- [Announcer] Welcome, everyone, to the Penny (audience applauds) - Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker series.

My name is Christina Hamilton, the series director.

Today we present fiber artist, collaborator and educator Sonya Clark.

(audience applauds) We're very happy as this is a welcoming back.

Sonya was actually here in the Penny Stamps series in the fall of October of 2015.

This was in tandem with an exhibition that she had at the Institute fo So many of you, you know, probably already know but we're so pleased to have he And today's event is presented in partnership with the Cranbrook Art Museum with support from the University of Michigan Museum of Art, or UMMA, and the Arts & Resistance LSNA Theme Semester, and the Arts Initiative.

And ours series partners Detroit Public Television, PBS Books and Michigan Just a few announcements before we get started.

There is a big exhibition, "Sonya Clark: We Are Each othe which is currently on view at the Cranbrook Art Museum, and this marks her 60th solo exhibition.

It is up right now.

You still have time if you haven' and it is a must-see.

It is just a perfect exhibition, Th at was her.

She said, "It's just perfect!"

And it is wonderful.

I have taken i try to get you out there enough if you And this Saturday, the 23rd, there will be a panel discussion and a closing reception for the exhibition at 2:30 PM at the Cranbrook Art Museum, and Sonya will be there in conversation, and the event will conclude with a poetry reading by Nandi Comer, the poet laureate of Michigan.

So that's a great event to go to, whether or not you've already seen and you have 'til Sunday to get the exhibitio if you haven't.

For those of you i be sure to include UMMA in your plans.

It is a Feel Good Friday, and this is to celebrate the opening of UMMA's fall season and to see the latest exhibitions and the unveiling of Cannup exterior commission, "Gift," up on the museum.

The museum's open late with DJs and dancing and art making and more, so put that in your on Friday night.

And while you are ther do not miss, Sonya Clark has a piece up in the part of her flag series titled "Whitewash," which is currently up in the Curriculum Col so include that too.

Next week of course, join us here ag but we also have a special event on Tuesday.

Tuesday at 5:30 PM upstairs at Rackham in the amphitheater, we will present Iranian painter Orkideh Torabi.

Reminder to silence your cell phones.

We will have a Q&A today at the end.

You'll see there are microphones on stands at the ends of the aisles here.

When that moment comes, you can an d ask your question.

And now for a pr please welcome dear friend of the series, who has done so much in this area for all of us, chief curator of the Cranbrook Art Museum, Laura Mott (audience applauds) - Hello.

It's so and it's Sonya graduated from the Cranbrook Academy of Art with an MFA in Fiber in 1995, and also received a mid-career Distinguished Alumni Award in 2011.

Over the course of her accomplished career, Clark has received awards such as United States a Pollock-Krasner Award, an 1858 prize, an ArtPrize Grand Jury Award, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award.

Her work has been exhibited in more than 500 museu galleries in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Australia.

She is the Professor of Art at Amherst College in Mass and previously served as the chair of Craft and Mate at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Michigan.

The exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum, titled "We Are Each Other," brings together her large-scale, community-centered and participatory projects.

Over the last few years I've gotten to see f how Sonya engages not only with ideas, but also people, whether it be teaching volunte to enact Detroit Healing Memorial, or in her performance of "Unraveling," where she unraveled the Confed through moments of intimacy, conversation and con alongside the Detroit community.

She embodies the qualities not only on how to be an emphatic human, but also gives us the tools to work collectively to better our society.

Please join me in welcoming an excep researcher and person, Sonya Clark.

(audience applauds) - Hi there.

(laughs) - Hi.

- The last time I was out on stage, all those seats were empty.

I'm so grateful that you are here.

That was just moments ago.

I don't mean I gave (audience laughs) Yeah, I'm so happy to These words hang on my studio wall as a reminder of my purpose.

But I do not, we do not go into it alone.

We do this work together because we must.

The alternative is detrimental to the whole.

These words are by the late Paul Robeson, who is there.

(laughs) And here I'm gonna quote from the biography written of him by Dorothy Butler Gilliam, who happened to be my best friend's mother when I was growing up.

Quote, "Paul Robeson, who rose from a poor preacher's son to a millionaire theatrical screen and concert star, and whose political activism caused him to be scorned in his later years," unquote by a right-wing government that took away his passport.

Paul Robeson was a unifying force in the 1930s and '40s, a symbolic Black man who could help heal racial wounds as part with his artistry.

There is power in that, but Paul Robeson didn't begin as an artist, and that's what you saw here.

He was a scholar athlete, a football player at a Big 10 school.

Okay, it wasn't here, but much like this one.

It was at Rutgers.

He was a football player at a time when the university classrooms and sports team were barely integrated.

Paul Robeson was deeply influential.

So influential and in so many ways across so many disciplines, and to so many people that he was the subject of the poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, the esteemed author and the first Black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize.

He was so esteemed (laughs) that I'm here today to talk to you about the exhibit that I named for the repetition and meaning in the final lines.

And I'm gonna ask you to repeat them with me.

"We are each other's harvest."

- [Audience] We're each other's harvest.

- [Sonya] "We are each other's business."

- [Audience] We are each other's business.

- [Sonya] "We are each other's magnitude and bond."

- [Audience] We are each other's magnitude and bond.

- On the back of the catalog for this show, it reads a little bit of my artist statement.

You can be judgy about my artist statement.

I'm always changing 'em.

You know how they go, "I make installations, performances, and objects in tangent with an urgent exploration of materials.

I gather dust, I locate embedded meaning and unearth historical imbalances.

I engage the language of objects and their etymology.

The intersections of text, textiles and hair celebrate Blackness and reclaim freedom while interrogating injustices.

The work is grounded in the exchange of stories and the transmission of craft techniques between individuals, communities, and generations.

From the very ancestral DNA coiled in my hair to the embodiment of epigenetic memories, I am a repository for all who have come before me, those who stand with me.

I am a collaboration, not a singular artist, but a collective.

And my artwork is, as well."

I wonder how many of you have seen the show?

Now, it's dark so you're not gonna get in trouble.

(audience laughs) Okay, so y For those of you who have seen the show, I hope you have had the chan It is, as Laura said, my 60th solo show, but here's the disclaimer, actually thousands of us are in the exhibit.

That is no exaggerat So while folks often ask me to sign catalogs, like this beautiful one that has been published to mark this exhibition, and I'm always happy to do so, this show is ours.

All who interact and participate, I am asking to sign this one catalog for m And all of those names, your mark, your scripts, I can think of no more powerful record of our magnitude and bond.

This is Sam Gilliam, and in my childhood, he was the husband of Dorothy Gilliam who wrote that biography of Paul Robeson.

So really when I say "We are each other's harvest, we are each other's magnitude," all of this interconnect Sam Gilliam, my childhood friend's father and was the most famous artist that I knew.

He died a little over a year ago.

And among his works were these draped paintings, in which he freed the canvas from its stretcher bars.

He understood the power of cloth as symbol and substance.

It's a consistent methodology in his work.

And so when I was a graduate student graduating from the Fiber program at Cranbrook, I interviewed the most famous artists that I knew, Mr. Gilliam.

So this was back in 1995, and he planted this seed.

Quote, "Others look to a monument.

We looked to a piece of cloth."

Years later I repeated, I reaped that seed, and sort of repeated it and collapsed the statement a bit to simply say cloth is a monument.

Now, I picked textiles as a medium because textiles speak.

The very word text comes from the Greek texere, meaning to weave.

Cloth is palpable.

All of you are wearing it.

It's touching you in very privat (audience laughs) We have this kind of intimacy It's language is understood at a visceral and haptic level.

And then for that, I depend on its ability to comm from me to you and back again.

And when I'm making artwork, I think it helps to use a Cloth also helps us remember who and how we are, and in that way, cloth is a monument.

So on the right is my thesis work from Cranbrook, my first attempt at really using cloth as a monument, a symbol that could hold the wisdom of a collective.

It's textile woven part Kente cloth, so you're seeing the Kente cloth on the left, and part US flag.

So I hope you see that in the image on the bottom.

I asked 50 Detroit women to wrap their heads in a gele, or wrap their heads in a head tie in the same way that I have my head tied now.

And the thing is that original woven cloth, the Kente cloth from the Ashanti people, it actually does speak.

Woven into its very structure of this roya are proverbs.

And the skill of the weaver, so the entire cloth is sort of showing off its s This entire cloth is called, "My Skill is Exhausted."

(audience laughs) But the proverbs are things like about advanceme and prosperity and fortitude.

And I plucked those symbols as you can see in the deta on the far right and made them into "Gele Kente Flag" for these women to wrap their heads.

In 1996 in my hometown of Washington, DC...

Anybody else from DC?

(audience cheers) All right, I hear (Sonya laughs) At our nation's capita the NAMES AIDS Memorial Quilts, so this is the year after I graduated, and the NAMES AIDS Memorial Quilt was on t I'm sorry, on the green there by the Washington Monument.

Each quilt was the size of a grave, or a twin bed, holding space as monument for those who had died of AIDS.

Now, you could write that 20,000 people had died of aids, but to actually hold space and a textile as a monument in a space that holds monuments was a whole nother thing.

This was of great influence to me, and so I took the strategies of those quilts, individual efforts forming a collective, and thought about warrior's cloth shirts, like the one you see on the right, that I had studied from West Africa These heirloom garments covered sealed packets containing prayers and medicines and powerful stuffs.

I added to that the shared etymology, that is to say the shared word history, of the bead and prayer.

And the project was called the "Beaded Prayers Proj So bead and prayer don't sound alike.

But bead comes from the word beodan, which means to ask or to pray.

Might be more familiar when we hear the word bid, like I bid you well, or the word bet.

You know these are secular prayer, right?

(laughs) All from the old English word beodan.

And voila, the beaded prayers project was born.

It started in 1998 and is still ongoing.

It's the twin to the healing memorial that was commissioned by the city of Detroit to help this region heal from the grief of the pandemic.

The original project has been to over 30 venues and has had over 5,000 participants from 75 nations.

Each participant contained their wish, hope, dream or prayer in a sealed packet, and put a bead on the outside.

So you see a bead on the in or prayer on the inside, prayer on the outside.

So back in 2011, I was gratefully awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and I was awarded that fellowship at the National Museum of African So that's where I was doing most of my research.

But routinely, every day I would get up from my des and I would say, let me check out one of these other museums on and see what's going on there.

Now, it happened to be in July, so being a DC native, those of you who raised your hands, like, the last pla by the Smithsonian anytime around July, 'cause everybody flocks there around July 4th.

But I still decided I was gonna go to the Museum of American History, and there was this long snaking line around the Star-Spangled Banner Room, so I skipped that and I made my way up to an exhibit that was called the "American Presidency," which is just on the second floor.

And there I saw this top hat, so you see a top hat and you know which president?

Yeah, it's Lincoln, right?

So I said, okay, I'm interested in what that's why I am here.

And as I walked towards it, and I saw next to it was this half of a dishcloth, and the half of a dishcloth said that this was the piece of cloth that wa by the Confederate insurrectionists at Appomattox to surrender.

It was a Confederate flag of truce that effectively ended the Civil War.

Here's the thing, I had never seen this cloth before, but that battle flag, the Confederate flag that that I know very well, and the only reason for that is propagan and the work of white terrorists and the Ku Klux Klan.

So I immediately wondered, why did I not know this and And here is where artists have power.

I'm just gonna tell you this factoid that I found out.

So with this dishcloth ended the Civil War on April 9th, 1865.

You know who was born April 9th, 33 years later?

Paul Robeson.

Sometimes the universe just sets stepping stones down, and says "Take note."

So this is what I did.

I made the cloth whole again, so that's a reproduction of it And then I made the cloth large, to take the kind of space that the Star Spangled Banners I made it 100 fold its original scale.

The original cloth would've been about 18 by 36 feet.

I mean 18 by 36 inches, not feet.

This piece is 15 by 30 feet.

I had to make a monument of it because this is the flag that we should kno the flag that makes us think like how often are we surrendering white supremacy?

How offering, how often are we decentering whi so that we can do the work of making a true American multicultural democracy?

(audience applauds) Now, this project was first at the Fabric Workshop and an d (laughs) a few days before the ope the museum director called me and she said, "So when you come, we need to t No artist wants to hear that.

(audience laughs) And I said, "Please tell me now if there's something that I can start doing some of the pr And she said, "Well, what we have is this that is white with these, you know, off-gray floors.

And then we have these big white cloths, and this big white cloth," and that's what yo that's monumental, and then t 100 true-to-scale of the truce flags, reproduction of the truce flags, called "Many."

She said, "There's a lot of whiteness actually happening in the space."

And I said, "Well, I know how We can solve that with color."

The thing about the truce flag is that it has, they really were looking for an absolutely white cloth, and they couldn't find that.

So the truce flag, you can no or you it can know it because these mini minimal red stripes.

So I said, "We'll have a point of focus wall, and we can use it to hold some of the text of the show as a title wall, and let's use that color red from those three stripes.

Let's color match that and paint that wall red."

And when we went to Benjamin Moore to color match those three red stripes, the color that matched was this.

(audience laughs) And I want you to ask yourselves why Benjamin Moore would have a color called Confederate Red.

Would they have a color called Nazi red?

I don't think so.

Would they have a color called Confederate Red, I mean a color called Nazi red that is sandwiched on this paint chip, I know you can't read it from far away, between Cherry Wine and Raspberry Truffle.

(audience laughs) And so we decided to call out Benjamin Moore and I ask you not to give them your business.

I just had this conversation with UMMA.

I said, you know, "What paint company do you use to paint the Benjamin Moore was called out about this.

And so what they did is they actually reb and they named it Patriotic Red.

(audience moans and chatters) Sometimes the art makes itself.

(audience laughs) So I wanted people to understand the structure of the truce flag.

And this is where the I'm an educator and an artist.

In order for you to know something, it helps to make it, to inte So I asked people in this space to, we dressed looms with the structure of the truce flag so that people could weave with The audience collectively could weave this elongated versions of the truce flag.

Some of them measuring three feet, some of them measuring 27 feet.

These scrolls of people trying to understand what is this truce flag, why don't we know it, and what does it mean to reconstruct the surrender of white supremacy?

This text piece "Propaganda," as you see sort of in the background h with the loom in the foreground, points to the linguistic connection between text and textile.

And in this case the textile is the t and the textile is absent.

Three red stripes.

You know whe you know where that's coming from.

It's a list, but just a partial list of that you can purchase easily with Confederate battle flags on them.

They range from yoga mats.

Think about that.

(audience laughs) To baby onesies, al so to dishcloths.

And another part of this exercise, and if you go to the Cranbrook you can do this as well.

You can weave Oh sorry, this should be called "Lesson Plans."

It's just mislabeled.

You can do a rubbing of that texture of the truce flag and draw in and then take one of the truce flags with you.

With the previous one over, to date, there are over like 1100 people the last that I counted, who had participated in helping make the woven piece.

With this it's harder to tell, but hundreds and hundreds of pe both in their bodies from the rubbing, and also in their hands, 'cause you can walk away with these.

And then there's language.

Do you see the language in this?

(laughs) I think that this is language, and I don't mean it metaphorically.

It's the language of freedom i Yes, it's hair from my Afro pic, and on our marble bathroom counter no less, but this substance, that mig Often the edges do.

My work recenters that which has been marginalized.

Can you see it?

A language that extends across generations.

It's encoded script, our DNA, holding beauty and freedom, despite all the attempts to deny it.

This is an homage to my most recent ancestor, my mother, Lilith Clark, who passed away as I whispered in her ear five years ago.

She routinely saved her hair for me, though she didn't really like that I worked with hair, and perhaps someone might ask me about that later.

(audience laughs) She was salt a and so I would separ from the white strands to preserve her wisdom.

The title is a reference not only to her wisdom, but to cotton candy, both of the sugarcane fields of her homeland, Jamaica, and the fact that cornro it's referred to as cane rows there, that little fact, and the sweetness of her wisdom that was dissolving like sugar on th in her final years.

So this piece seems really personal, right Like it's my mother, my mother's and yet I believe the personal is universal.

Yes, this is my mother's hair, and it is a DNA that added up to her individual physical being, and half that DNA adds up to mine, resulting in mi So how is it universal?

Well, we all have mothers, but more than that, in her hair is a repository of all the DNA of all the people who made her.

And you keep going back far enou and your people are in there too.

So hair has this power to separate us by its texture, its color, how we wear it, et cetera.

But it also, written in its very script of our DNA, holds us together to remind us that all of us are originally from the continent of Africa.

And our mother, Dinkinesh or Lucy, and other mothers before her are what bind us together.

We are each other's harvest.

We are each other's magnitude and bond.

But let us begin with this cute little child.

She's a little older now, she's still cute.

(audience laughs) Learning about freedoms and unfreedom in this nation in the 1970s.

So here I'm probably abo oh, maybe I was about nine, and maybe this photo was taken around 1976 when Mrs. Gilliam was writing that Paul Robeson biography.

My family happened to live across the street from skilled hands who turned my hair into art, and I knew it.

Cicely Tyson, if you don't know who that magnificent human being is, wore her hair sculpted with pride, and I did too.

Ambassador Ajibade from Benin and his family of 14 had teenage daughters and young aunties, and they did me and my sister up.

As in the Yoruba tradition, they believed the head is our dest the head is the seat of the soul.

I sat between the legs of young women, that's that sacred space from once we all have come and this little artist found freedom and beauty just as the West African artist J.D.

Ojeikere did in these photographs that he made around that same type period.

So these are these works called the "Wig Series," in which I'm trying to remember some of those fleeting ha remembering them on my head and preserv as small monuments.

For cultures that honor the head as the seed of the soul, this hairdressing isn't about vanity, it's about ritua It's a language of something larger than ourselves.

It's a language of our souls.

Photographer and cultural critic Bill Gaskins wrote a review of these works, and I'm just showing you a few of them, the in 1998, and in that review he said quote, "Hairdressing is a primordial textile art form."

And many years later there's a seed planted, got reaped many years later.

I started the Hair Craft Project.

I thought if hair and textiles are related languages, then there should be a fluency between them.

So I went to the native speakers to see how well they could translate.

12 hairdressers, hairstylists from Richmond, Virginia: Kamala Bhagat, Natasha Superville, Jameika Pollard, her sister, Jasmine Pollard, Jamilah Williams, Dionne Eggleston, Ingrid Riley, Ife Robinson, Nasirah Muhammad, Anita Moses, Marsha Johnson and Chaunda King.

Each were given my ancestral strands and a cotton canvas stitched with silk thread, and they were commissioned to do both.

These are my, most of my collaborators are pictured here.

This is the artwork that they did.

Their ingenious ingenuity (laughs) with the language of textiles and hair emerged here.

All of these women are healers and workers of community.

The best among them are often therapists in Black communities.

So all of that gathered up in their Their faces are their signature for their work.

Their work is so good and diverse that some people would see these photographs an "Do you need models?"

And I was like, "No, (audience laughs) But I give that as testimony that peo my body sort of receded as a canvas, and their work merged.

These are the actual canvases that they did, and again, their ingenuity was such that I had to like rethink what I was doing.

(audience laughs) I mean truly, truly magnificent work.

Together we found a bit of freedom, and this project won one of the largest art prizes in this nation, just down the street, ArtPrize.

(audience applauds and cheers) I mean, there's a way when people say, "Oh, girls Yeah, oh, girls braiding th Or co-won ArtPrize, to be more accurate.

So when that, of course they were commissioned.

When ArtPrize happened, they were given The project in its entirety was then commissioned, was then acquired by the MFA Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Again, I gave all of my sis the money distributed, and then all of these women artists, everyone, they started saying, "Should we give up our day jobs?"

And I was like, "No, don't (audience laughs) You're already artists."

But this idea that we are bonded together is why this work was so successful.

I think of all these bright colors chosen by my collaborators as they would choose what colors they wanted to have their photographs done.

And that relates to another project that I'm gonna show you shortly, but just again, that how we are each I could not have done this project by myself.

It's not possible.

It doesn't even make sense b I wanna talk about two other sisters, Angela Davis and Elizabeth Catlett.

Elizabeth Catlett was the first Black woman to receive an MFA at another Big 10 school, here at the University of Iowa.

And Angela Davis... Well, y'all better know who An otherwise, I can't.

I'm just gonna (audience laughs) Elizabeth Catlett created a poster and this serial artwork for activist Angela Davis in the 1970s, during the period in which the 28-year-old political radical and university professor was incarcerated for her activism.

Catlett, angry that Davis was being held without bail, she organized the quote, "Free Angela Davis Committee" and created this print to support the cause.

We are each other's bond.

This in turn reminds me of another artist, Ntozake Shange, who famously wrote these words: "When there is a woman there is magic."

And in 1976, she wrote the play called "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enough."

It's a series of 20 separate poems choreographed to music that interweaves the connected stories of love, empowerment, struggles and loss into a complex representation of sisterhood.

The cast consists of seven nameless African-American women, only identified as the Lady in Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Brown, and Purple.

Subjects from rape to abandonment, abortion, domestic violence are tack She writes, "My love is too delicate to have it thrown back on my face.

My love is too beautiful to have My love is too sanctified to have it thrown back on my face.

My love is too magic to have it thrown back on my face.

My love is too Saturday to have it thrown back on my face.

My love is too complicated to have it thrown back on my face My love is too music to have it thr We Black women are the litmus test for freedom in this nation.

And so it is that in 43 states, my hair that naturally grows from my head is still potentially illegal.

So in 2019, someone had to come up with a Crown Act to say it's legal for my hair to grow the way that it grows, and for me to don natural and cultural hairstyles.

This is ridiculous, but it is white terrorism, this way of trying to control the body.

Black women are a litmus for freedom.

I remember one time when I first showed this slide in a lecture years ago, before the pandemic, someone said to me, a white woman said, "I cannot imagine my body being policed like that."

(audience murmurs) That's true.

That's true.

And then moments later, (laughs) it seemed the Republican conservative, fascist patriarchy started taking away agencies over all fem bodies and trans bodies and overturning Roe versus Wade.

Black women are a litmus.

But let's not forget that idea of hair as language and hair as script.

I think this i who was jailed in 1977, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, wrote a play in Kikuyu, his mother tongue, instead of the colonizer's English.

That's why he was jailed, for writing in his own He later published this seminal book in which he pleads with African authors to write in their languages as an act of freedom, and for the wisdom and beauty that those thousands of languages contain to be held.

But that is language, and language differs from script.

It makes sense that a romance language, like Italian or even English, is held in a script that we take for granted, the Roman alphabet.

But why Kikuyu?

The Roman alphabet has been responsible for erasing native scripts in this many places around the world.

Everywhere that is green uses the Roman alphabet, the colonizer script.

So even those writers who listened to Ngug and wrote in Yoruba, Wolof, Zulu, or any of the other 2000 African languages, their words are then held in the text of the colonizer.

And order to be literate in your own language, you have to negotiate the colonizer's script.

Note that on the continent of Africa, you see a blue swath.

That's another colonizer, the Arabic language.

And then there's this brown patch, that's Ethiopia.

The one place that was never colonized.

Hmm.

Its script was maintained.

And so I set about to make a freedom about that.

It was proceeded by this piece, "Writer Type," a Remington typewriter with balls of my hair covering the Roman alphabet.

Ask me later why it was important that it was a Remington typewriter.

But when I made this typewriter, I realized that the typewriter or at least a new font, so I collaborated wi with a font in the curl pattern of my hair, and created "Twist."

"Twist" was then named by the great poet laureate She's connected to Gwendolyn Brooks by being one of the Black woman, maybe the second Black woman, to be a poet laureate I consider "Twist" a way towards freedom.

The hairball that you see in the bottom left corner is all the letters on top of each other.

And then you see the letter A, A for Angela.

So I was inspired by these 2000-year-old Bloomberg tablets that were found in London.

They were tablets that were used by Romans to write on these wooden tablets that would have pitch on them, black pitch on them, and then people would scratch in them their And so I spray painted glass with the help of my friend Daniel Minter, and scratched the Twist A into this A and then speckled it with stars of freedom.

The Afro is a freedom and so are the stars.

We have billionaires who have been racing to the sky for freedom because this world has becom too small for their endless capacity for greed and selfishness.

But honestly, the stars have long We use the names that Ptolemy gave them: Orion, Cassiopeia, et cetera.

Greek ancestral stories and myths mark the heavens, and we use them to understand ourselves through astrology, Libra, Virgo, Aries.

But then there's also the Big Dipper which we use to navigate towards freedom.

This Afro was coming from Elizabeth Catlitt's portrait.

I often wonder why we do not refer to Freedom Fighter and military agent Harriett Tubman as an astronomer, when she clearly was guided by her knowledge of the night sky to help others navigate their way toward freedom.

So think about who gets to claim the sky and the study of it.

Toni Morrison said years after Harriet Tubman did her work, quote, "The purpose of freedom is to free somebody else."

Those words struck me, and so I made th It's made of cloth cyanotypes, and cyanotypes, if you don't know, are an early form photography that uses two chemical salts that when exposed to t and later dipped in water, turn blue.

In the late 1800s, John Herschel, an astronomer, discovered the salts.

Anna Atkins, botanist and the first to be documented, used the process in her field studies.

I invited people to sprinkle cloths with seeds of sustenance and expose them to our nearest star, the sun.

I was thinking about those who provide sustenance for this nation, from those who were enslaved to those who are migrant workers, in current forms of slavery.

And we made hundreds and we made thousands of them together, over 4,000 of these 9-by-12-inch cloths, and then sewed them together again, thinking about quilt politics.

And among the many hands who helped were artists, students, students who are incarcerated, incarcerated individuals who are artists.

Among the random stars are several Big Dippers pointing to multiple freedoms.

This 1500-square-foot canopy was first shown in a museum in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a site of the Underground Railroad.

And people used flashlights, that's what you're seeing, to navigate their way through the space and to find the Big Dipper.

There's such a vast number of stars, that there's so many, and when I ask people if they will count how many stars they are, they scoff at me.

And yet I had a mathematician come up with a number.

And it doesn't even approach the number of people who were forcibly migrated during the transatlantic slave tr It's not even three years of that hundreds of year of enslavement and of the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade.

And I just wanna remind us that there is current slavery, 12 to 40 million people enslaved worldwide, and of those, 152 million child laborers could be counted among them.

I made this piece "Edifice and Mortar," which is a large, you know, an edifice is a large an or a system, a complex system of beliefs, and mortar, you understand, is what holds bricks together.

The front face of this piece, which is intended to look like an upside-down flag, has these foundational words.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," et cetera, et cetera from the Declaration of Independence.

And the mortar itself is made from hair that was gathered from salons in Richmond, which was one of my hometown for 12 years, I lived there, but also one of the spaces that was used for human trafficking.

The top port for human trafficking during the transatlantic slave trade.

The back of the piece makes reference to this Roman brick stamp from 2AD.

Note that it looks like an Afro.

and it actually has the name of the enslaved person who was making these bricks, COS, or Cos, in this particular one.

I use that to think about the word schiavo, which might be familiar to some of you who speak Latin or Italian.

And if that word is not familiar to you, likely you're sort of more familiar with th You all know what the word ciao means, right?

Like, hello, goodbye, ciao, that greetin I'm really interested in the way that monuments can live on our tongue.

The word ciao is used as a greeting in this many places in the world.

Notice that the United States is not lit, the Americas are not lit up, except for South Ame And yet most of you know the word ciao.

The word ciao derives from schiavo, and the word schiavo means slave.

Hold onto that for a moment.

When we greet each other, we're saying, "I'm your slave."

Because the Roman empire was built on slavery and the United States of America was built on that This is me working on a piece in which we've carved...

I worked with Nick Benson to carve the word schiavo out of Carrara marble, and use that dust for th I often work with dust.

In this case, I'm using a Conf that I purchased that is printed on a dish towel, and I use it to clean the floor, and as I clean the floor, the dirty floor reveals these dirty words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

I am dressed as Ella Watson, the same Ella Watson made famous by Gordon Parks.

I am kneeling as I wash the floor in the manner of Colin Kaepernick.

I am cleaning the dirty words just as these gentlemen are cleaning after the insurrection of January 6th.

I wanted to make a monument to Ella Watson.

Gordon Parks brought her out of the shadows.

I wanted to make a textile monument to the work that she did.

All the Black women who are in the shadows doing the work of cleaning up this nation.

Let's skip the next slide, and get to this.

I don't wanna leave my non-binary folks and the gentleman out of this as well, so sometimes I'm working in barbershops, and in this case I did a project where I invited people from Miami to read a poem, and in exchange they would get a free haircut.

The poem is by the late Calvin Hernton, and it goes thusly: "I am not a metaphor or a symbol.

This you hear is not the wind in the trees, nor a cat being maimed in the streets.

I am being maimed in the streets.

It is I who weep, laugh, feel pain or joy.

I speak this because I exist.

This is my voice.

These words ar My mouth speaks them.

My hand writes.

I It is my fist you hear beating against your ears."

I wanted to join in, too.

So I had a hairdre when I was reciting the poem as well.

And that led to the last project that I'm going to share with you today, which was 1-877-OUR-CURL.

Write it down.

And if y in which I engaged these seven poets, all Black fem poets, and ask them if we could use their poems, transliterating their poems into the Twist hair font for a proj The project 1-877-OUR-CURL allows you to stand in front of those transliterated poems.

You dial 1-877-OUR-CURL, and you can hear the poets reading their poems.

The most beautiful one, or the most beautiful print is when are reading together as a palimpsest.

And I'm going to play that for you now.

(poets speaking at once) (poets speaking at once continues) (poets speaking at once continues) - [Poet] Joy, like her sadness overflowing.

She is not She is visions and imagination.

(poets speaking at once) - [Poet] Not too tight, feathered, fringed.

(poets speaking at once) - Not too big.

- [Poet] Tousled, (poets speaking at once) - Rasta dread.

- Tight ropes.

(poets speaking at once) - Stilt-walker of hair.

- How did you sleep?

- Contortionists.

(poets speaking at once) - [Poet] Into tailored tufts of velvet made from un-sullied nests.

- Who are you texting?

(poets speaking at once) - Not too long.

- Did we What language?

- Long enough.

(poets speaking at once) - Eyes g (poets speaking at once) - [Poets] Ears so black, - And furthermore.

- The smel - Which cavity?

- A beauty craft.

- How long will it be?

- [Poet] How long do you want it?

I know you.

- Complete with lullabies for presidents.

- I wish I were you.

I want to drag my toes i - This fact, this hair.

- I finally (indistinct) - Is her monitor.

- You know it only get worse from here.

pr imeval.

- Cash only.

- [Poet] Box braids and Marley twists and wig wreaths announce the ongoing presence of the first woman ever made, who crossed the ocean without sextant, holding 400 years of sugar, undissolved, underneath her tongue.

(audience applauds) - The work I do is not possible without you.

I wonder, now you've heard it, do you see it?

The wealth of language here, the inherent scripts, my attempts to center that which is footnoted, repressed, marginalized, or discarded, to claim its beauty, humanity, and rightful freedom.

Because together, in doing so, we might save our collective humanity, as long as we remember that we are each others' harvest.

- We are each other's harvest.

- Oh come on, now.

(audience laughs) - We are each - That we are each other's harvest.

We are each other's business.

We are each other's magnitude and bond.

And with that, I thank you.

(audience applauds and cheers) I know this is when the grand exodus occurs, (audience laughs) and so in mome once we have those folks leave, I'm gonna invite folks to come to the so that I can have some questions from you.

And we'll be doing that for a little bit.

- You got this?

- Yep.

- Yeah, - All right.

- Thanks (Sonya laughs) Oh, but I want a photo of us.

(laughs) (audience chattering) Looks like I'm taking a photo of us all leaving, but ah, smile everybody.

(audience cheers) Okay.

(laughs) (audience chattering) So we have a few minutes for questions.

And this is my favorite part.

(laughs) So I'm gonna ask those of you who are getting ready to leave or leaving, if you could just leave quietly.

I respect that you have to go, but that way we can hear each other.

(audience applauds) And so I and I don't mean to silence you.

It sounds awful.

Like, that' But (laughs) in this case, it's beneficial to those of us who are able to Hi, we'll start here.

- Hi.

First of all, I really liked your lecture.

I thought that it was like, I've never seen anything like an d so I'm really excited to check out the exh and everything after this.

- [Sonya] You're - Yeah.

- [Sonya] I'm gonna - Okay.

But I wanted to ask why you used a Remington typ - Oh!

- Yes.

- Look at you, paying (a udience laughs) I used a Remington typewriter because Remington was in the business of making armaments for the Civil War.

- Oh.

- It makes sense, right?

Like small metal parts make same Remington guns, small metal parts make typewr Also Corona, same thing, right?

(laughs) Yeah, but with Remington I knew that they had helped provide guns for the Civil War, and so it just naturally makes pe n and sword reference.

- Yeah.

- As well, yeah.

- That's really cool.

Okay.

Thank you.

- Thank Let's go t Hi.

- Hello.

- [Sonya] What's your name?

I didn't ask y Sorry.

I m Yeah, go ahead.

- I'm Ahdi.

- Ahdi, nice to meet - Ahdi.

(laughs) - Ah - I just want to start the question by saying that I'm an oil painter.

- Yes.

- And when I paint, I feel everything stop just for a minute, and I sort of feel everything disappear, and it goes into the paint.

And I'm wondering if your textile, when you hold it, when you feel it, do you think it has a soul?

Do you give your textile a soul?

- Do I believe that my artwo So I'm gonna answer you in multiple ways.

One way is to say absolutely.

What I think you're describing, like my parallel, 'cause I don't know your experience.

I don't live in your bod but what you're describi like, sometimes I'm busy about making the work, right?

And also there is not a single thing that I showed you today, even that something it's a discreet object, that hasn't h And I mean that quite literally.

So I have a studio manager by the name of Meg A who helps me with my work, and I have many hands who help but even those pieces that is just me and the a and my materials... Like who made the canvas, in your case?

Who made the stretcher bars?

Wh All of those people are actually there with you, as well as all of the history of that particular all of those people are with you, as well as all the people who all of those people are with you.

So it's never a singular endeav and so sometimes that silence is all t gathered up to saying like, "Okay, we are doing something, we're going somewhere."

Where are we going?

Are Oh no, we're going here.

All right.

You know?

And so I lov and just to be aware of this lack of singularity, like this sense of like, we're doing something with purpose.

We are doing something with purpose.

And to me, when that silence comes, it's that I'm listening to all of those voices, too.

Thank you, Ahdi.

(laughs) - Thank you.

- Hi, who are you?

- I'm Oliver (indistinct) - Hi Oliver.

- And, well, I hope that I can properly phrase this, but first of all, are you aware of the artist Kara Walker?

- Yes.

- Yeah?

So this is something that I've wondered ab and I was actually- - Are you gonna ask me about Kara's work?

- I'm just using that as an example I guess, but well, like, (laughs) if like a white male were to do the same thing that she does, it wouldn't be like brilliant sa You know, it'd kind of just be like racist, right?

So I'm wondering, like, what can, I guess, an artist like me do to advocate?

Like, what is still respectful and what passes that, I guess?

- So if I'm understanding your question is how, as an ally and someone who wants to be actively anti-racist, right?

(laughs) What work can you do?

So the reason I asked you abou why you conjured Kara is that there's no way you can make Kara's work.

Even I can't make Kara's work, and we share a lot of things i Kara's the only person who can make Kara's work.

So now you have to figure out what are you going to make, right?

What is a story that you wanna tell, right?

And there's several artists who don't belong to marginalized communities who make work about the communities that they belong to as a way to hold up a mirror to say we could be better, do better, right, for the benefit of all of us, right?

Not for those poor Black people on the margins, but for the benefit of all of us.

I know this for a fact, if marginalized people in this nation every last one of us would be better, but we've been taught, would have a better life It's just a fact, right?

(audience applauds) If you have voting rights and healthcare for the most marginalized person, then the rest of us have freedoms, but we are taught that it's a ze It's propaganda.

You take care of those who are most and everybody wins.

(audience applauds) Just common sense, right?

So take care of what you can take care of, and everybody will win.

Don't try and That's not gonna work out.

(laughs) Thank you for your question.

- Thank you.

- Hi, who are you?

- Hi, my name is Richala - Oh, in English, it's Richalain, but- - Oh, Richalain, Richalain.

- The way it's pronounced traditionally is Richalain.

- Richalain.

- And so I was wondering, one, I am a huge fan of your work.

- Thank you.

- I'm obsessed with a lot of i - Our work.

(laughs) - You relate p a lot to textiles and fibers in how we're kind of all connected to each other and bonded in such a strong, significant way, and that shows throughout your work in how a lot of people are influencing the outcome and influencing the product of the design, and I was wondering, past the actual finished work, how have the people that you've worked with influenced yourself, your perception of your work and your perception of you?

- Yes.

- Yeah, such a good question.

So the reason that I like making wor that engages community is that I always learn somet about the work and about myself, right?

Because we're mirrors for each other, right?

That's not in the Gwendolyn, "We are each other's mirrors" isn't in t But in as in as much as things are relational and we're responsible to one another, I'll say this about the people who me in my studio, if they're too reverent, I actually don't want them in (audience laughs) No, I'm serious.

Like, we're trying We are not trying to beef up Sonya's ego.

Sonya's ego is fine.

(audience laughs) We're trying to So I love when one of my studio assistants will say, "This isn't gonna work.

This isn't really good."

That, to me, is interesting.

Like, let's talk about it.

If they're acting like everything that I poop is good, that's just good for my ego, right?

But it doesn't make the work better and it doesn't make my purpo Mm.

Excuse me.

It doesn't mak Likewise with the audience.

When I have the privilege of being in a space where I am present with someone who is present with my work, right?

Not a performed work, but present with someone who is present with my work, and they say something about th at story I get to take back to my studio and work with.

It's a gift.

Even if it's a negative response.

And by the way, I love kids, 'cause they go "Cool, Li ke, it's so uninhibited, you know?

It's just like, okay, best art critic ever.

(laughs) You know?

Right?

Because it's so honest, right?

Even the most difficult situations, so sometimes, and you know this in the w that have been talked about today, sometimes I'm actually trying to figure out a way that I can actually be in the work with the person experiencing the work so that I can get that feedback, so I can make the next wor And this is the good stuff, when we're in community, even when it's really complicated.

Yeah.

Thank you for your question.

- Thank you so much.

- (laughs) Let's go to h Hi.

- Hi, I'm Stevie, and- - Hi Stevie.

(laughs) - Hi.

Thank you so much for al and for being here.

I love what you said when you said, "I'm really interested in how monuments can and since you gave us so much, I'm gonna give something back to you.

And they're the words from someon who's my mentor and who actually connected us when I was at Cornell in the graduate program there.

And we had dinner in 2017 with (indistinct) and Noliwe.

- Oh, nice to see you again.

- And good to see you, too.

- Noliwe was just at the house the other day.

- Oh.

(laughs) What a wonderful pers But these words say, "Each public encount in the white cubes of the museum and gallery space is a master class in expression, communication and aesthetic force that instructs and edifies.

So exactly what knowledge do we have as an audience to what she calls her authentic obsession?

What connections have we made as the public?

What have we learned?

We now know and can see bett how DNA is an individual and collective fact, like the cloth in the garment of human destiny.

We now know in expansive ways that there is meaning in materials and objects.

We cannot look at combs, cloth, wood, metal, gold, sugar, hair and ink in the same ways."

And that's from Bill Gaskins.

(audience applauds) Thank you.

- Thank you.

So Bill Gaskins, who I is a person who wrote "hairdressing is a primordial textile art form," is family to me now and has been for many years, chosen family.

I didn't marry him, but Noliwe Br who is the head of Africana studies at Brown Unive and has also been a very good friend for very long, they fell in love about 25 years ago and I was there to witness it.

And they're both my dear, dear friends, so thank you for that.

Oh, this side.

- Hi.

- I got so many compliments and good writing You see what my Let's just sta (audience laughs) - That's Hi, I'm Leo.

I really l - It was just so cool to see and just like all your pieces are just really amazing and inspirational that- - You know what?

Not all - [Sonya] But let's pretend that jus and I could let's call it the fertilizer (audience laughs) that makes for the And in fact, if I'm not making some of those fertilizer p then I know that I'm just I'm just saying like, here's the thing that worked.

Let me do it again.

Let me do it again.

And that's the ego.

- Yeah.

- It's a My question is, what is your like future goals?

Like what is next?

What is next for you?

- Oh, yeah.

So I usually don't do this, I was telling everyone at lunch about this next bi and I say, "Shh, don't tell anybody."

So I'm gonna shh myself and do 'cause there are a lot of you in the room, and I need to get some of thes and I don't want you all scooping my gr No, I'm just kidding I will say that text is obviously important to me.

You can see that I'm not a writer.

I wish I were a poet, because then the talk would've been half an ho and everything, there wouldn't have been an um or an ah, there would be no extra words.

Everything would've just been like Bill Gaskin's writing, you kn Like, he just said everything that I And then she read it and then it was done.

(audience laughs) We could all go to dinner, have some wine, We're over.

So the next project is also engaging a cultu and engaging community, and some of the metaphors of written by that cultural ancestor towards using an everyday, something that we would see in our everyday occurrence as a symbol of Black lives thriving.

I can say that.

- Okay.

- Without tipping my han And some of you might even be able to connect the dots (audience laughs) But thank you for your quest - [Leo] - Hi.

- Hi.

I don't know how close I have to be to this.

- I can hear you fine.

- Okay.

Hello.

I have two names.

- What's your na Oh yeah.

- Yeah, I have two names My English nam - Yedi?

- Yeah, like the Yeti monster.

(audience laughs) Kinda similar.

So a lot of your work has to do with like connecti and human connection and like part of your manifesto is like we are each other's business and so we can't exist separately.

- [Sonya] Well, that was Gwendolyn Br but sure, I'll take it.

- Yeah.

(lau But like, yeah, and like we al and so like humans, we can't really live separately from each Personally, I am neurodivergent, and also I am not white, but I grew up in Midland, which is like super, super white.

So since I was young, like social connection has not felt like it has come very naturally for me.

It's kind of felt like the opposite.

And so I was wondering in your works where it invo like, participation and like interaction with the audience, like, what have you learned from that that you don't think you would be from work done physically in isolation?

Because I know that you mentioned how like people are always, like, with us even if we're physically alone, but like, I mean like physically interacting with people.

- Yeah.

So I never feel that I'm physically alone.

I think that, you know, when I'm in, I really don't ever think that I'm physically alone.

- [Laurie] Yeah.

- Like, this was not made by me.

Whatever me is, it was made by my parents, my grandparents, their great-grands, et cetera.

You just go back 10 generations, and it's 1,024 people standing Yo u go back one more generation, that's 2,050, right?

So as long as humans have existed to make this human, like, that's a hell of a lot of people, right?

- Yeah.

- So even in solitude, I'm not in solitude, right?

But I love your question about, because you identified as neurodivergent, it does make me think about some interactions in which a person can do something in my work, you know, in one of the pieces can engage it just by themselves, right?

Versus some engagements that are group engagements.

And so you've made me think, like, how am I attending to differen And how are they working?

Like, who I can't jump in the double Dutch 'cause that' - (laughs) Yeah.

- But I could be over here rubbing on this table by myself, or maybe even that feeling is too much, you know, in our bodies?

Like maybe tha but I could be ove Yeah, that's very helpful.

I'm not sure if I had an but you've given me a gi because you're making me think on different kinds of minds.

As a teacher, I think wh en I'm in the classroom, but as an artist, I'm oh , who am I hitting here?

And who am I maybe excluding?

And so that's a big gift.

I appreciate that.

- [Laurie] You're making me think a lot too, Sonya.

So thank you so much.

- (laughs) Yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

(laughs Hi.

- Hi.

My name is Lydia Myrick and I - Hi Lydia.

- (laughs) Hey.

I just wanted to say thank you for your p - You're welcome.

- And I really resonated with a lot of things that you said, especially with Angela and you know, just those type of visionaries that kind of inspired me throughout, you know, high school and middle school when I didn't really have a lot of Black people around me, just growing up in like, you know, an all But I do a lot of art that surrounds activism and curating galleries that are specifically toward activism and everything like that, and I really want to gauge lik how do you think you could bring people together?

How do you feel like I can make art, this type of art, specifically important to a wide range of people, just in th Because at least in my experience with trying to get, I know it probably doesn't make sense.

I don't know how t - It's just a big question.

- It is a huge question.

(Sonya laughs) It's like a loaded question.

But I guess my struggle, like and just like explaining it and making it important to other people and making it worth to see, because at least your work is worth seeing, and everybody else here, (laughs) but a lot of other p are required t So.

(laughs) - (l I just was wondering- - So if I'm unders you're saying how do - [Lydia] How do you bring people together?

- How do you bring peo Oh, that's- - Sorr (Lydia laughs) - Start - Yeah.

- Right?

So start sma Find out what people have in common, right?

There's a way, a friend of mine who's an activist was talking about like different ways of measuring success in a community-based project.

And one way of success is saying 500 people came 2,000 people were involved, et cetera.

Another way of measuring success is to say five people were there, but they were all really different in And I love that, right?

So how do you bring together like five of your most because then they are connected.

Like, they're differ to different groups, right?

And so with something like the Beaded Prayers Project and its twin, the Healing Memorial here, I was in a classroom, you know, like, one of my communities is my students.

And I said, "Okay, I'm gonna show you how to make these be and I'm gonna ask each of yo to ask a friend of yours to 'Cause from that I'm gonna learn how easy they are to if they're too complicated or whatever, 'cause you're all art students, so you have smar But then we're gonna see how you can extend that to somebody else, and so tha from this Each One Teach One model, right?

And now there are thousands of people.

Now it's so big, right, But it started really small.

I mean sure, 20 students, but it could have st And then in that same way that I was saying my parents or grandparents, like very quickly you get to 1,024 peo - Right.

- So don't ignore the small, right, as a measure of success.

That word is a little problematic.

I'd like to unpack it a little bit, but we'll just leave i When you also consider that it might be about the d and like how many different types of people, right?

Mm.

I appreciate you.

- Thank you.

- I'm just gonna check in on you with time because we're running.

- Oh.

- We're running.

We have a show that follows us in here.

So we- - Oh, you - We have a mandate.

- Okay.

- So just letting you know.

- Okay.

All right, s to the end of that line, but I might get to the end of Hi there.

- Hello, my name is - Brooklyn, nice to meet you.

- I just wanted to say I really l the usage of hair in a lot of because I think that like, it's something so for us and something that's so, like from like bigoted groups, it's like, so often overlooked or or, like, because they're probably jealous.

- Or co-opted.

- Yeah.

- That's anoth but we're gonna be over here doi - Right.

(laughs) - Okay.

(laughs) - But, like, the different braiding styles that you showed us in a few of your slides, and you were like mentioning how that, like, won an award like for braiding hair, which I think like braiding hair is even like an So like, I think- - Absolutely.

- [Brookly like an award for that.

And I'm like, the piece back there on slide in the background, just like, your process for collecting hair, like you said, how you got something off of an Afro pic.

Do you just like- - Yeah, it's my hair.

Then when I comb my hair, it's my hair.

- Yeah, like- - Just my Yeah.

Yeah.

And cut my hair, c Like the hair that might end up in the tras Mm.

Goes into artwork.

(audience la You know, gathering it all up.

Like why would I t (audience laughs) Throwin' away, might be, like, your great-great grandma too, right?

(laughs) Like, we don't know, right?

Yeah.

So I appreciate that.

- just one more question, if you had like a for that method, like, in the future maybe?

- What method?

- Like, collecting hair again, like for future- - More plans?

- [Brooklyn] Yeah, like for future - You mean if I'm only using my or other people's hair or?

- [Brooklyn] Just like, are you - Yes, I think I'm gonna be making work with hair for a long It's such a rich medium, you It's both, like, if you pluck one of my hairs, it's so intentionally mine and it's also collective, like it's singular and everybody's.

- [Brooklyn] Yeah.

- There' And it's political.

It's cultural.

It just goes on and on and on and on.

It seems endless to me the horizon line on that.

(laughs) Yeah, thank you.

Thank you.

- Hi.

- Hi.

What's your name?

- My name is Erin.

Erin.

- Erin.

- Yeah.

I was just curious abo they all have such deep, like, meanings to them, and I was just, I think that's very fascinating.

I love that in artwork, and I was just wonderi of what materials to use.

Like, how do they come "O h, I should use this typewriter, I should do this for this spec - So I think all materials have power.

So I'm often using materials that are discarded.

Like your hair, people throw it away, but some people Like I remember that other question when I said ask me when my mother was like, don't be using hair in your work, except she was Jamaican But even saying, like, the thing that you're tossing away, how can you use that?

Or even when it's something like a typewriter, which I had to buy from deep eBay and all of tha Like, how did that happen?

I just did some rese So I have the story behind that is that I have a of Anglo and South American literature in Italy.

We just became friends, you know, and one of my dearest friends, and he collects typewriters, Olivetti typewriters, right?

These like these beautifully designed typewriters in Italy.

And I was like, you know, I walked into his house, he had all these typewriters.

Little a And then I was like, "Huh, typewrit I mean literally it was like that.

Like I have a friend who and I thought, "Huh, typewriters.

Okay."

(laughs) And then I just started doing Li ke, I don't wanna collect 'c ause that doesn't make sense to me.

Though I do have one in the mo What's it?

Octavia Butler.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I was about to say O Octavia Butler used, 'cause she had an Olivetti, and I'll proba But it was just a friend of mine.

I was just like, you colle What about typewriters?

What about typ Wait, what about typewriters?

You know?

So curiosity leads you to good places, and your friends do, too.

Pick your friends wisely though.

Okay.

Last one on this How are we for time?

- Three minute - Okay.

All right.

- Hi, my name is Casey.

- [Sonya] Run over to that side.

(Sonya and C - But my Chinese name is- - I'm sorr - My name is Casey, but - Suru?

- Suru.

Kind of like Siri.

(laughs) - Suru?

- Suru.

- Oh, I'm not gonna get it.

- It's o - [Sonya] Yeah, sorry.

You can help me with it later.

- So my question w in your cultural heritage and how you wanted to express it?

Because as like a very culturally Americanized Chi whenever I make art about my culture or my relationship to it, I get like imposter syndrome, I I feel like it's inauthentic.

And even if you've never dealt with that, I just wanted to know if you had some tips.

(laughs) - So I feel like there's a lot of room in there, right?

So I'm a first-generation American, so that's a culture that I belong to that I share with a lot of my st I am a child of Caribbean parents, so that's a very specific kind of thing.

And I don't think I showed you any work.

Probably the only reference that I had to that i was the one with me holding my mother's hair, that photograph of me holding my mothe because of the relationship between Jamaica and th and why Africans were brought, forcibly brought, to the Caribbean.

I am African American, right?

But not in the same way that my husband is African American, where he has generations of people in his family who have been on this land that we call the United States of America, right?

But I just belong to so many identities that I just feel they're completely mine, And yet if you add up all of those identities, then it does feel like, oh, well that just ends up in being me, right?

(lau But if I take any one of them, then I get to connect with other people, right So I'd never feel like an imposter, and when I feel like I don't know something, that curiosity we were talking about, it just makes me wanna dig deep There's so many people wh about Jamaican culture than I do Of course they do.

I didn't grow up ther I just visited a lot as a child, right?

I didn't grow up in Yoruba culture, but I know that my father, who likely, his people came from the Yoruba people in West Africa, right?

So I feel like I c but with deep respect to knowing that I didn't grow up in that culture, right So that balance of saying like, I'm going to have a perspective that i about this culture that I feel connected to shouldn't make you feel like an imposter, because the way that you feel con you're not an individual, it's in you, right?

So ask the questions, do the research, right?

Feel the feels, right?

- [Casey] You say by learning and attempting to understand, that is how we reconnect to our roots or?

- Yeah, your curiosity is gonna get you there, right?

But also your feeling.

I wanted to like not into this intellectual exercise but how you feel about things, like right here in your gut, as like Roland Barthes talked about, like, the way that you look at a photograph and can see a photograph, and it looks like a tree.

Everybody would agree this is a photograph of a tree, right?

And so, wow, I'm really flattening this, but just bear with me.

You see a photograph of a tree, and you say, oh, he would describe this as studium.

Like, everybody would look at it a It's a tree."

But then you look at "That's like the tree in my th at I fell off the swing and scraped my kne (laughs) And that's a way of describing punctum.

It doesn't matter that he called them studium and punctum.

It's like the collective experience and the personal experience, and I feel like if you make work that is too much the personal, someone has to live in your skin to understand it, r Like even your twin, if you had a twin, might not get it, right?

And if it's too universal, then why are you makin So that sweet spot right in be that's the balance we're looking for.

I'm always looking for it, I remember an artist, oh gosh, I'm forgetting her name.

A very famous artist and she... You all, maybe some of you know this piece.

She extends a... (sighs) It's embarrassing that I can't remember her name.

I'm just getting tired, but (laugh You all with me?

You know this artist?

(sighs) She's so famous.

Anyway, so she decides that she's gonna learn how to walk on this tightrope.

And she said, it seems like you're but actually what your body is doing is constantly making adju And I feel that's part of the work of being an artist, too, is it, like, too much everybody to o much only I'm gonna get it, too much about, you know, this cultural that I don't feel that I know too much about, or too much about my person, you know what I mean?

Like, it's always those balances, and it's how you respond to the balance that is gonna let you walk across the tightrope, right?

Only you.

(laughs) Thank you.

- Thank you so much.

- Is that the last one?

(a udience applauds) - Okay.

- Go to Cranbrook on Saturday, and you'll have another opportunity.

- Oh yeah.

Come to Cranbrook on Sat - Yeah, I'm sorry.

There's ano I have no choice.

- She's gotta do what she's Don't ge (audienc Thank you all.

(a udience chattering)