(upbeat orchestral music) (audience chattering) - [Announcer] Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

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

Today, we present a heroin's return as we present really truly one of our very own, a Stamps school alum, but also an Ann Arbor native, artist Nicole Marroquin.

- Yay!

- Yeah.

(audience applauds) Yeah, I was reflecting today that this really truly is a special moment as Nicole's return sort of embodies this notion of the Penny Stamps Speaker Series itself being this mix of town and gown and bringing together of different communities here each week.

So a special welcome to townies in the house, who it may be your first time here 'cause Nicole has dragged you out.

We are here every Thursday, so pick up a brochure on your way out and join us again.

And I have to just give one celebrity shout out for people who know Fran is in the house.

(audience cheers) I find that very exciting.

And for those of you who don't know, wow.

I wanna thank our longtime partner, the Institute for the Humanities, for collaborating on this event.

Truly a key partner to this series for many, many, many years.

And then additional support from the U of M Department of American Cultures Latina/o Studies program.

And our series partners, Detroit Public Television and Michigan Radio 91.7 FM.

Nicole's appearance here in the series happens in tandem with an exhibition at the Institute for the Humanities Gallery, which will open this evening directly following Nicole's talk here.

We will not have our regular Q&A here today.

You will notice there are no microphones at the ends of the aisles.

We will all reconvene over at the Institute for Humanities.

They will have a lovely reception.

We will be able to have a Q&A there and meet Nicole and see her work.

So do join us directly after, the Institute for the Humanities Gallery, which is on the corner of Thayer and Washington.

It's literally just sort of around the corner, sort of caddy corner from Rackham.

So join us there right away.

One announcement for you, tomorrow there will be a book launch for the "ABCs of Black Authors."

This is a new coloring book and reading guide created by Stamp student Lauren McHale Mills.

(audience applauds and cheers) Yah.

Lauren will be speaking about how she created the book, and there will be a book signing and a reception.

And the first 10 guests will receive a free complimentary copy, so be there early.

It's from 3:00 to 4:00 PM tomorrow at the Stamps Gallery.

A reminder to silence your cell phones.

Remember there's no Q&A.

Go to the Institute for Humanities after.

And now to introduce our speaker, we have a dear friend of the series, the inimitable curator of the Institute for the Humanities Gallery, Amanda Krugliak.

(audience applauds) - Wow.

(clears throat) There are so many things that I wanna say about Nicole Marroquin, but they require hand gestures, expletives, and exclamations.

I first remember becoming aware of Nicole when she was still a graduate student at the Stamps School of Art & Design.

She was dropping off this incredible work at the Ann Arbor Art Center for a community exhibition.

And this small kid was following her around just trying to keep up.

And I have to say, even then, I was kind of in awe of this woman.

I mean beyond her work, which was amazing, it was just the way that she moved through it, like this force in space.

And I was this divorced mom, performance artist with two small kids just trying to work it out.

And she inspired me.

I carried that with me.

And I'm telling you this, because of the ways that paths cross over time, our stories, our histories and one thing leads to another, or there's a chance for this afterlife, all the ways that we can keep track of each other and lift each other up.

And suddenly this pattern emerges, and you don't even expect it.

And then here we are, nearly 20 years later at the Michigan Theater with all of you.

Nicole Marroquin is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator whose practice explores spacial justice and Latinx history.

She has presented her work at the Kochi Biennale, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Northwestern University, DePaul Museum of Art, among others.

She was a Joan Mitchell fellow at the Center for Racial Justice Innovation in 2014.

She has been an artist in residence at the Chicago Cultural Center, Mana Contemporary, Watershed, Ragdale and Oxbow, among others.

Her work is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen, Chicago.

In 2022, Nicole was awarded the coveted USA Artist Fellowship, recognizing the most impactful artists working and living in the United States today.

Her site-specific installation, With Care, created for the Institute Gallery, presents the documentary photographs of iconic Mexican-born artist, teacher and Nicole's dear friend, Diana Solis, in a visual dialogue with Nicole's own creative work.

The installation brings to light the tending to, the safekeeping, the trust, the care required to ensure the survival of the Solis collection and other archives like it for future generations.

Nicole's vision for this installation is abounding in color.

It is riotous in pattern, a glorious and unapologetic with image and form.

She inhabits the gallery space with the exuberance and volition of an unstoppable comet.

And if that's not love, what is?

Please join me in welcoming and celebrating.

Nicole, Nicole, Nicole Marroquin.

(audience cheers and applauds) - [Audience Member] Whoo!

- Hi, everybody.

- Hey!

- Can you hear me?

- Yeah.

- Thank you all for coming.

And thank you to Amanda for bringing me, thanks to the Institute for the Humanities.

I'm so excited to be here and to share my work with you.

I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my practice.

I'm going to show you some of my work.

But before I get into that, I gotta thank my parents for having the guts to move up here in 1973 (chuckles) where it's really cold and to leave Texas.

And then when you're done doing the things you needed to do, you stayed.

I like it here.

I also want to thank my incredible daughters for shaping me and making me who I am.

And you know, it's pretty weird to be here on this side 'cause when I was 15, I ushered a lot of excellent concerts here.

Yeah, Philip Glass fan (indistinct) live was pretty amazing.

And The Cure, like, it changed my life.

- Whoo.

- Yeah, just me.

Me with a perm.

(chuckles) - Aww.

- Yeah, you're welcome.

And so in 2008 I graduated from Stamps with my MFA.

And I dragged my daughter along with me.

And so Mina wearing my, when we were around strike, she wearing my strike t-shirt, has also, like the experience of being a University of Michigan was incredible and has done so much to make me who I am today, along with going to community high school.

Thank you so much to that place for letting me be because I was a handful, as were many of you, as are many of you, and I hope you keep it up.

- Whoo!

(Nicole chuckles) And this is kind where I wanna transition into talking about institutional critique and youth rebellion, right?

So I've always been interested in it, I look for it, and I am kind of trying to recover some of these histories.

Also wanna let you know, I spent a lot of midnights on eBay.

(chuckles) So I found a lot of history about Chicago schools that I think needs to be talked about by looking in the middle of the night, googling around and trying to figure it out myself.

I'm also, like, in education, I work with teachers but I'm also, like, I don't know.

You know?

Like, I think we have work to do.

This is during an air raid drill in a kindergarten.

And I really identify with one person there.

(audience chuckles) And I think about how knowledge produced, and, you know, what's worthy of study.

I love asking kindergartners whenever I have the chance, "Well, what do you really need to know?"

And this is the only bunch of text I'm gonna share with you.

I'm a big fan of Dr. Maria Cotera who really, like, changed the way I think.

And she talks about the politics of historical meaning-making and practices that shape our collective memory and points out that access to power determines one's presence in the archive.

And some people's lives and interventions are rarely the subject of historical meaning-making.

And that's kind of what I'm getting at.

I'm also deeply involved in the work of an artist and photographer who I'm gonna talk about a little bit later.

But when I'm looking at images, I'm looking for these people, right?

In this picture they're reading "Our Bodies, Ourselves."

They're smoking cigarettes.

They're at their alternative school talking about sexual health.

Like, this is it, right?

This is what I look for.

And so I make prints, but just like most artists now, like, I do research, I produce the work, and I disseminate it.

I think this print might actually be in the show.

But everything I make is with others, right?

I don't think anything I've done could have been done by myself, and so I wanna thank everybody who's made it possible for me, including my collaborators and the young people who I've worked with who make work that I'm actually gonna be showing tonight.

Elders who's informed my work and my very special bud, Liz, who (chuckles) the show, you'll see it.

It looks really good.

Yeah, thanks, Liz.

(chuckles) And so I like to take it to the street.

I like working with teachers.

Being around the Chicago Teachers Union, that is an absolute inspiration.

So what happened was I tried to make, like, rapid-response activist ceramics, and it takes a while.

And so I started thinking a little bit more seriously about print as a mode, right?

And so these are, you know, my attempt to support the teacher's union with ceramics.

But what ended up being the thing were these two-sided marching posters a little bit later, figured it out.

I'm part of the Justseeds Artists' Coop, the Chicago ACT Collective.

And I work almost always with Hoofprint Studio in the work that I do.

And so working together is crucial.

In 2020, about two weeks before the shutdown, and I probably had Covid right before that.

And I remember us working together with the students.

There's so many people out absent.

(chuckles) I was working with some of the students at the Lozano Leadership Academy, which is a school right up the street in my neighborhood.

And they had just been protesting at the Chicago History Museum because there's a lowrider car in the front of the museum.

And they said, "Wait, that is all of Latinx history for the city of Chicago?

That's not enough, and it's not accurate, and it's not even remotely close to our experience."

And these students tore it up, they shut it down, and they stood in front of the museum.

And as a result of their marching, there's gonna be, it won't be a comprehensive show, but there's going to be a show about activism in 2023 opening up.

And I'm inspired by them because we have so much work to do.

This is a 1960 report on persons of Spanish surnames.

And you know, growing up in the Midwest, I had a lot of concerns about the lack of people like me in the history.

And so I kind of was doing this research and just dragging it directly to the students in these classrooms.

And they did a bunch of interpretation, like the two collage on the left and my work on the right is largely inspired by them.

That's another two-sided marching poster.

Here's a little palate cleanser after looking at a lot of cops.

These are high school students from Lindblom.

This is in a yearbook.

Yearbooks are the most incredible, very often youth produced and edited documents.

And in this picture, their senior picture, they went to the Wall of Truth, which is across from the Wall of Respect, right, the legendary mural to have their pictures taken, wearing incredible outfits, looking gorgeous.

And in addition to that, this photo had never been seen by the historians who work on this material.

And so I felt very special when I sent it to them, and they freaked out.

Yeah, looking at yearbooks, I'm gonna talk about that.

So I'm gonna talk for a second about high schools and some uprisings that happened in one, because this is a part of the exhibition, if you get to see it.

There's a middle school and a high school, but they're the same school.

(chuckles) In '68, this is the one we're gonna talk about, there was this series of protests by students, and I was googling around 'cause somebody at a coffee shop told me about it, and I was like, "What?"

And I couldn't believe it because this is also the lunchroom where my children eat, you know?

I found this picture on eBay, and I couldn't believe what I was looking at.

And I thought, "Where's it been written about?"

I dug and dug for a while, found some newspapers that were talking about it.

I started to dig into the articles.

I found one dissertation by Dr. Dion Dans that talked about black power organizing on the West Side.

And I started to hone in on two individuals who seemed to be the student organizers.

And so I made some art with Sharron Matthews in it because I thought I need to meet her.

She has two Rs in her name so you can really Google her.

And then I start finding more pictures.

I mean, you can tell she's in charge, right?

That's her at the end with the briefcase.

She hates those pictures 'cause she has high waters on 'cause she got really tall.

Well I walked into a gallery, and she was posing for a picture in front of my print, so it worked, took two years but it worked.

And I've been interviewing her about this uprising and the work that she did on it and the struggle she went through.

There's only one picture of her in her own yearbook, right?

Because she was failed out of some courses, and she had to go someplace else to finish school.

But she was targeted by police probably because she had done about like 15 television, and like this Jet Magazine, I very randomly bought a Jet Magazine on eBay, and she had a full spread on this page.

And there was another one I found where she had a two-page article.

She was a great spokesperson for the movement and really got the word out.

I found a little bit more information about her, so I made a second draft of the poster.

And what I wanna say to people who are making art that has anything to do with history, if you find out something else (chuckles) that's more accurate, just change it, make a different one.

There's three different versions of this poster.

What were the students protesting for?

Representation of their culture and history in the curriculum, not unlike what people are struggling to make sure that we can retain today, right?

Also at the time, there were students of Mexican and Mexican-American, Mexican and Mexican-American students were actually counted as white in Chicago public schools until 1972.

And so they had what appears to be upwards of 80% dropout rate because if you look like you might speak Spanish or you had a name that made it seem like you might speak Spanish, you're put into separate classrooms, right?

And so people dropped out because there were no Spanish-speaking people at all in the schools, in this particular school.

Had about 3,000 students, about 1,200 of them are estimated to be Mexican and Mexican-Americans.

There's been a couple recovery history projects on this.

And so I really wanted to, I was really hoping to get more into some of the ways that this history could be engaged with, more people could engage with it.

And so I encountered some folks at the Magnum Foundation that were building this really incredible technology that I wanted to get my hands on (chuckles) where you can just pop a photo in, and it builds a wire frame for you.

And I thought, "Well, then the next move would be for us to put these sculptures into places where the actual history happened, and then young people could look at it."

But you know, you don't want kindergartners actually looking at pictures of police beating up students, right?

So maybe it would just be for the older students.

(chuckles) And then the pandemic hit, and I didn't really get any of it done.

You try, it didn't work.

And now I'm going back to it.

But I guess being gentle with yourself is really the key.

And the performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena said in 2021 that "our intellectual and artistic elders had been abandoned."

And he declared it was our responsibility to get to work on this material.

And I thought that spoke right to my heart.

I have been aiming to bring primary source knowers, people who are witnesses to the history into classrooms and into communities to talk about what it is they know, particularly around some of these histories, right?

This person who's speaking to students at Benito Juarez High School, she was 12 years old when the Froebel uprising happened.

Right?

Somebody pushed her down, she landed on her face, she tells the whole story.

She was carrying one of those jugs of Kool-Aid.

You know, I used to call juice, and she fell down and she was hurt.

But right after somebody pushed her down, about 100 police officers and riot gear came in and beat parents down to the point where many of them could not walk again.

And some of them had brain damage.

So she was actually saved by the person who pushed her down.

And also getting the word out and talking about this more openly, people that knew about it already have started to come out and show me pictures that are not taken from the perspective of journalists but actually people involved in the movement, which is a completely different perspective.

This picture of a Brown Beret actually making a recording of students protesting, or of parents protesting is incredible.

So let's take a second.

I love working in archives, (chuckles) not an an historian, but just because there's beautiful things in there.

And that's what I'm gonna talk about next.

I love to go to an archive and to think about the connections, I call it going on a drift, right?

This is what artists do.

We gotta give ourselves a little bit of elbow room.

Do you see the Black P Stone Rangers band on here?

This was in the Lincoln Park newspaper, and also sort of the evolution of Chicago house music, right, with Carlos B.

Boy Beltran having his little birthday party over there at the American Legion Hall.

And there's so many things that don't exist anymore.

They're interesting.

Like student discounts for abortion.

And sometimes as an artist, you just wanna look at the pictures, (audience chuckles) 'cause it's funny.

(chuckles) So I dug into this one newspaper because of that.

And this newspaper was actually located in the center of the neighborhood that I think about the most, which is Pilsen, right on the southwest side of Chicago.

And 18th Street is sort of like the artery that goes down the middle of it.

And the office for this newspaper was located there.

And I started looking at these newspapers, 1975 to 1976.

There's very few of these Spanish-language newspapers are actually collected until recently, it seems like.

And I mostly found clippings, but then I'd see this, this ad for a movie, and I got so excited.

These were films that were made in Mexico before 1957 because the cinema nationalized and they stopped making these, like, really kind of crummy pulp movies, exploitation cinema.

But in the 70s, they were playing right alongside American exploitation films that were 20 years later.

Oh, and at night, it was porno theater.

Fascinating, what I'm trying to do though is look at the context of this area, this community that I'm wanting to know more about.

Another thing, another way of looking at it, like this is like two-month-old research.

Another thing is you can see all these theaters and you can look at the addresses, and these are the locations of Spanish-language communities at that time.

You can know for a fact.

So something I thought that was pretty funny is these newspapers, I mean, these movies look like people were pretty stressed out about women getting jobs.

(chuckles) Kind of worried like, "What's happening?

What's gonna happen with all this independence, satanic pandemonium?"

(audience chuckles) "Are they gonna kill us?"

It's definitely dangerous, but it's sort of hard to, you know, nail down specifically what it is.

I can't stop looking at these newspapers.

(chuckles) In 2018, I noticed that I had a whole lot of mastheads of newspapers that I had been looking at over time.

And I made this poster, it actually is only 33 Spanish-language and bilingual newspapers that were written either in Chicago Latinx communities or by Spanish-speaking people.

That's a terrible title, right?

So what happened was, (chuckles) I have a better title now.

This is 55 Spanish-language bilingual and Latinx community serving newspapers published between 1929 and 1990.

So immediately after I finished this poster, I found like four more mastheads and I was like, "Ah," you know.

And so I printed stuff on the back.

But really what the answer was was just to make another one.

And while you're in there, just to say I was looking in the Chicago farm workers collection, which is here in Michigan, right?

The Chicago farm workers, United Farm Workers Chicago strike office collection, which is 19 linear feet.

You can go to check it out at the Walter Reuther Library in Detroit at Wayne State.

And here are the most incredible drawings by children of what they think grapes are about.

How do you show them?

What do they look like?

Is it one big grape?

Can you see the grapes through the hole in the shopping cart?

That's maybe my favorite one.

And as artists, like, we have a kind of a different job in the archives, and that is to notice, just like we do in everyday life.

So I also do ceramics.

This is sort of the span between recent and what I was working on when I was here at the school.

Right after I left the school, I made some pretty massive pieces.

And this is low fire, so it shattered almost instantly when it got dinked.

(chuckles) Life size, oh but also, it's covered in porcupine quills and graphite.

This actually lives in Ann Arbor.

This is, in 2016, it was very stressful.

I thought maybe the apocalypse was gonna happen.

There were so many concentrated police murders at one time.

And that's also when Missy Elliot's song, "How They Do It Where You From," came out.

Did I say that in the right order?

Well, you know the song I'm talking about, I hope.

And I started to think about her and I let my imagination work as hard as it possibly could, which is to imagine that she's a time traveler from Teotihuacan.

And she actually does look like one of the murals in Teotihuacan, and that she's been trying to tell us how to save ourselves, right, through her dance.

But we just couldn't understand the language.

And in my sort of fantasy that she finally tells us, "Okay, here's what to do, this is what the dances mean."

So I love working on clay, but I love working on clay with other people even more than doing it by myself.

And making clay in support of the community that I live in where I'm raising my children is really crucial.

And this was a project where we thought, "Oh, this will just be like an in-between project."

I had a self-fashioned residency at Benito Juarez High school with the incredible Paulina Camacho, the art teacher there.

And what happened was the houses were so beautiful, it was just a, you know, do a portrait of your own house.

And then the next group of students wanted to do it.

Then the next group of students wanted to do it.

They're really precious and really beautiful.

And next thing you know, we had about 125.

And here they are on display at the Jane Addams Hull-House alongside pottery that had been made in the ceramic factory there, very likely by immigrant hands, very likely by Mexican immigrant hands.

You know, making sort of a 100-year timeline of Latinx ceramics in Chicago.

Some of the students, by the time their work came out of the kiln, they had already been displaced.

And so the community is the library, right?

The people that live there are the ones who know the history and the displacement is like burning down a library.

And so there's this organization called PICO.

They don't have a lot of co-ops there, unlike Ann Arbor, which is like (chuckles) co-op city.

And I've lived in two.

And so this is this mural that the Department of Cultural Affairs funded that was painted by Gabrielle Villa and Hector Duarte, right kitty corner to the National Museum of Mexican Art, if you're ever there.

And so, of course, I tried my hand at making tiny houses and I made a miniature one.

And then I made a whole miniature neighborhood, and it lives inside of a miniature house (chuckles) in front of the, (chuckles) it's so satisfying to make a turducken.

But it's inside of a tiny house that has a tiny version of itself in it in front of the mural that it is a painting of.

Sorry.

But you see what I'm saying?

I also made some posters for them, and because of the funding, we were able to give the posters away.

So if you're ever over there, look inside the tiny library and grab yourself some posters.

Now I want to talk about the With Care portion.

Beyond, you know, doing work to support folks in the neighborhood, I want to talk about this incredible artist and photographer, Diana Solis.

Here's a photo of Diana inside of the dark room that she set up inside of the legendary grassroots anti-domestic violence collaborative called Mujeres Latinas En Accion.

When I found out that she had been a photographer, after being friends with her for at least about six years, seven years maybe, it kind of blew my mind.

But when I started to see the work, so my teenage daughter wasn't talking to me at the time, but she was talking to Diana and Diana said, "Well, maybe we should go and get the photos," after I've been bugging her for years.

And of course, Mina came with me and did the heavy lifting.

And thankfully, the work was intact.

And not only was it intact, it was incredible.

When I learned more, like for example, that in the kitchen of Mujeres Latinas En Accion, that she had set up a dark room, and it was a center of production, right?

As well as being a place where people taught about sexual health, in addition to being a place where people's lives were being saved, that she was there working and doing this care work.

Of course, I was also looking for myself.

And this picture really spoke to me.

This is at the end of the Pride march, right where you have the rally in Lincoln Park.

And in 1980, she took this photo, and I noticed they were wearing t-shirts, like band shirts for the band Heart.

And one of them's carrying a record.

And so I looked up the concert, and sure enough, it was the night before a Pride.

And I found a recording of it and I found the poster, and I'm like really excited about that.

I'm there, like, I'm with them.

Really into that band.

And the recording is so good.

I wish I had a QR code for you to check it out.

But, yeah, also too, look at that lineup.

What?

Judas Priest, Heart, and the Scorpions?

Get outta here.

That's ridiculous, it's unnecessary.

(audience chuckles) And so I'm looking at community care through her eyes, which are looking at people who are doing the care in the community, right?

It's incredibly beautiful to me, and it's such a privilege to be able to look at her work, which includes protests.

This is 1979, going from the West Side into Downtown/River North.

She is a rugby player too, and also, like, took incredible pictures of rugby.

She was part of this incredible separatist, lesbian militant organization called oi-ka-bef.

And took the most beautiful tender pictures of their gatherings in Mexico.

And that's actually her, which is all you need to know about her skill when it comes to self-portraits, 'cause she's naked and there's a candle.

I mean, that's hard to do, right?

(audience chuckles) But the tenderness in the work is what really grabs me.

I met her at the Casa Aztlan.

This is a picture from 1981 where she was teaching at the Casa Aztlan, and those are her students that she was teaching photography.

And then also she's an art educator and was throughout this entire period, right?

She's always teaching, teaching now.

In fact, last time I brought up this image, I said, "She's probably at the school right now."

And this is probably young people at Pros Arts.

I say probably because I was thinking it was in the basement of Casa Aztlan, but now I see that cabinet, and now I think it's not.

(Diana speaks indistinctly) Thank you, Diana.

It's in Dvorak Park.

(chuckles) You're a treasure.

I love you.

And these are the portraits that she was taking of people at the Casa Aztlan, people coming through the building and people who were there.

One of the things I love the most about her work, which I've said a few times, I realized, but I can, there's 8,100 negatives, I can say that, is that she sees mothers and she sees children.

And the way that she shows them is incredibly moving to me.

And also like the young baby punk rocker in me, just like how did I, I wish I was there.

She saw us, you know?

And also caring for community.

This is a discussion about sexual health in a Catholic school in the neighborhood.

If you have any question about whether or not she was doing radical work, this is a lot.

I didn't get this in Catholic school.

She also was part of and attended the Encuentros Feminista, the one in Mexico City and the one in Peru, and documented that.

And again, one shot, not two, not three, just one to create this self-portrait.

And so I've been talking about her work, like, without knowing what some of the images were, she's been very, very open and loving about letting me sort of run through her images.

Her entire archive is at my house.

And so what I've become is like the librarian, just the librarian.

I work with other curators when they want to put a show together.

I gather the images and I prepare them to present, right?

I was like thrilled that a couple of exhibitions were interested in looking at this work just as, it's just a baby now, you know.

I don't really even know how to talk about the work.

I don't know where some of the images were taken.

But luckily, we had a few opportunities here right before the pandemic.

And then I got to teach a class about her work.

And young people came in, undergraduates, a couple of graduate students came in, and they were actually the ones I wanted to write the descriptions and to select the keywords because it's really crucial.

This is a queer history that hasn't been written about.

The students who came in took it so seriously that one time in three hours, one student only scanned two negatives.

(chuckles) They were so nervous.

They were taught actually to go into latitude and to actually do the print quality scans and the digital de-dusting, right?

And then, of course, to go in and to add all of the descriptions and to seek the information that wasn't there.

We read a lot of great books.

And some of them found all these materials that I didn't know existed, right?

These are covers of magazines with photos that the Diana took.

And then the students created proposals for work, for how her work could be shown, right?

A photo, historic photo inside of what it looks like now, putting her work out on the streets close to where the photos had been taken.

Another student who does RISO, is a RISO printer, did color, added color and was making these, like, jubilant brilliant images of women and moms in the streets.

And then there's this very moving photo of this women's bar.

And it's now like, what's that restaurant?

- [Diana] (indistinct) Rick Bayless.

- Rick Bayless has a restaurant, I'm so sorry to ask you, Diana.

(chuckles) It's now a Rick Bayless restaurant.

And so this artist said, "Why don't we project it on the front and get it known for what it is?"

And so, like, it's always in progress.

We're making the work, it's happening, making the work as in creating the descriptions, getting it in order, and learning from the Diana about the work.

And this is how sometimes it happens.

It says, what is that, 3:00 AM, February 15th?

(chuckles) February 5th, a self-portrait with Robert Ford, C.C.

Hunt, Trent Atkins in my photo studio on Clark Street, 1981.

So Robert Ford and Trent Atkins started THING Magazine, right, and published THING Magazine.

And C.C.

Hunt is, yeah.

There's a whole series of this and it's pretty incredible.

My favorite pictures are the ones where she throws herself into the photo shoot.

And so what's happening now is, that's a sort of a bird's-eye view of a exhibition at the Poetry Foundation.

So she's also a poet, (chuckles) incredible human.

And so we curated this, me and Oscar Ariola, and it just came down like two weeks ago.

And you can see Colleen and Ariel and Diana working on materials for an exhibition that was at Cincinnati FotoFocus.

But next month, if you're in New York, check out the Leslie-Lohman Museum where there's gonna be a massive exhibition of her work and a couple other artists, including Joni Buren, Jeb and a few others.

But, like, what's happening now too is that the Diana's photographing again and making more work, which has been a blessing for so many people.

But for a second, I just want to talk about the intimate experience of working with somebody's life work.

I'm not looking at the photos she wants people to see.

I'm not looking at photos that she wants to have exhibited, necessarily.

I'm looking at pictures that other people took of her.

I'm looking at her school pictures, right?

Self-portraits that weren't meant to be seen by anybody.

And I have to be able to figure out where things are, but I'm also an artist, and I absorb a lot of this.

And I have also had a sort of lack of mentors that I could follow, and she's been my mentor.

But I started drawing her hairstyles, (audience chuckles) because she's got some iconic styles, right?

Like yes, incredible activist, you know, groundbreaking photographer, but she has some great outfits.

And so I've created an index based on her hairstyles.

(audience chuckles) But this is also a practical thing, just so y'all know, right?

Like I have to be able to look at an image and say what era it is.

It also helps that these pictures are incredible to me.

There's gonna be a zine that's gonna be in the gallery at some point that is about her hairstyles.

It's called Hairstyles.

(audience chuckles) And I also like to think- (audience member chuckles) that if she and I were maybe like crossed paths sooner, that we would've been friends.

(audience member speaks indistinctly) (Nicole laughs) Thank you.

(audience cheers and applauds) Hey, and meet me over at the gallery.

Let's go look at the work right now.

There's eight of her photos up there.

Come see me.

Thank you.

(audience cheers and applauds) - [Audience Member] Yeah!

- My people.

- [Audience Member] That was amazing.