My brother's locked in a state pen.

Me, I make#art at Penn State.

You see, I'm a potter.

I make plates.

And him, he in jail.

He make plates.

You see, I... When I was in graduate school, my brother wound up in prison.

So, I decided to# write a poem about my brother being incarcerated.

I thought I could join a synagogue, but when it# came to church, I just saw its walls cracked by the cinder blocks and words went over my#head like a cinder shop.

I've been writing poetry ever since 'cause I find that it utilizes#parts of me that I didn't know were there.

Stop talking down to me.

I said enough's enough.

If I'm#imprisoning my body, then you providing the cuffs.

[Applause] [Music] Isn't it amazing that the same way I'm making a piece today is the same way they made it thousands#of years ago?

And in many ways, it makes me feel like validated as an artist and#I'm following a tradition that's well beyond me.

[Music] I wanted to talk about this particular piece because#it's about Selena.

It's also about music and sound, but for a lot of these works, it's about#memory for me.

Selena isn't somebody that people talk about quite often anymore, but ceramics#has this power to like bring back up a story and archive it in a way that lasts forever and so it just really, I think it's really powerful to have this piece next to these ancient works.

That's really what's happening here too.

You have someone holding a lyre striking the strings# and producing music.

And it really gives a sense I think that we are all telling these stories that these stories circulate among us.

And that's really what I... Here at Princeton, Roberto Lugo#and I pulled 20 or 30 vessels from our ancient Mediterranean collections.

And a really powerful# moment was when we were looking at a fragment of an ancient vessel and Roberto flipped it over#and saw on the inside throwing lines.

So these marks from this individual whose name we don't#know from the fifth century BCE in Athens.

And that just offered this moment of human connection# between the work that Roberto is doing and this person from antiquity.

This opportunity to work and think about how the Greeks would tell a story made me think about how to tell the stories# of people like Roberto Clemente.

He grew up in a very similar place as my parents on a farm# in Puerto Rico, but then winding up in front of thousands of people playing baseball and#being discriminated against because of his race.

That is very much in dialogue with the ancient examples.

How you're able to create two different geographical spaces, two different# temporal zones, and it's the vessel's invitation to us to walk around and sort of engage with these different moments in the story.

[Music] I have a piece, Put Yourself in the#Picture.

It's a 20 foot tall vase.

It's made out of steel and foam and resin decorated in patterns that are representative of traditional forms of pottery#like Chinese blue and white pottery to ancient Greek pottery.

But it also has pitbulls, the most common dog in Kensington.

I want to show that my culture belongs and that#it holds up with all these other places.

It also gives a visual example of harmony# amongst things that maybe seem dissonant.