Speaker 1 (00:00:00): Coming up on Art Palace, Speaker 2 (00:00:03): It gave me clarity where sometimes deaf can seem final or spooky. It felt like a door. Speaker 1 (00:00:22): Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host Russell iig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool people are the artists of the Black and Brown Faces Exhibition. These conversations were a part of the Artisan Dialogue program for this exhibition where we asked the artists to explore relationships between their own work and an artwork in the museum's permanent collection. Visit the exhibition page on our website and scroll down to the artan dialogue section to see the artworks we are discussing. Speaker 3 (00:01:01): Hi, I'm Terrance Hammonds. My piece in black and brown faces is entitled The Beat It will Always Save Us and it depicts two couples dancing on careening meteorites. Speaker 1 (00:01:14): So tell me a little bit how you got to this. Where did this come from, this work? Speaker 3 (00:01:19): Well, honestly, the social upheaval that's been happening, and for me personally, I have found solace in searching through old photographs. So I've started searching through old photographs of interracial couples, but this is work that I've been doing for a while and I started finding these images of jitterbugs of dancers in the twenties and thirties and thinking about the social economic things that were happening for black and brown people around that time. And the fact I just honestly love that it's celebrated or with this piece, I was hoping to celebrate the endurance of black people and the magic of making something beautiful after out of something really painful. Speaker 1 (00:02:12): Tell me about how it's actually made. Speaker 3 (00:02:14): So it's a silk screen on birch plywood. The plywood is a reclaimed shipping crate from my garage. I guess in the last six or seven months I've been creating work where I'm reclaiming this shipping crate. My piece in the Rosenthal Center, everything is, is basically me sort of cannibalizing everything in my art studio to create a new piece Speaker 1 (00:02:41): That feels very of its time though too, of this idea of being stuck at home. And that makes a lot of sense in the Speaker 3 (00:02:49): Pandemic. I call it my quarantine work because again, you're at home and wanting to create new space or make something out of these things that are existing and taking up space around you. Speaker 1 (00:03:01): I mean, I think to me, my read of the pieces, it's very exuberant feeling and really joyful. It would be very easy to sort of come up with a pretty dower response Speaker 3 (00:03:14): To all of this. And the truth is I was pretty dour Speaker 1 (00:03:19): Around Speaker 3 (00:03:20): This time and honestly I think that I needed to be working on something that was uplifting, that was Speaker 1 (00:03:28): An Speaker 3 (00:03:28): Image that sort of celebrated joy. It helped me harness that joy so I can reflect it back to my family and in my daily activities. To me it's really important that the piece sort of radiates joy, that we talk about the joy and that joy comes from the struggles and determination for equal rights for all people. Speaker 1 (00:03:50): You've picked out a piece from the collection to talk about and it is the After Dinner Coffee Pot by Russell Wright, which was made in the years between 1937 and 1959. So what is it about this piece that you connected with? Speaker 3 (00:04:05): It is the simplicity of the form and that married with the function of an after dinner coffee, which is done after sharing hopefully a delicious meal with a friend or someone you love. And then the conversation that happens afterwards. I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier about the piece and about joy and focusing on joy. The after dinner coffee pot, when in use it functions as a catalyst for conversation to build communities for tough conversations, for loving conversations. For me, I think that along with some sweet dance moves is kind of what the world needs right now is to listen to each other and maybe if you've been together and you're both safe, maybe dancing close, Speaker 1 (00:04:55): And you kind of alluded to this when you were picking it out, it is the most unassuming piece I think in this entire display. There's all these other pieces of, some of them are pretty out there and very inventive sort of art deco designs, and this one is just like, it is not the most straightforward coffee pot you can imagine. Obviously there is some very interesting design here, but it is like, oh yeah, that's a nice coffee pot. Well, Speaker 3 (00:05:23): I think what I love about it is that it's quietly radical. I mean if you look at it, it's a really radical change of any coffee pot that I've ever personally seen. The color, a beautiful simple gray that looks beautiful on a table and the shape is I think a rather radical departure from any other ceramic coffee pot that I've personally seen and definitely that was being manufactured at the time. Also, I think Russell Wright and his wife, partner Mary Wright wrote this great book about the art of entertaining Speaker 4 (00:05:59): And Speaker 3 (00:05:59): The art of sharing basically. And then in that sharing becomes that's how you build community. That's how you build family traditions and heirlooms. I mean, I use my Russell Wright coffee pot almost every night. It has a place of pride in our cabinet and in our home. Speaker 1 (00:06:18): Thank you for being my guest today. Speaker 3 (00:06:19): No problem. Thank you so much for inviting me. Speaker 4 (00:06:28): My name is Hannah Jones. I also go by Jonesy. So my piece is called Check All That Apply. It's an intersectional piece. It's about my personal life being biracial and the injustices that are happening right now in our society. And while we're looking and making room for and fighting for people's rights, human rights, it's really a piece about making spaces for people that we aren't necessarily thinking about and breaking outside of the boundaries of what we think is traditional heteronormative white society. So it's really about me and if I went back to a personal story, the reason that it's called Check All That Apply is because I was in junior high and I went down to the office and the counselor lady told me that I needed to check one of the boxes about my race. My mom had filled it out for me and she had checked both and she had made a huge deal about it and said that okay, you need to call your mom and she needs to fill out only one. Speaker 4 (00:07:29): You need to fill out only one. And it just seemed like it was just so much of a big deal that it didn't need to be when out of all honesty, we were telling the truth, I am black, I am white, and it just didn't make sense to me why I had to choose one piece of myself. And as I grew older and coming out and being queer, I realized that there are even more intersections that I'm going to have to deal with and being a woman and we just put people in boxes and those boxes leave no space or any room for people to be human and to decide to be something else and to love themselves for who they are fully fledged out. Black lives are a spectrum and humanity is a spectrum, and so it's really just a look at all of those intersections that could be eventually in the future, and that's kind of what it examines. Speaker 1 (00:08:16): So tell me how you took those ideas and applied them to your painting. Speaker 4 (00:08:21): I think I took it very literally, and I do that very literally in my work sometimes where I use black and white as a pigment to represent exactly that, me as black, me as white, and that those are such rigid borders and there's such a contrast there. We take it so literally in society too. You can't be one or the other or you have to be one or the other. You can't just be both. So there's a very distinct contrast between the two of them and then the rainbows is everything else in between. So it's like the fluidity of being queer of all of those different colors. They're all existing at the same exact time, all on the canvas and you can't separate them. They're all there. I hope that people see something in themselves, even if you're not me, you're not biracial woman or queer. I hope you see that no matter who you are, no matter what your humanity is, you should be able to see yourself and allow yourself to breathe and give yourself grace and be all the colors that you want to be. Speaker 1 (00:09:22): So we also wanted to talk a little bit about work from the collection and you chose Hiawatha marriage from 1871 by Amonia Lewis and let me know what you were attracted to in that piece. Speaker 4 (00:09:35): I think originally I just put myself kind of in her position and to be a mixed person and to specifically be a mixed person between two minorities that are oppressed in this country, I can't imagine having to be in that situation as somebody who's a mix of the majority and the minority. So it's a very different thing and the things that she would encounter are completely different. So to see somebody who has been so oppressed by the system and then to also be a woman and then to also questionably be on the spectrum somehow. And so I think for me, I was attracted to all of her intersections as she is as a human to be. All of those things in that time and what she must've encountered to live freely Speaker 1 (00:10:22): And we should say she was part black and part Native American Speaker 4 (00:10:25): In Speaker 1 (00:10:26): Case people don't know, but yeah, you're right. I mean she was a person who definitely, she did her own carving, which was kind of unusual for women of the day. To even carve marble as a woman was a sort of rebellious act. Speaker 4 (00:10:42): Yeah, it's also beautiful, so stunning when you see it. I walked into that room and I was like, wow, it's immaculate, it's beautiful, it's glowing. Speaker 1 (00:10:50): Yeah, it is. When we just walked by, you were commenting on how soft Speaker 4 (00:10:55): It Speaker 1 (00:10:56): Does the texture, and I think when you see this really good marble sculptures, it's always amazing how they get that fleshiness Speaker 4 (00:11:04): To Speaker 1 (00:11:04): Something is nothing like flesh. Speaker 4 (00:11:07): And I think of it almost literally too in the sense that this person has encountered, like I said, a lot of oppression and to have a soft hand like that and those details, that's really, it's crazy to me that she sit down and be able to be that meticulous about it when she probably has a lot of other things going on in the world that she's living in and she's able to hone in, sit down and make something that soft and that beautiful. Speaker 1 (00:11:29): Then also she dressed really androgynously Speaker 4 (00:11:32): Too, Speaker 1 (00:11:33): So she also was so unafraid to just, she wore a lot of men's clothing and just kind of really messed with people's expectations of gender at the time Speaker 4 (00:11:44): And at the time it was very dangerous. You know what I mean? So I think I see this person, I don't even know her, but I'm like, this was a brave woman. Speaker 1 (00:11:53): This is a Speaker 4 (00:11:54): Really brave woman who decided I don't like the boxes. I'm going to step outside the boxes and we'll see what happens. We're going to make smart. Speaker 5 (00:12:08): I'm g Horton, so the piece that's up, it's one of 12 to 13 pieces for my forthcoming series, which is called Coming of Age, and this particular piece is entitled, if I Rule the World, imagine that the series is really, it's a meditation on a young boy's transformation from a boy to a man. The boy in this series, it so happens to be my 13 year old nephew and he is living in Louisville, Kentucky right now, which is where I'm from, and I'm really walking you through some of the transitions that he is experiencing. Speaker 1 (00:12:45): Tell me about the markings on his face. Speaker 5 (00:12:48): Those are tribal markings and when you think of tribes, certain tribes, in this case in Africa, tribal markings are an indicator of on a young boy that he is transitioning into adulthood and identity is such a fragile concept. We're all still trying to figure out who we are and what is the world and how do we fit in it. And here this young boy is, he's asking himself the same questions, but his perception is tainted and is limited with some of his attachments to material possessions. He's showing you the gods, he's showing himself or he's showing who he think he is to the world, and regardless of how he sees himself at the end of the day, he's confident in his attachments to this new identity or to this alienated identity. And it just, in his case, with him being 13, it becomes a foundation for what his life or for what this identity will grow into. Speaker 1 (00:14:01): What were the things that you felt shaped you at that age and do you think there are things that when you were 13 didn't seem like a big deal that actually changed your life? Yeah, Speaker 5 (00:14:14): So that's a great question. What's shaped me at 13 is really what some of the elements I'm going to talk about in the series. I'm using the 13 year old boy to really talk about my story, but some of those elements are peer pressure, love or lack of love, and really just the people, the people around me because the people around me help validate this identity that I was starting to grow into. When I was 13, I stopped drawing. I was an artist up until 13, but my friends and everybody around me, they discouraged that instead it was acceptable for me to play basketball, football. Those yeses and those noss are the reason why I ended up coaching 10 years of division one college basketball. Speaker 1 (00:15:06): What do you think attracted you to this idea of transitioning from adolescence into adulthood? Speaker 5 (00:15:12): We don't talk about it enough. Kids just grow up. We just grow up. And in Jay's case, which is the main character in this story, his name is jj. He's growing up and he's growing up based on his proximity, what he's closely connected to, and in his case, he's connected to a lot of people who aren't necessarily giving him the positive attention and guidance that he may need and he's just going to grow up. And I wanted to slow down. I wanted to slow it down a little bit and use my ability to draw and tell stories through art as an opportunity, just meditate and reflect on his transitions as we see it happens. Speaker 1 (00:15:50): When we were trying to pick out a piece, you felt really strongly about this and you were sort of immediately seemed like you knew you wanted to talk about the Freedman by John Quincy Adams Ward, which is from 1863. I'm kind of curious, what was it about this that drew you in? Speaker 5 (00:16:09): It's the posture, it's the composition of this piece and his body position is leaning in a way in which you can't really tell whether he's getting up and we talked about or whether he's resting. And for me, when I first saw it, I knew that this was a representation of what we know as a slave in America, like a former slave. So I was just naturally attracted to it and on top of that, I mean it was a black man. I mean you can still see the shackles on his hands too. Speaker 1 (00:16:43): To me it's just full of so much momentum Speaker 5 (00:16:46): For sure. Speaker 1 (00:16:47): And yeah, we were kind of going back and forth. I was like, yeah, to me he feels like he's definitely standing up. But then you brought up a great point, which I hadn't really thought about, is if this is a person who's been enslaved, he's like maybe wants to sit down for once. So it's something I hadn't really considered about it. I was thinking of it in more, I think symbolic terms of the idea of standing and rising. But I think, yeah, that makes a lot of sense too of a person kind of resting is actually in this instance, a very powerful image. Speaker 5 (00:17:21): But also when I thought of resting, I started to ask myself this question resting from what? And the shackles just allow the storytelling to just deepen there. What really drew me to this piece when I first saw it, it's the texture, it's the colors, it's the bronze, it's so prominent, it sticks out and it catches your attention and that's what it did when I first saw it. So yeah, I'm just about it. Cool. Speaker 1 (00:17:50): So thank you so much for sitting down and talking with me today. Speaker 5 (00:17:53): No doubt, man. This is fine. Speaker 2 (00:18:01): Hi, my name is Annie Ruth. I am so excited about my piece in the exhibition. This piece that I've done actually is a try faced piece, and so I call the piece the door because we all have doors that are in our lives that open and close. It is really a intersection of mind, body, spirit, and there's elements of African styled art that will kind of almost make you feel like it's a painting of a sculpture. I created the painting while my mom was battling cancer that has spread to her brain and lungs, and so we knew she was going to eventually be entering that door that took her to the next realm, and probably three weeks ago I was able to help usher her through that doorway from death to life everlasting, and it just made me look at seeing spiritually in a different way. It gave me clarity where sometimes deaf can seem final or spooky. It felt like a door that I helped her to transition through. Speaker 1 (00:19:26): Are there sort of different levels of mats in the work? Speaker 2 (00:19:30): Yes. What I did was I started out and created the piece on one plane and then I actually cut it to where it was a multiplane. Speaker 1 (00:19:44): Yeah, Speaker 2 (00:19:45): Yeah. Speaker 1 (00:19:46): It's nice. It creates this interesting sense of that extra dimensionality that you're talking about. It is a for all intent and purposes a two D work when you look at it, but then that sense of having those different planes, it adds that idea of passage that you're speaking of. That's really great. Speaker 2 (00:20:06): It was, I think there were some things I had to personally experience to get there because when my mother came to live with me, I knew that she would pass from death to life in my home, and at first it seemed somewhat spooky until I really prayed about it, and then when I stopped looking at it as, oh, she's going to die in my home versus she's going to transition from one plane to another, I took it as a sense of honor and I was actually able to sing to her as she made that passage, I was able to walk her to that door of transition. Speaker 1 (00:20:48): Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about work in the collection and we just kind of walked around and you wanted to find something that sort of stood out to you and this piece stood out to you and it's a power figure that's from the Republic of the Congo, and I kind of was curious what stood out to you about it? Speaker 2 (00:21:13): What stood out to me about it was that mirror, it's a round mirror in the center of that piece and oftentimes when I look at mirrors, I look at them to be reflective, not only reflective of what it's capturing, but reflective of what it could be. And it was the fact that it was a African carving that stood out to me. Not only that it was a carving, but it was really that center mirror that we are meant to be reflective of our ancestors and our ancestors, not just far away but near. So that's what really stuck out to me about that piece. Speaker 1 (00:22:06): I Speaker 2 (00:22:06): Saw a lot of introspection. Speaker 1 (00:22:09): That's both an interesting take that you have on it. And then I think what's fascinating that you were attracted to that mirror is that it is meant to be almost like a gate or a portal in fact. So it is meant to represent the sort of ancestral realm. And so it's interesting because it actually has a really direct connection with what you're talking about in your work of this passage and sort of moving from one realm into another. Obviously the stylistic connections are so clear too. I mean, when I looked at your work immediately I thought, oh, this reminds me of African carvings and things like that. So I think it's clear you were inspired by that as well. Speaker 2 (00:22:55): Yeah, I actually wanted to give the painting a feel that it was carved. What I really want the viewer to see is not only the doors to different dimensions, but the doors that can open and close between different races, how we communicate with each other, how we're actually even able to notice if a door is open or if a door is closed. Sometimes closed doors are often depicted as a negative where sometimes a closed door can be a good thing. It could be a sign of protection. My prayer is that the viewer will look at the piece and kind of experience those multi-dimensions Speaker 1 (00:23:44): Of door. All right. Well, thank you so much for talking with me. You're welcome. Speaker 2 (00:23:48): Thanks for having me. Speaker 6 (00:23:56): My name is Michael Kage. My work is called House of My Dreams, and it's a screen printed flag with applique and GoldLeaf and it's a black and white flag, and it's a story about the haves and the have nots. It's the idea that there's a house of my dreams that I can get if I work hard enough is a half truth. I have to be perfect. I have to live long enough. Frankly, there are different set of rules and with those rules come barriers to accessing the types of things I need in place to have the house of my dream. So disproportionately, people of color try to take shortcuts and wind up in the big house instead of a dream house. And so this piece, it's an observation turned critique of contemporary America and the way that the system treats people of color differently. Speaker 1 (00:25:17): Why do you have the capital building in there? Speaker 6 (00:25:20): The house of my dreams, ideally the house of my dreams would be a house of representatives that we elect that were for the people, but big business corporations, the big money can be alluring, it can be distracting. The power of the lobby sometimes unfortunately gets in the way and trumps the power of the people. Speaker 1 (00:25:45): Talk to me about the choice to make the flag stark black and white. Speaker 6 (00:25:50): We live in the largest civil rights movement ever. We're speaking a lot about blackness and we in turn are speaking a lot about whiteness, which I don't think is something that we talk about much. I think because being white doesn't really present problems that create barriers in your life. You really don't talk about being white much. So I think we're living in a time where we're having some very difficult conversations. Alternatively, the black and white is kind of the symbolic of prison stripes, so that big house is characterized by the stripe pattern on the uniforms that the prisoners wear. Speaker 1 (00:26:42): So you wanted to talk about painting in the collection by Edward Hopper called Sun on Prospect Street, Lauer, Massachusetts, which is from 1934. I'm curious why you chose this piece Speaker 6 (00:26:55): Personally, there's some threads that Edward Hopper and I share that I thought were interesting. We both grew up with one sibling. He grew up pretty wealthy. I did not. He grew up in a strong kind of matrilineal household Speaker 1 (00:27:14): With Speaker 6 (00:27:14): The mom and the grandmom and so did I and the aunties and all of that, and the women definitely ran the house. It wasn't until later in his career that he really took off and he was kind of frustrated about that. I have that same sense of frustration. He was a realist. He did paintings and etchings of urban and rural spaces, architecture. I consider myself a realist as an ideology, not necessarily an application of my artistic practice. And what I do is I shine a light on things that I observe and that I want to challenge that exist in contemporary America. He was painting the America that he knew in real time. He was cataloging it and trying to capture it as much as he could, and I'm doing the same thing, and that's the house of someone's dreams. He painted that house because he thought that house was beautiful and he had the funds to access that type of place. Speaker 1 (00:28:28): For me, I've always felt like this painting is despite its sunny suburban setting that we see, I've always felt it's kind of tinged with a certain sadness, and I think it's because there's no people in it in that emptiness to it. I also can't help but see it almost as a little bit of a critique of suburbia in a way. Speaker 6 (00:28:50): Well, I could see that. I'm sure there's a certain loneliness when you're in a tiny box separated from your neighbors and there's a certain kind of privacy that you have, and you don't want anyone on your yard. You have a privacy fence. I mean, there's not one in this painting, but where I'm getting at. But I think that with this painting, what I read about this painting is that the time that he painted this was actually bustling with people. It was like a booming tourist destination Speaker 6 (00:29:24): And he intentionally excluded the people from the painting. So this was a safe place that people felt like they could bring their families and where there wasn't gun violence and there wasn't drugs and some of the ills that you see in urban environments, and although he chose to depict it a certain way, the reality was that this was a safe place. This was if I'm looking for a safe place to take my family because of the element that and the environment that my family and my children are growing up in because of the element that I grew up in, this would be a suitable option. Speaker 1 (00:30:03): Well, thanks so much for chatting with me today. Speaker 6 (00:30:05): Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Speaker 7 (00:30:13): My name is Daryl Mentia Daniels. So the painting that I have in the exhibition is titled Tired and it is of a woman who is by herself, but she isn't in a protest situation and she's raising her fist in the air as a symbol for power, and she's wearing a shirt that says, ain't I a Woman? Which is a famous speech by Sojourner Truth. And I really just wanted to talk about not only the power and the influence of black women, but also the impact that today's times have had on black women, and to also talk about how they still relate to the times back when Sojourner Truth made her speech. Speaker 1 (00:31:02): I was curious about the source of the image. It looked like something that was from a photograph or a news photograph. Where did it come from? Speaker 7 (00:31:11): I made this image up. I did go to a few marches in New York for George Floyd and for Breonna Taylor, and I did see a lot of different people marching, so I was inspired by the people that I saw, but this is a made up character, but it was inspired by the protests. Speaker 1 (00:31:31): That's interesting. Yeah, it has a feeling of a real scene that you would see, so it makes sense that you're pulling from your actual experiences. I'm curious about the color choices that you made in the painting and specifically I feel like it has this really bright orange background. Speaker 7 (00:31:51): Why orange? I really wanted it to be very alarming and I wanted to stand out and I also wanted to, I didn't want to go completely yellow, that's just a little too happy, but I wanted her light to be dimmed and her skin is black, but you could still see pieces of orange markings throughout her skin to really just talk about her consciousness and how that level of energy within her is dimmed based off of the situations that we're in now. I wanted her to have this head wrap on matching her mask to not only reflect today's times and today's fashion, but to also reflect on the times back in the 18 hundreds and during slavery where women were wearing scarves over their head and being forced to cover their crown. So I just really wanted to kind of do this back and forth between then and now. Speaker 1 (00:32:55): So you wanted to talk about Phyllis Wheatley, which is a sculpture by Elizabeth Catlett from 1973, and this was one you specifically chose a work by Elizabeth Catlett, and I was curious about what she means to you or what your relationship is to that artist. Speaker 7 (00:33:15): Elizabeth Catlett is like a goddess to me. She is such an inspiration and just a pioneer for women artists, for black women artists, and her printmaking, her painting, her sculptures have all inspired me in some way, shape or form. I've been inspired by her marks and her prints and just the way she kind of references African history and African art and African sculptures. And I've also been inspired by African sculptures, particularly the terracotta head or the Benin sculptures with the markings in their faces. That's been a huge inspiration for the type of work that I make. Now. Speaker 1 (00:34:00): The idea of Mark making and I'm looking at the sculpture, I think there's a lot. You can kind of see her relationship with printmaking and mark making, even in this sculpture, looking at the way Phyllis Wheatley's shirt, her top, which she's wearing, has a sort of texture to it, whereas her arms are very smooth, and then even the lines and the shapes of her arms, they're very graphic. A great connection between this piece and your work is a sense of empowerment. I'm just kind of curious, how do you see empowerment in this sculpture Speaker 7 (00:34:41): Pose in general? How should I describe this pose? Speaker 1 (00:34:47): Well, so her arms are crossed, but she has one hand up to Speaker 7 (00:34:52): Her head, one hand on her face, and she's just looking at the viewer, and it's just a very strong pose to be in. I feel like she's ready to answer anything. She's ready to attack anything. She's just ready Speaker 1 (00:35:07): On just kind of a purely formal level. The base feels very solid, the way her arms are supporting her other arm, it feels this is not a sculpture that's going to tip over ever. Right. Speaker 7 (00:35:20): It's awesome. It's interesting how she depicted Phyllis Wheatley and Phyllis Wheatley's story from being enslaved and becoming a writer and gaining her own freedom and just relation of the strength of a woman and how nothing can really hold her down, and she's always going to keep marching and moving forward. That's just something that I really wanted to try to depict with the painting that I created. And just in relation to the topic of empowerment and the stories between Sojourner Truth, Phyllis Wheatley and Elizabeth Catlett. Speaker 8 (00:36:15): My name is Kevin J. Watkins. So I have five images in the black and Brown Faces exhibit, and it's a documentary style piece, black and white of the protests throughout the summer here in Cincinnati. Speaker 1 (00:36:27): And tell me about how you've chosen to arrange those images. Speaker 8 (00:36:31): So basically I kind of wanted them sort of a linear fashion to tell a story. All the images are kind of touching, so it kind of flows and it gives you a chance to step back, look at the images, and figure out the story for yourself. Speaker 1 (00:36:44): And the images are printed rather large too. Speaker 8 (00:36:47): Yeah, definitely. I wanted to print as big as possible, so it's really in your face, you can really see the detail and the expressions, and like I said, I wanted the images kind of black and white to give it that odor feel and strip it back down, take the color away, and also have them kind of all together range touching. Speaker 1 (00:37:05): Tell me a little bit about the experience of actually shooting these photographs. Speaker 8 (00:37:10): So I started the very first night of the protest after George Floyd was murdered. I went down the very first night here, and it was an amazing experience. It was a lot of energy down there from the people. It kind of felt like a powder keg that was going to erupt at time, so it was a little scary, but the inspiration behind it going forward was just absorbing all the energy and continuing to document throughout the summer and just telling that story. Speaker 1 (00:37:35): The photos also, they seem to capture different perspectives too. Even though you are the singular vision, they seem to sort of hop around and it gives you actually a really interesting view of it, not just from one view. Speaker 8 (00:37:47): Yeah, definitely. So the protest, like I said, it was several different ones that I went to. A lot of 'em were different. A lot of 'em had similarities. So I think that's where you get some of the differentiation. But also I think I'm a portrait photographer by nature, so I'm kind of used to posing people. This was opposite of what I do, so it was more so trying to capture those moments. So I was looking for almost people posing themselves. I know they weren't posing, they were protesting, but those moments where somebody's really passionate about what they're doing in time was just capturing those single moments. I did end up using the image of the chief of police here in Cincinnati. Speaker 1 (00:38:24): Yeah, yeah, I noticed that. Speaker 8 (00:38:25): Yeah, I thought that was a very vital part to just telling the story. Speaker 1 (00:38:28): Also Speaker 8 (00:38:29): A black and brown face, and he's obviously, he has to be a police chief, and he's also a black man within everything that's going on right now. So I just thought he was fitting to help tell that story as well. Speaker 1 (00:38:39): So we also wanted to talk about work in the museum's collection, which is by an artist named Lorna Simpson, and it's called Counting from 1991. And I'm curious what attracted to you to this work? Speaker 8 (00:38:52): And I think the aesthetic of it all looks kind of similar to mine. It kind drew me to it as well. The black and white, the way the images are put together, basically touching it is kind of telling that story as well. Speaker 1 (00:39:04): I hadn't even thought about it for a connection to yours is that they're both images that are made up of smaller photographs that are combined, and even the way they're sort of not all the same size and the shapes, but they're all kind of touching. It's kind of interesting. It isn't sort of a documentary type thing. So we have, just to describe the piece, we see a part of a woman's face, and then according to the label, it says a smokehouse that once held enslaved people, and then below that, a coil of braided hair. And then there are these numbers next to them. They feel very cataloged in a way next to the woman's neck. It says different periods of time during the smokehouse, it gives you 310 years ago, 1,575 bricks. And then for the braid it says 25 twists, 70 braids, 50 locks. Speaker 8 (00:39:59): Yeah. Speaker 1 (00:40:00): I don't know. What do you make of all that? Speaker 8 (00:40:03): Man, it is very detailed. 1500 bricks. Yeah, I like the whole aspect behind it, just telling you exactly what's going on. 50 locks. That's a lot. Speaker 1 (00:40:16): It's interesting though, I feel like to me it's almost like the point is almost that these things are not very meaningful. Does it matter the amount of bricks? Speaker 8 (00:40:27): True, true. Yeah, Speaker 1 (00:40:27): Definitely. It's a smokehouse that held enslaved people, but we're not talking about slavery. We're talking about the number of bricks in the year and how so there's this weird cold distancing that's happening, just sort of pointing out it's 310 years ago, it's this, and it's like, yeah, but that's not the important part of the story. Right. Speaker 8 (00:40:47): Sure. Definitely, definitely. That makes a lot of sense. Now that you say that it is definitely giving it that almost like a divide. Speaker 1 (00:40:53): What do you think about the way that they're photographed? Speaker 8 (00:40:55): I love it. I think the top piece of the woman's kind of mouth and down, I think it does kind of draw you in a little bit too as well, just because it's a bigger print and it definitely just draws you in. It makes you just look at it and think exactly what the photographer was trying to portray with this, the smokehouse. I like how that one's kind of pulled back just to give you the whole view of it, and it makes it feel very kind of solitaire lies were lost there, or people lived there or died there. Speaker 1 (00:41:26): Well, it's also, I hadn't really thought about the way that the smokehouse, it's a tiny little image in larger, wider rectangle. Yes. That's so interesting because what it feels like is it's like we're isolating a thing out of a larger landscape that makes me think of what are we missing? Yeah, what's being blocked out in this image We're getting just the braid. We're not really getting a person with it as well, so it's like a, yeah, it's like disconnected hair, just hair lying on a table or something. It doesn't feel like it's connected to a human being in any way. I think all of these are kind of slightly disconnected from what else is there to the, there's not a Yeah, the fragmentary. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We're getting fragments of information on the side, and then we're getting fragments of images. And I think that's sort of the interesting thing about this piece is that the struggle it puts in you of how do I put this together to make sense of it. I like the parallel between her peace and mind, just kind the aesthetic of how they're put together, larger size photos and the kind of way it's set up. So yeah, it's beautiful. Well, I hope people get to enjoy looking at both of them. Thank you so much for talking with me today. Thank you for having me, man. It was a great time. Sure, thank you. Speaker 9 (00:42:53): My name is Adante Clark. Well, black and brown faces. What I wanted to capture with this was just the moment in time that we're in currently in 2020 with this piece that is in black and brown faces. I wanted to say, okay, we've now are seven months, eight months into this pandemic and which will be our new norm. It has changed the way that we view our day-to-day, whether that's working from home and so on and so forth, not commuting. So with the piece here, I wanted to capture just appreciating the things that we did in our society as far as commuting, the way we hug, the way we shook hands just upon meeting each other. Like me, you Speaker 1 (00:43:31): We're Speaker 9 (00:43:31): Not allowed to shake hands, so I understand that. But this is our new norm, so I really wanted to capture just where we stand today versus where we were and what can we appreciate from that moment. Speaker 1 (00:43:42): So how did those ideas translate into an image for you? Speaker 9 (00:43:45): I attempt to have a portrait that's the base of it, and there's an expression, however, the scene that will be taking place typically takes place in the space of the mind. So if you can capture it in the mind that what you're going to do next or what your decision making is going to be, I think it allows us to then formulate what we want to do next. So the image that we will see that's caught up capturing the awakening, it's literally let's, how do we capture what is new for us and what's new? The norm Speaker 1 (00:44:22): Is the face in your work, is it somebody specific? Speaker 9 (00:44:26): So the face is not someone specific, right? I typically want to specifically find an expression Speaker 1 (00:44:34): That Speaker 9 (00:44:34): Sells what I'm trying to say and that image and that the person that I'm using is a black male and he's looking someone downward and he's in deep thought, right? So he's in deep thought. And then you have this scene, you're going to see people walking, you're going to see people exchanging the handshake. You're going to see someone who is approaching another individual with their arms out attempting to say, Hey, I want to give a hug, embracing with a hug. And then you're going to see somewhat of a slight crowd in the foreground. I mean, sorry, in the background of the street. And it's just the whole idea of us, the way we socialize, the way we presented ourselves, the way we greet each other. All those things have changed Speaker 1 (00:45:17): For us. Speaker 9 (00:45:18): And then also I will say an important piece is that obviously you have the whole portrait, but on the right hand side, there's an individual, there's a figure that is sitting on top of the ear, but it's sitting on top of the ear, the same, I would say, color as the larger portrait, which is removed from the inside where the thoughts are taken. So that's the window that you're looking through and the window of, Hey, here's my reflection. Speaker 1 (00:45:46): So you chose to talk about Tom Shaw's today? I am No one. What about two hours from now? And I'm curious just first, what made you choose that piece? Speaker 9 (00:45:55): I really think this is a bold statement and it's a very impactful image. So this portrait here, this work that Tom Shaw has produced, when I seen it, it definitely grabbed my attention. So I was captured by it. Again, you see someone with a somewhat stale look on their face, and then the titling today, I am no one, but what about two hours from now? And I think there's a balance between, okay, I'm viewed as no one. Speaker 1 (00:46:26): Maybe Speaker 9 (00:46:26): There's hope for two hours from now, but also just given the expression of this stale look, there could be thought of what can I do differently to where I'm seen differently? So obviously the image is basically saying, I am no one. That's his view of maybe how the world is seeing him, or maybe that's his view of himself, but however I can change that is the hope of two hours from now. Speaker 1 (00:46:51): Yeah, I can't help but think about the Xs and the I and how that relates to the title as well. And so that idea of two hours from now, and then when I see those Xs, it makes me also think about the danger he might be in. Speaker 9 (00:47:09): Yeah, so it's like the danger and just why am I viewed this way? Why am I not someone in maybe the eyes of someone else who has your normal pupil eye structure? Why when they look at me, am I considered no one when I at my piece or just the work that I create? And then I look at this piece, I find it very important to make statements. These need to be the conversations that need to be had. These are the type of things that people are experiencing in dealing with. And I definitely think when it comes to a work of art, it's something that we all can enjoy, but make sure that there's a purpose behind what you want to say. And hopefully that for years coming, people can always reflect and build off of this idea or just this image or emotion that it actually inflicts. Speaker 1 (00:48:06): All right. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Speaker 9 (00:48:09): Sure. Thank you so much. Speaker 2 (00:48:18): My name's Issa x Anderson. My piece is called 2020 Vision, a Moment in Time, and we were told to create something that kind of expressed our view as a black artist for the year 2020. When I created the piece, I wanted to capture the iris and how that kind of represents vision. And also the year 2020 being a plan on words 2020 vision, the iris and the eye. We know it reflects light, and that's pretty much how we are allowed to see. So just with a lot of things going on this year, especially a covid situation, I wanted to use this time as it was a time of reflection for me Speaker 2 (00:49:03): With us having to quarantine and whatnot and be away from our families, not being able to go to family events, travel so much was canceled. And for me, being stuck at home, it was a time for me to just think about what it is that I wanted in life, what were my plans after things were to get back to normal, I guess, and just think about the relationships with family and just appreciate people more. Again, when it's over with now, what is it that we're going to do? How are we going to treat each other? How are we going to move forward? And that's kind of what I was thinking about when I created this piece. Speaker 1 (00:49:41): Tell me about the surface of the painting. Incredibly glossy. Speaker 2 (00:49:45): For one, it's on the cardboard backing and then it's acrylic painting, a layer of acrylic painting. And then I put a epoxy coating. Speaker 9 (00:49:56): Oh, okay. Speaker 2 (00:49:57): Over to make it shiny. Speaker 1 (00:49:58): Why? What was that about? Speaker 2 (00:50:00): Just the gloss in the eye, actually, how our eyes are glossy kind of. Yeah, Speaker 9 (00:50:05): No, Speaker 1 (00:50:06): That makes sense. Yeah, that's the thing I noticed about Speaker 9 (00:50:08): It immediately, and Speaker 1 (00:50:10): It makes the black of the painting Speaker 9 (00:50:12): Feel really deep too. Speaker 2 (00:50:15): And this was my first time actually working with that type of material. It was a bit struggling because I didn't have enough at first, but I worked with what I had. Speaker 9 (00:50:27): Obviously Speaker 1 (00:50:28): You pick up on the idea of an iris right away, but then it also has this feeling of a galaxy or a nebula or something floating out in space. And I think part of it is that the really rich black that coating gives, it lends it that sort of extra depth. I wanted to talk to you about the work in the museum that we just looked at by Cyrus Karu, and it's these selection of glasses that he's created. They're, he calls 'em like sea stuns. They're from the Macho Nay series, and I did a little Google translate on that, and it just means four eyes. Speaker 2 (00:51:05): Oh, wow. Speaker 1 (00:51:06): Yeah, so I think macho is eyes and is four four, so four eyes, which is kind of funny, a Speaker 2 (00:51:14): Little, Speaker 1 (00:51:16): The old way of making fun of people in glasses, but I thought this would be an interesting piece to look at. So what did you think about it right away? Speaker 2 (00:51:26): I definitely thought it was an interesting piece to look at or interesting pieces because he has so many different types of, Speaker 1 (00:51:32): Yeah, in the gallery we have two sculptures, the two actual glasses on view, but then there's a video that's also on view that shows him wearing more of these sculptures. So you kind of get to see multiple ones. Speaker 2 (00:51:47): I think they're very unique pieces. I use the word glasses. I have contacts in right now, but it just kind of makes me think about how when you go select glasses at the Speaker 1 (00:51:57): Optometrist, Speaker 2 (00:51:58): I think. Yeah, and you kind of like, well, which ones do I get? Which frames look right on me? And he just kind of went there and did some of everything and used its, I guess, recycled materials. Speaker 1 (00:52:10): Yeah. Yeah. They're all made out of just things he picks up off the street, what he's got lying around. So he finds on both of ours, I think there's little pieces of pencils, which I like. Speaker 2 (00:52:23): Oh yeah, I did see that. Yeah, that one was, yeah. Speaker 1 (00:52:26): Yeah, there's the ins are clipped off and it's just like, Speaker 2 (00:52:29): I thought they were matches at first. Speaker 1 (00:52:31): Oh, Speaker 2 (00:52:32): Are you talking about the little red pieces? Speaker 1 (00:52:34): There's ones that on one, I think they have a red cap on them on the end, and then on the others yellow pencils with I think a little gold cap on the end, I believe. But I thought that the red ones looked to me like a color pencil, a nice drawing pencil that has a little red, shows you, I could be wrong. It might not be a drawing Speaker 2 (00:52:54): Pencil at all. Well, I thought they were pretty cool. Yeah. Speaker 1 (00:53:00): For the cardboard you used in your work, was it recycled? Was it just something you found? Speaker 2 (00:53:04): Yes, it was recycled. I just went searching around who's going to give me a box or something? I need to find something. So I wind up finding a piece and it worked out. I Speaker 1 (00:53:12): Mean, I think that's a similar spirit of what Cyrus is doing here where he is just sort of using what materials, he's fine, being inspired by the things around him. The other thing I think it's cool about piece is it seems like you're kind of creating your own identity through those things. And I know when you talked about going to buy glasses or pick out a new pair, it's really fraught with high stakes. It's not just a thing you're going to probably trade on and off. Most of the time they're like an extension of your body. They Speaker 2 (00:53:44): Are. They really are. Speaker 1 (00:53:46): So it's like that idea of glasses as identity really speaks to me as a lifelong glasses wearer. I agree. Speaker 2 (00:53:54): I agree. And they do different glasses, say different things about people. There's a certain shape I feel Speaker 1 (00:54:00): Like Speaker 2 (00:54:02): Can give that teacher Look, you look like a teacher with those types of glasses on, or you look like a nerd now. Right? So yeah, I can agree with that. Speaker 1 (00:54:10): Yeah, Speaker 2 (00:54:11): I just hope people are inspired by my piece. Again, I was using it coming from a place wanting to put something positive out there because again, with so much going on, negative, negative, negative, it's like what do we take from this year? And again, how do you reflect on this year? What did you get positive out of it? Yeah. Speaker 1 (00:54:36): Awesome. Thanks so much for doing this with me. Speaker 2 (00:54:38): Thank you. Speaker 10 (00:54:46): Hello, my name is Mark Anthony Brown, Jr. I'm a photographer. My piece in the exhibition is a dip tick. Two parts to it is 13 photographs, one that's pretty big, and then there's a grid of 12 others, and it's essentially 13 portraits of close personal friends of mine. And my intention behind that was to control the narrative and how we're perceived as black men as well as engaging the immediate community of Cincinnati outside the role of just being an observer and actually being a participant Speaker 1 (00:55:20): Who are the people in the photographs. Speaker 10 (00:55:23): It ranges from people I grew up with to people I played basketball in high school with, but all, I consider them all to be part of my close knit group of friends, but they're not necessarily all friends with each other. So touching back on community is kind of cross community, cross-referencing people. Yeah. Speaker 1 (00:55:44): How did they feel about having their pictures taken? Were they all game for that? Speaker 10 (00:55:47): Yeah, so the title of the piece is actually called Great Reverence to Be Revered is to be honored to be Respected. I talked to every last person and told 'em what I was trying to do, and the response was kind of uniform across the board. It was like, what? Of course, I believe in everything you're doing as far as your artistry and your photography. It would be an absolute honor, and my intention was to honor my friends, share this special moment with my friends. When I speak about the title, great Reverence is the exchange between me, the artist and mock subject. Speaker 1 (00:56:19): You described it as being in two parts and what kind of brought you to that arrangement? Speaker 10 (00:56:25): So I think the main piece kind of shows black men in solidarity, and then the grid allows for a little bit of individuality and peek into who that person might be solely by themselves. Speaker 1 (00:56:41): You wanted to talk about a photograph from the collection called Types by Annu Matthew from 2005. And so I'm curious what attracted you to this piece? Speaker 10 (00:56:52): I actually saw this piece, and I didn't get to really dive into it in person, but I saw the night of the opening of black and brown faces. But when I looked into it a little bit further, and even in glancing initially, it seemed like a piece where the artist was taking control of the narrative around who they are as a person and how they're portrayed. I'm real big on that and my work as far as, I'm a street photographer documentary photographer, so a lot of my work touches on the Black experience. So it's the black experience, so I feel like it should be portrayed by somebody who actually is having that experience. So with her speaking con of touching on Indian and the connotation of Indian and then a denotation of Indian was just very profound in a way. It was simple, but it was profound. I think it's under-addressed Speaker 1 (00:57:45): To quickly describe the artwork for folks if they're not able to see it. The photographer, ANU Matthew has taken this historical photograph of a Native American, and then she has created this self-portrait of herself in a very similar pose. She's using jewelry and other decorations that are traditionally Indian from India, which is the name of the series, and Indian from India. And so she's playing with that confusion that happens, and yeah, she's playing with those ideas of stereotypes, Speaker 10 (00:58:22): The playing with the semantics of Indian and what people might think of Indian and what an Indian actually is. I think that was very clever, but also she played on similarities as well. I know that the original Native American photograph may have been somewhat posed with props, but she also took that and applied it to how it really would be in her Indian culture. With some of the Native American photographs. There was face painting and there's face painting in Indian, but there's a different type. Actually, I was actually a little bit confused until I really delved into the project because originally I thought that she was a Native American and she was just doing kind of doing something for her lineage because Native Americans, as well as Indians are understated narrative within art. But as I looked at it closer and then it was like a literal Indian from this specific place in India, when you really look at it, it makes you go deeper than just, oh, this is cool. She has the same thing going if you really have to really think about the similarities, the dissimilarities and what she's trying to do. Speaker 1 (00:59:31): Yeah, I think it's an interesting piece also because it really is about our country and about the United States because it's about her particular experience of this way she's perceived in the United States as a person who immigrated here. And then it also has to do with the way essentially the people who immigrated to the United States originally view the people who were already here in this sort of sense of belonging and not belonging. And I think it's a really interesting comparison to make. Speaker 10 (01:00:06): I think also one thing that she was doing with the work was that she was holding the powers that be within the institutions kind of accountable for how they portrayed and to be more careful with your word usage. And I always, I kind of did a similar thing with my artist statement in the show where you kind of just take a jab at the institution while you can and just try to hold them accountable even though they are in fact the institution. I'm always a little bit righteously rebellious, for lack of better words. Speaker 1 (01:00:46): Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself to close out 2020 with Wellness, healing, and Art. The Cincinnati Art Museum will reopen for special engagement days on Saturday and Sunday, December 26th and 27th from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM members have special access on Member mornings from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM During this time, the Museum's exhibition ticket revenue will be donated to support and raise awareness for Arts Wave's 2021 Regional Artist Relief Fund that will make grants available for artists throughout Greater Cincinnati. Current special exhibitions are Frank Duveneck, American Master, Aqua Aga. All the flowers are for me, black and brown faces and Women Breaking Boundaries. You can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and we also have an Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is Efron Music by Belau. And as always, please rate and review us to help others find the show. I'm Russell, and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.