunity to work on an experimental redesign of the welfare system in Britain.

I mean, it was a small-ish project, but with people, the concern people get caught up in bureaucracy and are forgotten.

And she had this experiment where, what if we have teams of people who can support someone in need, evaluate their particular needs, but that person is the captain of their welfare.

So, that's a flip, that is a change in the way we approach welfare proxy.

Another one, my friend Mike Johnston, who was just elected mayor of Denver, has an approach to housing where when you're moving people from temporary housing into affordable housing, very often they'll be in this transitional housing, and then as something comes available, you move them one by one.

But that breaks apart the community that has been built within that temporary housing.

People come to rely on one another.

There is a real sense of community.

And so instead he's working on a program that moves people together.

And so that is a beautiful example.

I have a student who worked on pregnant incarcerated women and showing the dignity of someone who's even in this position of, not where society seems to have forgotten them.

So, in each of these ideas and I'm gonna start wrapping up.

We see a shift in worldview from scarcity to abundance, from competition to collaboration, from scaling up to a human scale, from impossibility to possibility.

If we can close by thinking about how this relates to democracy and what democracy requires.

Democracy requires us, not to just be thinking about ourselves, but to be thinking and acting in our collective interests, bearing in mind that we will have different ideas, about what that interest might be, but building up this sense of agency.

And in this, I just wanna give a huge shout out to Philipa Hughes, whose work I respect so much and that gorgeous exhibit at UMMA where you have an opportunity to see that people across all partisan lines can respond in similar, not similar things.

There's so much we have in common and it's just a task of finding that.

So, let's close by just inhaling and exhaling and breathing in the life that we share together at this moment.

I'm so glad that we are here together in this community, this temporary community that is clearly beauty, beautiful.

I'm honored to share the stage with three people whose work helps us to remind us of the meaningfulness of our lives.

And so with that, please give it up for Pablo Helguera.

He is coming up.

(audience applauding) - Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Very honored by the opportunity to speak as part of the series and to talk to you about radical conversations.

I thought I would speak today about the expectation that we often have about art to give us comfort during times of crisis.

While I share that desire, like many others, I mainly believe that art should instead, challenge our views, not serve merely as background music of the world.

So, what does that mean?

I will try to explain with a few thoughts on the subject of discomfort.

In 1957, a psychologist named Leon Festinger, coined the term, cognitive dissonance, describing the mental discomfort that we feel when we hold to contradictory beliefs.

For example, knowing that smoking is bad and yet you rationalize your smoking, because it makes you feel good and it's not so bad, et cetera.

I'm interested in cognitive dissonance, because I feel it helps to explain the question of like, why do we want art to be radical and transformative?

But then when we are faced with a discomfort of that radicality, we tend to recoil and go back to our comfort zone.

Del dicho al hecho hay un trecho.

It's a common Spanish saying, which basically means from the talk to the walk, there's a wide gap.

Referring how things are different when they happen than when we speak about them, make us uncomfortable.

It's something that I always, as an artist heard from museum directors, foundations, curators and so forth.

Yet when I deliver that discomfort, the self-proclaimed masochism tends to go away.

I've had curators tell me that they want to make dangerous art, but when they face the danger, they get concerned about legal and safety issues and afraid of getting fired.

But I don't blame them, because I often have found myself, living within that contradiction, also wanting to change and challenge the status quo, while at the same time finding myself sometimes being afraid of that change.

Since I began my career, I have thought about this fact and my duty to act, to be uncomfortable, to make others uncomfortable if necessary for the sake of the common good, if that's what's needed.

I also found often discomfort in museums, because I worked as museum educator for many, many years.

Visitors in galleries wanted resolution for me, which instinctively they saw it.

In terms of getting an explanation, tell me what this means.

What I learned is not only that the so-called explanation, quote unquote doesn't really explain anything, but only becomes a bit of information that seemingly satisfies an urge to dismiss any questions that our work may present.

So-called explanations often become the means by which we don't have to think about art anymore.

So to offer an anecdote from art school, I was an exchange student at the University of Barcelona many years ago.

The school was very traditional with a lot of realist painters, and one day an anonymous student hung a dead de feathered chicken painted with an electric blue collar with like some kind of enamel paint that made it look like radioactive on the hallways.

There was a big debate amongst my classmates, about this provocative piece.

They all hated it and thought it was disgusting and stupid.

But then as their debate went on, I started to think to myself that I disagreed.

And I told them, you know, you might hate this piece now, but you cannot deny that it's memorable.

I bet you that 30 years from now, you will have not, you have forgotten all these paintings that we're making right now, but that blue chicken is something you will never forget.

They dismiss my comment as ridiculous, of course.

And you know, I have lost touch with my ex classmates, so I cannot verify my claim and I can be the judge of my own bet.

But I certainly have not forgotten about that blue chicken.

And I have honestly forgotten all these invitations of tapia and mural that they were making.

If anything, the incident informs my mind that sometimes art is like a riddle.

And some of the best artworks are these things that they don't give up us thinking about them.

They straddle the fine cognitive dissonance line between something that is not too intimidated for us to run away from it, but also not safe enough to altogether disregard it.

And I think it's healthy, I believe, for it to be so.

Each one of us should have a blue chicken in our minds.

Now, as I said, we learn nothing when we are simply being told something.

Learning is about reflecting and articulating our reflections, which is why I always felt we learned the most when we are engaged in looking and conversing, when we find the work that we don't think it's art, when something that makes us uneasy, trying to figure out that uneasiness is something that I find really interesting.

So I'm going to describe five, or sorry, four projects that I've done in the past that exemplify these uneasy questions that I have explored throughout my career.

And these are just some slides of like the time when I was an art educator, first at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, later at the Guggenheim Museum there.

I'm in Bilbao, but I was working for the Guggenheim Museum in New York, being a arts educator, helping others understand art, which led me to think a lot about how we explained images, who we depend on explanations.

This piece was titled Mock Turtle.

It's a piece that it's a box painted white with a hole inside of which supposedly there's a turtle, which you cannot see.

You will look into the box, there's like impossible to see anything.

However, there's a hundred exhibition labels around the piece that explains the piece to you in many different ways.

There were also guides that I produced in the exhibition, and I produced basically hundreds of exhibition education materials to explain something that you cannot see.

He was inspired on a part of a book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which you may know, "The Little Prince," where the main protagonist, which is a pilot who's lost in the desert, finds this boy, the little prince who asks him, "Draw me a lamp."

He draws, he's a terrible artist, so he cannot really draw, but he does his best.

He draws like this animal.

And the prince is like, "This is terrible, terrible lamp, make another."

He makes another, which is too small, too big, too old, too young.

He finally draws a box with a hole in it and tells him, "This is your lamp."

And the little prince is delighted.

He loves to see through the box and imagine the lamp within it.

So this was a statement about how we demand information to know, and then how we curtail the most important aspect of our humanity, which is all imagination to understand the world.

I also have created conversations that are of a political nature and are provocative and uncomfortable nature.

And I was working at a time when we played a lot with ideas of fact and fiction, and we are still working now with fact and fiction or living with fact and fiction in ways that are much more unsavory than before.

But just to explain what I did in that location, Rudolph Giuliani was the mayor of New York and had left his mayoralty, I was in New York, and he was hired by the Mexican government to assess and consult with Mexico City.

I was very offended by that think, knowing that Giuliani was such a conservative politician who had applied censorship for the arts.

And I wanted to make a piece that spoke about how conservative the culture in Mexico City's government had become.

And I went to a curator and said, "We need to do something about this."

So he said to me, "Propose an idea and will do it."

So me and a friend decided to propose a fictional symposium of cultural purification.

We send this call for papers asking for people to suggest ideas for purifying the culture in Mexico, which sounds like a really fascist idea, but people seem to love it.

And we got a lot of paper proposals.

We accepted six of those proposals, and then we wrote six other papers and we hired actors to perform them.

So we invited the real presenters and we trained these actors to read papers that were really radical in their approach.

Some of them were like super, like left wing, others were super right wing.

One was like a western civilization.

Interesting, like wanted to do like turn out museums, Mexican museums to Greek museums.

Another one just wanted to turn every museum into folk art museums.

And their proposals were so ridiculous.

We thought we would just show the whole gamut of extreme ideas about art in this symposium.

But we presented it as a completely real symposium because people knew me from organizing public programs in museums.

Nobody thought that this was a fiction.

So we found a space in a hotel in Mexico City downtown to hold a entire conference.

It ran like an exact like conference where the presenters started with his panels.

And immediately you could see the contrast.

I mean, and the real panelists were really freaked out by the extreme ideas that, so some other fellow presenters were having, which the real presenters did not know that this was happening.

So we created great deal of confusion and anger and strong responses from the participants.

One of my high school friends played a a local politician who was defending local culture.

Another friend from Austria read a paper about the failures of Mexican education, which was really devastating for everybody in the audience thinking he was an Austrian scholar who had done all these research on Mexican education.

So in the end, one of the real presenters went to the press and said like, this was really alarming because one of the other last presenters, an American proposed that the US should basically run Mexican culture.

And the debate unfolded in the press.

And part of my points in this project was to show how influential an idea can feel when it feels authoritative, when it's actually being given from a stage and how we don't tend to question them.

And this was the purpose of this particular symposium.

But I have also done much smaller and more intimate, uncomfortable conversations with individuals.

This was a much quieter project I did in Chinatown in New York City.

It was in a very small alternative space that two friends, curator friends had, and they invited me.

It was basically one room.

In Chinatown at the time and still today there's a lot of small, like room size spaces where they read you cards.

So I thought I would do a card reading parlor, inviting people to get a free read, a reading for a dollar.

And I created a set of cards that I would read to people kind of tarot style.

And I would tell the individual that this was an artwork right beforehand.

But what I was using is my knowledge as an educator that whenever you make an emotional relationship with an object, with any object, the relationship changes.

In other words, if you see this image, you might not think anything of it.

But if I tell you this image represents your childhood, then you immediately start thinking about connections with your own personal life.

And tarot reading tends to be kind of like a very personal, almost like form of therapy where the participants, even if I told them that this was a game, they will take it very seriously that the images that they had selected, that I was attaching to notions of love, death, childhood, and so forth, became enormously meaningful to them.

So it was an example of how you can construct relationships and dialogues that can take somebody to places that they did not anticipate they will go to.

And I had really wonderful experiences with people who came to me to confess really personal issues and things that had changed, that were decisions that were making about changing their lives.

So I realized how through small ways we can create as artists, processes where we can instigate and welcome change and personal transformation.

But I could talk about many different projects that I have done in the past.

And mainly to say that, well the largest project I did in my life was based a lot on conversations.

It was the School of Panamerican Unrest.

It's a project that I did in 2006 where I drove from Alaska to Chile through the entirety of the Pan American highway is 20,000 miles to have conversations and dialogues with individuals about the very idea and notion of being American in the large sense of the word.

I created this schoolhouse structure that I carried with me.

It was important to me to have a space, an autonomous space of my own where and have these conversations and invite people to engage with me on questions such as, what makes you American, what makes you Canadian, what makes you Mexican?

What makes you Chilean?

And how is that manifesting in your artwork?

And it became a really interesting way to help people think about themselves.

It also was one of the first, one of the last piece projects ever made before the age of social media.

Because we had no Facebook, we had no Twitter.

We basically had a blog where we posted or proceedings on our communications.

It also generated really interesting tensions because of who I was perceived to be or who I am being a white Mexican artist who lives in New York, which manifested differently in every country, every place I went, Guatemala and Mexico have a complex sometimes tense relationship.

The same that Mexico in the US and in places like Venezuela, which was at the time being run by Ugo Chavez, who was in his first reelection campaign, he had promoted idea of a Pan-American state in the same way that I was promoting it.

So many people were thinking that I was a pro Chavez apologist, while the other half of the participants thought that I was like an American pro bush administration defender.

But my interest was really to be a catalyst of conversation and to invite individuals to share their thoughts and to document those thoughts.

So it was a very difficult tension at times where people wanted me to be an educator to teach thing to lecture them instead of be a listener that will document their ideas.

It was like the tension that we sometimes have as artists when we propose a format of interlocution.

But in this long project, what I also learned was that the most meaningful conversations are the ones that you can have with those who are yearning to have one.

And this happened to me in Asuncion, in Paraguay, which is an incredible country.

Bilingual people speak Guaraní, which is the indigenous language there, as well as Spanish.

It's a very impoverished country, one of the poorest in Latin America.

But they were so excited that an artist was coming from elsewhere to see them because they felt that every artist will just go to Europe or the United States and never to Paraguay.

And that's where I learned also that the places that need us the most, you know, is where we should go.

That's where that gives us meaning as well as artists as where we can create meaningful conversations.

So, these projects I have presented, I sought to explore past and present myths that we often do not question the voice of the institution or relationship with our national identity.

How memory is fallacious and creative, how national myths are forged through our collective process and how we can't and should not entirely disassociate ourselves from our past, especially when these past contains dark chapters.

The projects that I did came from a process of research and exploration, embodying the notion of unrest, and conscientizaçã which is a term created by the educator Paolo Freire, Brazilian educator that refers to critical consciousness, allowing others to reflect about a problem and do something about it.

Carl Jung wrote about how during difficult times, these experiences can lead to profound self understanding.

Søren Kierkegaard explored how individuals are forced to confront their true selves and make meaningful choices when facing existential dread of suffering.

And Audrey Lorde in the Cancer Journals discuss how her battle with cancer led to deeper insights about herself and her activism.

Rebecca Solnit, in "A Field Guide of Getting Lost and Hope in the Dark," explores how moments of uncertainty and crisis can lead to creative breakthroughs and personal enlightenment.

This is what I hope art can give us during moments of struggle, not escapism, but a room for reflection.

One that can be at times challenging, but also enlightening.

Albert Camus once said, "My generation knows that it will not reform the world, but its task is perhaps even greater.

It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself."

In a similar fashion, I believe that as artists today, we seek to build models of thinking and dialogue to help us imagine what is possible, one conversation at a time.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) Thank you.

And now before you go, we're not done because you have, we are gonna welcome Philippa Hughes and Lexa Walsh for something completely different.

(audience applauding) - Thank you, thank you so much.

All right, everybody.

- Hello.

- First you heard a little bit of theory, you heard a little bit of practice.

Now we're gonna have some action.

You might notice that there's some people walking around, passing things out.

Just hold them in your hand for now.

- Do not open, please.

Your action right now is inaction, please.

- Yep, pass 'em down the rows.

This is a little fun, exciting thing we've got planned for you because we want you to experience what we've been talking about earlier tonight.

What does it mean to make a connection to each other?

And we're gonna like create a little experience for you.

Let's click it.

- Patience.

- Okay.

- It's a good sound.

- Good job, you're being patient.

- Pretty good, huh?

- I know, if you've been to UMMA recently, you might recognize some of this.

(upbeat music) Okay, I think I see somebody opening up your package.

Don't do it yet.

- There's good reason for all of this.

Just hold tight, hold tight.

We want everybody to get them first.

These are very special cookies, if you know what I mean.

- [Lexa] Not that kind of special.

Hey, do you mind turning it down in the back so we can chat?

I wanna know Philippa, about your first food memory.

- [Philippa] Yeah, you know, when I was in fifth grade, I opened a restaurant in the basement of my parents, of our home.

And I put up little signs around the neighborhood and I advertised macaroni and cheese.

My specialty was grilled cheese sandwiches and I charged money.

Nobody came, it was really sad.

- Not even your siblings?

- Well, so my uncle came, he left a tip.

It was really cute.

How about you?

What's your first food memory?

- Well, I am the youngest of 15 kids, so we had dinner.

- 15?

- We had dinner in stations so the little kids would eat first.

And then my brothers who came back from sports practice and then my older sisters who were AAU swimmers.

And then finally my parents would lock themselves in the kitchen and have dinner.

So.

- Wow.

- But I also had a nightclub in my bedroom that was with my nephews, and we had a charge card and my brother still owes $8 for the ice teas and PB and Js.

- So I hope you're charging him interest.

All right, does everybody have a cookie?

If you don't raise your hand.

Yeah, awesome, all right.

- All right, ah, we've got cookies also.

- So, okay, let's switch that slide and everybody, everybody open your cookies.

Hard to open.

- Don't throw your trash on the floor, please.

- Yes, do not throw your trash on the floor.

Break open your cookies and inside the cookie you'll find a little prompt and the prompt is actually taken directly.

It's inspired by professor Bednar's paper that she talked about on flourishing.

Do you remember that she said that there are four pillars of flourishing, community, dignity, sustainability, and beauty.

So each of these prompts is related to one of those pillars.

So what we want you to do is turn to a neighbor.

I know some of you don't like this kind of thing, but honestly, it's really fun.

It's just turn to a neighbor.

And then some of you who are not sitting next to somebody, you could even like, move over and have a little chat.

We're gonna talk for two or three minutes based on this prompt.

So here we go, everyone, come on, it's really fun.

Ready?

Go.

Thank you so much.

- That was amazing.

- That was really wonderful.

Thank you for doing that and for really engaging with each other.

I really wish we could have some of you come up here and tell us what you talked about.

So maybe a little later we can chat about it in the lobby, but we wanna tell you a little bit about our projects.

You know, you're probably wondering why we even did that little project with the cookies.

And the reason is because we are both artists who work in the medium of food and dialogue and relationships between people.

And so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my project called "Hey, We Need to Talk," which is at UMMA.

I am the visiting artist for art and civic engagement.

And I developed this project to bring people together in difficult conversations that are honest, courageous, and let's dare I say radical conversations.

Because as you know, we live in very polarized times and people refuse to speak to each other.

They refuse to talk to somebody who's on the other team or who wears a different jersey.

I'm trying to appeal to your Michigan, I went to a football game a couple weeks ago and I was like, oh my God, you people are really radical about your team.

And what I tried to do was create a space in the museum that I call a social sculpture.

And the idea is to create a space that is, that makes you go, whoa, where am I, I have stepped into something different.

And it I feel a sense of awe and wonder because when one, when people feel a sense of awe, they feel more connected to each other.

And so I want people to enter this space and immediately feel connected to each other so that we can get to the point where we can start having the kinds of conversations that are necessary to repair the social fabric of our country.

And those kinds of conversations can happen in this space.

Now, I wanna just go back real quick though, to tell you like, how did I get to this point where I was creating something like that in the museum in this particular place.

So eight years ago after the 2016 election, I was kind of upset about the result.

And so my instinct was to invite people over for dinner, people who didn't vote like me because I wanted to ask them my own questions.

I just wanted to understand.

And it was amazing.

But the problem was we just argued right from the minute people came through the door and you know, that's not so great, but it was still a really, it was still a fun dinner.

And you know, by the way, I tried to make red and blue foods to, because, and I even thought that like, if I cooked food for people, they might not call me a libtard anymore.

And so I came up with this idea, I'm gonna cook red and blue foods and bring us all together.

I made a blueberry and cherry crisp.

Yeah, okay, for dessert.

Anyway, so I kept doing that over and over in my home and I got this amazing opportunity to travel around the country.

It was for a project called Looking for America, where I organized pretty large dinners in museums across the country like Anchorage.

I went to Anchorage, Alaska, I went to El Paso, Texas.

And the more I started understanding how powerful art could be for bringing people together, the more I realized like this was where I wanted to be sort of the leader in bringing people together through the arts.

Because I know that the arts have transformative power.

You've probably heard, I don't know, we all kind of probably agree art, the transformative power of art.

You've probably heard people say that before, but have you felt it?

Like, can you explain it?

I cannot explain it, but I feel it.

And that's what I've tried to do in this at UMMA, is create a space where we feel something different, something more powerful than just us that make us feel that we are part of something bigger than just us.

And so I really hope you all will come over to UMMA to visit and check it out.

Let us know how you feel when you get there.

There's some interactive things that happen.

And so anyway, that's how it all started.

That's how I started using food.

Oh, I'm sorry, I have to mention one more thing.

So in this gallery space, we host a weekly meal with people who are politically diverse.

And that happens every week in the gallery with eight people.

And it's been amazing.

We have amazing stories to tell about what's happened after each meal.

And so I, I'll share one more with you about that, but I just wanted to turn it over to Alexa so that she can share a little bit about like, how did food first become part of your art practice?

- Well, it was not through my parents' cooking, unfortunately, but when I was in graduate school in the early, I guess it was 2009, I became the chef for the Monday night lecture series.

And everybody started asking me, why don't you just incorporate food in your practice?

I was like, oh no, those are separate things.

And thanks to our friend Tinos and down here, director of UMMA, she brought me in to be the social practice artist and residence at the Portland Art Museum.

And there I started a meal series called Meal Ticket, where I had a non-hierarchical meal among Portland Art Museum staff.

And it was every week for four months.

And so, you know, a curator would sit across from a visitor experience guide and a janitor might sit across from a security guard and so on.

And I would make all the food and serve it.

And it was just a chance for them to sort of sit at the same table.

And it was in the boardroom, which was also a place where a lot of them were not invited normally.

But I also always use a recipe exchange as kind of the basis for my conversation.

It's basically a conversation prompt, because a recipe can be a set of instructions for anything, and a recipe tells so much about, it's just a prompt for storytelling about family, about culture, about values.

So that recipe exchange turned into a community cookbook in a very cute folded napkin style.

And that has led now to the tea talks that I do, which are basically taking meal ticket and putting them with people who are likely in disagreement.

So I've done tea talks with activists who use different tactics I've done them with, or tried to do it with taxi drivers and Uber drivers, but the taxi drivers threatened to punch the Uber drivers and the Uber drivers didn't show up.

I did do it with Airbnb hosts and tenants rights activists, and also with artists and tech workers.

And I'm currently doing them with veterans and civilians.

And this opportunity for an intimate meal is an opportunity to have a conversation that just might not happen otherwise and can break down barriers.

I think it's really important.

I know you agree that to just allow for a conversation so that there can be understanding is essential.

What you do with that understanding is up to you, that becomes kind of your own objective.

- Yeah, and the thing I often tell people when they come to the dinners that I've been hosting at the museum is that we might not be able to find common ground actually in this moment, that is not our goal because we've gone beyond the ability to do that in this moment.

All we wanna do is just to see each other as human beings again, and to care about each other.

I often say that I have, I work in an aesthetic of care and delight because we have to begin with care before we can even have a difficult conversation.

That's where it begins.

- And don't you think facilitation is a really important part of that?

Intimacy is an important part of that.

And also not revealing what the politics are or not labeling the people in the talks.

So I think both of us do that, and I think that's the most important thing to both of us, is that you do not set up an expectation by saying, I'm a whatever.

- Yeah, I very much am against labels in many ways, but especially political labels, in part because our political, what political party you belong to or whatever, it's, for me, not the most, it's the least important thing about a person.

And so, as we know, like once you put that label on somebody, it creates a whole set of perceived characteristics and walls.

And walls, yeah.

And so, yeah, no, we enter the conversations there.

I wanted to draw out this idea of intimacy there.

I think we both organize quite small gatherings and for me it's in part because it's a way to really be, to really get to know somebody.

And I know that sounds so sort of obvious, but I think we've kind of forgotten that about how to have relationships with people.

We've forgotten that I just need to know who you are first before I can talk about gun policy or any of those other difficult things that we know we're gonna disagree on.

- And I also think with an intimate group, you don't have the gang mentality, you don't feel threatened.

There's just, if it's two people, four people, six people, we can just have a real conversation as fellow humans, as fellow Americans in these cases.

And again, we're not looking to convince anybody of anything, but you might be surprised at how much common ground you actually have as humans.

Wow, imagine that we are surprised by that.

But we are in these settings.

- One place that I do think we differ just a teeny bit.

So when I organize, when I host a dinner, I try to as moderate, as lightly as possible.

Because one thing that I know is that I have constructed a pretty artificial environment in a museum.

And once you leave the museum, then what?

How do you have those kinds of difficult conversations when you are outside of the museum walls?

And so for me, the meals that happen in the museum, it's almost like a way to one, see that's even possible to have a conversation like that, but two, to sort of start practicing.

It's like a muscle to start working out a little bit and just to show that it's possible.

And here's the first step.

But once you get outside the walls, that's where it's gonna really matter.

Especially when we're talking about democracy and policy.

It's not enough to just talk to each other.

You've gotta take that to the next level, build that relationship so that you can actually affect change in the world.

- And I think it is become sort of a toolbox and maybe you practice with these tools at home, at Thanksgiving, we all know that that can be very difficult, but this toolbox is something that we can bring with us outside the home, outside the museum, into real life.

- Yeah and I also wanna give a little shout out.

So I'm teaching a class at the Ford School and some of my students are here.

Hi Amina.

And it was so, yes.

So throughout the course of the class, they broke up into teams and organized little mini dialogue projects that just happened yesterday.

And I was weepy during each, experiencing each one.

And I find that tears are a sign of success.

So bravo to all the students who are here, yay.

I don't know where you all are, hello.

But, you know, I think those were good examples of how ordinary people who are not artists, these are all policy students, business students, social work students.

You don't have to know anything about organizing, hosting, whatever you just have to wanna do.

And that's the action part here.

You just have to wanna do it and then just do something and make it fun.

That's key, you have to make it fun.

And that was so much fun yesterday.

- And I'll just add one final point that as visual artists, I think both of us, the space making is both a psychic space, but also a physical space.

So we are both interested in creating a hearth of some sort so that these, so that we can feel or create comfort for our guests.

I mean, we're basically hosting dinner parties and curating the, on some level, curating the guests.

Yeah, the space really matters.

Beauty really matters to me.

Aesthetic really matters because we need more beauty in the world.

And I think when we are feeling beautiful and joyful, it helps us to show up for each other very differently.

So the space does matter very much.

So we've been talking for a little bit, we could talk all night, but we do have a little, another special surprise for you.

So when you leave the theater, you're going to be handed little cards that are gonna ask you to answer a question, another prompt.

But if you come to the museum and take a look around the exhibit, please, but answer that prompt and give it to the front desk.

There will be a prize, another prize for you.

So please, please come to the museum and check it out.

And interspersed in these cards is an extra, extra prize.

So many enticements.

So please grab a card when you're going out the door, and thank you so much for coming and for indulging us.

(audience applauding) (indistinct)