- Welcome to the ICA.
I'm Monica Garza, Director of Education.
Thanks, Steve.
(audience applauds)
Tonight's discussion is the first
of two programs we are
co-hosting this year
with the Hutchins Center
for African and African-American Research.
Over the years, the ICA has
worked closely with the Fellows,
the staff and faculty affiliated
with the Hutchins Center
on various educational
programs and initiatives.
Most recently, we featured
artist John Jennings'
graphic novel adaptation
of Octavia Butler's
influential book Kindred via ICA Reads,
an annual program that connects
the literary and the visual arts.
We are very grateful for both
Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
and especially Executive
Director Abby Wolf
for quickly embracing the idea
to deepen and formalize our
collaboration this year.
It truly has been a pleasure
developing this program
with you and your team.
(audience applauds)
Now, about our panelists.
We invited these very amazing individuals
to have an open conversation
on representation and responsibilities.
This program will likely not offer
one fixed solution but will hopefully
encourage more open
and unscripted dialogue
among all of us in the room
on topics that matter very much to us.
In a recent program
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
with our moderator, Dr.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad,
and civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson,
they talked about the
importance of history
and how it continues to shape us.
Khalil said, and I'm gonna
paraphrase here Khalil,
the very people we have empowered
with a capacity to establish
our normative values
and to express our collective will
are constantly referring to
historical precedent and narratives.
Although they were talking specifically
of laws and the men that drafted them,
much can also be said about
art and cultural history,
a very flawed narrative first established
by one gender and one race.
So, how does this
patriarchal and whitewashed
historical narrative shape
our making, our viewing,
and our presenting orf art today?
We are all here to get closer
to many of these issues,
and I thank you for that.
I expect that something said tonight
may get a little uncomfortable
and a little awkward for some,
but I ask that we collectively
promote a space for
honest, civil dialogue.
We are recording this program,
so please silence your phones.
Now, I'd like to welcome Abby Wolf,
Executive Director of the Hutchins Center.
(audience applauds)
- Hello, everyone.
I'm Abby Wolf, as Monica said.
Thank you so much, Monica,
for that kind introduction.
I don't have prepared remarks
because I'm kinda taking it easy right now
and enjoying this space.
But I do want to say thank you to the ICA.
When Jill Medvedow and Monica
approached us with this idea,
it was a very easy yes to say
because we really wanted
to participate in this.
I think we had no idea at that time,
I mean,
this topic has been
crucial for a long time,
and I think we had no idea
how much it would just keep building.
Not only through art, but
through other discourses
that we're hearing and
participating in right now.
Just a few words about
the Hutchins Center.
We're a multidisciplinary
research institute
across the river at Harvard.
We have publications,
one of which is on sale at the bookstore
so I hope you'll check that out.
We have a Fellows program.
Nikki Greene on the panel
is a veteran of that.
We have some Fellows in the audience.
We do many things,
but art and art history are absolutely
central to all that we do.
Visual representation is crucial
to the field of African and
African-American research.
I'll end there, but we're
so pleased to be here.
Thank you to the panelists, and enjoy.
Thank you for coming.
(audience applauds)
- There's one thing I forgot to ask.
Am I introducing the panel?
- [Woman] Yes.
- Okay, alright.
(laughs)
Well, good evening, everyone.
Thanks for being here.
It's a delight.
Joey, I see someone who
I know from New York,
and there may be some other
folks out in the audience.
I bring greetings from
the Schaumburg Center
by way of its art collection,
which I know is always in conversation
with its sister institutions,
even though I'm no longer the director.
Tonight, we are joined by an amazing group
of art professionals
representing a gallerist,
a curator, an art
historian, and an artist.
Let me start with Sheida Soleiman.
Did I say it right?
- Soleimani.
- Soleimani.
She's an Iranian-American
artist who lives in Providence,
daughter of political
refugees who were persecuted
by the Iranian government
in the early 1980s.
Soleimani makes work that melds
sculpture, collage, and photography
and highlights her own
critical perspective
on historical and contemporary
socio=political occurrences in Iran.
Her work has been
recognized internationally
in both exhibitions and
publications such Artforum,
The New York Times, Huffington Post,
Interview, and VICE Magazine.
She's currently teaching at both
Brandeis and RISD.
Some of her students are in the audience.
We're gonna get to see a
little bit of her work.
Welcome, Sheida.
- Thank you.
- To her left is Eva.
Yes.
(audience applauds)
To her left is someone who
likely needs no introduction.
This is home turf for Eva Respini.
She is the Barbara Lee
Chief Curator at the ICA.
She's presently at work on the exhibition
Art in the Age of the
Internet: 1989 to Today,
which examines how the Internet
has radically changed the field of art.
We are grateful that she's joining us
this evening as both host and participant.
- Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- Dr. Nikki Greene is an art historian
examining African and
African-American identities,
music, the body, feminism
in the 20th century,
and contemporary art.
She is the author
of Rhythms of Grease,
Grime, Glass, and Glitter.
That's funky.
(audience laughs)
The Body in Contemporary Black Art.
It presents a new interpretation
of the work of David Hammons, Renee Stout,
Maria Magdalena Campos
Pons, Radcliffe Bailey,
and considers the
intersection between the body,
Black identity, and the musical
possibilities of the visual.
She is currently at Wellesley,
Wellesley, excuse me, Wellesley College,
and she is a Fellow
at the Hutchins Center
at
Harvard University,
and the visual editor
of Transition Magazine.
- Yes, Fellow last year.
(audience applauds)
I had to do a little curating
because there's a lot
of really great things
she has going on right now.
So, pardon for the slip.
Camilo Alvarez
was born in '76 in New
York, resides in Boston.
He is Dominican as well as
living in Santo Domingo for seven years.
He's a graduate of Skidmore College
with a Masters in Liberal
Arts and Museum Studies
from Harvard University.
He has worked, among
other places, at Exit Art,
Socrates Sculpture Park,
MIT's List Visual Arts Center,
and the Skowhegan School
of Painting and Sculpture.
He is currently the owner, director,
and preparator, of Samson.
Did I say it correctly?
- Sam-sun-ya.
(audience laughs)
- Sam-son-ya,
Formally, Samson
Projects, founded in 2004.
Samson's Projects,
Sam-son-ya's programs and exhibitions
have been viewed by, among others,
The New York Times, AfriForum,
The Boston Globe, and Flash Art.
Let's give a round of applause.
(audience applauds)
The old saying
being in the community
is not the same thing as
being of the community
got me to thinking recently
about this question of representation
and responsibility in creative spaces.
I certainly learned this many times
as a native-born Chicagoan
when I found myself leading Black Harlem's
oldest cultural institution
the Schaumburg Center,
a place where being from
Harlem actually means something
to your capacity to speak for
and within that community.
From that experience,
I also thought about the spaces,
the creative spaces within
the field that I know best.
As a scholar of African-American history,
of Black history,
some of the most innovative scholarship
was pinned first by White scholars
looking to overturn the
conventional wisdom of the field,
the practice of American history,
that had systematically denied
Black agency and humanity.
Just as a signpost of what
I mean, it was indeed,
we are essentially a century
from the Birth of a Nation,
the first Hollywood, well,
motion picture release equivalent
of the first major Hollywood production
that retold the story of Reconstruction.
But it wasn't just the
story of White supremacy's
emergence as a major feature
of national reconciliation,
a moment of actually heralding the Klan
as having come and literally save the day
from the terror of Black men
as rapists and criminals,
resonant with these times.
It was also the works
of historians themselves
for more than a generation
before that film that had informed,
in their scholarship,
the very ideas that took root
in the creative space of what we know
today to be the big screen.
It was about 50 years later
when the work of scholars
like Kenneth Stampp or August Meyer
or more popularly known, Howard Zinn
or most recently, Eric Foner,
took to the task of
correcting, on their own terms,
in the creative and imaginative
ways that they could,
tell a more complete,
truthful, and honest story
of African-American agency and humanity,
a political accomplishment,
and the deeply-rooted contributions
of Black people to the very nature
of American democracy.
But what was it about their commitment
that shielded them from
getting anything in particular
wrong because they were
not of the community?
In other words, it was something
about the commitment to the work itself
to being as close as one could
to the lived experiences of those
who had struggled in this vain
and to having as wide a field of view
for telling that story that in many ways
helped to inspire
the emergence of social history
in the 1980s of which so
many of my colleagues today
are indebted to for being able
to tell the story from the bottom up.
Here we are,
looking across the landscape
of our contemporary moment
where we see any number of examples
of this question of community
visa vi representation and responsibility.
I heard recently, for example,
David Simon and George Pelecanos
on NPR talking about being two White men
and telling a story of female sex workers
in Times Square in the 1970s.
By most accounts, so far,
they've done a pretty good job of it.
We certainly have watched
the success of Ava DuVernay's 13th,
one of the most successful Black
women directors working today,
both in narrative film as
well as documentary film.
Essentially, tell a
story of the experiences
of Black men from slavery
to mass incarceration.
I even think about Molly Crabapple's work
as a graphic artist, as an illustrator,
in collaboration with
Bryan Stevenson and Jay-Z.
A White woman being
commissioned to tell the story
of slavery and mass
incarceration on one hand,
and for Jay-Z, the story
of the war on drugs.
Now don't get me wrong,
I think a lot about being
an early fan of say, American Idol,
another form of popular
culture in creative space,
which for years rewarded
blue-eyed soul performers
instead of African-Americans
who were certainly as gifted,
if not better, at the art form.
The Voice, in my opinion,
created a space to indeed detach
voice from the body in terms
of how one initially
selected the contestants.
Thinking about that detachment,
I'm also reminded of
some of the controversy
attending to the selection
of the Chinese sculpture,
and I'm sure to not get this correct,
Lei Yixin
of the Hunan Province
for being the sculptor on the
Martin Luther King monument,
which now
is on the Washington Mall.
He himself,
not only being detached
from the community,
was on a temporary work
visa in St. Paul, Minnesota,
when he was discovered.
He does not speak English,
and indeed, insisted upon
using Chinese stone workers
to reassemble
Martin Luther King after he'd been
literally built in China.
Here we have a wide panoply
of tensions between being in the community
and of the community
and what kinds of
contributions one can make
to the human condition to the question
of how we are to see each other,
and what do we owe each other.
The last thing that I think sets in motion
the conversation we're
going to have tonight is
the response to the
Guggenheim's exhibition
of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu,
two Chinese artists whose work
has subsequently been pulled,
Dogs That Cannot Touch,
a 2003 video recording of two pit bulls
on treadmills harnessed in such a way
that they cannot actually fight.
According to The New York Times,
these works have been exhibited
in museums in Asia, Europe,
and the United States,
but the Guggenheim regrets that explicit
and repeated threats of violence
had made our decisions necessary.
As an arts institution
committed to presenting
a multiplicity of voices,
we are dismayed that we
must withhold works of art.
One wonders to what degree it is
the scale and scope
of the dissent that
has shaped the decision
about the capacity
to embody the pain,
in this case, of animals in a work of art.
So, I wanna trouble, in this way,
how we think about the moment
when we choose not to accept
the representation of
someone else's experience
if we think of
the larger relationship
of we as human being
and as animals.
Finally, Roxane Gay, in 2015,
wrote an essay
remarking on the phenomenon
of empathy poured out
in the wake of Cecil the Lion's murder
by a dentist
on safari in Zimbabwe.
She says on Twitter, I joked,
"I'm personally going to start
"wearing a lion costume
when I leave my house
"so if I get shot, people will care."
She was responding to the
recent killing of Samuel DuBose,
a Cincinnati motorist killed
while unarmed during a traffic stop
by a White officer, Ray Tensing,
who only recently has been
acquitted of all charges.
It seems to me
that we might start the
question by thinking about
what is the work required
to be able to be responsible
to the representation of humanity
that we all engage in as artists
or as creative people?
One other way to think about it
is what role does historical literacy
and cultural proximity play
in assessing the question
of representation and responsibility?
Sheida?
- Oh man, you seem ready.
I mean, I guess,
I'm already thinking about
what makes something okay,
I'm gonna read off my little brain chart,
and does that mean that
you have experience?
Like you're saying do you have
to belong to a community or not?
I guess the first thing I
always think about is using,
I guess I'm gonna use
myself as an example here
because that's the closest
thing I have to go off.
My work, you know, uses
a lot of human rights
and torture victims that
I don't personally know.
I'm not a human rights violation victim,
but I have parents that
are, or my mother is.
I grew up with stories of my mother
telling me about her time in
prison, about her torture.
Those were my bedtime stories
that I went to bed with
at age five or six,
thinking about what a
prison cell looked like.
Getting older and starting to
realize that these are things,
I went to school and I didn't learn
how to speak English
until I was about six.
Since this was so normal
to me, and I got to school,
I thought everyone had parents
that were human rights violation victims.
When I started talking to
the other kids in school,
I was like so, what did your
parents' prison look like?
It didn't go over too well.
- Are you serious?
- Yeah.
- Wow.
- It wasn't normal to them
and they were like who is this kid?
What's going on?
It took me a second to
step back and be like,
okay, this isn't a shared experience.
How can I use an experience
that maybe I have not personally had
but one that I'm extremely close to,
to start talking about issues
that I think are extremely important.
That's kind of what I
started doing at a later age.
I started trying to take on
my mother's story earlier
in my works when I was in
college, but most recently,
I've been working with human rights
violation lawyers in Iran on the ground
that give me information about victims
that I try to connect with families
of women that are executed
as often as possible to try to spread the
news about what's happening
in the Middle East
outside of what the West
is accustomed to hearing.
For me, I think responsibility
and representation comes
from having some type of
dialogue, direct dialogue
with an experience.
- I define that as a journey
of historical literacy,
but that is a kind of historical literacy.
It's a personal biography.
It's a proximity to people
who actually lived that experience.
Now Nikki, Dr. Greene,
you are,
you're an art historian.
You have a kind of built-in distance,
but you also have an advantage
because you have disciplinary
rules that require you
to prove thought the
preponderance of evidence
that you know something
about these people.
Talk about,
maybe even think about it
in terms of the Dana Schutz
controversy in terms of
how you would think about an artist's work
in the peeling back of the layers
of how an artist comes
to a work like that.
It can be an abstraction.
It can be direct.
But think about sort of when you engage
as an art historian,
what are you looking for
to understand why an artist
comes to a work like this?
What is the moment of
creation that you can connect the dots?
(audience laughs)
- So...
You know, I think my role as a professor,
and for those of us who
have the privilege to
devote our lives to teaching
but also researching,
the joy of
enjoying the mind and thinking of ideas
and how we can convey them.
I find that my role is always about
giving students
access.
That access can happen at
a number of entry points.
I'll start with just the classroom.
I think there's a certain
level of access to be,
of course, at a place
like Wellesley College.
I've also taught at a place
like Rutgers University
in Camden, New Jersey,
very different places,
very different sites.
I'm originally from Newark, New Jersey.
My access point
was the Newark Museum.
For me, and I'm gonna get to this
peeling back layers.
- That's okay, take your time.
- I won't make it too
long of a road there.
For me, to have access
to the Newark Museum
as a poor black girl in New Jersey
meant that the Newark
Museum had to be free.
Thankfully, safe place,
my mother could take both
myself and my brother.
I could have access to
a certain kind of visual literacy
at a relatively young age.
Well, four or five years old.
That is my starting point
that I can, at four or five,
have access to a space that would allow me
to begin to think about images
as a way of explaining
the world around me.
As a professor now, I have students who,
I have some students who
grew up going to museums,
traveled the world.
I did a section on the
Parthenon last week.
How many of you have
been to the Parthenon?
I have four or five hands in the room.
I have not been.
(audience laughs)
But I taught the section anyway.
(audience laughs)
- It's overrated.
- I still taught it.
But
for those students
who may have never come across
a Parthenon or who may never come across
a Dana Schutz painting, I
have not taught her yet,
but I think that
my role is to say
we can enter the world of the Parthenon,
we can enter the world of
someone like David Hammons
who was on display here,
and may be it'd be helpful to go an image.
I'm an art historian.
- We should poll the audience
to see if they know who that is.
- Well, his name is on there.
David Hammons, who can
enter a space like this,
and I don't wanna take up too
much time explaining that,
but my role then is to
be able to give then a
wide variety of examples
so that when they come across
something like Open Casket by Dana Schutz,
that there's a way in which
we talked about the history of
slavery.
I'm teaching a survey
of African-American art
right now to be able to track.
I haven't gotten to this
Dana Schutz controversy
because I wanna start from
a certain historical moment and for me,
that's thinking about the
Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
We're in the 19th Century now.
We're not gonna touch that
because I haven't given them
the tools yet to unpack it.
Now, for the visitor who's coming
who's not in my classroom
or in a classroom at all
and they come across that,
that then becomes a different conversation
about what all of our roles are
to think about what's the
kind of visual literacy
that we want to provide
people on a daily basis.
Does that mean that
we need to be much more careful
and say, the news media,
that when they come across
a slain Black body
that they don't accept that as normal,
that they don't take that as oh,
that's another day in the United States.
It's fine to show an image
of a 15-year-old boy laying
slain in the street, right?
If we don't have that
kind of visual literacy,
then we come across a painting
like Open Casket with probably
not enough tools to unpack it.
I think the conversations
we have thereafter
and the role that institutions,
like what we're doing
here tonight with the ICA,
can offer an opportunity
to get that dialogue going
so we can kind of deal with it
in a way that sort of
makes sense to everyone.
- [Khalil] Go ahead, jump in.
- I mean, I'm with you, absolutely.
I think you're talking
about teaching students
from a certain socio-economic background,
and I'm in the same position.
Most, I'm not gonna say
all students at RISD,
but most students at RISD come from
a certain level of privilege,
same with Brandeis.
Most of them come to school
and they know how to talk
about post-modernism.
They're already thinking about
art historical references
and how it shapes their work,
and what they can and can't
do and what the rules are.
That comes with a level
of privilege and access,
having had money to be
able to go to museums,
having been able to have
the access to see the work.
For them to be able to unpack it,
the tools are so necessary.
I'm with you 100%,
and if we don't teach or,
I don't think it's about
teaching as much as.
If we don't show
or give the visual
literacy to people to
be able to unpack these
dialogues, there's no
way to come to any point.
I think it's such a
convoluted and conflicting
thing in the first place.
I've been having this discussion
with my students in my
Art in Activism class
when the painting was created.
There's still, there's
still such a divide.
I don't think there's an
easy answer to it fully.
- I wanted to play with
this just a moment longer,
and I'm gonna invite Eva
and Camilo to get in.
One way that I wanna say back what I heard
is that the
illiteracy
about Black history
makes it possible for
the art to do violence,
both potentially in an intended way
and in an unintended way.
Of course, we know that the power
of this kind of imagery was
violent and intended to be so
as a celebration of spectacle
lynchings, for example,
in an earlier period.
But the harm that is anticipated
for at least some, if
I take the perspective
of some of the activists and protestors,
both in the context of
ICA as well as Whitney,
one could take your observation
and say that essentially,
the museum itself has not done enough
to educate its audience
about the context in which
the art itself lives.
The counterexample would be that
so much of what you find
in fine art museums,
essentially, everything before modern art,
is very much a didactic history telling
because so much of it is portraiture.
Any docent tour is going
to be, essentially,
a story about either the art
creator or the subject in the work.
It seems to me that
what we take for granted
with regard to European history,
of American history,
without the contributions of non-Whites,
is a narrative that overlays
even the infrastructure of the museum
space and the gallery space itself.
It's not a neutral.
It's not a white wall.
It is a wall that in conversation
with what's in lots of
people's heads already.
Typically, Black folks
are much more suspicious
of what's in White folks heads
when they encounter this
art on these white walls.
The question I have for Camilo and Eva is
you as a gallerist and you
as a curator at a museum,
what do you do and what can you do
in the space itself when the traditions
of confining the text itself
in conversation with
the visual may limit you
in terms of how much
you should or can say.
Is there any way around this?
Is there a way to remain
either the gallery
or the museum in light of this history?
- I think what you're both
saying is absolutely right,
that there's on one hand, the
responsibility of the artist,
and in the case with Dana Schutz,
what the controversy around the Whitney,
I think what's more crucial
is the responsibility of the institution
that has chosen to show
that work and in the context
in which it has chosen to show that work.
That's not the
responsibility of the artist
to explain the context of their work.
That's what we do as curators.
We're translators, and we're
translators to our publics
and we should know who our publics are.
If that given subject has political,
social, historical resonances that
are
difficult to talk about, that are
very divisive, then I really
believe that the institution
should take on providing
a context for those works.
Then there's the larger context
of what museums do in general,
telling the story of art history.
In our case, contemporary art.
I think in there,
we make choices as an institution
on who we show, what we collect,
what we choose to be in
our permanent collection
where our audiences come
back again and again
and visit works and learn
from the works in our
permanent collection.
I think the choices we make there,
that's a responsibility as well,
and provides a context for the works
that we show in a temporary
exhibition.
I think there too,
the responsibility for an institution
is to be as diverse as possible
in the way that we think
about the creative act,
so diversity of mediums,
diversity of methodologies,
diversity of the people
whoa are making the work.
How do you get that diversity
is also to look at
yourself as an institution.
Those people who are producers
of content in a museum,
curators, educators,
performing arts curators,
in order to have the most dynamic program,
I believe that also those
producers need to be
diverse in their viewpoints
and their expertise.
I think, you know,
tangentially what we're
really talking about here
is the privilege of museums
as
historically, places of White privilege
and the fact that most museums,
the museum field is not diverse.
There was a AMD study
that came out, sorry,
the Mellon Foundation
commissioned a study in 2015.
That study said that 72% of museum
staff were White.
The most diverse departments
are facilities and securities,
so when you get to the more senior,
leadership, curatorial, education,
conservation, the
content-producing departments,
it's even less diverse.
- Well, education is on the better end
of the bad scale.
(laughs)
Right, no surprises there.
- So, when you talk about
access, Nikki, I mean,
for me and for us in the
museum field and institutions,
all of this is in the background
and informs how we do or
do not provide context
for something like a Dana Schutz painting
or everything else that we do.
That web, you know, is difficult.
One has to approach it
through many different facets,
and we have to be vigilant, I think,
in how we are understanding
ourselves as museums,
but how we put forward
the work that we do,
the platforms that we give and the artists
that we choose to give that platform too.
- I wanna come back to that.
Camilo, you have control.
You have authority.
- Right.
(audience laughs)
- That's right.
You're the counterexample.
Talk to us about what you're able
to accomplish in a space where
you get to control what goes on the walls.
- Well, as a proprietor in
this commercial art world,
I'm kind of a diamond, and
actually, that's my birthstone.
There's very few men of color
in the commercial art world.
It's incredibly, dominantly White.
It's actually interesting,
the Dana Schutz painting
was first exhibited
in a German gallery,
and then it came here.
The context was shifted from
White Germans to the Whitney.
- [Khalil] This is Camilo's gallery.
- As a gallerist, luckily I've been
exposed to a fair amount of art.
I like to traverse among poor, wealthy,
artists, curators.
I have this kind of really untraditional,
wavy character slash situation,
which is incredibly privileged,
but at the same time and because of that,
besides considering myself a
translator.
I can speak both many languages,
which is also a set of skills I have,
which lets me talk to many more people,
but in turn, I also
consider myself a muffler.
I kind of have to clean,
a catalytic converter cleans the message.
I can talk to curators
with the latest jargon,
but then I can talk to a collector
that's just coming off the street,
a young collector versus a
very establish collector.
Then, we're talking to artists as well.
Mixed in between emerging,
established, and mid-career artists,
is a whole other different
spectrum as well.
For example, this image
shows Henry Taylor.
That was a painting that was in his
first solo at the studio
museum called Tasered.
It's actually an image of his brother
being recently just tasered.
Then there's a detail of this other work.
It's a piece of a print portfolio
by Keris Salmon who's
by trade a journalist.
Of course, it's an art form,
but she's also a filmmaker,
another art form.
She is married to this White man
who comes from a very,
very old, wealthy family.
She did this research through plantations.
This is imagery from slave plantations
in Tennessee mostly,
if I recall correctly.
But again, just being able to traverse
from Henry to Keris to then showing.
Right now, I have handcuffs,
jade handcuffs by Ai
Weiwei in the gallery.
I feel incredibly lucky
because of that, but then also,
I have to be able to talk to curators
or historians and then
students off the street.
Because I'm in Boston,
it's an educational hub,
very different from New York
which is the commercial center
of the contemporary art world.
I was in New York yesterday,
and then I'm here now.
I was talking to students from
undergrad to post-doc levels,
then also, high schoolers.
That's what part of my methodology
slash joie de vivre is to be able
to talk to so many different people.
Again, coming from New York,
where you're exposed to a lot,
it's incredibly important for people
to understand that the message,
nobody works in a vacuum and
the message is very wide.
Talking about historical literacy,
responsibility is that in order
to be able to understand
all these different,
diverse ethnicities, and gender,
and generations, you
gotta get exposed to them.
Again, proximity.
Whenever I travel, I'm
also lucky to travel.
The art world takes me everywhere.
I talk to taxi cab drivers.
I mean, it helps I used
to drive a cab, right?
But then I enter these
billionaires' homes.
- You're gonna have an HBO series.
- Oh my gosh, it'd be amazing.
- Confessions of Camilo.
- Again, as a gallerist, but again,
it's this commercial realm
where to a certain degree,
you're supposed to provide entertainment,
but then also in the load, education.
Then also, because you're in this
slightly speculative mode where people
are also thinking about
these artworks as assets,
there's this also, like,
I mean, again, another word
for gallerist is dealer,
which I really don't like.
- So let's talk about that a little bit.
I wanna get you back involved
'cause you're a practicing artist.
You don't wanna starve.
- Sure, I try not to.
- You've got a day job,
so that helps presumably.
How does money
either reward
literacy in proximity for artists of color
as compared to White artists?
Are there higher standards
for being literate about
what it is your work
is supposed to do or is it doing
as compared to White artists who may be
freer to explore the
canvas in any way they--
The question may imply a point of view.
I really don't know.
I put it back to you.
How does money matter
in these questions about the choices
that you as a gallerist,
make, you as a curator,
and even you as an artist
attempting to make work that is both
politically relevant and
transformative and at the same time
may have a audience for purchase?
- Sure, I mean, I think
a lot about, I mean,
the art world is a capitalist construct.
I am lucky enough to be
a teacher and professor,
and I really enjoy to, but
I also do it because it
funds my practice, and my
practice is what I really love.
I also don't sell a lot of my images, A,
because I feel uncomfortable
selling to collectors
that don't engage with the content.
- [Khalil] Let's talk about that.
That's the point.
How do you know this?
What is your standard for saying,
"I don't trust this person?"
- [Sheida] Well, I am lucky enough
to work with two gallerists
that know and support the
type of work that I make
and aren't going to just
put it in front of someone
who's not engaged with that content.
I think, for me, people
are like, oh, well,
we have this collector,
in past before I'd been
working with my two galleries,
Edel Assanti in London and
Andrew Rafacz in Chicago.
In the past, people have
been like, oh, well,
we have this collector that
just loves Iranian artists.
I'm like, well, that's great.
Are they looking at
miniatures or is it rugs?
What's your idea?
(audience laughs)
What are you thinking about?
Are they interested in
human rights violations?
- Does the color palette match my piece?
- Yeah, or sometimes I'll
get people who are like,
oh, well, it's really poppy,
and I'm like, oh, tell
me what poppy means?
You wanna talk poppy?
Tell me what that's about?
I'm not interested in having my work
be on the wall of someone
who's just going to look at it
and collect it for its
aesthetic sensibilities.
I do think about aesthetic
sensibilities as a Trojan horse.
If you think about a Trojan horse,
and this is an analogy that I've gotten
from a very good friend of mine.
If you think about the Trojan
horse, it was given as a gift.
You see it and you're
like, oh, it's a present.
It looks so good, I'll let it in.
I think about that with
aesthetics the same way.
This looks visually appealing
in some way, shape, or form.
It has some type of sensibility
in its colors or composition.
I could look at it at and be
like, wow, that looks cool.
And what's the next step?
Once you let it in, then
you have to deconstruct it,
and that's what I'm interested in doing.
If someone wants to fuck
with deconstructing my stuff,
then I can fuck with them.
(audience laughs)
Pardon my language.
- Speaking of the harm that is being done,
you have a chance here
to introduce your work to this audience.
Maybe tell us a little bit what we see.
- Okay, so these are
from an earlier series
that I started in 2013
called National Anthem
kind of going of the, I
keep on looking up there,
but they're actually right there,
going off the fact that
Iran's national anthem
has been changed three times,
each time suiting the most oppressive
regime that's come into power.
In 1952, Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown
in a coup d'etat by the United States CIA
in efforts to try to make,
you know, put someone of
Western influence in power
in Iran to make the oil trade
more, you know, accessible.
In 1979, there was another revolution
where Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini came into power
and instilled his oppressive regime
that's still in power today.
Because of such, I think a lot of
Americans, Westerners,
Europeans, Westerns in general,
I think think about Iran only in the terms
of the nuclear deal, oil,
and then sometimes I'll get like oh,
does everyone have to wear a hijab?
What is it, a burka?
I'm like, alright, we
could talk about that too,
but there's a lot more severity
to the issues that are going on in Iran,
especially since the revolution.
It's a religious,
totalitarian dictatorship.
- [Khalil] And talk about women
because women are the primary
subjects of your work.
- [Sheida] Yes, women
specifically, I've decided.
Well, in this series, National Anthem,
I was focusing on a broad range
of human rights violation victims,
people that were executed
for being homosexual,
people who were executed for protesting
or standing up for their beliefs.
The more I looked at it,
after making this series,
these are two specific women.
On the right is Reyhaneh Jabbari
who was executed for attacking her rapist,
and on the left is an acid burn victim
that had acid thrown in her face
after she was caught
not wearing her chador,
not hijab, correctly.
I'm also thinking a lot about
what makes these types of things possible.
I'm looking a lot at gross
domestic products reports,
rice, fish, oil, pomegranates,
being a lot of agricultural
outputs of Iran.
All of them are spoiled by
the oil industry and trade.
The oil industry and trade in concert
is what makes a lot of these
human rights violations possible.
In the hands of a patriarchal government,
women are suffering.
It's not because they
can't show their hair.
I'm sure that is some of the suffering,
absolutely, for sure,
but it's the suffering that occurs
because they can't stand up for themselves
because the government
doesn't allow them to do so.
So Reyhaneh Jabbari did
not even get a trial.
She was, you know,
she had a court with a sharia judge,
which is a man and only
goes by sharia rule,
which is an eye for an eye.
She didn't have a fair case whatsoever
before she was executed and was imprisoned
for a long time before she was executed.
This is National Anthem.
The newer series of images,
I started thinking a lot about
my experience with my mother.
I'm not, you know, I'm lucky enough
and privileged enough to not be
a human rights violation victim,
but I am raised by a
woman who has severe PTSD
and has dealt with a lot of these issues.
I was a like a child therapist.
She didn't talk to anyone else
about it, so I learned a lot.
I got to see her scars when I was little,
and I got to see what her
prison cell looked like,
and I got hear about what happened
to a lot of the other
women that were in prison.
I started thinking about how
in the previous series of
work that I was making,
I was thinking about human
rights violation victims.
But more and more, I noticed
that it was a lot of women.
I wanted to start focusing
on a lot of the women
whose histories have been erased.
I started collecting
images, speaking, first,
it was through Google
Search before I started
getting involved with human
rights violation lawyers.
I was like, okay, well, how
many of these women can I find?
Amnesty International just covered one.
Maybe I'll search it.
I realized in between 2013 and 2015,
Amnesty International only covered
nine cases of women that
were executed in Iran.
I was like there's gotta be more.
My mom told be there was a lot.
What's going on?
Why can't I find them?
Through starting communication
with families and lawyers,
I started gaining access to information
about women that have been
executed and cannot be found.
There's no trace of them.
My work is to try to
bring attention to women
that have been erased
from history in a way.
If you look at the execution records
that have been shared with me,
which I actually just
published a 'zine of,
a lot of the records
will say unnamed woman
executed August 4, 2016,
for drug charges, but it won't elaborate,
and then there won't be a name.
Very rarely you could find
a name, and whenever I do,
I try to pull a picture
and find something.
- That's incredible.
That's really incredibly powerful,
both in its aesthetic
as well as in the stories
that you're able to tell from it.
We're gonna open to questions
in just a couple of minutes,
so I want to round out in maybe the last--
- That was fast.
- Few prompts.
Yeah, it goes by quickly, right?
Yes, okay, just checking.
- Damn, alright, I hope
I didn't talk too much.
- I wanna refine the
question on money to Eva,
and that is that
so,
I'm on the Board of
MOMA, Barnes Foundation,
very well aware of the amount of money
it takes to run a museum,
very well aware of how money
moves in and out of museums,
who the museum goers are,
who the Board members are.
I am there for representation,
so let's be clear about that.
Therefore,
when the criticism
of ICA and mounting
Schutz' larger exhibition,
partly the strength of the criticism,
the passion with which the
criticisms was engaged,
was around, essentially,
the money to be made by Schutz
by virtue of being in the ICA show
period.
I don't know that there's
a resolution to that
because that opens up
all sorts of questions
that, of course, the Guggenheim
itself is wrestling with.
But I do want you to talk about
just sort of what is the relationship
between a major museum and mounting
exhibitions of living
artists and how that work
moves into the commercial realm?
That's essentially what many
of the community activists were saying.
It's not simply that
she did a bad thing in their eyes.
It's that she will be rewarded
for the controversy itself,
and so that any exhibition in this moment
will ultimately redound to her benefit.
- I mean, she was famous
before she got here.
Unfortunately, the historical
literacy is unknown.
I think I showed, I'm
on the advisory board,
just for, here,
I mean, representation,
but then also for
inclusion I think as well.
- Me too.
- I think, of course, she's also a mother,
so I think there's an
empathic connection there.
Nobody owns paint,
so I think for her to take that on
was incredibly difficult and
incredibly courageous, I think.
Even on turn, also I
think for anybody else,
had a Black and anybody that
wrote the letters to here,
was also incredibly courageous to do that.
I think just the fact
that it's actually this,
this uncomfortable conversation
is happening is incredibly important.
I think I can see both sides,
and I think it's just very
essential that both sides happen.
I think it's incredibly important
for an institution to take that on.
The show was scheduled before
the controversy started,
before she probably even
made the painting, I think.
- Yes, that's true.
Our show was scheduled
before she made Open Casket.
I'm sorry, I'm just trying
to kind of go back to your question.
I think, actually because
Dana is successful
and has been successful in her
career since very early on,
I do actually think that's
part of the conversation.
I think what's unfortunate
is that that painting
and this artist, a White woman,
becomes the center of the conversation
about race and representation.
Why is it that this White artist
is the flashpoint for this conversation,
unfortunately, where there
are many other artists,
including in our program
and on view at the Whitney
at the same time, that
were maybe, I would say,
dealing with the issue of representation
and race in more nuanced ways?
That's maybe on the side.
I would say when it comes to museums,
money, collectors, and
sort of how we operate,
I think of my role as sort of twofold.
In one way, we rely,
as you know on the
generosity of individuals.
Museums in the United States,
mostly, are private museums.
It's individuals who fund us,
and even when you buy a ticket for $15,
which seems like a lot of money,
it's just a fraction of paying salaries,
keeping the lights on, and
hosting free programs like this.
On one hand, we really
rely on those individuals.
On the other hand,
I see my role as a curator
in providing opportunities to show work
that maybe doesn't sell,
that is not commercially
something blue chip or something
that collectors go after.
It could be large scale video.
It could be installation work.
It could be work that doesn't
do well on the market.
It doesn't mean we don't show work
that does well on the
market, and obviously,
Dana Schutz does well on the market.
I also see my role as supporting artists
when I make acquisitions of works of art.
I have the pleasure of
working with living in artists
which means I can buy their work,
and it benefits them and benefits in their
making more work.
For example, here just a couple
of acquisitions we made recently.
This monumental Kara Walker work
which was on view last summer here.
We had just acquired that
through the generosity
of Barbara Lee, so again,
an individual who helped
us acquire this work.
Ellen Gallagher is another
person who acquired recently,
another fantastic work, Deluxe.
Then two fantastic works, in fact,
one sculpture from the Nari Ward show,
and then Nari gave us the accompanying
video as a kind of thanks.
Also, we have Steve
McQueen's Ashes on view.
That was a major acquisition we made.
For me also, the finances are, you know,
I see I have an opportunity
to support artists in their practice.
By acquiring their work it doesn't only
become part of our narrative,
but it is an opportunity yo then support
their practice going on.
- We're gonna bring home
a kind of reconciliation of sorts
between the incredibly
literate Dr. Greene,
and a series of artist she admires
and has been writing about.
If there is a moment to celebrate
the work of artists
who are of these communities
and you have a translator
here to celebrate that work,
why don't you share with us a few pieces.
Then we'll go to Q and A.
- Well, I'll start with
some of the artists,
and I'll do this very quickly
so that we have time for questions.
I'll start with the artists,
just a few who are
included in the transition.
- [Khalil] Dr. Greene, can
I just ask you one thing?
And to, also, if you can,
for some of these artists,
lay bare how they would maybe
be thinking about this question
in light of their work?
- [Nikki] The question of?
- [Khalil] Of representation,
responsibility.
If you can.
- [Nikki] Sure.
Well, starting with Ikere Jones,
who is a, it's a fashion line,
and Wale Oyejide
is a lawyer by profession
but also a fashion designer.
Raj Walker took the photograph.
This I think is a really special way
of thinking about the multiple ways
in which money and maybe something
that we wouldn't consider fine art,
which is fashion art, can be included.
In his work,
in those blazers that you see there,
it's kind of classic, European,
Rococo paintings that he then
infuses with Black bodies.
For a particular, this particular spread,
he had a fashion show in Italy
using
refugees who arrived in Italy.
For any of you who have been to Italy,
you know that this is a huge issue
among Italians in terms of the place
of immigrants within the country.
Being able to then wear works
that kind of disrupt the European canon
I think is really significant.
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
just had a wonderful show
at the Californian
African-American Museum.
She too thinks about
disrupting the male gaze.
She thinks about how,
she also does performance work.
In this particular example,
you're looking at a colonial
postcard that then she,
that she then included collage
that also includes a kind of
urban topography on top
of this woman's body
to kind of interrogate
how an African woman's
body within Africa then gets reinterpreted
and consumed
by the European,
especially the European male gaze.
Joyce J. Scott, this is huge.
I deliberately put down the measurements.
This is only a 10-inch,
almost 11-inch,
piece of beads demonstrating, basically,
a portrait of Rodney King.
Taking something that we, again,
disrupting this idea of what
we expect to see in art,
fashion, jewelry or beading,
and taking a brutal and violent
occasion in our history
of Rodney King being
brutalized by the LAPD,
and then creating something
aesthetically interesting
but nevertheless still
kind of poking at you
to consider what that violence did.
Deana Lawson, who's a photographer,
teaches at Princeton
now, raised in New York,
she took a series of photographs for
LIFE Magazine
of the family members of the,
of the tragedy, the Charleston
shooting.
I had an opportunity to interview her.
To consider how,
how does the presence of the
slain victims continue to live on
in the memories of the family members,
sort of after the tragedy,
that their presence remains in their home
and in our memory as it becomes
a part of how we now understand
the implication of White supremacy?
We're seeing it still
played out on people's lives
in the violence that occurs there.
- Can I stop you there?
'Cause that was amazing.
(audience applauds)
So, 10 minutes?
10 minutes.
Floor's open,
and a comment or a question.
It's kind of easy,
just one or the other
if you wouldn't mind.
Do we have a floating mic
or do we have a stand?
- [Woman] No we'll just
repeat the question.
- Got it.
Floor's open.
Anyone?
Yes.
- [Woman] Thank you all for
such a really stimulating event.
(speaker doesn't have a microphone)
One of the things that
I really grapple with
is the question of theme
as a really critical part
of artistic production and acception,
but also the constitutions
of civil society.
Also, when empathy
may be accommodating, Nikki,
what you called a kind of illiteracy
about race and history.
How we,
as curators, as artists,
as educators, and as viewers,
try to grapple with these issues.
That's the one comment I wanted to make.
The other comment
is about
thinking about Eva's comments
about how much the ICA
is doing to try and
diversify the works on view, the artists,
people in the institution,
but also thinking about how frequently,
at the two I worked at,
diversity often means
expanding the table
to take in more people,
but not changing the fundamental
assumptions as a key shift.
In particular, considering racial issues,
it's always about people of color
and not about kind of Whiteness
as a racial construct.
In the wake of Charlottesville,
I think about this a lot.
It's very uncomfortable
to think about Whiteness as an identity.
Something that we don't want to claim
yet we are trying to change
the world to be a better place,
but it's also really necessary.
These are comments, not questions,
but I would love to here your thoughts.
- If you're way out,
can you raise your hand
if you didn't hear anything or very much?
Wow, she said a lot.
I can do it,
but does anyone else
want to do the summary
or in a response summarize what she said?
Alright, how about I try,
and then if I leave something unsaid?
So, I'll start with the
second part 'cause it's fresh.
Essentially, what is the obligation
of curators and museums
to ask White people to do more work
to recognize Whiteness as
a historical construct,
as a identity, as a source of power,
and that it's not simply bringing
in people of color either
through commission,
through Board membership,
to be additive to a culture
that is already set in its ways?
Is that fair?
- That's okay.
- That was good.
(audience applauds)
So eloquent.
- Now, I can't remember,
my brain has just died, so
what's the first question?
- Well, I think the first
question was about empathy.
I think they're intertwined.
I think when it comes down to it,
White people just have to be
a little bit more
emphatic toward to other.
That's basically it.
When a White society has been supreme
and has had all the power and privilege,
you have to extend the hand, basically,
or it's gonna get taken.
I mean, I think that's
happened every now and then.
I think it's also
just necessary for people to understand
that we're all human.
If your fellow human is not happy,
you're not gonna be happy.
- I think that's right.
Those are two rich comments
about racial literacy,
raising the racial literacy.
It has to be done, and how do we do it,
and it works in both directions,
both learning about Black
people and brown people,
everyone and at the same time,
making sure that White
people do the work as well.
- Yeah, I was just gonna
say empathy isn't enough.
We can all have empathy for others,
but then the responsibility
that everyone has then
is to not, I think where,
I don't wanna bring up Open Casket again,
but I think where many people
have problems was that
there wasn't, you can't
just have empathy and
not understand the consequences
of whatever you represent.
Does she have a right
to represent that image?
Yes, every artist can
create what he or she
is passionate about and wants to portray.
I think that's a role of artists
in the 21st century and forever.
I think that
it can't stop at empathy
and that literacy.
That means talking to
other
Black and brown people,
reading about the history of Emmett Till
and what did it mean for his mother
to take his image and the power
that she had,
the agency that she wanted for that image.
If one understands that,
you have empathy for this,
this mother who's lost her son
due to White supremacy,
but then now, I need to
understand, well, what happened?
What happened to his body?
Why haven't I seen a painting about this?
Why haven't, you know, hwy aren't,
why are there only photographs, primarily?
Why haven't other Black artists,
why haven't Black artists in
general done that kind of work?
It's because it has a particular
kind of resonance for our history
that will, with a little more
investigation beyond empathy,
inform your decision of oh,
maybe that's not my place.
- Well, it's US history.
It's not just Black history.
It's also White history.
(audience applauds)
- I saw a hand.
Second row, yes?
- [Woman] Hi.
- Oh, first row, we'll
do first and then second.
Go for it.
(speaker's voice is low)
You have to speak up 'cause
you're just talking to us.
They want to hear you to.
- Hi, my name is Bumpie,
and I'm one of the organizers
who spoke with the ICA
about representation
and then wrote the letter the the ICA
and a public statement about
(speaker's voice is low)
that's active about representation
at the institutional level.
I want to switch up
Khalil's statement about
the literacy about Black history
that it's impossible
for art to do violence.
The question of this is who's illiteracy,
and why does this illiteracy
tend to perpetuate
this turn that notion
of who is illiterate?
Lived experience is just as literate.
The idea also is not
about a particular artist
and the views that may have.
It is that they do have a responsibility,
as ICA's clearly understated
that they don't have any responsibility,
especially when they have representation.
That when there are communities
who are not represented artists
and communities that are not institutions,
that is what the ICA defines as community
in many conversations and at the curator
topic of content being representative.
When you have community members
who are from communities that
suffer this kind of violence
and they're bringing this up,
it takes a great deal of energy.
Also, the release of power,
there's this weird exchange that happens
where you're giving up power
to be recognized at the
institutional level.
It is not an easy task to do.
It takes, oftentimes,
it takes a lot of work,
especially at the institutional level
to have anything being done.
Yeah, we can talk about empathy.
We can talk about this,
that, and the other,
that the museum doesn't make money,
but the idea that there are people
who are behind the museums
who are still doing this.
Why are they doing this?
And if they're doing that,
if they're funding museums,
and the community is coming up
and they're dismissing the
communities, ultimately.
The communities that are
suffering the effects
of this kind of racialized economy,
then what is the agenda
of that institution?
If they're really not making any money,
there shouldn't be any problem, you know,
apologizing or addressing
it with the members
of the community in conversation, correct?
I just wanted to whip up that
institutional accountability
and responsibility are very,
very difficult questions,
but if we see any change,
if we have any civil rights,
it is because people from
vulnerable communities
are standing on the front lines,
even as we speak, to do that work.
- Yeah, thank you.
I completely concur that the next,
the next stage of racial justice work
across many different communities,
not just Black and White,
is an institutional battle.
It's not about the legal
structures of inequality,
but it is about the everyday
practice of institutions.
Yeah, so, quick anecdote.
Went to the National Portrait Museum
with my children last spring.
We walked in and we
hadn't been there before,
so we were all sort of wide-eyed
and excited about what we might see.
Essentially, the story was of
American history visa vi of
the portrait, Walt Whitman,
the first woman lawyer
fighting for suffrage.
We eventually ended up
in the Civil War room
with Ulysses S. Grant on one side,
I believe Robert E. Lee,
and there was John Brown off by himself,
adjacent to Frederick
Douglass as a statue.
What was interesting was that
the docent, who's a volunteer,
had nothing to say
about the context of the Civil War.
She had many stories to tell
about the generals in the
Civil War, their personalities,
and the friendships that they
had before the war broke out.
There's one thing about representation,
sort of the scale of who's
on those walls or pedestals.
It was another thing
of the absolute erasure
of the very stories
that are told through those paintings.
That's an example of
institution of no violence
because here I am now having to carry
the emotional trauma of my children
who I have to explain to them
why it is that we can have a conversation
about the Civil War that is disembodied
from racism and the harm
done to Black people.
Frederick Douglass just sat there
looking out plaintifly at all of us.
Second row, yes, pass?
Okay.
So I think we're gonna,
I'm gonna take a queue from our host.
How many more?
- [Woman] I think we're
gonna have to wrap it up.
- One more out of fairness?
- [Woman] One more, then
a surprise afterwards.
- Steve, yes?
- [Steve] I just wanna
ask what is violence?
Because we're talking about images
and objects that do violence.
I don't know how many people here
have been beaten up by
the cops like I have,
I know what violence is.
I grew up in Detroit.
I had the National Guard
standing on my lawn
with rifles pointed at my family,
so I know what White supremacy is.
I know what violence is.
I know what paintings are.
I'm sort of curious as to what,
we're using this word that
this object has done violence
and I've very interested,
and sort of desperate,
to understand what we mean
when we say a painting has done violence.
- Well, I remember somebody telling me
that I don't understand why your emotions
have to involve in my reality.
I mean, again, going back to empathy,
I mean, going back to what Nikki said,
it's like yeah, it's about action.
I understand, I can feel,
I can imagine you can
also understand seeing
your mother's tears and what
she felt in that prison.
Now, that's real.
You can see tears, you can see her scars.
To a certain degree,
I think society would like
to think that this is entertainment.
Being a gallerist in a commercial
art world in a gallery,
people kind of walk in and they look.
It's a very passive
understanding of what's going on.
When these really
harsh subject matters come across,
all of a sudden it gets
that much more serious.
It's mental violence, sure, but it's not,
I don't know, it's hard to
define, I would say, Steve.
- The main thing, I think, it's emotional.
I think that the
discussion that I had a lot
with my students in my
classes were the violence
that they were describing
was emotional violence
in like having to do emotional labor
or having this painting, specifically,
that we were talking about,
half of the class would
say that it was violent
to even have this existing
because people have to contend
with this subject matter.
African-Americans have to
contend with this subject matter
in a completely different way
than a White audience does,
and that's a violent type
of resurfacing of a memory.
Then there's the other half of our class
that was like well, yes, but.
I think there's the divide.
It's how you decide to define violence.
Of course, you're thinking
about physical violence,
also emotional as well.
- [Steve] I was just responding
that everyone's talking about violence.
I'm not sure what the definition of it is.
But we're talking about it.
- I guess in the context of this work,
I would say the violence is emotional.
It's pain.
- I'll take the bait.
(audience laughs)
My specialty is criminal justice.
I'll give you two sort of snippets,
or three snippets, quickly.
We know that the
domination that guards
have over prisoners is
not just the physical
reminder of the capacity
to terrorize or to punish,
but it's the implicit threat
of that that is a form
of low-grade violence.
It's how prisons are built.
The science of it itself
is intended to do such.
We also know that human
beings have biologically,
the capacity to experience
the emotion of another person
just by the visual, the shared space,
and objects can do that work as well.
The obvious thing would be
in terms of human being to human being,
simply someone crying or
laughing makes you cry or laugh.
Objects are analogs
approximate to that experience
and depending on the
person's emotional state,
can also be a trigger for violence.
The last thing is, to me,
thinking about taking a knee
in the midst of the country's debate about
state violence and the flag
and free speech seems to me
that for many White Americans
it is a form of violence
to see Black players kneeling
in the face of the national anthem.
That form of violence,
what for them creates is the analog,
which is a form of outrage.
These are debatable
except the sort of science
of how we experience
other people's emotions
and the face of those emotions.
There are many people who would define it
in that way which is not just
about the physical experience
of someone hurting you.
- I like your answer.
That was good.
(audience applauds)
- [Monica] Thank you, Khalil
and our panelists tonight.
That was really great.
(audience applauds)
And again, this is the first of,
we're gonna have another
conversation in the spring,
also in collaboration
with the Hutchins Center.
That will be moderated by Dr. Sarah Lewis.
That'll be in the spring,
so I hope you'll be able to come back.
We'll have many more programs in between.
Lastly, we want the
conversation to continue.
We do have a reception right behind this.
This is gonna go up in a minute.
I invite everyone to come down
to the stage and continue talking.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
