Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series. Today,
we are thrilled to officially open the regular season of talks with artist
Sanford Biggers. Yeah, and I wanna thank our partners for their support
of today's program, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, or MOCAD, and
the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and Michigan Radio 91.7 FM. Always
aiming for a deeper immersive experience for all of you out there,
Sanford's work just happens to currently be on view just down the road
in Detroit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit which is hosting a
solo exhibition, aptly named "Subjective Cosmologies," now through January
1st. So if you didn't see it... It just opened this past weekend.
If you didn't see it then, you have till January 1. Don't miss
it. You can also meet him today if you join us.
We will have a Q&A directly following the talk in here which will
be in the screening room, the other theater in the theater,
which if you exit this room and go left down the hallway,
you'll find yourself in another theater lobby and that is the screening
room. I have one hot tip for you today. A very recent graduate
of the Stamps School, Levester Williams. He has an exhibition which is now
on display at the Institute for Humanities Gallery, which is just around
the corner at the corner of Washington and Thayer, and it just so
happens he has an opening reception for that exhibition happening today
directly following the lecture. So you can stop by there and take that
in. And before we take off today, I wanted to give you a
few thoughts on our season theme, "Seed,"
which we have visually represented here with what has been cut off of
course from this picture, but is prominently displayed in most of our graphics,
which is a nebula, or the birth of a star.
Now, simply put, a seed holds potential, but alone it's really, it's just
nothing more than a seed. It has to be activated by just the
right elements for its potential to be realized.
So the speaker series here is the seed bed, seed bed of ideas
for you, and you, the Penny Stamps community, carry the potential of activation
to foster the growth of the creative ideas which are presented.
For a seed fully activated supersedes itself and produces more seeds,
just as one idea begets another. And now the most fun part that
I found out when thinking about seed, which is in the dictionary of
slang, and though I don't advise its usage: "seed," past tense for "see,"
as in a view of the past such as when you look at
the stars, you can say,
"I seed it. I seed that celestial canopy,"
as you are literally looking back in time when you look at the
stars, you're looking through light years of the past.
Stars, too, are generated from seeds, seeds of light which require activation
through intense pressures forcing an act of fusion. So I hope that this
season, there will be many acts of fusion created from the interface of
ideas released here on this stage and activated by the forces of your
fertile minds. And very fitting today, we begin with "Subjective Cosmology"
and Sanford Biggers, who is himself a master of fusion, as you will
discover. And with us to give him a proper introduction, please welcome
executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, or MOCAD,
Elysia Borowy Reeder. Hello,
everybody. It's great to see everyone. How many of you have been to
MOCAD? Can I see your hands?
Alright. Well, this is gonna give you a great reason to come and
see us. I am so excited to introduce Sanford Biggers. MOCAD is turning
10 years old, and I'm filled with pride with our pioneering history,
as well as our role in the local, national, and international art worlds.
MOCAD's mission is to support the vanguard of contemporary art, and Sanford
Biggers exemplifies all of our hard work for the past 10 years.
In a community that has struggled with decline, social, economic, and political,
many of the issues in Sanford's work are particularly relevant. He's an
artist educator. He works full time as a professor at Columbia University.
His work is held in major museum collections. He is represented by Monique
Meloche in Chicago, as well as Massimo De Carlo in Europe.
In bringing to light such issues, his work helps address problems that cross
pollinate cultures,
that are present on both local, and international, and national
levels. Sanford has an expansive studio practice that includes performance.
This project at MOCAD was born out of a need to experiment and
to engage with the community differently. Moon Medicin, which is Sanford's
performance group, is a multimedia concept band, and he performed at the
opening of MOCAD inside the gallery. Sanford's cross disciplinary approach
uses film, sculpture, performance. He knows no limits. His choice of medium
is driven by his ideas.
He is thought provoking. He is challenging. His work is nuanced with interpretations
of the world around us. He references our history, music, culture,
in all kinds of exciting and complex ways.
Please welcome Sanford
Biggers. 'S up? 'S up? 'S up? Good afternoon.
How is everyone today? Good. Welcome back to school.
First of all, I'd like to thank Elysia, I want to thank Christina,
and I wanna thank Penny Stamps for having me here this afternoon.
And I have a lot to show you, so I'm going to jump
into it fairly quickly. Just a little background logistical stuff.
I was born in Los Angeles, but I live in New York.
I've been there for several years, but in the interim I've lived in
Atlanta; Baltimore; Chicago; Warsaw; Budapest; Nagoya, Japan; Berlin, Germany;
Salvador de Bahia, Brazil; for stints here and there, usually anywhere from
three months to two or three years. And you'll see a lot of
those ideas represented in the work I'm gonna show you.
But before we get into that, I want to sort of
open your minds a bit, get you a little bit more ready for some
of the artwork that I create. So I created this mind mapping
to give you some insight to some of the ideas and some of
the themes that I draw from in my work. So,
please
take a look. Okay. Now that
we're all
warmed up,
all I could say about that is it's complicated.
So, I'm gonna show some images that I haven't shown in a really
long time. And this has come up because of the recent show,
"Subjective Cosmology," that just opened in Detroit at MOCAD last week.
And as an artist, working over multiple decades at this point,
you realize how far, and how close you remain to some of your
earlier works, and it's interesting to see how that plays out over several
years. And one theme that's always been very interesting to me is history.
And
I have a sense that history is malleable, because every year,
every few years, we find some historical fact that is debunked. Historians
are refuted. Ideas go back and forth over millennia just to find out
that what we believed, like the earth is flat, turns out not to
be the case. With that in mind as an artist, that becomes very
fertile ground to make work. So a few years ago, and I'll start
here, I was invited to be in a show at the Princeton University
Museum of Art. And this is an encyclopedic museum that has work from
all periods since they've been collecting, and from all over the world.
And three artists were invited, Ai Weiwei, Ellen Harvey, and myself,
to do interventions in the museum, so we could borrow work from there
and create work based on it, or reorganize their collection.
So I chose to work in the Pre Columbian section, the Renaissance,
African, and Greco Roman sections. So this is an example of a piece
that I had in the Pre Columbian section. Are many of you familiar
with the Olmec heads, or the heads from the Olmec culture?
Okay, so this is a perfect example. The Olmec were a society that
existed somewhere between 400 and 1200 BC. And they were known...
Some of the artworks or the landmarks that are known from their culture
are these monolithic headstones that stand anywhere from 8 to 16 feet tall
and are massive blocks, boulders that are carved with these facial features.
And historians have debated for years whether these were descendants of
Inuit cultures that came over during Pangaea, when all the land masses were
together, or came across the Bering Strait, and then there's another camp
that says these might be descendants of early African navigators who were
sailing off the coast of Western Africa but would be caught in tidal currents,
and siroccos, and gusts of wind that would bring them over to Mexico,
and hence, the cultures merged and these icons were made.
So with that in mind, in the Pre Columbian section, there was this
Olmec head up top. Let's see if this thing works.
Yeah, there we go. And there was this
dagger with a fist on it. And that was from around 600 BC.
So I thought, "If these guys really came from Africa and they had
these afros, there had to have a way to comb them out."
So I made combs with the Afro pick with a fist on it,
reminiscent of the kind you might see from the late 60s, early 70s, during
the Civil Rights era. I carved it in an indigenous wood to that
region, and carved it in a way that looked like it could've been made at
that same time. Next to it, I created my own museum text that
explains exactly what I just told you. And the idea, this type of
intervention is a way of rewriting history. And when I say writing,
I obviously mean R I G H T I N G as opposed
to scribing. So, close up. And soon after, also sort of riffing off
of African cultures and various artifacts from societies in Africa, I started
to make my own versions of Nkisi. Nkisi, I'm sure many of you have seen
them in museums. They're usually wooden figures with nails, and shards,
and pieces of glass stuck in them. And the idea is that they
ward off evil spirits. So as a community gets ready for an event,
everybody walks by the sculpture and hammers a nail into it,
and that shows the communal strength. So I started to do that.
And it, once again, wards off evil spirits. So, while I was dumpster diving
one day, I came across this old book called "The Hangman's House."
And thinking of the history of the US as being a hangman's house
where there were so many lynching during the Jim Crow era and the
Reconstruction era, and now they're starting to talk about that in terms
of terrorism. But when I made this piece, I was thinking,
"Is there a way to alleviate that memory, the gravity of that history?"
So I started to make my own nkisi with this particular book.
Now, the book has nothing to do with what I've just told you.
It's the title that really struck me, and it's the aesthetic that added
to the ability to make this some type of artifact. So in the
90s, I lived in Japan for three years, and I became enamored with
the culture: Japanese language, Buddhism, Shintoism, and the artworks from
those eras. So coming back to the States, I wanted to make work
that I felt was autobiographical in some sense. So I started to go
to different stores and pick up items. And I found this plastic Buddhas.
And underneath the Buddha was a clear, acrylic gel that had embedded:
Four leaf clovers, horseshoes, pieces of rice, things that have nothing
to do with Buddhism, have nothing to do with Japan, but are good
luck items. And then I looked closer, to see that they were all
made in Mexico. So I started to...
I really became really interested in the fact that there was no real
origin for this icon, and that it was almost ahistoric. And it was, in
one way, it was a snapshot of globalism and also cultural appropriation.
But I started to take these and cast
other Buddhas out of them and wrap them, mummify them actually,
in fat shoelaces. So this goes back to my childhood in Los Angeles
as a b boy. And many of you are, I'm sure,
familiar with the phrase of a b boy or a b girl.
That is someone who is a practitioner of the hip hop arts.
Whether it be breakdancing, deejaying, emceeing, or doing graffiti, those
are b boys and b girls. So I started to make b bodhisattva. So
these Buddhas were now being mixed in with that culture and mummified in
these fat shoelaces. I then started to cast some in clear acrylic with,
in the belly, South African bracelets, and Puerto Rican flags, and fat gold
chains, and African leather medallions, that were all made in Taiwan.
So once again, were sort of without origin, were in this world of
ideas and symbols that we have access to. So taking that a step
further, I started to make large mandalas. And a mandala is a Buddhist
diagram that usually depicts multiple deities within some type of diagrammatic
field that represents the heavens. And Jung would even say that it represents
the mind, or the psyche. So I started to make my own versions
of the mandala with four clear Buddhas on the outside, spinning around,
and one that was cloaked, in the center, with the fat shoelaces.
And this is where I started to engage with the figure.
I started getting African sculptures that I would find at thrift stores
or African markets, and I would start to modify them. So this particular
one, which I call "Eclipse," was a figure that I just bisected and
put on two separate pedestals at different heights. And as you walk close
to them, from one angle, it looks like
the figure in the round, but then you get to the other side
and you see that hard edge. So it was also playing with this
notion of being whole or being not whole, not totally complete,
but also sort of the optical effect of that hard edge versus the
refined and sculpted edge. And then started playing with these, thinking
about them as fetish figures or power objects in a ethnographic sense.
So if they are fetish objects, then why not use fetish materials on
the fetish object? So I started dipping them in liquid latex,
in things that I might find at sex shops.
I started to make lotus blossoms. These are actually skateboard wheels that
are dipped in black liquid latex, the figure in red liquid latex,
and then a rope around the neck, and feather boa to sort of hide
the face.
And then I made a much larger version.
This one is approximately 27 feet tall with the canopy on top.
And this was part of a solo exhibition I did, called "Cosmic Voodoo Circus,"
at the Sculpture Center in New York around five years ago.
And this is one of my assistants, Julie, standing next to it,
who helped me fabricate the piece. And these are preliminary sketches for
that body of work. So this is actually an etching that I did.
And I found this a few weeks ago when I was preparing for
a show in London. And like I was saying earlier, I forgot that
I even made these sketches, and then I'm making work now that totally
has to do with this. So it's one of those moments...
All of you creatives in the room, whether you're writers, musicians,
or artists, or even in sciences, it doesn't matter: Go through your notebooks.
The work sometimes needs... You need time to understand what you were trying
to do years ago.
So in addition to those figures, I was also making pattern based works
and floor based works. And all of this is echoed in the show
in Detroit right now. I started making these floor pieces. This is my
version of a mandala, and these are hand
carved, vinyl, square
tiles that I would get from surplus stores. And I got them because
I like the color content. I like that they have this washed out
look. They were usually used for institutions back in the '50s and the '60s,
like high schools, junior high schools, hospitals. So I started to hand
carve them and put them together as these large floors. And then...
Let's see if I have a close up. I don't think I have
one on me. But these figures that are around the center are six
arm and eight arm dancing Shiva figures. Once again, they're actually b
boys from an old breakdance poster that I had, that would show how
to poplock: One, two, three, four, five. Put them all through Photoshop
and made them into a dancing Shiva. So I expanded that larger.
And this is also a nod to art history. Many
of you who are familiar with the work of Carl Andre and the
floor pieces that he did, which sort of challenged the viewer to either
walk around it or to walk on it, and create that kind of
tension in a very minimalist sculpture. Taking that idea, making a large
scale floor with hand carved tiles. I made this mandala. But to take
it even further, I started taking them to
breakdancing contests. We'll be doing that later, if we have time,
so start stretching.
So what I would do was take these to breakdance competitions in New
York, and I would put a camera above and videotape the whole event.
The dancers usually did not know they were being recorded, but afterwards
I would tell them. And then, when I showed the floor at a
museum or gallery, I'd invite the same dancers to either comes as guests,
come and perform if they want, but to
bring them into these galleries and museums, where typically, they may not
go. And as some of these dance floors have traveled, some have been
in Asia, some have been in Germany, and the UK,
I usually have certain hours during a week where anybody can come in
and dance on the floors. Because going back to that idea of the
ethnographic object, once people start to perform and dance on these,
they start to accumulate scuff marks, and those scuff marks start to become
the history of these pieces. So sometimes, I show a video just like
this, so you can see it in action, and sometimes I don't,
in a total quiet space where you have to sort of glean from
those scuff marks what action might have happened. And then I started to
do much larger floor pieces. This is actually
colored sand, poured directly on the floor, no adhesives.
This is 20 feet wide by 40 feet, so it's massive.
And if you sneeze, poof, it's gone. And
this
image is actually a reproduction of a sixth century, Afghani prayer rug.
And I sort of did this in response to a lot of negative
portrayals of Islam that were happening in New York. This was soon after
9/11. And I thought there was other beautiful aspects that people should
be aware of. That's another reason why you see it off the axis
of the space, because it has to face in a perfect direction in
order to actually function as a prayer rug. That's just another view of
it. And I was telling someone the other day that when this was
installed, there was probably a good 200 or so people standing around it.
And a friend of mine brought his young daughter, she was around six
or seven at the time, and she'd come during the week so she'd seen
the piece development, but I think she freaked out when there was that
many people in the room, and she bolted right across the thing.
Luckily, I'd already took the pictures, so. Then the whole room just gasped,
because they were thinking I was gonna freak out, but I was like,
"I got pictures, I'm good."
But she was so fast that she just
basically made a smudge or two along the pattern. And that moment was
the moment that the audience realized that this was actually real,
this was sand, it was not paint, and that there was a fragility
and a ethnomorality to this. And of course, once again, being a student
of Buddhism, that is one of the major notions: That nothing is permanent.
Everything is ephemeral. So people asked me, "Why would you take the 200
or so hours to put this thing down, when you could sweep it
up in around two minutes?" It's about the gesture. And as people remember
this installation, you know how the memory works, it becomes even more grand
than the actual object itself. So it's really tapping into that visceral
quality between an experience rather than an object. Now the exact opposite
of that, with probably around the same amount of labor, was this piece,
and this is a glass mandala. I call this piece "Lotus"
and it looks like a lotus blossom, or it looks like the iris of
an eye.
And it's seven and a half foot diameter, solid glass, and hand etched, and
that's a steel ring around it, so it weighs around 650 700 pounds.
And when you get closer, you start to realize that those petals along
that lotus blossom are actually cross sections of slave ships. Now this
is an iconic diagram that was made by slavers to show how to
best pack human cargo, and later it was adopted by abolitionists in the
UK who wanted to show the atrocities of slavery and the conditions that
people were actually packed in. So I've sort of used this as
a dichotomous object, a performative object, if you will. Because
when you first approach it, it's very seductive. You want to get closer
and see what exactly the diagram is. The way the lights reflect off
of it, it seems like almost crystal. And then you get closer,
and there's that moment when you're sort of stricken with the horror of
what it really represents.
And to create this, we hand carved over 6,000 figures.
And then I was later commissioned by the city of New York to
do a much larger version. This is around 20 feet diameter and made
of steel, so approximately a ton, almost a ton and a half,
of steel, on the side of a junior high school in the
Bronx. And this is another piece, called "Blossom." Once again, I sort of
call this piece a performative object. And what I mean by that is,
let's think about the power object, the performative object, and the object
that does more than just... It's more than just to be looked at.
What you're not getting here is that this piano actually plays.
So when you walk into the room, the keys start to move,
the pedals start to move, and it's playing my own rendition of the
famous Billie Holiday song, "Strange Fruit." And those of you who know that
American standard, that song is about black bodies hanging in the southern
trees, it's a strange fruit. And this piece was encouraged,
inspired, by the Jena Six incident in Louisiana, where, in around 2007,
2008, at a high school, there was a tree where all the white
students, the popular white kids, would hang out. And one day,
a black student wanted to sit there, so he asked permission from one
of the teachers. And the teachers, of course, said, "Why you even asking
me? Go sit at the tree." So the kid goes, he sits at
the tree. Gradually, the white students start to leave. The next morning,
when everyone gets back to school, there's nooses hanging from that tree.
Now,
it sounds sort of bizarre, but even when that was happening,
I was in New York, and at Columbia University, on two teachers' doors,
nooses were found hanging soon after this. So there was this little undercurrent
of this almost racial poking and teasing. But what happened in Jena was
this started several events that wound up around a year later,
when a group of black kids were going to a corner store,
and a group or white kids were coming out, and a fight ensued. And the
white kids pulled out a gun, and the black kids beat up the
white kids and took the gun. And when the cops came,
the black kids got arrested 'cause they stole the gun.
And once that happened, everybody descended on Jena, and there were riots
and... Not riots, but more protests. And you can find this,
it's all history. Recent history, mind you. So that was one of the
reasons why I wanted to do this piece. I didn't wanna use a body underneath
a tree, but once again, this is still the hangman's house.
I find every few years, I do a piece that thematically relates to
lynching, because there's new versions of lynching always happening. So
the piano ends up being a stand in, and the piano's song, the
piano's lament, is the voice of that human.
But the dichotomous meaning, once again, from this performative object,
is that the Buddha finds enlightenment underneath the tree. So there is
the potential for transcendence, even though there's this history. And these
are just a few different views of the same piece. This is
a retrofitted baby grand piano, so it's turned into a player piano.
You can see the keys being depressed right there. And it's a sculpted tree.
The tree is made of steel,
two part epoxies, silk leaves, airbrushing. It was a very detailed process
to create it.
And continuing with the piano theme, this levitating
piano is in an exhibition that I did at MASS MoCA that was
called "The Cartographer's Conundrum." And
MASS MoCA is the largest open art space in North America.
The room that I did my installation in is larger than a football
field, so could you imagine having to fill that space up?
Literally every time I walked in there, I felt like somebody kicked me
in the gut. It was just daunting. But it was actually good preparation
for MOCAD, 'cause MOCAD is a very large space, too, so I think this
really was sort of training in how to deal with spaces that are
on that scale. So I found church pews in the neighboring town,
and I bolted some of them to the ground, and then the rest
are ascending up into the heavens, as you see there. And in front
of that is this levitating piano. The explosion is created by pipe organ
pipes that are hung in space. And then this is sort of a
larger view of the hall where this was shown. And in the beginning
of the hall, another floor piece, floor patterns. Now, this is all buildup
to show you the visual language that has come throughout the last 15 years
or so: The patterns, the figures, the lotus, the trees. They all start
to come together in a recent series of paintings that I've been doing.
This is another iconic image that I sample frequently.
This gentlemen's name... He's reportedly named Gordon the Slave. And this
is a Library of Congress image showing, basically, the scarification on
his back from being whipped so much. And I started to look at
this and, once again, try to find a way to transcend that history,
and I started to create works like this sort of figurative piece with
bound string and twine around the back of it to create almost sacred
geometry or a constellation.
But then the figure keeps coming up in the recent two dimensional works
I've been doing. So this is his... I call it a specter. This
is his body right here, of course, in negative.
Now, this series of works are... These series are paintings that are done
on antique quilts. So I've been doing research about the underground railroad,
and reportedly, quilts were used as signposts. As escaping slaves were traveling
from the South to the North, and they would come upon a safe
house, if there was a quilt of a certain pattern or folded a
certain way, it would signify that the house was open or under surveillance:
Keep moving or go five miles up and make a turn,
depending on the pattern that was displayed. So I started to collect antique,
pre 1900 quilts, that typically were made by groups of women,
with embedded code, assuming that that story's true. So then I come in
as
an intervener, hundreds of years later, and put another layer of code,
so that's when I start to draw and paint directly on the surfaces.
So this is a large one right here, and you can see a
tree, a bonsai. This is done with tar, and glitter,
and oil stick. And then another figure right here, who's the negative shadow
the figure. And a patch that I made, that shows that lotus image.
And then all this purple was done with spray paint to create a
nimbus, or rays, coming off of that lotus. And I'm just gonna show, go
through a few of them, and you'll see the reoccurring symbols from the
previous work.
This is a headless, floating, monk's robe.
And these really are... It's difficult to work on these quilts because,
obviously, I'm dealing with historical objects, and I vacillate between
feeling that I'm doing graffiti or
destroying them, or beautifying them. So it's a balancing act.
I usually don't have a set plan when I work on them.
It's really responding directly to the texture, the way the paint adheres
to the material. If I make a mistake, there's really no way to get out of
it. Sometimes I'll put new pieces of fabric on them. So they're very
hands
on. This is a
double lotus,
just the shadows of
a lotus. And oh, okay, so yes, one more performative object.
This is also from that show from the first slide that I showed
you, with the fisted comb. This is what I call "The Ghetto Bird
Tunic," and this was also in that same exhibition, and I wrote text
that contextualized this within the African section of the museum. So I
consider this "Ghetto Bird Tunic" to be a rites of passage costume.
So, anyone know what a ghetto bird is? Anyone know what that slang is? A
ghetto bird is a police helicopter. In certain neighborhoods, I'm sure Detroit,
Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, there are areas where police helicopters
are on constant patrol. And as a rites of passage, young men of
color have to put on this jacket, and if they can go outside
and not be seen, or caught, or harassed by the cops,
then they can actually become a man. Or actually, they just get to
live.
So, ouch. So, that kind of a museum... I wrote that in museum lingo, much
more a museum jargon and vernacular, to create this. This is the first
one I made. This is a waste length. And then I made a
longer one, because the longer you do it, the longer your coat gets.
And this was later. This was seen as an object. In fact,
I just was at an opening last night in Philadelphia where this piece
is being shown. It's a show called "The Freedom Principle," and
the theme of that show is the avant garde art and music exchange
in Chicago, with the artists' ensemble of Chicago and various avant garde
troupes there. So this, later, I made this piece around 10 years ago,
but years after, I started to use it for performance.
And here it is in a performance with one of my mentors,
the great Terry Adkins, musician and sculptor, wearing the coat. This is
the poet Saul Williams, wearing the coat. Once again, Terry Atkins in another
concert, wearing it. So around four or five different people have made it,
and now when it goes through an exhibition, the idea is that is actually
has that power in it, it has the essence, and the remnant,
and the patina of the people who've used it. Now, I use that
as a bridge to talk about performance. So I will repurpose and remix my
own pieces. I do this all the time. Curators hate it, but
sometimes you gotta do it. This is the same female figure that you
saw before, the 25 foot tall one. Now this is her at a
party that was at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City,
which is a legendary concert space that has now closed. So there's a
bit of music history with this venue. And for the closing show,
I was commissioned to do the artistic design, the deejay was Questlove from
The Roots, or the Jimmy Fallon show, and the entertainment was Santigold.
And I don't know if you're familiar with Santigold. You should get her
here
to do a performance. She's incredible. But I also designed she and her
dancers' costumes, which are based off of this large pagan
monument.
So this is them backstage.
And then this is the venue when it was in full effect.
And the figure is over here somewhere.
Oh, right... Yeah, there we go. So it felt like you were in
some crazy pagan ceremony. Now, that's all performance to lead up to me
showing you a clip of the performance of my group Moon Medicin. And
we just performed last Friday at MOCAD. And I'm just gonna go show
you a quick clip of us performing at Lincoln Center around two years
ago. Now, the video I showed you in the beginning,
we take that kind of video approach to create visuals for the band.
We also wear costumes, we wear masks, and we also interject lots of
highly charged political content in those videos, even in the songs that
we choose to perform.
But here's an
example. I'm responsible for costumes, video, and all piano, synthesizer,
keyboard stuff, and I choose the music, and I
pick
the
band. So this is the audience last Friday, when we finally took the
stage.
And as an experiment, and a way that I would love to proceed
with this project, we performed in the installation. So as opposed to performing
in another room on a stage, we actually integrated the installation as the
backdrop for the
show. And the members of my group are: DJ Jahi Sundance, who
is known to perform with Robert Glasper and Meshell Ndegeocello; Martin
Luther is the lead guitarist and vocalist, who used to be part of
The Roots, and was in the last Julie Taymor film; Swiss Chris,
former musical director for The Black Eyed Peas; my bassist is André Cymone,
who is Prince's original bass player and best friend, childhood friend,
I've brought him out of retirement, and he's part of the group,
which is an honor; and myself on keyboards; and Mark Hines, who does a little
bit of everything. He does a lot of the technical stuff,
the computer programming, some of the video editing, and pitches in on bass
when necessary.
But as you can see, we do a version of the Prince song, "Controversy,"
but instead of singing his lyrics, we sing the Black National Anthem,
which a lot of people don't know, and a lot of people don't
realize there actually is a Black National Anthem that was made in 1904.
And so, to help that, we do a little karaoke style. Lyrics are on
the top.
And whatever is happening in current news, the night before, the day of,
we will put that into the mix. This was the day after the
Walter Scott killing was videotaped. We had that on the screen.
And there's Bob Ross. Give it up for
Bob Ross. Okay. So I'm just gonna show you some quick images.
This is very, very, very recent work. I opened a solo
exhibition in London two weeks ago, and then opened the Detroit show last
week, and this week I actually got some pictures to show you of
both. So this is the outside of the exhibition in London.
It's called "Hither and Yon." And this piece right here is called "Woke."
And the materials are hand carved figurative sculptures at the bottom.
I've carved five different sculptures, covered them in tar and glitter,
and the shadow and the wall piece are all done with a
double colored sequin material. So the actual drawing is me flipping each
of the sequins over to show the reverse side, which is silver.
So you have black and silver to create the portraits. In the space
are several of the quilt paintings and some
recent bronze figures, which is a new series of sculptures, and I'll show
you an example of how those are
made. A lot of the figures that are in these quilts are derived
from the sculptures that I've been making, the figurative sculptures.
And these figures... I call the series "BAM," and this is how they're
actually created.
So what I do, as I told you, I've been collecting these African
wooden figures for years, and now what I've done is started to dip
them in a thick, brown wax so they're
less recognizable, less discernible, more abstracted, and easier to disregard.
There's no real personal traits on them now. And then I take those
wax covered figures to a shooting range and sculpt them with different caliber
weapons, so 22, 12 gauge shotguns, 9mm pistols, you name it, handguns, a
whole plethora, because each one leaves a different mark.
It's pretty morbid. I personally don't pull the trigger just because the
mojo is just too strong there.
My DP, my director of photography, actually pulls the trigger. And up to
date, we've probably done around eight different figures. But once they
are shot, I take the remnants and I cast them in bronze.
So these are the bronze figures afterwards,
and they show all the marks of their creation.
These three on the show in London. Now, the names of each of
them are representative of names of victims of police violence over the
last five years or so. So the male figure that you just saw
was "For Michael," for Michael Brown.
These three: "For Walter," Walter Scott, who I just mentioned that was in
that previous video behind the band; "For Tanisha," which is Tanisha Anderson,
who died while being physically restrained by the cops in Cleveland, 2014;
and
"For Yvette," who was killed in Los Angeles after being kicked in the
pelvis and the stomach by a police officer,
and she died on the way to the station.
Part of evoking the names, even saying them right now, is,
in its own way, a bit of a memorial.
In an adjacent room, I have the videos of each of those figures,
and the way it's set up are three different monitors and they're all
going at different times, so you're constantly moving around to catch where
the action is coming
from. And then these are the last few images, which are from the
show in Detroit. And it was a very different approach to Detroit,
as Elysia mentioned. It was much more of a
complicated installation, a risk taking installation. All the works here
are new concepts, new ideas, new approaches to even creating the work.
And to walk into the space, you have to walk over this billboard
on the ground. You literally have to step on it.
And this is what the billboard says:
"Just Us," or, justice. And you have to step over justice to enter
the space.
And once in, there's this piece right here, which is called "Sleeping Giant."
And once again, this is derived from one of those figures,
one of the "BAM" figures that I just showed you. And this one
is made with a metal armature, and all the
material and objects that cover, that create the skin of the figure,
are found objects that were found over a around two week,
three week period in Detroit, driving around, dumpster diving,
and so on. This piece in the far corner was created on the
spot. A lot of the work there really was created during the performance,
too. So after Moon Medicin performed, we retired the costumes that we'd
been wearing for the last year and a half, hung them on
a rack there, and now they're an artwork. So the masks and the
costumes are hanging from
that. In the back is a figure called "Laocoön." This is a
bigger image of it. And I have no idea, generationally, what's happening
in this room. But if anyone recalls, there was a figure called "Fat
Albert," who was a very famous, sort of moralistic, animated cartoon on
Saturday mornings, that was created by Bill Cosby.
And obviously, a lot has happened since then.
This piece... What you can't get from the picture is that it's actually...
Right now it's probably three quarters of the way full of air,
but throughout the show, it's losing air and then getting pumped up again,
so it's like a very elongated last breath. And the name "Laocoön" refers
to a famous
sculpture that is now in Rome that depicts Laocoön, who was the priest
who warned the Romans of the Trojan Horse.
Now, the priest was then punished by Athena, because Athena protects the
Greeks. So she punished him by killing him and his sons.
At least, that's one story. There's another story that said he was punished
by Poseidon, because, as a priest, he was sworn to celibacy, but was
found fornicating with his wife. What was interesting about the Laocoön
figure... And you can look this figure up, because there's been debates
and stories about this figure, and interpretations, for hundreds of years.
Once again, history is malleable. And with all the conflated ideas that
go into this piece, part Bill Cosby, part Fat Albert, part Black Lives
Matter, part the police killings, and so on,
this is something that will be interpreted many ways by many people.
It is not meant to be a happy piece.
There is a dark humor to it. But there is a morbidity behind
it as well. Ultimately, it's sort of more powerful than me to describe.
Once you see it, you can make your own assumptions
and conclusions. A partner piece to that, which is very small,
minuscule, is this origami Trojan Horse that's in the corner of the exhibition.
You almost have to walk around to find
it. And this piece was made, literally, in the last two days of
the show. Because as I was making my way from where I was
staying to
the museum, I kept running by these huge spools, so I wanted to
make another found object work. So me and the group rolled that thing
all the way, three or four, probably five or six, blocks,
to get to the museum, and then put it in the space.
We videotaped it and used part of that videotape in our performance.
So a lot of the work is generative in the sense that its
creation renders it as an art object, but its creation
also is an artistic process that becomes a piece itself.
And this is just a last image of us in the space,
performing, last Friday night.
And that's all my images for you tonight.
Hopefully, some people have some questions, and we can do that in the
room next door. Thank you.
