(gentle whimsical music) - [Emcee] Welcome, everyone, to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

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

My name is Amanda Krugliak.

I'm the curator of the Institute for the Humanities.

And in addition to tonight's lecture, there's another Penny Stamps lecture tomorrow entitled, "Legendary Drag Queens," and it's inspired by last year's institute exhibition, "Beautiful by Night," So please attend that as well.

It's at the Michigan Theater at 5:30.

A project like to be heard is only possible with the support and participation of many people.

On behalf of the institute and the artist, many thanks to our collaborators, the students, the students and Professor Amal Hassan Fadlalla's course, Gender and Immigration Identity, Race, and Place, the student affiliates and staff and director, Dr. Kyra Shahid of the Trotter Multicultural Center, Elizabeth James and students in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies and the Dos Gallery, students of Sigrid Anderson's class, Can Literature Promote Social Justice?

Students from the Penny Stamps School of Art, the U of M Sexual Misconduct Response and Prevention Task Force, and all of the students who dropped by the studio and wrote us.

The project was informed by these engagements and incredible students who bravely shared their stories and their own words and shaped this project.

You are the University of Michigan.

Thanks to facilities and operation's building managers, Ginnie Schlaff, Philip Han, Gregory Watson, and Rob Ramsburgh who gave us places.

And the AAC committee, especially Christie Gilbert, (indistinct), Sue Gott, and Alex Schultzer who helped us navigate all the considerations that come into play when you try to put art in public.

The project is also supported by the Mellon Foundation as part of the Institute for the Humanities multi-year High Stakes Art initiative.

And my personal thanks to the institute staff that has made it all happen.

Brooklyn based artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh's work permeates culture in an outspoken and erosive process.

Each image and installation inside or outside is a catalyst for ideas, opinions, discussion, dissent, outcry, confrontation, critique, and ultimately future visions that all offer the opportunity to transcend just another day of the status quo.

Like magic, divinity, or some version of synesthesia, when we see Fazlalizadeh's drawings, we hear the unforgettable voices of her subjects.

Each distinctive, yet heard together, they are like a choir.

The exhibition "Pressed Against My Own Glass" in the institute gallery was the first presentation of Fazlalizadeh's Institute for the Humanities Residency that has spanned over the month of September.

And the gallery will be opened immediately after the lecture and Q&A, so please follow us over there.

The multimedia installation in the gallery contemplates the domestic space as it pertains to the artist's sense of belonging, safety, and home.

The intimate experience of the gallery installation is presented in tandem with "To Be Heard," Fazlalizadeh's public project that is launched today at the university.

She spent several weeks meeting with students, listening to their stories, having candid and honest conversations about their lives and how they've experienced racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression.

The residency culminated today with her hand drawn portraits of students and their own words being reproduced at a large scale and exhibited on the facades of the most recognizable buildings on campus.

There are also life size drawings installed on the grounds of Central Campus.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is from Oklahoma City, born to a black mother and Iranian father.

Her work is rooted in community engagement and the public sphere.

She makes site specific work that considers how people, particularly women, queer folks, and black and brown people experience race and gender with their surrounding environments.

From the sidewalk, to retail stores, to the church, to the workplace, to the school.

She is the creator of "Stop Telling Women to Smile," an international street art series that tackles gender-based street harassment.

She has spoken out about her work and process at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Brooklyn Museum, the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center, Stanford University and Parsons New School.

The artist has been profiled by The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker and Time Magazine.

And in 2018, she became the inaugural public artist in residence for the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

The impact of Fazlalizadeh's work spread to popular culture when she collaborated with director Spike Lee to base all of the artwork featured in his Netflix series, "She's Gotta Have It," on her work, and she also was the art consultant on that project.

In 2020, her debut book, "Stop Telling Women to Smile: Stories of Street Harassment and How We're Taking Back Our Power" was released from Seal Press.

And she recently completed an artist residency at MoMA PS1 in Queens.

In both "Pressed Against My Own Glass" and "To Be Heard," Tatyana Fazlalizadeh's works are immediate here, and then gone, and we bear witness as passerby, yet like ghost images, they stay with us and cannot be unseen.

They insist on future critical inquiries.

Who is represented and acknowledged in public spaces and who remains marginalized, invisible, and vulnerable?

What is the afterlife of a public art project?

What stories do we choose to represent and tell?

And how can we as a community continue to push forward for the long road to listen and honestly see one another to commit our efforts towards real change?

It is with great pleasure that I introduced to you, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh.

(crowd applauding) - Thank you, Amanda.

Thank you for being here.

This is a great crowd.

I thank all of you.

This is awesome.

Again, thank you to Amanda for that wonderful introduction.

Thank you to Christina for inviting me to be a part of this Penny Stamps lecture series, and thank you to all of you for being here.

There are a lot of thanks that I can give and I'll do more at the end, mostly to the students who have engaged with me as I've been here for these past few weeks.

The teachers and professors and directors who have engaged with me as I've been here.

It's only because of you all that I've been able to do this work, so I'm very, very grateful.

I'm a little chilly, it's kind of cold in here, so my voice is a little shaky.

I'm not nervous or anything, I'm just warming up.

Maybe I'm a little nervous.

Not really, okay.

I am going to walk you guys through my work, my process.

When I was invited to do this speaker series, I was told in the email to sort of think about this as art students.

So I wanna talk to you guys as if I'm talking to art students.

Not just art students, but from artists to artists, creators to creators.

I wanna walk you through my process.

Who I am as an artist, how I got here, but talk to you very casually and very openly about who I am, my process, and how I got to this place.

So I hope that you'll walk with me and that you'll enjoy learning about me and my process and my work.

I'm gonna talk about the project here at the end.

I will sort of walk you through how I got to this project to begin.

So for my own little introduction for myself, I am Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, and I am an artist.

I'm based in Brooklyn, New York.

From Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

I always mention that because I think that being from Oklahoma is important to my process, important to who I am as a person and as an artist.

It informs a lot of my work where I come from.

I am the daughter of a black mother who is here tonight, and my father who is from Iran.

And so my identities, my racial identities are important to me.

They sort of informed the work that I was doing early on in my career, and then I began to branch out and to think about myself and how I fit and navigate this world more broadly.

I consider myself an artist, a painter, a muralist, a cultural worker.

I have been called an activist over the years, but I've sort of pulled away from that title a bit recently and just thinking more about the type of work that I do.

I think that it isn't just activism.

I can see how it fits into that category, but I think more so what I'm doing with my work is thinking about addressing, examining, and trying to shift culture.

And in that sense, I consider myself more of a cultural worker.

I was a young kid in Oklahoma, and my background again is important to me.

And I say that because when I started creating art, I was creating art about black folks.

I was thinking about blackness a lot.

I was thinking a lot about portraiture and people and images of human beings.

And the human beings that I wanted to address and to see in my work were the people who were around me, the people who looked like me, and the people who I was consuming in the media that I was consuming.

I would read black magazines, I watched black TV shows, I go to a black church, I went to a black school.

These are the people that I was surrounded by.

And so that's why it was important to me to sort of think about those people as I started creating artwork.

Also, as I was young, I was painting, I started to paint and draw the things, again, that I was sort of surrounded by.

And so my work, when I was a kid sort of took me to art school.

I went to school in Philadelphia.

I discovered that I could paint, that I could draw when I was in high school.

Thanks to the help of a wonderful teacher, Quiquia Calhoun, who was my art teacher in high school in Oklahoma City.

She encouraged me to pursue art as a career.

And so I moved to Philadelphia and I attended the University of the Arts where I was an illustration major.

And it was in that school and in those classes at UArts in Philadelphia when I really started to think more, I think eloquently about how to talk about race in my work.

Instead of just painting black people and to paint and draw black folks and brown folks, what I was actually saying in those pieces, what am I actually thinking about?

What do I care about?

And so college for me was a time for me to really figure out what it was that I wanted to say about black folks as opposed to just drawing and painting them.

what are we dealing with?

What do I wanna talk about?

What do I wanna do?

These are some of my earlier pieces.

And even in these pieces, I look back on them and I'm...

I think that they're good paintings, but you look back on your earlier work and you're sort of like, what can I have done differently?

And so I think about these pieces.

The piece to the right, I wouldn't necessarily paint that again.

I don't know if I would paint either of these again.

But this is just to show you how I was thinking about and trying to address these different things in my work.

Thinking about police violence against black men in particular.

How do I show that?

This is how I decided to show it when I was in my early twenties, in my early twenties.

Today, I think that I've evolved as an artist, and I think that I would talk about a subject matter such as this a bit differently now.

But this is where I was, and this is the work that I was doing at that time, an oil painter.

I've always been an oil painter.

Painting is very important to me, it's very important to my process, even as I have evolved, to go into the studio and to sit at a canvas and to create an image, an illusion onto this canvas that represents an idea that I have and a passion that I have is something that I'm very, very much so, so passionate about.

While I was living in Philadelphia, I began to work on murals.

I began to work outside in the public space.

Philadelphia has a program called the Mural Arts program.

I don't know if you've heard of it before, but there's a lot of murals in Philadelphia.

And so as an artist living and working in Philadelphia, I started to work with them.

This is me working on the very first mural that I've ever worked on.

I'm smiling here.

It was a fun project, a fun process.

But as I was working on murals in Philadelphia, I also started to think about myself as a person and an artist within the public space.

I started to think about how, when I was painting on these murals, what I was experiencing being an artist working on the wall was different from my male colleagues who were also painting with me and working on the wall.

Sometimes we'd be painting on a piece, and it's summertime, and men would walk by and they would catcall me as I was working outside on the wall.

Now, catcalling and street harassment is something that I've been experiencing since I was maybe 16, 17 years old.

When I moved to Philadelphia, it really became this huge part of my life.

I started to see myself and recognize myself in the way that other people were seeing in me and recognizing me.

People started to perceive my body in a very sexual way.

Men that I'd never known that were strangers to me on the street would walk by and sexualize me and make sexual comments towards me.

And so this was something that I was sort of grappling with, this sort of violence that was happening to me on the street because it would be very violent at times.

At the same time, I'm developing as an artist, I am thinking about what matters to me as an artist.

I am training myself, I'm working.

And so I started to think about how myself as a black person has been the main idea in my work.

What about myself as a black woman as well?

What about the experiences that I have outside in the street?

How does that relate to the work that I'm painting outside?

Does it relate?

And if not, how do I make it relate?

How do I take all of these things are happening to me, my artist development, my woman development, my personhood, and create something that talks about all of these things together.

And so then I started to develop a project called "Stop Telling Women to Smile."

At this time, I've been doing my oil paintings, doing illustration work, doing murals, and I started to do this project that was completely different from all of those things.

Even though I'd painted murals before, they were paintings of murals.

We had permission.

This was something that I went out and I did without permission.

It was an experiment.

I was drawing, I was using paper and glue, tools that I'd never used before.

I, at the time, started looking at an artist called JR.

So JR was doing a project and I saw that he was doing these really big large scale pieces outside these black and white photographs that he was gluing to walls.

I thought that was very interesting and I thought that it was something that I could do too.

So I took it, I stole it.

And I decided to do "Stop Telling Woman to Smile" with the similar material, paper and glue.

And why was I doing this?

I wanted to talk about what I was experiencing outside in the street.

I wanted to talk about how men would catcall me, how they would say things to me.

And I thought that it was important to talk about that where it was happening.

So instead of doing a painting on canvas, instead of doing an illustration, what if I do a piece that I actually put up outside where this is happening to mel.

So environment, site, and location became a crucial part of my work.

It wasn't just about what I was saying in the piece, it was actually where I was saying it.

How do I use the outdoors as an actual part of the work itself?

"Stop Telling Women to Smile" begin with just myself, my own self-portrait, and then I began to draw other people.

Once I put the pieces up, it really started to get recognized and started to take off.

This is like the early days of Tumblr.

And so I put a piece up.

The first piece, actually.

The first piece that I put up of "Stop Telling Women to Smile" was in Brooklyn.

And the next day, I was scrolling on Tumblr and someone had taken a picture of that piece, and it was on Tumblr.

And had all these likes and it was good.

All these likes and retweets, and whatever you would call Tumblr retweets back then.

And I was just like really sort of exhilarated that this was resonating with people, that people were seeing it, and that it was resonating with them.

I realized then that what I experienced at street harassment was not just an isolated experience.

I knew this, right?

I would talk to my friends about it.

Like, I'm getting harassed in the street, and we'd talk about it and they'd had similar experiences.

But I'd never had this conversation with people nationally.

I never had this conversation with people on the internet.

And I didn't get to see just how many people were experiencing street harassment and violent sexual harassment in public places until I started this work.

And so I began to travel with this work, and this opened up an entirely new part of my process that I still use today and that got me here to this project today, and that is community engagement, to talk to people.

Instead of just talking about what I experienced with street harassment, now I'm interested in what other people experienced.

People who are not like me, who don't look like me, who live in different cities, who come from different backgrounds, who...

Different races, different genders, different sexualities.

How do you experience this thing that we all seem to experience, but how do you experience it differently than me?

Because I think that that's important.

If I'm gonna continue this work, if I'm gonna make more pieces in this project, which is now becoming a series, I can't just talk about my own experience.

I wanna talk about how other people experience street harassment so that now I'm making work that actually is useful to you and your experience.

And so I began to travel with it.

And I began to talk to people and have conversations with them, and that opened up a process that I still use today, and that is a very heavy part of the process.

I think that when we think about artists, we think about just the drawing, just the painting, the piece that goes up outside on the street.

But everything that gets to that point, the conversations that I have with people, the photographs that I take with them, the audio, the transcripts, going back and listening to these conversations, are just as important as the work itself that goes onto the wall.

And it's heavy.

So now I'm an artist, I'm a painter, I draw, but now I'm also taking on this role of listening to these very traumatic experiences from other people.

And so what do I do with that?

Like, how do I do something that is useful, that is powerful, that is innovative, but is also taking on this very real and heavy responsibility of telling people stories through my work.

And so what's the process?

The process is to talk to folks, shoot their photograph, draw their portrait, add text to it, and then put it up in the street.

It's very simple, but it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of work.

The text that goes along with these pieces are very important to the piece itself.

This is from a while ago, the very beginning of this project.

This was 2014 when I started traveling with it.

And this was in Oakland, and I met Suzanne.

And I asked Suzanne, what is your experience with street harassment?

And Suzanne told me that when I'm harassed in the street, it's not just about my sexuality or me being a woman, it's also my race.

That's what they're seeing and that's what they're commenting on at first.

And so I'm dealing with sexism at the same time as I'm dealing with racism.

It was just something that I feel like I experience as well, but I feel like I obviously experience it very differently than Suzanne does.

And so we put up this piece.

And the text is straight from her, which she wanted to say.

And so we made this piece, put it up in the street.

Here is Olympia, who is a trans woman that I met in Brooklyn.

Same process.

What is your experience, what do you go through, and what do you want to say about it?

And what she wanted to say was, my womanhood is not up for debate.

She told me that when she's outside in the street, her street harassment comes in many different forms, and one of those is people looking at her trying to decipher who she is or what she is, if she's deceiving someone, and what that means for how they are able to treat her then, how violent they're able to be with her.

And so she wanted to say, my womanhood is not up for a debate.

You don't get to look at me and decide for yourself whether or not I'm a woman.

And this is the piece up in the street.

Similar, here, Dean.

The photograph, the drawing, the design of the poster, and then the poster in the street.

This project has been an ongoing series for years.

I have found that people all over the world reach out to me and have told me how they need the work in their neighborhoods, how they have, how they resonate with this work, how the work relates to them, and how we could do it in other cities across the country or across the globe, and so I did.

I've taken this project to many different cities.

One was Mexico City where we did this piece here.

This was Andrea.

Andrea was a 54-year-old woman that I met.

We had a group discussion and she was there and we talked about these issues of street harassment.

And she was saying how even at her age at 54, she's been experiencing this for decades and she continues to experience it.

This is me meeting Andrea out in the street.

We were about to go put up her poster and she actually walked by, and so we ended up walking and putting up her poster together.

What I have found about this project and with this work and my career as a whole is that, I started out as an illustration major in college, right?

And then I started doing murals.

I've always been a painter, so painting on oil, oil paintings has always been a constant thread in my career.

But here I am in Mexico City walking out onto the street, about to glue a poster onto the wall to talk about how this woman who I just met a few days ago experiences street harassment and violence against her every day.

And what is that doing?

Now, I'm doing a lot, right?

I'm working in culture, I'm working outside in the streets, I'm doing public art, I'm doing socially engaged art, I'm doing all of these things where I just a few years ago was simply an illustration major in school.

And why am I doing this?

This is something that I have to come back to often.

Why do I do the work that I do?

It's hard.

It's a lot of work.

It's physically taxing emotionally, mentally, but I do it because it's meaningful to me, I think that it's important work, I'm good at it, I enjoy doing it, and I also get to have interactions like this with Andrea.

This is a piece in Chicago.

So I'll just briefly go through this part.

When these pieces go out into the street, they sort of become a part of the environment.

And so, they're no longer just my drawings, my posters that I put up on the wall, now they're open to everything.

They're open to the elements, they're open to people, they're open to weather, they're open to whatever happen to them.

They become a part of the wall.

And so people write on them a lot.

When it first started to happen, I was a little taken aback, but then I just started to realize how people writing on it was really highlighting what the work is actually talking about.

And it's also creating the space for community dialogue to happen exactly onto the piece itself.

And this is where I start to get into being a cultural worker, right?

So now I'm thinking about culture, I'm changing culture, and I see it happening right in front of my eyes, right there on the wall.

Because this work has had such a sort of national, an international reception.

I began to do a thing called International Wheat Pasting Night where I release pieces from the project for people to download and print and to go out and put up in their own communities and their own cities.

As a form of us doing it all together, I'm opening up my work to not just myself, but to everyone else to be able to participate in this and to do it in an action where you know that someone else is doing at the same time that you are.

So hopefully we wake up and place it all over.

So these are just a few photos from International Wheat Pasting Night that are found in different cities.

This is in Mexico City, I believe.

This was in Paris, I believe.

This was in New York.

Somewhere in France.

This is in Baltimore.

Now, this process of working where I interview people, I draw their portraits and I put up work in the street that is talking about their experiences started with this project, and it was started by talking about a very particular issue, street harassment.

Now, I've continued my work and I've evolved and I've done other projects, but I've carried this process and this method of working with me into other projects as well.

And so instead of just talking about street harassment, now I wanna talk about other ways that we experience the public space.

How else are people navigating the world, navigating cities, where their identities take up such a large person of how people experience them and treat them.

How do I talk about that?

How are you not just experiencing the street, but how are you also experiencing other spaces, schools, the home space, how are you experiencing these other large racial aggressions that are happening to us on maybe a societal level?

And so this is a piece that I did in 2016 after the election in Oklahoma City.

Oklahoma City being a very red state, very conservative state, very republican state, can be a very racist state.

And so after the election in 2016 of Donald Trump, I went there and I did these portraits of folks.

One of them is my mother, and the rest of them are friends.

Friends who I talked to and I interviewed about what they were feeling, what they're experiencing after this election.

How do you feel about this?

What do you wanna say about this?

I took some of those portraits and I created this piece that was sort of a clap back to be honest, to the election, that was saying, "No, we're here.

We've been here and we're not going anywhere."

I wouldn't have done this piece had I not already done "Stop Telling Women to Smile."

If I hadn't already developed this muscle of going out into the street and putting up work that I said things that I felt needed to be said.

And this is me working on that piece.

This was in 2017.

This was another woman that I interviewed.

At the time, I was calling the series America Is Black as sort of a title that I think represented the identities that fall under America.

America is Black, just being the title for that.

I interviewed her as part of the series.

This is in El Paso, Texas.

And this is a mural that I did of her to get that same sentiment to speak back against the racial aggressions that were happening very explicitly during that time.

In 2018, I was the public artist and residence for the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

And so this was another project, rights and taking the same idea.

How do I talk to people?

How do I get what they wanna say about who they are out into the public?

About how they experience a particular space?

How they, particularly the public in the street, out into the public?

This guy's name was Trevor.

We had a conversation, and he said to me, "I think that people always see me as this very hard, militant person, but I'm also this very soft person, and I feel like I'm not allowed to be that way," and so we put up this piece in Brooklyn.

This piece that you've seen around campus is also was a part of this residency in New York.

These are women and girls that I met, talked to, had a conversation with, and asked them what they wanted to say.

I put this piece together and it's one of my favorite pieces that I've done.

I think it's just really (indistinct).

This is also from the Commission on Human Rights.

The past couple of years, as my work has continued to evolve, I've been thinking more about how to create public space installations that aren't outside, but are indoors.

We're still talking about what happens in a public space.

What if it's a public private space and then we walk inside of a building, and we're still experiencing ourselves in the context of race and of gender, but now we're experiencing it within this set particular environment inside.

In this project I was interested the church.

Interested in how people experienced the church, the black church, to be specific.

This was in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And a hundred years ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma, there was a Tulsa massacre where black folks were killed.

And so I went into this church and I wanted to talk about that.

I wanted to talk about how violence meets us in places that we don't expect for us to meet us.

I know how it meets me outside on the street, but how's it gonna meet me when I'm in a space that is supposed to be safe for me?

A place that is supposed to be for fellowship, for love and convening, but it's still at the threat of violence, of racial violence.

And we've seen it in recent years.

There have been shootings in churches.

And so what does that mean for you when you sort of like hold the weight of that, you hold the history of that, and you hold the current weight of that as well, knowing that the threat is always there.

And so I took portraits of folks.

This time I'm experimenting with video.

So I did this video and I projected it through fabric so that it would shine throughout the entire church.

I created pieces, structural pieces.

The piece to the left here is wood and glass and mirror and acrylic with light shining onto the ceiling.

You can see the projection in the background of fire.

It was a really immersive installation that really takes me into this new sort of world that I'm into now of creating multimedia installation pieces that discuss the similar issues that I've been thinking about, but now I'm creating an entire installation for you to walk into and for you to then feel and read and see and understand and hear how someone might experience their race or gender in that particular environment.

So here we are at UMichigan.

We made it.

It's been a long journey, and we're here.

This is from "Pressed Against My Own Glass."

"Pressed Against My Own Glass" is a multimedia installation.

Again, coming from that church piece that I did last year, I've been thinking about interior spaces, going inside of a place, and how does someone experience that particular place.

This time I wanted to focus on myself.

I'll say that a lot of the work that I do starts with me thinking about myself.

"Stop telling Women to Smile," started with myself, how I was experiencing street harassment.

And I do that because, if I'm gonna be asking questions to people, posing these questions to people, having these very candid conversations with them where I'm asking them very deep questions to tell me about their lives and their experiences, I feel like I need to be able to do the same thing.

So I'm always looking at myself and thinking about how I experience something, how I would wanna talk about it, how I would wanna be questioned about it.

And this project, "Pressed Against My Own Glass," I'm doing that starting with myself and I'm staying there.

Instead of starting with myself, and then interviewing other people, I wanted to stay there with myself.

And so this installation, this gallery show is very much so about me.

It's in relation to how I think about other black women in the home space.

But it's my thoughts and my feelings in relation to black women and how we have historically experienced the home space.

And here I am painting again.

I started out as an oil painter.

I'm still an oil painter.

This is a self portrait of mine that is layered on top of text from my journal.

I'm always thinking of text and imagery, as you've seen.

How can a text enhance an image?

How can text represent the voice of the person that's represented in that image?

And how can I do it in an interesting way, instead of just placing it at the bottom border like I do in my posters outside.

Here, I want it to think about how can I layer.

How can I layer to say, this is the person that you're seeing, and these are the thoughts, the emotions, the feelings that this person experiences, this person being myself.

I'm being very vulnerable.

I'm being very open.

I'm also being very empowered.

I feel like I'm looking at the viewer in a way that invites you in to look at me, but I'm not just allowing you to have the gaze that you wanna have for me.

I'm sort of telling you to have a gaze that I want you to see me with, and the text adds to that.

This is another installation shot from "Pressed Against My Own Glass."

Again, layering.

Layering imagery here, layering with color, thinking about historical photographs, old photographs, family photographs with my current imagery of black women within the home space.

This is a collage wall from the show.

This is a video projection that's in the show.

The text that you see there is onto the Wall, and we pasted this text on the wall.

And it's text from Bell Hooks is an essay that she wrote about home, about the home space, about how black women have experienced the home space, how we have had the role of taking care of the home.

We've been placed in that role because of sexism, but what have we done with it?

What we done with it has been really incredible historically.

And so with this text, again, I'm layering.

I'm thinking about how to talk about something, how to say something, and then how to meet you with an image and how does that image interact with the text itself.

And so in this video, you'll see several images of different historical photographs of women within the home space, and how that's interacting with the text.

This show...

I wanted to do this show to compliment the public art installations that are also a part of this residency.

I think that to think about what happens to me inside of the home, what happens to other black women inside of the home, in this place that is inside, that is supposed to be safe for us,.

and perhaps in many ways is safe for us, it's such an intimate...

It's such an intimate thing to do.

I'm sort of looking at my internal world as opposed to thinking about the external world, which is what so much of my work is about.

What are you on the exterior?

How are people experiencing you and treating you because of what's on the exterior?

So I found that to have an installation that was about the home and being inside and to accompany that with this public art installation that's outside I thought would compliment each other very well.

So I hope that you guys go see the show in addition to seeing the pieces outside around campus.

And that leads me to be heard.

There's a lot to say about this project.

When I thought of a proposal for this residency, I knew I wanted to go back to the method of interviewing and creating public art pieces based on community engagement.

But I didn't have a set idea on what I was gonna talk about.

I wanted to come here and I wanted to listen, and that's why I titled It "To Be Heard."

I really wanted to talk to women, black folks, brown folks, about what it's like to be a student here at UMichigan.

What is the school like?

Why did you come here?

How's it been for you?

And to take their voices and what they wanna say about how they experience the school and put it out on the street.

It's been very interesting.

I thought that I knew what I would hear.

I thought I'd had some ideas about some of the things that I would hear, and I did hear those things.

Things like racial aggressions that happen in classrooms.

Things like being surrounded by white men in a class, and how they don't listen to you or don't see you or don't hear you.

I heard those things and those things are real and very true.

But I also heard things that I think were coming from this very particular time that we are in, which is after this pandemic, people haven't been here, people are experiencing the weight of the loss that we've had.

And people are lonely, people are looking for community, people are looking for safe spaces.

Some folks are finding it and some folks aren't.

I thought that that was fascinating for me that I thought that I was talking to students just about, okay, race and gender, right?

But I really found is that people were experiencing a lot of more emotional, deep personal things.

And so it was a lot of conversations, right?

This is Taylor who was one of the first people that I talked to.

And there's Taylor's drawing.

Taylor's piece is outside of the library, Shapiro Library.

And her piece says, I'm black and I belong here.

I talked to Taylor, I talked to several other black students, I went to a group meeting at Trotter.

There are a lot of sentiments that I heard around blackness, around being a black student here at the school.

And one thing that a few folks said and were coming out, especially in our conversation, me and Taylor, was this idea that like, I really gotta search for my space.

I have to create my space.

The school isn't gonna do it for me.

They're not supporting me in that.

And sometimes I feel like this place isn't necessarily for me.

And so to say very boldly, I belong here, I'm black and I belong here, I thought was fitting for the conversations that we had.

One thing about this process, for me, text is very important, obviously, but a project like this is more of a collaboration.

Sometimes I think of something that I wanna say and I go outside and I put it on the street, I don't really care.

It could say it could be anything.

But when I'm working on a project like this, the text that goes up is a collaboration.

I can't speak for anybody, but I also am the artist, right?

I'm creating the pieces.

And so it's this thing where I have to think of, take what someone has said to me and try to succinctly say it in a way that I feel like is hard hitting, that gets to the point, but also isn't overriding the entirety of everything that they said to me, that isn't diminishing it into one small thing.

And so it becomes this process of me thinking about these conversations that I've had trying to pull out what are the common themes and what can I say in one or two or three pieces that really touches on a lot of what folks were saying to me.

Some other common themes that came out were, yeah, were about community, mostly.

Community, a safe space, of having a lack of support from the school.

When I talked to Mazan here, it was in a group setting, but she said something to me that I felt like was very, was very important and also related to a lot of other things that people were saying.

She talked about how being at this school has been difficult, and that it has, at times, really hurt her confidence.

And it started to make me think about my experience in college.

My experience in college was very difficult.

I was good artist, but I was also very lonely.

I was also at a predominantly white school and also felt the weight of being the only black person in the class.

What that does to you?

When you don't look around and have anybody to necessarily jump into a study group with or anybody to answer your questions or anybody to talk to you about what's happening in the class, 'cause they're not talking to you.

They talking to the other white people that are next to him.

And so you have to go out then and carry the weight of finding people to be in community with in order to simply succeed as a student.

And so to end it, she simply said, "Don't let this school break you."

"Find your people, find your support system, find your community."

"Don't let it break you 'cause it will, and it'll try to.

And so that's the piece that we put up for her.

You'll find it outside in the diag, which I was just like, "Yes, that's right.

Don't let the school break you down."

I put it in the diag next to Santana's piece.

Santana talked about feeling lonely, talked about feeling like she didn't find a space to fit in anywhere.

And I thought that those two worked well together in conversation.

Don't let this school break you down as well as here is this Indian American student saying how I can't find my community anywhere, right?

And so that was again, a sentiment that I found to be common across the conversations that I was having.

This sense of wanting to find community, wanting to find safe space.

But where is it?

Where does it happen?

Out of the the many conversations that I had with students and the students who came and engaged with me, I found that we were having these sort of human conversations.

These conversations that felt like needed to happen.

Students were coming into my office and just talking, just so much was pouring out.

Just talking and talking.

And usually it's, you know, I can be a quiet person.

And so like the conversations were very lively though.

A lot was happening in these conversations.

It felt like they were looking for space to talk about these that they were experiencing, and I was offering them that space.

That's one thing that I really enjoy about my work, that I find important about my work, is that even though I came here without like an explicit knowing what this thing was going to look like and what it was going to be, what the pieces were going to say, I knew that I was at least offering space.

At the end of it all, no matter what the pieces turned out to be, the fact that these students can come into my room and talk to me about anything.

I'm not a part of the institution, I'm not a teacher, I'm not a professor.

You can say anything to me.

And the fact that I was offering that space to them, I really enjoyed that.

That was meaningful for me as an artist, and I think that that was meaningful for them as well.

This is Brooklyn.

Brooklyn and I were talking and we were discussing the issue of race, and we both sort of started talking about how racism is such a distraction.

I was thinking about how Toni Morrison talked about how racism is a distraction.

It keeps you from the work that you're supposed to do, the work that you need to be doing, the things that you enjoy doing.

It distracts you from that, and has you focusing on trying to prove to somebody that you're a human being who's deserving of love and care and to be seen.

And she was saying how she felt like if she didn't have to deal with the issue of race, how she could probably be her more authentic self.

She talked about this and Desiree also talked about this.

And Desiree's piece says, I'm gonna move through this space as my authentic self unapologetically.

I'll actually talk more about that piece in a second because that goes back to the issue of collaboration and the issue of using text in a piece.

So there's more I wanna say about that when we get to that slide in a few minutes.

But this is Courtney.

Courtney was very passionate about talking about the sexual assault that happens on this campus and how it goes without consequence for the men and boys who go to this school.

We decided on words of protection for women, stop letting men get away with sexual misconduct.

I have known about UMichigan and the statistics around sexual assault that happens at this school.

The one of the first engagements that I had here was with a class.

And I opened up the class up to just a group discussion.

What do you have to say about your experiences here?

And immediately, several students started talking about sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexism, all of these things that they were experiencing and that were very, very, had a lot of of weight to the class.

The class became very heavy with this issue of sexual assault.

Courtney was one of the people in that class, and she had a lot to say about it.

She had friends who had experiences sexual assault on this school without having any justice, without feeling like the school heard them or support them.

Put that friend through a lot when it came to simply getting her, simply believing her.

I met with students from the sexual assault task force and learned about the things that they were doing in order to protect students from sexual assault.

And I thought that it was great what they were doing, handing out personal protection equipment and creating all of these different things that were for the benefit of students, but I thought it was interesting that these students were taking this on and not the school.

You're a student, and you have so much going on and so much that you have to do.

And so for the students to be taking this on, I thought that was very interesting.

And go to this point of the school not supporting these women, not supporting these folks who are being, who are at the hands of this violence all of the time.

How do you navigate school?

How do you go to school knowing that any moment that in your social settings, the settings that you go to because you're underage and it's the way you socialize, you're not protected there.

These are folks from Trotter.

So Trotter, there's going to be another piece.

All of the pieces are up except for the one that's gonna be a Trotter.

There's some issues with the wall, and so it's gonna go up next week.

Trotter, a lot that I can say about Trotter.

Trotter has been such a great experience for me.

The director, Kyra, has been so welcoming and warm in conversation with me.

And to see these black students hang out in Sankofa Lounge.

I've been hanging out there, spending time there, has been really beautiful.

When I was in college, we didn't have a space like that, so I had to find my black friends just by like bouncing around the campus, meeting people.

And so to know the activism that went into creating that space that has been around for years, but now has this new building that was open a couple of years ago that is now a multicultural space, but started out as this black space that was started and maintained by black activism.

And to see black students there engaging with each other, meeting each other, hanging out with each other was a really beautiful thing.

And I'm hoping that the piece that we put up on Trotter can reflect that.

This is not the actual photo of the piece.

This is the mockup.

The pieces went up today, so I didn't get images of them just yet.

But this is again, Taylor's piece, "I'm black and I belong."

And this is Desiree's piece, "I Will Navigate this Place as My Authentic Self unapologetically."

We went back and forth on what this text was going to be, again, going back to the collaboration.

I sent her an idea what I thought that the text could say.

I originally had it as, I will navigate the whiteness of this place as my unapologetic self.

And then we went to this, and then we went to an idea that she had that was about, this place wasn't designed for me, yet I'll navigate it unapologetically.

And so because I put up these pieces and the text so short, I'm always thinking about how do I get to the meat of it?

Like, how do I get to what it is that I wanna say or what we wanna say what needs to be said in these few short words.

I think each of those options that I just listed could work.

I felt like what was happening in the conversations when people were talking to me about not being of their authentic self is because they felt like they couldn't be around the surrounding of whiteness around.

And I don't just mean white people, I mean whiteness.

I mean the institutional whiteness.

I mean, Ann Arbor being so white.

I mean, all of it, right?

So it's sort of like this... And I thought that that mentioning whiteness and pointing that out and saying it, we say black a lot, we say brown a lot, but we don't often say white, we don't have to say whiteness, we don't often point out that racial aspect.

Those people are racialized just as much as we are racialized.

Everybody is racialized, right?

So why don't we say that as well?

So I was interested in pointing that out.

And then I was also interested in what Desiree said about this space not being designed for me.

We talked about what does that mean, this space isn't designed for you?

I thought that it needed to be a little bit more specific and a little bit more clear.

For the sake of time, we sort of came to this one.

I'll navigate this place as my authentic self unapologetically, which I think fits and I think works, and I think is beautiful because it can be put really in any many surroundings.

She liked it, I loved it, and so it really was sort of just like this, again, coming to a meeting place with the student, the person, the story, what they have to say.

And me as an artist thinking about texts, thinking about how this is gonna hit people as they're walking by, thinking about how people interact with pieces and walk by them quickly.

And so we came to this.

This piece is right outside on MLB.

I think it looks gorgeous.

It's one of my favorites.

And I think I'm out of time.

So, but this wraps it.

I did this project.

It was weeks, a lot of work, a lot of hard work.

The first work was very...

The first week was very intense.

Second week was very intense.

The third week was very intense.

But we got to this place of creating these really beautiful portraits that are now outside on a view outside.

And I hope that what they do, people ask me like, what's the impact?

What do you hope that the impact of this work is?

I hope it does a few things.

I hope that the students who are featured in these pieces walk by, see themselves, are in love with seeing themselves in these beautifully drawn portraits, having their voices and their words out.

I hope that other students walk by and it resonates with them.

They feel close to it.

They feel like someone has spoken up for them with them, that their peers have spoken up for them and with them.

I hope that the institution looks at this work and recognizes, one, that public art is important.

I think on a campus like this, that it's important to show black and brown students, their faces, and not just for the purposes of DEI, but to actually say what they wanna say, what their experiences are, to show their faces in conjunction with that.

And I hope that it also just opens up the...

I also hope that it opens the importance of speaking publicly about what folks experience and to listen to the people who don't look like you, who you don't normally talk to, and to see them.

To really, really truly see them.

I try to see them in these pieces and I try to draw them as if I saw them.

And so I hope that that resonates with anybody walks by, particularly people who wouldn't normally want to look or see these folks.

So thank you all so much.

We're gonna open it up for some questions, if anybody has any.

(crowd applauding) - (indistinct) that time for you?

- Okay.

- Any questions?

If you have a question, just raise your hand.

I'll see you point it out.

Also, we are also gonna walk over to the gallery, so if you just wanna like talk about some things that show and have some questions that you wanna talk about there, that's fine too.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yes.

Oh, either of you.

- [Student] Is there a map of salutations (student faintly speaking).

- Is there a map, Amanda?

(Amanda faintly speaking) - Yeah, so there's a QR code on each piece that'll tell you more about where they are.

- [Amanda] In the website too.

(Amanda faintly speaking) - Yes, right here.

- [Student] What's the sort of process you have to go (student faintly speaking).

Like, I mean, how do you get that sort of permission?

- Yeah, so the question was how do I get permission to put my work up on buildings.

For this project, it was a long process.

Amanda, the curator, could say that it was a lot to put up work on these buildings.

But for pieces of this size, generally, I would just ask the building owner for permission to do it.

But there are a lot of pieces that I had put up without permission.

"Stop Telling Women to Smile", that project, most of those pieces were just thrown up without permission.

And I think that that is important for a project like that.

This act of taking back physical space or simply taking physical space without asking anybody if I can do it is important for a work like that.

Sometimes when I wanna go large scale is simply asking the building owner, getting permission.

If there's permits, you have to get permits through that whole process.

Yes.

- [Student] Do you find yourself hesitant to... (student faintly speaking).

Sometimes I feel scared to like push it too far.

- Yeah, we'll see, right?

We'll see what the reaction is.

No, I mean, okay, here's the thing.

So going back to like this piece, I'm also thinking more about what is the pushback that these students are gonna get, right?

Not necessarily like thinking about what the institutions are gonna say.

I don't really care.

I'm going back to New York.

What they gonna do?

So, as far as myself.

But I don't want the students to get any type of like repercussions from this, right?

Because it's text that is on top of your face.

So that's mostly what I've kind of considered.

I don't really think about what the institution thinks.

If you invited me here, you know the type of artist that I am, the type of work that I'm going to make.

So hopefully you are encouraging of that.

If I feel any censoring of myself, then I try to stay away from things like that.

So, yeah.

Yes.

- [Student] I was wondering if you could tell us your take on systematic racism.

- My take on systematic racism?

That's a big, big one.

My take on systematic racism.

I think that it is what racism is, I think in this country at least.

It is so ingrained and baked into every single part of our society, every single structure.

When I was doing the project with the Commission on Human Rights, a large portion of that project was for me to be involved in most of the things that the commission was doing.

So I was going to family court, I was sitting in on court processing.

I was going to...

I was going to job, planning and workshops for young people.

I was going to all types of different places that I was really seeing the workings of the city in different parts of it.

Education, sanitation, everything.

And I saw how racism was ingrained in every single part of it, and sexism.

And so it's huge.

It's why when I came here, I was thinking not just about these interpersonal moments of racism, but also what is happening on a larger level, the structural issues of racism that are happening here.

It's big, it's hard, it's everywhere, and it's very hard to dismantle.

And as an artist, that's why my work really centers around the person because trying to destroy the whole thing, right?

That's why I'm not an activist.

There are people who are working very, very hard to dismantle the whole thing, the systematic racism.

But for me and myself, I find joy and meaning in going into the very person, everyday people, and how they're experiencing it in their everyday lives.

And I think you see it.

You see the systematic racism when you simply talk to person, how they experience racism in their everyday life.

And you can see it in the workings of so many different structures of our society.

So...

But ultimately, I think that systematic racism is bad.

It's not great.

It's terrible.

But it's hard, you know?

It's hard.

Yes.

- [Student] Because the space for people to be vulnerable or share their experience is such an important process.

I'm thinking about (student faintly speaking).

So I'm curious, what do you do to sort of take care of yourself so that you can sustain this practice?

- Mmm.

I, you know... Yeah, I mean, you know...

I mean, that's something that's like been harder for me in recent years.

I think over the past 10 years of doing work like this, I would take care of myself by spending time with friends, like finding solace and being able to talk about the work that I do amongst the company of people who will hear me, who will relate to me, who will hold me with care and tenderness.

Before coming here, I was thinking about physically how am I gonna be able to do this?

'Cause it's also physically taxing.

So trying to eat well, trying to make sure that I'm sleeping, things like that.

But when I'm in it, it's exhausting, and sometimes I forget about how to take care of myself.

So when I leave here, I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna process and I'm gonna sit and I'm gonna take some time.

But sometimes when I'm in it, honestly, I don't know.

I'm thinking about the work, and maybe that's something I should work on.

'Cause it is a lot, it is a lot to do.

Yeah.

Yes.

- [Student] As long as I can remember, I get taught by my instructors that text does not belong in art.

I was curious, what would you have to say to that?

- To be honest with you, I don't really like text in art either.

Like, I don't like text in paintings, and I've tried over the years to put text and paintings and figure out how that works.

I don't like it.

So with work like this, or like the work in the show where I put my painting on top of the journals, that's text, and it's in the work.

It's me trying to figure out an interesting way to use text in work because I think it is tricky.

And I think the reason why is because there's so much bad art that has text.

You know, it can just...

It can easily be bad.

But here's another point.

I think that work like this that people might consider social or political artwork is automatically deemed not good art just because it's political.

And I think a lot of political artwork like this does use text.

And I think we're thinking about things like posters and things like that, but there's a way to do it to where it's good.

It just has to be good art.

And I think that it's just so many times that you add text and it can just easily go in the other direction of being bad.

But I think it's also, if you have the foundation of like it being good work, like I think this is a very good drawing.

And so I think adding a text on top of it, it simply works because it's just good art to begin with.

But I think it's tricky.

And sometimes I don't like using texts.

I'm trying to figure out how to...

It doesn't work because it can be tricky.

And that's why I try to play with layering in my installation work of using text, but not using it actually in a photograph or in a painting, but in relation to it, right?

It's still creating this art piece, but it's in relation to the visual image as opposed to being right on top of it.

Yeah.

Yes.

- [Student] First of all, congrats.

I mean, you marveled this all around really.

- Thank you.

- [Student] I just wanna (indistinct) a little bit on something that's coming up again and again.

I think of a hypothetical question, and you don't have to answer if you don't want to.

Let's say that maybe the mayor, (indistinct) who is straight white male and the president of the university.

(student faintly speaking) In the room right now, and they were kinda like under hypnosis.

And we had like 30 seconds or 60 seconds to like really impart on them how do you bring the disconnect between the brochures and the pavement in a city that kind of has the yelling signs in the windows but doesn't really make having black friends or whatever.

You can sort of, yeah.

They're hypnotized, they're there, the mayor and the president.

(crowd laughing) - I mean, I honestly don't know what I would say to them or if I would say anything to them.

I mean, the thing is that, I think at this point in my life, I'm older, I'm just...

I'm really not interested in trying to change anyone.

I think that, yes, the president of the university has a lot of power, and so for him to like take something in while he's hypnotized and to have this really sort of like change of heart could potentially have a great effect 'cause he's a president of the university.

But I don't think that there's any one thing that I could say that he would internalize that would change the history of this very old school.

All the rich people who donate money to this school, all these big buildings that have been here for so long that are named after white men, all of that stuff.

I don't know, you know.

I don't necessarily have the answer for that.

And so I think, for me, my work is more so about you're a black student, you're coming here, you're gonna be here for four years, how do you make it here and survive here, be here confidently, feel loved here, feel taken care of, is probably not gonna come from the president of the university.

It's probably gonna come from the people around you.

And I think that just like, just being at this point in my life, that's more of what I'm interested in.

And maybe I'm just pessimistic.

I could be at this point, but I don't see the dismantling of the big structures.

At least not in a way that like, while I'm here right now in front of you for these few weeks or while I'm right here in this lifetime, that I'm going to see.

And so what else... How else can I turn the lens?

Who else can I look at and point to?

That's sort of what I'm interested in.

I hope that answers your question.

I know it's not like... Or maybe I may say to them, you know, I don't know, go talk to this student.

You know what I'm saying?

They probably have the answer more than I do.

I think that's, yeah, probably what I would say.

- [Amanda] Let's do one more.

- Okay, we got one more.

- [Amanda] And everybody to go to the gallery and see the work at the gallery.

- Okay.

One more.

I saw a hand here, but first, do you still wanna ask?

- [Student] (indistinct) lost that question.

Coming from Brooklyn, which is so diverse and coming here to Ann Arbor and speaking with a lot of people, specifically black women, I'm brown.

So how can we as a predominantly white diversity and as everyone else who's not black, kind of support from your conversations with these black women, how can we support them and, I guess, respect their culture and your guys' culture and just be supportive as students here?

- I think there's probably several different ways, I think.

So I think there are several different ways.

I think...

I'm thinking about these conversations, I'm thinking about students who talked about being in a class and really feeling invisible.

Like, I'm sitting in this class and people really are just like, it's like I'm not even here.

And that may seem like a small minuscule thing, but it's really not.

There's a lot to that.

I think that if you are a student and you are sitting in that class and you feel completely invisible, but this is a class where you have to be visible because you're here to learn and you're participating in the class, it has an effect on how you are able to succeed in the class.

I feel like being seen, being heard, being treated as if you are a human being who exists, who is not just one speckle in a place that's... And it's not even like pointing to you and being like, I have to take care of you and look at you because you are black.

It's not being hyper visible.

It's really just about, I'm a human being who's existing here trying to learn just as everybody else is, so simply treat me that way.

I think that's one way, simply treating people like they're human beings who exist, looking them in the eye, listening to them when they talk to you, things like that.

I think their support in the form of, if the black student union is doing something or if they need something or if they are reserving a class or a classroom or something like that, like uplifting that, whatever the efforts are that they're doing, whatever the needs are, uplifting those, supporting those.

I think that is probably, again, looks like going and talking to like a black student next to you 'cause they have the answers more than I do.

And I'm pretty sure that they are probably putting those needs and those desires somewhere.

So going finding those and supporting them in that way.

I also, I just don't want it to be like, if I was a black student here, somebody walking up to me like, "How can I support you?"

It's like, I don't know, that feels a little weird.

You know what I mean?

Like I want the support, but also I feel like just walk up to people and treat them like they're humans, understanding that it's not a lot of them, black women, in particular here.

Apparently, it's under 4% , the black population at this school.

So black women.

I can imagine it's even more less than that.

And so I think just understanding that it can be difficult, but they have love and they have support, they have the community, but also uplifting them in the ways that they need the support.

That's not like necessarily material answer, right?

Like I don't have like a bullet point, bullet list.

But I think just thinking about it, I think this issue of feeling overstepped, overlooked, really has sort of like consequences to how a person is able to navigate a space and how they feel in their bodies and in themselves.

So I think just treating people like they're human beings is a great first step.

So, yeah.

And I think that that's a good thing to close on.

Thank you all so much for coming and for staying and part of the Q&A.

I really appreciate it.

And, yeah, thank you all again.

(crowd applauding) (gentle whimsical music) - [Emcee] Welcome, everyone, to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(crowd applauding)