(uplifting music beginning) - [Announcer] BECU isn't like other financial institutions.

And the difference is people.

Because we're not for profit, there's no boardroom of billionaires maximizing their margins.

Our biggest stakeholders are people, like you.

It's our members who make money meaningful, so we focus on helping them thrive.

It's the art student bringing beauty to his community that makes a college loan matter.

It's the mother building her family's foundation that makes a mortgage matter.

It's people that make BECU matter.

People like you.

- [Announcer #2] Meta's mission is to build technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses.

Supporting local artists allows us to shape the way we think about building the next evolution of digital connection.

We are proud to support black arts legacies.

(mellow music beginning) - [Speaker #1] These are necessary conversations.

- [Preston] Ideas come from everywhere.

- [Speaker #3] And the next generation takes them into a new idea.

- [Speaker #4] About us, by us, for us, and near us.

(mellow music ending) - [Preston] Ideas come from everywhere.

You have to draw on every sort of emotional tendril that you can grab a hold of.

(melancholy rock music beginning) I up in LA in the sixties.

(melancholy rock music continuing) I think that some of us just need to do art, right?

Whether you can articulate that or not, you just feel like you need to do things.

So I was drawing and painting and stuff as a kid right from the start, but when I started making art in anger, so to speak, not as metaphorically, I thought about photography.

Photography was such an important aspect of life at the time, and photography seems really interesting to me because of its evidentiary power.

You can't take a photograph without being there.

And that was really appealing to me.

Bearing witness to life.

(dramatic music beginning) Knowing how to do more than one thing actually was the lifeline of my career.

That's the reason I got the teaching jobs that I got, that's the reasons that I got the photo jobs that I got.

The reason I got art jobs is because I can do more than one thing.

It's one thing that to be like a painter, right?

And to paint, and then funnel all your ideas through painting.

You can do that, but some ideas may be more effective at communicating what your ideas are if it occupied space, if it had dimension, and that's where my books come in, is they are actual, they are embodiment, right?

They actually are what they propose to be about, and that has power.

If they were photographed or painted, then they're replicas of what, and that's a different thing.

I mean that has its own connotations, but actuality is a powerful thing.

I taught at Cornish for 30 years.

90% of of every job I've had in my life has been with youth and young people.

- [Clayton] He was very good about teaching to just do your work.

Like, not somebody else's work.

Don't worry about what's happening out in the world.

Don't worry about what's hot right now, but do your work.

- [Ben] What he instilled in us was to just keep going and to keep striving and to keep pushing, and like, you're never gonna make your best thing.

Like, it's never gonna be your best.

And just keep working and keep hacking away at it.

And like, you know, there's not a quick end goal.

It's a lifetime of goals, and so to just keep pushing forward, I think he really helped to instill that.

And I think the show at (indistinct) right now speaks a lot to that.

And like, there's a wide breadth of work and there's so much of it, and it's so beautiful and tight.

And like the attention to detail was another thing that he taught us as well.

(jazzy music ending) - [Preston] The whole thing about abstract truth is abstract entities and concrete ones.

Abstract being things that, you know, we know are true.

You know, like feelings, like anxiety, and fear, and even truth, (laughs) in this case, but aren't tied to actual things.

And, you know, we recognize them intellectually, and as opposed to concrete, which are are actual things that we can recognize through our senses.

We can smell 'em, we can touch 'em.

(contemplative music beginning) Behind me is a piece called "The Code Switcher," which is dealing with the linguistic phenomenon of being able to change dialects, change the languages based on the social setting that you find yourself in.

As you walk around the piece, the colors of the feet change, based on your proximity to the light.

So the symbolic person is code-switching as you move around and change your environment.

So I'm quite interested in the abstract nature of personal truth, the differences between individuals' reality.

(gentle music playing) So with my work, I'm interested in viewers that live other truths, other than mine, being able to put together new elements, different elements, and expand your world into a new understanding.

This was the first piece that demonstrated that I can actually do this communication thing that I'm really serious about.

It's called "Times Being What They Are."

I was in a show in New York with this piece, and there were two elderly white ladies standing watching at the opening, looking at this piece.

And they're about in their seventies or so.

So I walked up and asked them if they had any questions.

One of 'em said, "No, we're just standing here, "gazing out that window."

And that said a lot to me, because not only did they get the work, they were identifying with the work, which was a higher level of accomplishment.

I think far too many people come to galleries and museums with the idea that they're not gonna understand what they're looking at.

They're just going 'cause they're going with their friends, or they are supposed to, this culture, or some vague notion of culture, but not really participating in understanding and being enriched by the work.

So what I'm trying to do is set up a minimalist construct that doesn't overwhelm the viewer with visual stimuli.

That they feel that they have a chance of maybe putting things together.

And so, and that's the key, is to carefully construct and select the elements that initially appear simple, but will catalyze complex thought.

In my books, I don't have any actual text, right?

Text is a stand-in for objects, and things, and places, and people, right?

Those images come into your mind as you're reading.

Well, with my work, you're confronted with objects, and things, and places, and people.

I'm hoping that the, you take the leap and go like, "Well, maybe this guy would like me "to convert these into words."

You know, if I put this together and think of what they might mean to me, and what they might mean together, then I can come with a literal, some literal translations.

(mellow music playing) Jackie Robinson, he famously said that the measure of a person's life is influence on society, and so everything I've done is in the service of trying to make the world better.

(mellow music continuing) (mellow music ending)