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AMBOS: Quipu Fronterizo/Border Quipu - Tanya Aguiñiga

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Border Quipu/Quipu Fronterizo ( AMBOS Project) , 2016-2018 Recycled dress and bathing suit straps Variable Included in the permanent collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Quipu Fronterizo/Border Quipu is a community-based intervention that engages US/Mexico border commuters

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Tanya Aguiñiga on her Border Quipus Exhibiton (start 55:14)

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Tanya Aguiñiga on her Border Quipus Exhibiton (start 55:14)

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Listen: Episode 13 of Clever with Tanya Aguiñiga

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In this episode of Clever, artist/activist Tanya Aguiñiga shares how growing up in Mexico and crossing the US border every day shaped her.

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The ancient Inca had no known written language, but they may have used an intricate language of knots. Khipu, or quipu, taken from the Quechua word for "knot," are collections of cotton or wool strings in varying colors with different knots held in horizontal rows; there are around 600 that survive from the 15th to 16th centuries. They've long been a mystery to researchers, who debated they were either a numerical form of record keeping, or something with deeper narrative meaning. Recent excavations at Incahuasi in Peru are slowly unwinding some of their enigmatic use.

William Neuman reports on the importance of the new discovery for the New York Times:

At the site called Incahuasi, about 100 miles south of Lima, excavators have found, for the first time, several khipus in the place where they were used - in this case, a storage house for agricultural products where they appear to have been used as accounting books to record the amount of peanuts, chili peppers, beans, corn and other items that went in and out.

In some cases the khipus - the first ones were found at the site in 2013 - were buried under the remnants of centuries-old produce, which was preserved thanks to the extremely dry desert conditions.

Unfortunately, Neuman adds that the "excavations at Incahuasi have stopped because of a lack of financing." Yet those already found could have a Rosetta Stone-like impact on khipu knowledge, linking context with the string artifacts for the first time.

Much of the research now on khipu is about finding connections between the rare examples. The Khipu Database Project, hosted by Harvard University, is analyzing these connections, looking at the different colors of string, types, and placements of knots. For example, the khipu discovered with the chili peppers may have some specific indicator that resembles others whose provenance was lost over the centuries since Spanish colonialism.

"Essentially, a database is necessary because there is so much variability in khipu construction and colors, and we think the 'messages' were encoded in patterns of these differences; thus, the database allows us to identify and study those patterns," explained Gary Urton, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard and creator of the database, to Hyperallergic.

The significance of khipu, like so many Inca traditions, vanished during colonization, with those not in private collections or museums mostly unearthed from graves, disassociated from their original places of use. Now there's the potential to disentangle this lost language of knots, and gain a perspective on precolonial life now absent from our history.

Related

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Unraveling the Lost Inca Language of Knots

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The ancient Inca had no known written language, but they may have used an intricate language of knots. Khipu, or quipu, taken from the Quechua word for "knot," are collections of cotton or wool strings in varying colors with different knots held in horizontal rows; there are around 600 that survive from the 15th to 16th centuries.

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Central to this assemblage is a lighter with a root from a tree that grew through it. Lighters are generally associated with smoking, an act that promises a euphoric state. Is it too much to call it a dream-like buzz? Of course, it's also known to cause cancer, sometimes resulting in a final sleep. The lighter recalls a tree's dream, constrained as it was by its actual existence. There are two chunks of concrete that fell from an aging overpass with a black and blue background, color's inspired by nighttime and the cover of Kelley's book (Freedom Dreaming). The background colors are not intended to be set in opposition like a binary. Instead, they spill over into the other side. The dreams seep into the rest of the day, and the rest of the day finds its way into the dream. The overpass, one person's dream that became the background for many. Like concrete, dreams come together with inherited materials and a bit of novelty. The bowling trophy topper. What is there to say? It belongs on top. Perhaps someone dreamt of winning this trophy. It also recalls the "dream" sequence from The Big Lebowski. What does all of this mean for curriculum? Dreams are important but not innocent (chunks of concrete falling from an overpass). Dreams can open up new worlds beyond the actual (trophy topper), but they are derived from an experience with the actual world (root growing through a lighter). And it is possible for dreams to get in the way of appreciating the moment.

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Fun activity prompts to awaken the artistic spirit.

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Wicked Arts Assignments are bold, unusual, contrary, funny, poetical, inspiring, socially committed, or otherwise challenging.

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Ingold, T. (2015). The life of lines. Routledge.

"[What] happens when people or things cling to one another? There is an entwining of lines. They must bind in some such way that the tension that would tear them apart actually holds them fast. Nothing can hold on unless it puts out a line, and unless that line can tangle with others. When everything tangles with everything else, the result is what I call a meshwork. To describe the meshwork is to start from the premise that every living being is a line or, better, a bundle of lines. This book, at once sociological and ecological in scope and ambition, is a study of the life of lines" (p. 3).

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Afronaut: Afrofuturism & BlackCrit as frames for curriculum

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Afronaut: Afrofuturism & BlackCrit as frames for curriculum

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This short film describes the place I’m in with respect to both my curriculum design and my research interests. I sit at the precipice, looking out, wondering: “is culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching the solutions to equitable education for Black students?” Perhaps a reimagined (BlackCrit, speculative, Afrocentric) theoretical framework is called for to guarantee an education space for Black students that’s not anything we have yet seen, read about, or designed. Like the main character in the film, the methods she used to get to the moon were unlike those used by the American space team, and perhaps what worked for the American team is detrimental to the character. Her reimagined method appeared to be grounded in reflexivity, deep thought, and an intention to make connections with life in outer space - which differed greatly than what the American team portrayed, which was a colonizing of the moon, sealed with the placement of the symbol of colonialism - the American flag.  As I sit through my wonderings over curriculum design, I am choosing to, like my heroine in the film, remain grounded in reflexivity, deep thought (about my students), and intention of connecting with the spaces occupied by my students, their(my) families, and their (our) communities, so that my curriculum and research generate opportunities for sustaining Black futures.

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The Wallach Gallery has something new up that resonates with our focus on spatiality and colonization. Let's find a time to see this together on a future Black Paint field trip.

"Living With Ghosts initiates an exploration into the ways the unresolved traumas of Africa’s colonial past and its unfulfilled project of decolonisation continue to haunt its present. The exhibition concerns itself with the ghosts, spirits, and phantoms that abound in the modern calamities of African postcolonial history. These are the apparitions, the unseen but deeply felt forces – thus at once visible and invisible, material and immaterial – that continually disturb individual and collective relations within the African postcolony and throughout its diaspora, leaving behind melancholic traces in subjectivities, landscapes, architecture, and archival materials."

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Living With Ghosts initiates an exploration into the ways the unresolved traumas of Africa's colonial past and its unfulfilled project of decolonisation continue to haunt its present. The exhibition concerns itself with the ghosts, spirits, and phantoms that abound in the modern calamities of African postcolonial history.

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I'm intrigued at how the artist approaches this work as pedagogical - join us on Feb 26 for an on-site visit, or engage the virtual programming and let us know what you think!

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Open to the public Saturdays and Sundays, 12-6 pm Open to classes by appointment. Annex, Level C, Brooklyn Army Terminal, 80 58th St, Brooklyn, NY 11220

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Professor Schmidts talk and discussion afterwards reminds me of this article and project I came across. History and time is present within bodies and passed down through generations as inheritance. What the body holds, how it is assigned value, and how to recognize and reclaim narratives to uplift and look at a story holistically.

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The third chapter of "Inheritance" is a recognition, a celebration, and a reclamation of the Black body.

About the author: Gillian B. White is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Today, we launch the third chapter of The Atlantic's " Inheritance " project: "What the Body Holds." In this chapter, you will find stories on how Black Americans think about self-presentation to the outside world, on the inequities in how bodies are assigned value, and on the quest for dignity in a society that might otherwise seek to strip it away.

Over the course of our work we were drawn again and again to questions of what it means for Black people to reclaim spaces and narratives, to feel seen, to express joy, to experience autonomy. "What the Body Holds" is a reflection on the ways in which bodies are central to our memory and how we experience the world.

These themes are crucial to the larger exploration of the "Inheritance" project, which focuses on elevating the history of Black America, and centering the stories of Black people of all kinds. In past chapters, "Inheritance" has asked readers to interrogate the stories we are told about Black history, and the stories we tell ourselves about our country. We have also focused on the importance of place as a powerful catalyst for remembrance, particularly for a people whose history has often been suppressed or ignored.

We hope you enjoy our latest installation of "Inheritance," and sign up for future updates from the project.

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The third chapter of "Inheritance" is a recognition, a celebration, and a reclamation of the Black body. About the author: Gillian B. White is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Today, we launch the third chapter of The Atlantic's " Inheritance " project: "What the Body Holds."

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When the critique of the term "mastery" came up I thought about Elladj Baldé, the first Black Canadian Figure Skater - partly because I went down an Instagram rabbit hole this afternoon watching his amazing ice skating. The mix of athleticism and artistry and pleasure is magnificent. I feel so much joy watching him play and perform on ice, and I know I am watching someone who has committed his whole life to perfecting his skills and knowledge. He is truly a master and part of me doesn't want to take that away from him.

It's interesting who gets to hold the title of master, who we think is oppressed by the term, and how just as someone like Elladj emerges as a "master" of his craft, the term is no longer suitable. I agree that "master" does have a violent connotation and history but just as we critique it, I want to also decolonize it, wrest it from ownership by the oppressor so that others can be honored for their excellence in the ways we have always been waiting for.

Still I prefer the phrase that Raquel used, a "deep commitment to practice" seems equally powerful and honorable. Maybe instead of reframing mastery, we can reframe what society thinks of "practice" so that it is held up in high regard when one commits to it.

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Canadian Figure Skater Elladj Baldé Is Changing The Sport One Viral Video At A Time

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I've been interested in the water metaphors and imagery coming up to describe the movement of thought in Lab - flows, fluidity, waves, eddies, tides. And when my breakout group was finished, the first thing I heard back in the main room was "teleport" and "photons" which delighted me. I wonder what that conversation was about.

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Who's ready for a Black Paint trip back to Madison Square Park?

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Who's ready for a Black Paint trip back to Madison Square Park?

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pretty neat to see this after Ghost Forest this fall!

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The work "Brier Patch" by artist Hugh Hayden is an installation on view through April.

If you pass by Madison Square Park you'll notice about 100 wooden elementary school-style desks sprouting tree branches-a somewhat eerie scene.

It's part of Artist Hugh Hayden's new installation called "Brier Patch" and is spread out over four lawns in the park. On view through April 24, the commission hopes to bring to mind the disparities within the education system and the idea of the American Dream while also calling on folklore with tangled branches emerging from the desks.
RECOMMENDED: You can now walk through a glowing tunnel in midtown
The largest group of desks (48 of them) is arranged in a grid on the Oval Lawn while another smaller grid sits on Sparrow Lawn across from the playground in the Northeast corner of the park. Two desks sit on Elm Lawn. Finally, another group can be found on the Veteran's Lawn without branches, allowing for the public to interact with the installation and sit in the desks.

According to the Madison Square Park Conservancy, the grid of desks reminds viewers of the typical classroom setting or even darkly, the tombstones in a military cemetery.

"In Hayden's installation, each desk, like a tombstone, can be seen as a stand-in for an individual," the Conservancy explains. The wild branches disrupt the formation helping to signify intellectual development and how some excel and others get left behind...where only a few can truly thrive. It also alludes to student loan debt taken on by getting a higher education.

"In Hugh Hayden's project, the overgrown configuration of branches overwhelms and encumbers the placidity of seats of childhood learning," said Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the deputy director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator of Madison Square Park Conservancy. "Hayden imbues each of his works with intense meaning that, when peeled back, reveals lived experiences about rooted systems in our country and the world. He transforms everyday objects into new forms that expose the properties and purpose of the original source. Brier Patch is both visually powerful and loaded with inherent tensions-growth and stagnation, seduction and peril, individual and community-that ask us to consider how these dichotomies coexist in engrained systems and the work on view."

The twisted branches and the name "Brier Patch" are meant to evoke an environment that is difficult to inhabit as well as the brier patch tales found in folklore traditions around the world, including Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus" stories, which are now condemned for their fictitious depictions of Southern plantation life.
"Brier Patch" is open now at Madison Square Park through April 24.

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100 school desks with tangled branches have taken root in Madison Square Park

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The work "Brier Patch" by artist Hugh Hayden is an installation on view through April. If you pass by Madison Square Park you'll notice about 100 wooden elementary school-style desks sprouting tree branches-a somewhat eerie scene. It's part of Artist Hugh Hayden's new installation called "Brier Patch" and is spread out over four lawns in the park.

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"Who is Queen?'s immense assemblage of paintings, drawings, sculptures, moving images, and sounds, barely contained by their architecture, are drawn into relation through counterpoint. In a musical composition, counterpoint, or the contrapuntal, refers to a complex development of simultaneous voices in tension; point against point. Organized above a foundational cantus firma (a fixed, often preexisting melody), voices in counterpoint form overlapping lines, rearticulating and modify-oppositions or a more strongly punctuated call-and-response, counterpoint is a continuous system of folds and fractals, a horizontal music, weaving dynamic threads into a detailed tapestry."

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Hi all,
Just wanted to share an interesting article I read about digital ways of commemorating and communicating with people who no longer are with us.

Have a lovely weekend :)

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Communicating with the Dead in the Digital Age

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Today I went to a workshop and

Omari Hardwick said it is the touch that grounds you. My mind became a slideshow of ways touch becomes love.

I remembered the way as a child I took a running leap into bed every night to feel the warmth of my silky sheets. I thought of the way my grandmother's fingers grazed my neck when she clasped the necklace I have never taken off. I flashed to Thailand where I felt so alone until a student ran up and squeezed the life back into me and I realized that all I was missing was an embrace, a hug (pictured above).

I think of touch as the exchange of love; the knowledge and memories that demonstrate the power exists between two (sometimes a person, sometimes an object etc.).

Touch is also something we grieved, mourned, missed during the pandemic. Touch so often is the bandaid that's stronger than words, a gift filled with intention. I missed hugging my Ks. I wanted their fist bump hellos and goodbyes. Touch is grounding and powerful because it is embedded with so much intimacy and humanity.

- Jenny Flaumenhaft

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Vivian Maier was the anti-social media photographer. We talked in our group about the concept of humility and if/how it's possible in photography, particularly with the performative nature of social media. I thought of this artist who took photographs her entire life, but her work wasn't discovered until after her death when her a case of thousands of her negatives were auctioned off and purchased by a random guy who was then responsible for not just her legacy, but the ethical questions around profit from her work. There's a great documentary about her: http://www.vivianmaier.com/film-finding-vivian-maier/

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She cradles a Rolleicord camera to her breast, her eyes staring into her reflection. Until recently, the woman behind the camera was unknown, living a quiet life as a nanny in Chicago and dying, alone in a nursing home, in 2009 at the age of 83. When Vivian Maier's cache of 100,000 images were unearthed, her work was compared with the greats of street photography. A film was made, Finding Vivian Maier, which introduced a new generation to her work. But Maier herself was the draw; who, exactly, was the mysterious French nanny? What drove her relentless imagery, and why did she keep it so resolutely hidden?

Maier was a private but eccentric Mary Poppins-like figure, who spoke with a delicate French trill and was never without her medium format camera. She took thousands of photographs from the 1950s to 70s, but squirrelled them away in a room she forbade anyone to enter. She was poor, and in 2007 her possessions were auctioned off to recoup her debts - her archive of photographs among them. John Maloof, an estate agent and president of his local history society, discovered them at an auction and took a punt, hoping to find images for a book he was writing on the Portage Park area of Chicago. He found nothing relevant, and put the whole lot into storage for two years.

"I was one of the few buyers at that auction," he remembers. "I Googled 'Vivian Maier' and nothing came up. It wasn't until 2009, when I found a lab envelope with her name on it, that I was prompted to Google her name again. What came up was an obituary posted only a few days prior. Ever since, Vivian has become my life."

Maloof has what is believed to be the bulk of Maier's work and personal effects. But there are more negatives, prints, films, and tens of thousands of undeveloped rolls. Some of these belong to Jeff Goldstein, a Chicagoan who set about acquiring the items Maloof didn't get. He set up an "educational and collaborative space" dedicated to Maier's work, while Maloof is now working on a documentary and book about Maier's life and photography.

Maier was born in New York City on 01 February 1926 to a French mother and an Austrian father, and spent her childhood shuttling between America and France. "Around 1930, her father disappears from records," recounts Maloof, in a broad Chicago twang. "She and her mother are recorded as living with an award-winning portrait photographer named Jeanne Bertrand, who was born in the 1800s and knew the founder of the Whitney Museum. Vivian may have had some artistic influence rub off on her in these early years."

In around 1959, Maier packed her collection of medium format cameras in a large hard case and set off around the world for a year, on a trip that Maloof says was more than just a holiday. "I think this was her exploring," he reckons. "Thailand, Egypt, Yemen, Italy, France, Taiwan, Vietnam, Morocco, Canada, the Philippines - she was everywhere. She was independent and intrepid, a very private, yet opinionated and strong woman.

"If you had Vivian Maier as a nanny, she would be the coolest adult you'd know," he adds, referencing conversations he's had with some of her former charges. "The kids all wanted to be with Vivian. She was a real eccentric who'd take kids on wild adventures exploring the city, take them to shows and plays and strawberry fields. If she found a dead snake on the kerb, she'd take it home and show them. And she always had her camera around to document this. As a kid, that's pretty cool."

Maier worked as a governess until the mid-1990s, never marrying or having children of her own. Taciturn to the point of silence, she gained a reputation for being secretive. "I think Vivian was so secretive because she was a nanny with no ties to any family, no close friends, never married, never had kids," explains Maloof. "From what I know, she never had a love life. Photography was the only thing she had. And if you expose your only emotional outlet, it's vulnerable. If she knew people would receive it they way they are today, she may have thought twice. But hindsight is always 20/20."

Now that her work has been discovered, Maier's legacy is secure. "Every street photography book will have to include her from now on," says Deutsche Borse Photography Prize nominee Anna Fox. "In the history of photography, lots of people have been discovered after their deaths, but her photographs are amazing. I was quite taken aback when I first saw them. What's most interesting is the accidental story and the incredible effort to get her work off the ground - because there's little about her background and people that knew her, it adds to the mystery and intrigue. But the images are beautifully constructed and it's clear she knew her references. There's a glimmer of Diane Arbus, a glimmer of Robert Frank."

Maier could have gleaned this knowledge from her large library of art and photography books, but there's no record of her being formally trained and, as far as Maloof is aware, she never received any feedback from critics or experts. Despite this, she left a secret archive of masterful photographs behind - something which, for Fox, is typically female. "It's a common story that only small amounts of photographic work by women gets out into the public," she adds. "Despite the vast female majority of photography teachers and students, it's still a male-dominated profession. Exhibitions and publications hardly reference women photographers. It can change, it will have to change.

"As a woman you have a privileged position," she continues. "Women develop relationships with people they are photographing, and are less threatening with a medium format camera. There's a subtle irony and gentleness that is a particular female gaze, although it makes more sense to look at photographers as photographers. Vivian's images are so strong they stand up regardless of gender."

It's impossible to know how Maier felt about her obscurity, but her images sensitively record life's have-nots and also-rans. More gentle than the work of Arbus, they bleed with empathy, retaining a respectful distance even as they hone in on outsiders' private moments. She captures the faraway gaze of a young man caught in thought and the taut expression of a middle-aged woman sneaking a look at a disabled man, but the faces she records are always sombre. It's always a film noir in Maier's world.

And if Maier picked out obscure people and faces, she also picked out seemingly nondescript locations, even in America's most photographed places. Having grown up in Chicago I'm all too aware of the visual clichés of the city, including offset skyline shots, skyscrapers in perspective at sunset and the bustling urban scene outside the flashing lights of the Chicago Theatre. Maier does none of these, capturing the city in a subtler way. "There's always been an interest in street photography in Chicago, the city's made for it," informs Joe Gallina, manager at the Central Camera store where Maier processed her rolls. "But Vivian's style stands out because she really captured the city. Her pictures are a social history."

In December 2008, Maier slipped and fell on the ice. She never truly recovered and died on 21 April the following year in a suburban nursing home. While she was still alive, someone - it's thought Maier herself - recorded her thoughts on life and death. Although the sound is tinny there's a striking confidence in her voice. "Nothing is meant to last forever," she says. "We have to make room for other people. It's a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end, and somebody has the same opportunity to go to the end, and so on. And somebody else takes their place."

She could be talking about her own photography, which so nearly sank into obscurity. No doubt her work will also inspire other photographers to take up their cameras and get out into the streets; for now, it's just good to celebrate her remarkable achievement. The writer Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to destroy all his unpublished works after he died - an order Brod ignored. Vivian Maier may never have intended her work be seen by anybody, but by sharing the delicate power of her images, John Maloof, Jeff Goldstein and others have opened a photographic treasure trove.

See more of Maier's work here or watch the film here.
Read our article about a new book of Maier's colour photography: https://www.1854.photography/2018/11/vivian-maier-the-color-work/

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Reading Time: 7 minutes She cradles a Rolleicord camera to her breast, her eyes staring into her reflection. Until recently, the woman behind the camera was unknown, living a quiet life as a nanny in Chicago and dying, alone in a nursing home, in 2009 at the age of 83.

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what happened to the Ghost Forest trees?

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what happened to the Ghost Forest trees?

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Below a hill in Hunts Point, the Bronx River glistens, offering an escape from the city. Herons and egrets glide above the water and the air is fresh. A 20-foot sailboat slices through the calm flow of the river. But this sailboat was made by kids.

Rocking the Boat is a Bronx-based nonprofit that empowers local youth through teaching them to build and sail wooden boats. On Friday, the organization received enough wood to build five more boats from the deinstallation of a Manhattan art installation.

Ghost Forest, the public art installation by Maya Lin that illuminated the effects of climate change on the world's forests, was uninstalled from Madison Square Park on Nov. 19 after six months of display. The lumber was milled on site by Tri-Lox, a Brooklyn-based, sustainability-focused millworks and workshop. The 49 50-foot-tall Atlantic white cedar trees will no longer stand in the park's Oval Lawn but will glide through the waters of the Bronx River. Because Rocking the Boat builds their boats out of solid wood and not plywood, finding the right materials can be difficult.

Madison Square Park Conservancy teamed up with Rocking the Boat and Tri-Lox to repurpose the trees, amplifying the environmental and social impact of Ghost Forest. All of the cedars used in Ghost Forest were originally sourced from a restoration project in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, where climate change-related phenomena have caused large swaths of forest die-off.

"It was really important to the artist that we do this," said Tom Reidy, deputy director of finance and special projects with the Madison Square Park Conservancy. It was also important to the Madison Square Park Conservancy. The park launched a sustainability division to look at the park's practices from a sustainability lens and to educate the community about sustainability initiatives. Donating the wood from Ghost Forest allows the Conservancy to practice sustainability.

Rocking the Boat is based in Hunts Point on the Bronx River and offers three tracks for its students including boat building, environmental science and sailing. Beyond rowing and sailing, the group uses the boats to conduct environmental research and restoration on the Bronx River. Staff social workers also work with participants throughout their high school years and beyond. The organization offers public programs to school groups and a free community rowing and sailing program. The goal of the program is to show kids the opportunities they have and help them recognize their potential, said Adam Green, founder and executive director of Rocking the Boat.

Andy Aguilar is a junior in high school and a sailor with Rocking the Boat. She said using the wood from the art installation to now build boats is powerful and "gives the wood a new life."

Sebastian Ramos is an apprentice in the boat building program. He said being a part of Rocking the Boat has pushed him out of his comfort zone and helped him grow as a person. He is excited to use the wood on the next boat building project.

Jaymi Lopez, a boat building apprentice, said she is grateful that people are trying to help the Earth through reusing the wood and that people care where the wood goes.

Tri-Lox is also working to build a system of reuse and salvaging trees that can be used for wood and incorporating that wood into the New York cityscape, said Alexander Bender, co-founder of Tri-Lox.

"We've seen too many trees in New York go into the chipper, and we (Tri-Lox) felt like it was time to create a more sustainable circular system that gives New York City trees a second life," Bender said. "I think being able to salvage the trees form the Ghost Forest, being an exhibit that focused on the fragile state of our ecosystem is really the perfect opportunity to both respond to Maya Lin's deeply moving work and to also expand our mission at Tri-Lox of salvaging trees so it really has this beautiful synergy."

The smaller sections of the trees that cannot be milled will be turned into mulch to use in the park, and the conservancy's arborist will use some smaller pieces to make tree props.

"100 percent of the tree is being recycled in one fashion or another. We're really excited that this has all come together," Reidy said. "It was a really fantastic exhibition and this is a sweet and appropriate conclusion to the show."
Rocking the Boat's beginnings
Green was volunteering with a junior high school in East Harlem in 1994 when the teacher he was volunteering with said he had a dream to build a boat with his students but was never able to do it on his own.

Green grew up on the 11th floor of an apartment in New York City but always loved being outside and creating things with his hands. When the teacher asked if Green would help turn his dream into a reality Green decided to "give it a shot," he said. The pair worked alongside seventh and eighth graders.

Eight months later, the first boat was floating in the swimming pool in the basement of the school.

Green immediately noticed the connection the seventh and eighth graders were making to learning when they realized there was a practical, relevant purpose to it and that they could use what they learned in the classroom to create a boat out of a pile of wood.

"They were learning things and actually using them," Green said. Before, many of the students did not know how to read a ruler, but through the process of building the boat, they learned how. The interrelationships that formed during the boat building process was also transformative, he said

"It was magical," Green said. Adding, "There was just this feeling of connection and sort of a bond that we all had because we were doing this really special thing."

What started with eight kids in a small classroom in Harlem, turned into an organization serving about 4,000 people.

"I was really excited about connecting kids to nature and understanding how that nature affects them and how they affect it," Green said.

Historically, the Bronx community has had very little access to parks and green spaces. People living in the area have the highest levels of asthma in New York City because of the air quality.

Rocking the Boat gives kids the opportunity be in nature and to have extraordinary experiences that give them the opportunity to discover skills, talents and possibilities in their own selves, their lives and in their own communities and then use those skills to go out into the world and be successful, Green said.

"This (the Bronx River) is an amazingly rich resource that improves the quality of life, not just for the animals, but for the people of the Bronx," Green said.

The group recently received funding to start growing seaweed at the mouth of the Bronx River to use in community gardens as fertilizer. The group has also built boats for other organizations such as a whaleboat for the Mystic Seaport Museum and a steamboat for the Stevens Institute of Technology.

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Wood from Madison Square Park art installation donated to Bronx-based organization working to empower youth | amNewYork

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Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC Below a hill in Hunts Point, the Bronx River glistens, offering an escape from the city. Herons and egrets glide above the water and the air is fresh.

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I've been hung up on Khruangbin for while now. After our discussion, I felt like sharing this music video--they are still being made--with the group.

Lyrics

Ooh, one to remember
Writing it down now
So we won't forget
Ooh, never enough paper
Never enough letters
So we won't forget

Call me what you want
Call me what you need
Words don't have to say
Keep it to myself

Ooh, every minute
Every hour
So we won't forget
You don't have to be silent
Say to remind me
So we won't forget
Ooh

Call me what you want
Call me what you need
Words don't have to say
Keep it to myself

Call me what you want
Call me what you need
Words don't have to say
Keep it to myself

Ooh, one to remember
Writing it down now
So we won't forget
Ooh, never enough paper
Never enough letters
So we won't forget

Ooh, every minute
Every hour
So we won't forget
You, don't have to be silent
Say to remind me
So we won't forget
Ooh

Ooh, one to remember
Writing it down now
So we won't forget
Ooh, never enough paper
Never enough letters
So we won't forget

Ooh, every minute
Every hour
So we won't forget
You, don't have to be silent
Say to remind me
So we won't forget

Ooh, say you remember
For I think I've lost it

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Khruangbin - So We Won't Forget (Official Video)

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On Monday I participated in the public account of the work of the constitutional convention of Chile.
This year in Chile we elected 155 people to write a new constitution, and every month each constituent gives a public address to share their progress. This week the president of the convention, Elisa Loncon, (pictured above) came to our territory. The goal for this month was to communicate the ways on which people can participate in the writing of the constitution. There are 11 ways to do this ! So we designed a methodology in which attendees would work in groups of 6 to 8 people on one of these forms of participation and create a story to read at the end that explains how the participation through that method works.
Elisa Loncon and the constituents that were elected in this region all joined different groups to work with them. Our goal was to design a method so that children and youth could participate and take the lead, instead of everybody sitting and listening and then providing some time for questions.
The groups I was working with wrote stories about a mechanism of participation in which the constituents define certain core subjects that are central to the new constitution and then 1000 people will be randomly selected by the civil registry for each subject, to discuss their ideas about  the subject they were selected for.
On my walk back home after this, I passed the police gym, pictured above.
During the social explosion of October 2019 people who were protesting were detained and brought to this place, as there was no space in the detention center for so many people and they needed to keep adults separate from the minors who were also detained.  I was one of the volunteers during this period, standing outside and making sure that families were contacted, that people were actually there and not taken anywhere else and that the public defenders were called. I did this mostly because of the stories of tortured and disappeared people during the dictatorship. We wanted to make sure that the police and military were accountable.
The protests of October and November 2019 made the new constitution a reality.
In the context of our conversations in curriculum lab, I am awed by what we are learning about what is possible to dream about and work towards. What we are learning about participation, knowledge, relationship to territory and living and non-living things, and to each other.

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Sarah and i keep checking in on this event because it's high on our list of things to do in December!! It's unclear when the performances will be announced so you should keep an eye out and we will certainly share the details as soon as we know... after we've secured our own tickets ;-)

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"No American photographer of the last quarter-century has turned out a more probing, varied and moving body of work."
- The New York Times

Carrie Mae Weems, an artist who has consistently and poignantly addressed the conditions of race in the United States, will create a multi-work installation and series of performances titled The Shape of Things. Weems' unflinching gaze at what she describes as the "pageantry" and "circus-like" quality of contemporary American political life find form in a series of large-scale installations and a cyclorama (a panoramic image on the inside of a cylindrical platform) of six to eight projections of new and existing film footage where Weems addresses the turmoil of current events and the "long march forward." Suggestive of a 19th-century carnival with dioramas based on spontaneous street memorials, peep shows, and a Pepper's Ghost, The Shape of Things is an incisive, powerfully emotional, and critical reflection on events both deeply embedded in American culture and history and the explosive events of the past year.

This monumental series of installations is accompanied by Land of Broken Dreams, an ambitious convening and concert series that will activate the Armory with a wide range of events, performances, and talks with invited artists, readings by poets, singers, dancers, and discussions by scholars on the most urgent issues of the day.

#TheShapeofThings

The Shape of Things is supported by generous grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the VIA Art Fund, Ken Kuchin and Tyler Morgan, and the Robert Lehman Foundation. The production is also supported in part by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Photo © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Return to Arts at the Armory Listing
Buy Tickets
December 2-31, 2021

Installation:
Tuesdays-Thursdays 12:00pm-7:00pm
Fridays 12:00pm-9:00pm
Saturdays and Sundays 12:00pm-6:00pm
Open Monday, December 27 12:00pm-7:00pm

Tickets: $18 (plus fees); free for Armory members

Performances:
Additional details and pricing information to be announced at a later date. Performance tickets include admission to the Installation.
Wade Thompson Drill Hall
Health and Safety Protocols
All ticket-holders must be fully vaccinated. "Fully vaccinated" means that you received your final dose of an FDA or WHO-approved vaccine at least 14 days before your performance date. At check-in, ticket holders will be required to show proof of full vaccination (the New York State Excelsior Pass or a hard copy or photo of your vaccination card) and a government-issued photo ID.

All patrons and staff are required to wear masks while inside the Armory.

To view additional COVID-19 Policies, please visit our FAQs page.

Other Ways to Buy
Tickets can be purchased by phone by calling the Box Office at (212) 933-5812 (M-F, 10:00am-6:00pm).

Sign up for our email list to get notifications and reminders about purchasing tickets for this and other upcoming events.

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The Park Avenue Armory Conservancy is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to restoring the Park Avenue Armory and bringing it back to life as a dynamic center for the visual and performing arts, following a model of adaptive reuse for artistic uses found in several European and American cities, but not in New York.

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Conversation between Tressie McMillan Cottom and Kiese Laymon

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Conversation between Tressie McMillan Cottom and Kiese Laymon

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I listened to this podcast last week and I can't stop thinking about it. Revision as an ethic and a form of life, our responsibility to always be open to revise previous thought, and just how gorgeaous the conversation itself is. Super recommended if you have an hour.
Dani

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Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today's episode hosted by Tressie McMillan Cottom featuring Kiese Laymon. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

Two Acclaimed Writers on the Art of Revising Your Life

Kiese Laymon and Tressie McMillan Cottom on vulnerability, revision and love.

Back to The Ezra Klein Show

transcript

Two Acclaimed Writers on the Art of Revising Your Life

Kiese Laymon and Tressie McMillan Cottom on vulnerability, revision and love.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

I'm Ezra Klein, and this is "The Ezra Klein Show."

Hey, it's Ezra. While I'm on paternity leave, we are turning the show over to an all-star team of guest hosts. This week, Tressie McMillan Cottom takes the helm. Tressie is a research professor at UNC Chapel Hill's I-School. She's a contributing writer to New York Times Opinion. She's got a great newsletter you should sign up for. She's author of the National Book Award finalist "Thick: And Other Essays." And she is just one of the most interesting, fun to talk to people I've ever had on the show. So I'm very excited to hear what she does with the mic. Enjoy.

tressie mcmillan cottom

kiese laymon

I'm good. I'm happy to be talking to you during complicated times. You know, I read you at all times. And that helps me sometimes make things less complicated, sometimes make things more complicated in a good way. So I'm just happy to be here with you.

tressie mcmillan cottom

I want to talk about craft and writing before we get into bigger conversations, which we'll get there. But you're also just one of my favorite writers. And I think that we don't often talk with Black writers in particular about the craft of what they do because our work always has such an urgent political and social context. But our work is urgent because we're good at the work, right? We're good at writing. So like I wanted -

kiese laymon

I hope so.

tressie mcmillan cottom

Let's start - I know, right? Let's start there about - throughout your work, you talk a lot, both in your talks but also in your books, your essays, about what writing did for you as a person. And I want to start with a two-parter, which is what you needed from writing when you started out and what you need from writing now as like, you know, as you mature into your process. So when you start out, what did writing solve for you? Why writing and not like, I don't know, you toyed with being a basketball player or football player, you know, a hip-hop star as every young Black boy in the South wanted to be?

Yes, but you settled on writing and took it pretty far. Like it worked out for you. So what was writing solving for you young?

kiese laymon

Writing was just the only thing in my life as a young person, and it's the only thing in my life as an adult, that I'm not like afraid to mess up in. You know, basketball, I could play. But I was afraid to miss. I was afraid to make bad passes. You know, I was that person who would always say, "my bad," even if it wasn't. I'm sort of like that in my life too.

But when it comes to writing - partially because I was really upset at the way we were taught writing, but when it comes to that writing, I think, like you, like I want to go in there and I want to leave not just the page, but I want to leave the genre different. That's my goal. And so that means you're going to fail a lot. But it's like the only thing in my life that when I fail, I take it super seriously of course, but I just get back on it and try again. In every other part of my life, everything, in a personal, every other thing intellectual, I'm terrified. I'm a scared fat Black boy.

But when I get on that page, I'm scared, but like that fear just kind of like is always met with something. And often, that fear is met with my trying to use an assemblage of languages I haven't seen before. I just think if I can write, it's because I'm unafraid to fail in that medium. I'll try anything. I'll write anything. And that doesn't mean - that doesn't mean you're going to see it, but it means that I will try anything on the page.

tressie mcmillan cottom

I've told you this many times. I'm going to keep saying it. I read "Heavy" and I was angry. I was angry at how vulnerable you were and how powerful you were. I was angry that you kept pushing me to think and feel at the same time. Because like a lot of intellectuals, I prefer to do one or the other. And even then, only on my own terms. And like you just kept insisting that we do both. And then you wrote it in a voice that was undeniable, which I just think of as the ultimate act of creation, when I can argue with you, but I cannot deny you.

kiese laymon

Yeah, yeah.

tressie mcmillan cottom

I'd like for you to go for a little bit for our audience. Do you mind reading a little bit from "Heavy"? And I want to note that "you" in this passage, the second person address, is your mama. It's your mama. The book is addressed to her.

kiese laymon

Yeah, I'll read a bit from "Heavy." In this passage, I'm writing about Renata, who's one of my mother's students. And Renata was like 22 or something at the time. I was between 8 and 10. And Renata had been molesting me for a few months, so.

"Ever since we were old enough to spend the night or day at our friend's house, we'd all play this game called hide and go get it. One person had to count to 35 and the other people had to hide usually in a dark closet or hallway. We played with boys and girls. But in the dark of those hallways and closets, sometimes folks would touch each other in ways they'd never touch each other when the lights were on. I was too afraid to touch anyone but not too afraid to want to be touched. My body didn't care if the person touching me was a boy or a girl. My body felt grateful for tender touch no matter where it came from.

Around the same time, girls and girls' bodies and girls' booties and girls' touch made me feel not just special, but sexier and more beautiful than boys' touch and boys' booties. I didn't know why, and I wasn't sure how to use words to explain it. I didn't know who would listen to me explain something so scary if I thought I'd found the words. I kept thinking you should have been the one I talked with about it all since you were the one who taught me to read and write. But sexuality and bodies and feeling good and pain and tender touch and booties were something we never talked about.

My body told different stories about you and Renata, even though her touch was rough and yours was gentle. When either of you touched me, it all felt like love until it didn't. Then it felt like dying. Though I had no idea what was going through Layla and Dougie's heads and bodies as they talked in Daryl's rooms, I wondered if they ever felt love while they were in there with the big boys. I knew I would have."

tressie mcmillan cottom

See, that's the kind of thing that made me just want to pull you close and push you away all at the same time, yeah, yeah.

kiese laymon

Why do you want to push me away?

tressie mcmillan cottom

You know why? I think one of my challenges as a writer is being comfortable with the vulnerability that you do so bravely. And so you push me to be brave about it, even when I wasn't sure I was ready to be. So like the way you sit there in the ambivalence of some of those feelings of wanting, frankly, the want, the want, which we don't always pay a lot of attention to in contemporary Black writing. We're more comfortable with it in historical writing, I think looking back at Black writers in the context of history. But in contemporary work, right, we're supposed to - we're not supposed to want anything.

kiese laymon

Right, right.

tressie mcmillan cottom

And yeah, so I think it's the comfort with the wanting. How do you reckon with wanting so visibly on the page? I know you talked about not being afraid. But you've got to at least be wrestling with yourself a little there.

kiese laymon

Yeah, yeah, I want to be clear. That's a great - I want to - that's a great place for me to make clear something. I am afraid on this page. But I attempt to meet that fear, you know? Like a lot of times, you know, if we were together and I don't like to go on no airplanes, right? And you were just like, yo, Kiese. I'm like, what's up, Tressie?

And I'll say I'm in North Carolina. You're like, want to fly up to New York? I might be like, yeah, let's go, because I think that's what you want to hear. You know what I'm saying? But shit, once we get closer to that airport, I ain't got my Xanax; I ain't got my - I'm gonna be - you know that I'm going to start. I'm not going on that plane, right? I'm just going to tell you. I'm that dude who's going to be like, yeah, let's go, bah, bah.

But when it comes to the page, I just feel like, one, because I was trained as a fiction writer, and the thing about - I think training matters, right? Like I was trained to look at characters other than myself and question their ambivalence, like weight the teeter-totter of emotionality that we all sit on. And I think the hard part for some of us is applying some of the stuff that we might do fictionally or see fictionally to ourselves. And the hard part for that - so yeah, it was scary to write. You know what? When those boys were molesting and sexually assaulting my friends in addition to being mad, in addition to being scared, I actually felt like, damn, why didn't they pick me? And then I assumed I wasn't picked because I was fat and I was sweaty and all of these things. So writing that was hard. But it's the only place in my life where I'm going to write that, you know what I'm saying?

And I'm not going to be like, oh, this is the answer either. Like two years later, I might rewrite it. But once I sit in it, I'm going to put it on the page and like it's going to look at me and see if it reads me. And then I'm just going to keep going if I can. But I think that's a really important point. I hit fear on every single paragraph I write, especially when I'm doing essays. But sometimes you've just got to meet that fear head on and sometimes you've got to run away from it.

tressie mcmillan cottom

And that's it. Seeing you choose to not run away from it in the page is, I think, the calling in to the reader that makes your work so resonant long after you finish reading. You talk about something that I want to talk with you a lot about today.

kiese laymon

OK.

tressie mcmillan cottom

You said, listen, I'm going to write, right? I'm going to write it. That's the one place where I'm going to do this thing. You said, I may come back and rewrite it later. But I'm going to write it. I'm going to talk to you about revision, Key, not just the process of revising our text, but like what revision means as an ethic. Because when I go back and I read over all of your work, you have never been afraid to say, this is not my final attempt at this even though I'm sharing it.

I may come back and I may change this; I may recast this. Because I've changed and now I see this differently. I think about the character's motivations differently. I think about what this essay has done in the world and I want to revise it. Why revise something once it's out and about? This is not what we tend to do as writers.

kiese laymon

I mean, there are a number of reasons. The first reason is because we love each other, you know? And when I put a book out there, like for better or worse, like I have all the critiques of capitalism and the market that we want, but that book is competing with, among other things, Tressie - Tressie's book. And I'm just not good enough to compete with Tressie.

tressie mcmillan cottom

Ah, stop it.

kiese laymon

tressie mcmillan cottom

That strikes me as not just a creative practice, as you talk about, that's about what kind of human being want to be.

kiese laymon

Oh, it's taught. You know, I had a coach who said, you play the game the way you live your life. And this is my college basketball coach. And I really don't believe that actually. But in writing, I find that I live my life better if I'm playing the writing game with more integrity. I live better. I treat myself better. I treat the people I love better.

I treat the world better if I'm like - you know, like have a dutiful relationship to art and trying to make it more beautiful with every time I go into it. Like when I don't read and I don't write a lot, I'm just a terror to be around, you know? And I know that now.

tressie mcmillan cottom

Yeah, we share that, we share that. There's this old cliché that, you know, writing is revision. You're not writing if you're not revising. And I want to read a quote from an essay you recently wrote for Vox, which was partly about revision. So this is in response to a conversation that you're having with your childhood friend, Ray Gunn. I love Ray, by the way. Don't know Ray, I just love him through your writing of him.

kiese laymon

He loves you. He loves you.

tressie mcmillan cottom

I really do. I was like, oh, I know Ray, I get Ray. And this is what you say, Kiese, he said, "I thought he was talking about revision, a word our professors and high school teachers believe necessitated us, reducing all of our Black rhetorical abundance into meager ass absolutes. In my own sloppy work on and off the page, I was beginning to understand revision as a dynamic practice of revisitation premised on ethically reimagining the ingredients, scope and primary audience of one's initial vision.

Revision required witnessing and testifying. Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every god ever asked of believers." I love that. You elevated revision. You elevated revision to faith, which was, yeah.

kiese laymon

Yeah.

tressie mcmillan cottom

I mean, it just, yeah, it struck me.

kiese laymon

I thought the Bible folks was going to be mad.

tressie mcmillan cottom

Really?

kiese laymon

I thought my Bible people were going to be mad, but whatever, whatever.

tressie mcmillan cottom

But they rolled with you, they rolled with you?

kiese laymon

Yeah, because it sounds - you know, if you can make something sound biblical, I think your Bible people will be like, well, that's OK, that's OK, you know?

tressie mcmillan cottom

Well, yeah, because they think you've read the Bible. And that's all that they want.

kiese laymon

Exactly.

tressie mcmillan cottom

That's all the Bible people want, for you to have read the Bible.

kiese laymon

That is it.

tressie mcmillan cottom

So we will get into like that life giving part of revision later. But first, I want to talk a little bit more about this type of revision. Because this gets at the heart of why you got your rights back for the book, which I want to talk about, what the marketplace asks, especially of Black writers. So when you talk about revision that reduces our Black rhetorical abundance, what do you mean by that? And when has this been done to you?

kiese laymon

Hey, I'm going back to second grade, third grade, fourth grade. I was a kid who used "be" in an action verb, you know, be sitting, be walking, be - and I came from a mother who was just like, don't do that, right? But I still did it at school. And nobody ever told me why not to do it. And nobody ever told me that there was any value in it.

I'm talking about a second, third, fourth, fifth grader or like when someone will say like, you know, they took they house away from them. That, to me, sounds - I mean, aurally, like they took they house away from them. One is the repetition of they. That sounds better to me than if I were to say, they took their house away from them. And so my point was not that I didn't want my teachers to tell me what was right or wrong. But my teachers never saw any value in the right way of being that we brought to school.

And so much of that right way was informed by hip-hop real talk, which was informed by blues if you take it all the way back. So I just assumed that like our - my teachers from second, fourth, fifth grade, all the way up into graduate school just were denying a blues ethic. And when you deny Black people in Mississippi a blues ethic, you're denying those Black people.

And so, you know, it can go from all the way to there to when I publish books now. And I can be saying like so-and-so had to go get a switch. And let's say I have an editor that's like, well, I'm going to need you to explain to the rest of the readers what a switch is. Well, I'm not about to break this illusion to describe a switch. Because the people for who are on the first row of my audience, they understand what a switch is.

And they understand that when I - if I break this to go describe what a switch is, they're going to realize that they're not reading something that is like directed especially to them. Do you see what I'm saying? So for me, it was just a matter of like - I mean, it's deeper than this, but on one level, I think it is often teachers/editors not simply not knowing from whence our abundance comes, but not knowing how to value it in any way and just saying, no, that's wrong. I'm not that kind of student.

Like I need you to explain to me more than it's wrong. Like, I want you to tell me there's some value in this, but for now, we want to see you try to communicate with this word, as opposed to misusages of "they" don't have a place in the school. OK, well, you're telling me a big part of me and my family don't have a place in this school. And I just think we need to make it clear. And that's exactly what they were saying, you know?

tressie mcmillan cottom

That is. And that is the soul-crushing part of what's necessary for you to do that kind of brave engagement with fear that you talked about earlier on the page. I don't think we get bravery from other people's words. We get the bravery from the words we got from our people. And so if you take that away, it's really hard to be brave. I can't even talk like myself. How are you supposed to be brave on the page?

kiese laymon

And there's a collective intelligence. Like we know when we come into these buildings that there's a way that we're supposed to talk that is different than the way we might communicate at home. But at some point, I'm going to need you, teacher, to tell me and show me that you value the way I communicate and talk and be at home. And if you don't, I'm going to resent that. And in my resentment armed with this library my mama gave me, I'm going to try to write books that can supplant the books that you put in these classrooms because I know that these students want to be known that there are different kinds of ways of being in different homes too. You know what I'm saying? So like a lot of my fear just comes from like a hatred of the way I was taught about me, not just about like standard language, but they taught us about us in the most demeaning, like decrepit horrible ways possible. And, you know, some of us, when we got that pen, we kind of wanted to undo some of that work. And that's sort of what I think I'm doing, among other things, trying to undo that work, you know?

tressie mcmillan cottom

And you're very successful at doing it. So I wonder, as a successful writer, are the expectations of your revision process now just coming from you? Or do you still have editors - for me, it's always a copy editor, by the way. I now put in all my contracts that I get final say on who copy-edits me.

kiese laymon

Woo.

tressie mcmillan cottom

Because I don't - I won't have any - yeah, I'm not - I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this anymore with white copy editors editing me in text. So do you still get this at this level of your success where it's clear you own your voice, that it's clear that how to assemble your audience and to speak to them in different registers? But do you still get pushback on that kind of soul-crushing revision, that you need to do it?

kiese laymon

Yeah, that's a great question, Tressie. Because I actually like the collaborative part of writing, which is the editing part. Like I love - like I'm going to put this out. You're tasked with reading my stuff and sort of telling me how you think it can be better. And then I'm tasked with coming back and being like, well, maybe we can do - you know what I mean? Like I love like that part of it.

But the thing that we don't talk enough about is that - in this so-called awakening if we think about how it relates to publishing, I think we finally see a lot lots and lots of people who look like us who are getting opportunities that they should have always gotten. My hope is that they get three and four and five and six opportunities as like some other people do, right? But the flip side is that I think we need to talk about editors who for the longest just haven't edited people who are not white and don't have the skills necessarily to edit people who aren't white.

So sometimes I feel like the collateral damage is the writer, sometimes, who is the guinea pig. And I'm a writer now who like, I can, like you, I can publish whatever I want. But that doesn't stop editors from pitching to me like these very elaborate pitches. And really, they're just asking me to sign my name to their pitch. And I'm like, I'm not about to sign my name to like this argument, one, because I don't agree with it. And two, because even if I agreed with it, I wouldn't cast it that way. And sometimes I think we can get into a rocky road. But what I don't say yes to editors who give me three page pitches and then say, this is what I want you to say. But that happens a lot, fam. Like I don't know if you feel me. You know, you seem like you're a lot more in charge of your career. But that's what I'm saying. Like I - I can do all that shit on the page, man, but -

tressie mcmillan cottom

If that's what it seems like, then the PR is working.

kiese laymon

Oh, yeah.

tressie mcmillan cottom

Because writing is a very vulnerable position to be in. You always think that another opportunity isn't going to come around.

kiese laymon

That's right.

tressie mcmillan cottom

I don't know of any writers who feel secure that people are always going to want to hear from you. So I think that vulnerability is built into the industry.

kiese laymon

Yes.

tressie mcmillan cottom

And that's what gives editors and publishers sort of the upper hand, right? So no, I absolutely get those similar pitches. Like, you know, it would be great if we could get a Tressie book about wokeness. And I'm like, good luck. But, yeah, I think that continues to happen, which is why I think you pushing back on the idea that anything you do publish is an eternal work in progress is really a powerful way, especially -

kiese laymon

It is.

tressie mcmillan cottom

- I think for minority and people of color and Black writers to think of it as a constant process of revision.

kiese laymon

We have to. I mean, and I understand all the reasons we think, understandably, like if we disappear, we might not appear again, right? Like if we go back into the annals and like just take care of ourselves and don't get edited for a while, I understand people who are like, yo, it took me forever to get here. I'm like 55. I'm not about to - but at the same time, y'all, the work we create is our work. Like our people weren't brought to this nation as labor/technology for us to like let these people tell us when our work is done. Maybe it's done before you think. But I think often it's not done. And I just think we have a responsibility to continually revise when this market tells us not to.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

tressie mcmillan cottom

All right, so one thing you and I have in common, I like to think, as writers, is that we work really hard at being ourselves on the page.

kiese laymon

Yeah.

tressie mcmillan cottom

And in your ethic of revision, you show us over and over again how hard that work is, how hard it is to go back and change something, to make it more reflective of who you are as you mature. And you have done that brilliantly and impressively with "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America." So you bought back the rights to that book. And you revised, basically, the whole text, Kiese.

You started the new version with an essay that is about the process of revision in its own way, right? Revising America, revising your relationship to America. So listen, why, why do this? Why revise so much of that book? Why show us your work in that way? And does it matter that you did it right now?

kiese laymon

Woo, yeah, I think the why right now is that I just was not sure that I was going to make it. And -

tressie mcmillan cottom

You mean make it out of -

kiese laymon

- when I say make it -

tressie mcmillan cottom

Yeah.

kiese laymon

- out of Covid. You know, I don't know -

tressie mcmillan cottom

Oh, OK.

kiese laymon

-like we haven't talked explicitly about this, but like when - like I was on book tour when it hit or when they say it hit. And, you know, the people that I knew closest to me that were dying were like my good friends' partners, my students and my cousin. Like those were the first people. And then I was just like, oh, you know, it's that fatalism shit that a lot of us have. I'm like, not only is my Granny done - because I thought my Granny was done, right, immediately.

And I'm like, OK, I might have two or three weeks. And I was just like, yo, if I pass and I let my first two books stay in the hands of someone who I feel like did not respect my talent, I am not worth anything. And so one of the things that drove me to get those rights back was the fact that I didn't think I was going to be alive. And I knew that the books would live longer than me. And whether I live through Covid or not, the books will still be out here in this world longer than me.

And I just wanted them to be out in the world with, you know, with a style and a shape and a content that I could actually get behind, you know? "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America" is an interesting revision because I don't know that I made that book better. But there were just some essays in there I couldn't stand by. Like I couldn't stand by the Kanye essay, couldn't stand by the Michael Jackson joint. And I wanted to take those out. And I'd written some new stuff about Outkast, about the pandemic. I just wanted to put it in there, change the sequence, you know, kind of tell it backwards.

And, more importantly, I wanted my rights to be my rights. You know, we sold like 40,000 copies. I hardly made any money off of it. So I just thought that was foul long division, sold for like $3,00 or $4,000. So I just wanted my books back. I had to sell them - I had to buy them back for $50,000. But in the end of the day, like I just wanted to have a little bit of integrity because I didn't think - I didn't think I was going to make it. I didn't think I was going to make it.

tressie mcmillan cottom

You felt the presence of death that presently in Covid?

kiese laymon

Yeah, because I'm - I mean, this is what I'm thinking, this is what I always think is interesting about when people talk about afropessimism. Because I think if we talk about what that - not what we've been taught that word means, but like the state of being like utterly pessimistic and fatalistic as a Black person, I don't think we need much around us to encourage us to be like, oh shit, they coming, it's coming. And, you know, I grew up, you know, I grew up in Mississippi. So like the blackest state, the poorest state in the union, I'm a big Black boy. Like I did not, I just assumed that like that shit was going to get to us. I mean, I remember my family being like, yo, when it gets to our lungs - that's how we talked about it. When it gets to our lungs, we got to blah, blah, blah. So the assumption was, first, my Granny, my mama might not be here, no matter what I did, no matter how much money I made. And then I was like, I don't know how I'm going to make it. So at least let me just get this art out here the way I wanted to. That's very self-centered too. But that's what I felt.

tressie mcmillan cottom

I don't know that I think it's self-centered. But, yeah, I think the urgency has not been felt the same by everybody, which is why I wanted to follow up on that. Because Covid felt very urgent to me too. I mean, it's so funny, I talked about it the same way. We're both Southern, you know, from Mississippi - you're from Mississippi, I'm from North Carolina. We both come from the Black Southern tradition. And maybe that's just what was coming out of me. But I also kept talking about my lungs. It's just like, well, you know, there go the lungs.

kiese laymon

The lungs.

tressie mcmillan cottom

So you talked about that being part of the context of saying, basically, if this is the end, if I'm looking at like a meaningful end to the people I love and maybe myself, because that's what Covid felt really present and urgent, against that backdrop, you're like, my artist was going to be left standing. And you wanted the most recent revision not just of the book, because you're saying you're not sure you made it better. Were you just making it more present, like this is who I am now? Was that the goal?

kiese laymon

Well, that's the thing about, I think, revision, I think if we're honest. You know, like sometimes I think, yeah, like the goal is to make something necessarily better. But I think sometimes making something have a bit more integrity is not necessarily making it artistically better. You know? It's like sometimes when you ask people who their favorite emcees are their favorite and they'll give you a top five or whatever.

But then you'd be like, OK, but tell me who the best emcees are? So with this, like I was trying to make this have more integrity for me, you know what I'm saying? But when I imagine the readers reading it, it wasn't going to hit the same. But it wasn't even about it hitting the same. It was about five years later, let me look back at these essays that gave me an opportunity to talk to Tressie.

Like that essay collection gave me an opportunity for people in this world to see what I do with art and what my home does with art. But I just wanted to go back and tell it backwards and actually make it a little bit more complicated of a piece of art. I just wanted to get the art back really from people who I didn't think have my best interests at heart. So if we died, I wanted this art to go forward with my family and, you know, whatever comes from that, I wanted it to go to my family and not necessarily to someone who I thought didn't really have any love or trust for me.

tressie mcmillan cottom

One of the things that helps or seems to be part of your revision process is something you mentioned about you like the collaborative part of writing. And you talk - you were talking about editing. But you also call out to the polyvocal character of Black art-making. Throughout your work, you will bring other people in as a voice. That might be more common in fiction, but you even do it in your essays -

kiese laymon

Yeah.

tressie mcmillan cottom

- which I find fascinating. So you've got, you know, you'll bring your mom in as a voice. And you'll treat your exchange with your mother and your back and forth with each other as a text and as part of your argument. You do it with other writers.

kiese laymon

Yeah.

tressie mcmillan cottom

So like there's you talking with - it's a collaboration of like letters with other Black male writers in one of your essays. You do it when you bring Ray Gunn and your friends in. And you do this back and forth. I've seen you do it with text messages, which now I hear you push your students to do that. So you clearly also do it for yourself. Like you'll even show your text messages as an essay. And you treat it that way. Is that the community of people feel responsible to, the people whose voices you bring into the text? And like - choosing to bring a voice in when you're doing something like an essay is really tricky.

kiese laymon

Yeah, it is tricky. But, you know, again, I think sometimes when people ask me to write stuff, like if you were to ask me to write something for your publication, I think when I was a much younger writer, I'd be like, man, what do I have to say? And I think now as an older writer, I'm like what do I have to say that can wreck the genre? And one of the things that I think, for better or worse, wrecks the genre of the essay is when you bring dialogic voices of Black folk in to serve as quote, unquote, "experts."

You know, I've never talked about this explicitly, but I know my mama is an expert at what the fuck she's an expert in. And I know my boy Ray Gunn is, I know Lathon is, you know, I know the people. I know [INAUDIBLE] Crump is. But the question is, like how do you allow them to have the flexibility and the fluidity of like their real character and like the directness of quote, unquote, "expertise." And one, you just have to - reportage is just you have to ask the question, you have to ask these people questions, sit down and listen to answers.

But then I just think you have to think about, OK, what happens if I bring Ray Gunn's voice into a piece about Chauvin and what happens in Minnesota. My grandmother, like I've interviewed my grandmama probably like 2,000 to 3,000 hours. Because I'm always in my mind, I'm thinking about to do this different project. And so my grandmama was not allowed to read and write in any sort of public way.

And then they used her ability to read and write to not allow her to vote, though she went outside the bounds to learn how to read and write. So you can't tell me not to put this person who gave me life and gave me like artistic and ethical vision, you can't tell me not to put her in some essay, particularly an essay you don't think she belongs.

So that's why when you asked me to write about Outkast, you know, Oxford American, I'm going to spin this about my grandmama's innovation. You know what I mean? You ask me to write about Black churches or you ask me to write about three-on-three basketball, I'm also spinning this into this, you know, this woman who grew up in 1929 who used to play basketball on this, like, pine tree. So it's some way, you can see like, oh, he keeps on writing about his grandmama or his family. But in my heart, it's like, yeah, because y'all tried to write my grandmama and my family off the face of the Earth. So I'm going to try to bring these people into some hopefully majestic sort of artful creation. That's just basically what I do.

These people mean the world to me. These people hurt me in ways nobody else can. They love me in ways nobody else can. They know about my birth marks. They know everything.

And when I was growing up, I was always dissuaded from putting them in the stuff that I was turning in for school. So when I got my writing might up, I'm like, no, I'm going to put my people in everything I write.

tressie mcmillan cottom

Mm-hmm.

kiese laymon

And you're going to have to tell me that it's not good. But I'm going to do it.

tressie mcmillan cottom

When you're revising your text, it sounds - you're also revising the canon that made your texts necessary in that way, right? Like assign me anything, but I know that the thing you're assigning me has never included this. And so you're pushing back on just the canon always, yeah.

kiese laymon

And you know us. You know, we're tricksters. You know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, I wrote a book called "Long Division." And there's two characters called City. And, you know, that book is doing a lot of things. One of the things I'm doing is like I'm literally writing back to my mother who made me read "A Tale of Two Cities" like eight times before I could do anything. Well, I'm like, OK, Mama, well, I'm going to craft my own Tale of Two Cities and it's going to be called "Long Division."

Now, I don't need to make that explicit for anybody else on Earth but me and my mama. Do you know what I'm saying? But I just think sometimes, those kind of things are what carry art. I'm not like just trying to reactively write against normative cis white shit. But I am trying to affirmatively write myselves and the parts of myself that I don't even love into whatever people are going to be reading tomorrow. That's for sure. I'm definitely trying to do that.

tressie mcmillan cottom

You talk about revision as an ethic a little while ago. And I wanted to get at your decision making about what you choose to revise and when. So you talk about in the collection of essays pulling out like, revision was actually editing. You pulled out two essays - one about Kanye West. And what was the second one you said you pulled out?

kiese laymon

There was one that was about Michael Jackson, Tupac and Bernie Mac.

tressie mcmillan cottom

Why these? Why did you pull these essays out specifically?

kiese laymon

tressie mcmillan cottom

What did Kanye do where you were like, OK, listen, either I got - is it the Donald Trump stuff?

kiese laymon

Nah, it wasn't -

tressie mcmillan cottom

Or is it just his descent into sort of like this public performance, yeah?

kiese laymon

I mean, the Donald Trump, by the time Donald Trump stuff comes along, like I'm in a - my relationship with Kanye had gone through like six different phases. But like it was real talk, it was when Yeezus came out. And Kanye got critiqued when My Dark Twisted Fantasy came out for being like explicitly hypermisogynoir, hyper. And he heard the critiques. I know folks who know him and he heard the critique. And then he doubled down on those critiques on Yeezus.

And then I was just like, OK, well, fam, like this is not the person you thought, which I thought was this is a person who once they are educated, they take the education and in their own way, gradually figure out ways to fold that education into their art. No, Kanye heard that people thought he was a misogynist and Kanye doubled down on misogyny. That's what happened.

tressie mcmillan cottom

One of the things I like about your ethic of revision, by the way, is that you show it in your everyday life. So you're like, listen, I will take the hit on revising an essay collection that was very successful, not just because the arguments don't work, which is another - or that there was a factual error, but this is not who I am in this moment and what I want a piece of art to represent for me. But I also, within that art, you talk about the things that you personally give up as you revise your relationship to the things you love and to the world. Can I get you to read the one that really jumped out at me?

kiese laymon

Yeah.

tressie mcmillan cottom

It is from Mississippi. You moved back to Mississippi, super successful. You're living like sort of this parallel life in Oxford, Mississippi as like a John Grisham endowed writer and resident in this place where you never would have stepped foot in when you were growing up in another part of Mississippi. And I love here how you - you want to engage as the person you were, but you've got to acknowledge that you're a different person now and the way it manifests in this. Can you read that for us?

kiese laymon

"I drive by two massive Confederate monuments in Oxford. Black officers are guarding them both. I want to ask the brothers if they are humiliated guarding monuments that commemorate our destruction. When they start answering or radioing for backup, I want to say, oh, one sec, brothers. Then I want to blast the first verse of "Fuck the Police." I imagine the brothers parked in the shadows of the armed monuments, banging a beat on their cruisers, and all of us rapping "Fuck the Police" until backup arrives.

When the white officers arrive, I imagine getting all bougie Black professor on them, explaining that white Mississippians cling to the Confederacy not because they lost the Civil War, but because they cheated in a rigged battle against Black Mississippians. Their monuments are memorials of our suffering at the hands of folk who never had to pay, play, live or fight fair.

But they already know that. Every Mississippian, whether they admit it or not, knows that. What they don't know is that 'Fuck the Police' was one of our memorials, one of our most evocative monuments. And every member of NWA had roots in the South. I wanted to play it so badly as I watched that police precinct in Minneapolis burn and when Trump sicced his National Guard on peaceful protesters so he could get a photo Beelzebub would be jealous of.

I want to bump "Fuck the Police" right now. The existence of the song is proof that even if we could not bring as much material suffering to white folks as they did to us, we could memorialize and channel the spirits of those beaten, killed by nasty cheaters. Mama's greatest worry is that I will be shot out of the sky by these cheaters. She is right. One day I will not get up off of the ground. Mama knows that in my dreams, we soar bulletproof and often, we crash.

In my actual dreams, I run like Ahmaud. I shoot midrange jumpers like George. I heal like Breonna. I rap every lyric to 'Fuck the Police' in a Monte Carlo packed to the brim with them and Mignon and Tim and Henry and David fiending for new ways to love each other.

I fantasize about doing to white folk and their police what they do to us. And more than fantasize, I remember and relish publicly rapping words grandmama could never whisper outside of her house. But there is a way to commemorate our losses and wins without humiliating queer folks and, subsequently, morally debasing those of us who are not queer. Those who we seek to humiliate, we eventually seek to destroy.

And that first verse of 'Fuck the Police' does not fairly memorialize or commemorate the lives of queer folk. I had to stop rapping it two decades ago. I had to stop listening to it in 2015. As absurd as it sounds, the only thing harder than giving up 'Fuck to Police' was giving up lying to people I purported to love, giving up disordered eating and giving up gambling. Queer antagonism, like trans antagonism, like anti-blackness is an addiction broken only by honest reckoning, consistent practice, and the welcoming of radical spirits.

Like most Mississippians, I am an addict. Like most Americans, I am a coward. I wave at Black officers guarding the Confederate monuments. They wave back. Adia Victoria's 'And Then You Die' churns in the background. And I drive myself home. Fuck. Fuck."

You talked to Adia the other day,

tressie mcmillan cottom

I did. Yeah, I talked Adia the other day. Talking to her again very soon actually. Adia Victoria is a beautiful modern blues woman is what I call her. I like the idea that blues women are still being made young, which is one reason why I love Adia Victoria, has a wonderful album, "Southern Gothic," which I think of your work as being very much in a conversation with that contemporary, however, Southern Gothic, which I think you captured there, which is the complicity that we all have been reproducing this everyday stuff. Like it's easy to talk about - not easy maybe, but it's easier to talk defund the police than it is to drive by the police and not a nice polite hello, especially when you're standing in the middle of Oxford, Mississippi.

kiese laymon

Yeah, and you know how hard work is to come by. You know how hard work is - this is not an excuse. This is just a look into what we actually, some of us actually do feel, you know?

tressie mcmillan cottom

Is this something, this revision of yourself of saying, I love this art, like I love NWA. Or for me, it was saying, I had to give up one of my favorite songs by Salt-N-Pepa because I realized there was something in it that I just couldn't resonate with as an adult.

kiese laymon

Which one?

tressie mcmillan cottom

Well, they've got - they used a pejorative for intelligence in "What a man, what a man, what a mighty good man." And I just can't say it anymore.

kiese laymon

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

tressie mcmillan cottom

I can't say it anymore, right? Even though we know what the art was made in response to, right, theirs being a particular type of Black feminist ethic about Black women being desirable and having the choice of partners. But they built it on pejoratives and slurs that I can't live with.

And in the same way, you have this thing with an NWA song that, yeah, it was serving a particular purpose for us, but was doing it in a way that compromises our love for a broader community. And you being able to do that revision in real time and talk to us about what that looks like and feels like, do you think you've gotten better as an adult, as a big grown-up, as an official grown-up, have you gotten better at holding yourself to task like you do in that passage?

kiese laymon

I'm going to be honest with you, yes. It's so hard to say -

Good, good.

tressie mcmillan cottom

- it's so hard to say yes to that. I just don't think that you ask anybody on Earth to do anything that you aren't willing to do. And so I have - you know, you were talking about Kanye. I got a million critiques of Kanye. You talk about this human being Donald Trump and all the people who made Donald Trump.

I got a gazillion critiques of those folks. But at the end of the day, I know that I need to be able to give up something that I do not want to give. Like, I love fuck the police, fam. I love the memory of -

Oh, the memory. I remember it so clearly the first time - I saw the video for the first time, I heard the song. I also had the images, I saw the video.

kiese laymon

Yes.

tressie mcmillan cottom

Blew my mind.

kiese laymon

Blew my mind.

tressie mcmillan cottom

It was a moment.

kiese laymon

It was and, you know, like this is where I just think words, we have to remember words are word. And they have histories, but they also are alive. And so like I was baptized into NWA. And, yes, I can be like, well, all of the rape - because they literally rapped about rape - all of the murder, that was over there. But fuck, OK, you can say all that if you want to.

But for me, when I'm asking these white folk down here to divest themselves of the worst of Mississippi, the worst of this nation, the worst of white folk, yes, but then I also have to be willing to divest myself of sometimes the things that are like wholly ableist, like absolutely completely queer and trans antagonist. And like that song, a song that made me feel like I could walk with my head up is also a song that is like steeped in that stuff. So like I'm not trying to do any sort of like - prove to anybody I'm better than anybody by not fucking with that song.

But like I need to not fuck with that song because I don't need more incentive to believe the ideas in that song. And I have plenty of incentives to believe the ideas in that song. That's me. You know what I'm saying? This isn't for somebody else. It's because like I'm already queer antagonistic. I'm already trans antagonistic. I'm already anti-Black. I'm already misogynist.

If I know certain things are going to encourage me to be more, I need to, as a grown human being who creates art, be like, I've got to divest myself of that art. And I think that's what we all have to do as human beings in this world if we want to move to a more honest, tender place. I can't control the world, but I can control what I do, you know?

tressie mcmillan cottom

That seems to me like a really good response to the argument that we are always supposed to take art within its historical context, you know, this idea that you cannot judge art by contemporary standards and ethics. And what you're saying is, no, you - not only can you, but as the artist, you had better, right, that that is an imperative for the art to do what you want it to do in the world. You know what one of my greatest fears is, Kiese?

kiese laymon

What's that?

tressie mcmillan cottom

Creating something and putting it out in the world thinking that it's going to make something I care about better and people finding something in it to make the exact counterargument. I worry constantly when I release something. I spend manic hours up in like 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 A.M. trying to find every way that somebody could misconstrue my meaning to counteract what I intended. And I think of your ethic of a revision there saying, it starts with you the artist, you the creator, as, you know, being a response to that, of holding yourself responsible. I've got to hold myself responsible for that as much as I do the people I'm afraid of.

kiese laymon

And it's tough to make lush art because - like you talked about secondary characterization before. Like if I bring in a secondary character who has a notion of progress that I don't have, you know, like my mother, for example. My mother's belief to this day, even post "Heavy" is like, we don't have rearview mirrors. Do not talk to me about the past. I don't want to hear nothing about the past, my mama says, right?

tressie mcmillan cottom

Yeah.

kiese laymon

So when I put that in a book and then I see it quoted back on Instagram, we don't need to look back into the past. The past is - I'm like, but fam, you're quoting somebody that the book is actually arguing about. But they don't see it that way. They'll be like, Kiese said, don't look back at the past. You know what I mean? So I just think it's - I feel you the same way, but I also just feel like once you bring in other characters who start saying things that a lot of people might agree with, they'll give that shit to you even though you're trying to say the opposite.

tressie mcmillan cottom

In a heartbeat because we have a hard time separating the art from the artist, I think especially when the artist is different from us in some critical identity. We have a hard time separating women from their work. We have a hard time separating Black people from their work, et cetera, et cetera.

You know what else I think that you do really well, that you reflect really critically on how places and your location in these places really make you. And so I want to talk about how these places have revised you as a person, as a thinking person and a creative person. So Mississippi is always the backdrop of your life.

kiese laymon

Yeah.

tressie mcmillan cottom

Everything you write starts with, listen, I am from this place and this history. But you have also moved from - you graduated from Oberlin. You go to Indiana University for your MFA. You end up in Vassar. You come back to Mississippi. And now you're starting out on in other new place. You're going to Texas, which I just got to say, Texas feels big. I don't know why. I feel like you're moving to another nation when you move to Texas. How did these places shape you and revise how you think?

kiese laymon

Woo. Well, that's a great question. But I'm going to try to be short because I could talk too long about that. You know, my mama was 19 when I'm born, my father is 20. And I'm born on the campus of Jackson State University. So as much as Mississippi shaped me and Forrest, where my grandmama lived, which is a rural community, chicken community, 45 miles - like I grew up on the institution. They go to grad school in Wisconsin, I go with them there, go back and forth with my grandmama.

I'm in school. I go to a high school, I go to another high school, go to another high school. I've never not been in school. Like I've never not - I was born in school. When I finished grad school, I went directly to Vassar. I went to University of Mississippi and I'm supposed to be starting at Rice in January.

tressie mcmillan cottom

Are you expecting the culture of Texas - what do you expect from it?

kiese laymon

I'm kind of trying to avoid that question right now about Texas, fam, because like I'm from Mississippi, you know? And it's very terrifying to move to a place like Mississippi that has one abortion clinic and, you know, the Dobbs case is about to come out. They're trying to take that one out. And then move to a place like Texas, you know, when you leave Mississippi, like we left for Illinois. We left for Milwaukee, you know what I'm saying? We left for Indianapolis. We left for Atlanta. I'm not necessarily sure about what it means to leave Mississippi when it is in the state it is in to go to another place that is trying to outdo Mississippi, you know?

tressie mcmillan cottom

Oh, yeah, yeah.

kiese laymon

I don't know. But that's what I'm supposed to be going, so we'll see.

tressie mcmillan cottom

We're going to check on you. We're going to check on you.

kiese laymon

Yeah, I'm going to need that.

tressie mcmillan cottom

I feel like though you've got the - you have the theory of moral practice and creative practice that you're taking with you that I've got to think has got to be a boon for how you will think about that place though. I might be more worried about how you'll change Texas than maybe how Texas will change you. I think that that's the hope for me.

kiese laymon

See, I'm 47, fam. Like I don't want to change Texas no more. Like please don't let me go there trying to change Texas. Because I feel like Texas, I feel like I'm going to try to - I'm going to try to feel it out before I try to change it.

tressie mcmillan cottom

OK, all right.

kiese laymon

Let me say that, yeah.

tressie mcmillan cottom

All right. So I think about the American project, to the extent that it is still a project undergoing, is in many ways a project about this nation's refusal to revise, right? Won't revise its history, won't revise its present, won't revise its narratives about the future. And this is an attachment not just to the status quo, but to like the founding myths of what this nation is supposed to be.

And so in many ways, the fight over things like Confederate monuments, which you write about, or fights over critical race theory are about this nation's refusal to revise its story about itself. But you're constantly revising yourself. You're constantly modeling it. And so I'd just love to hear you talk about what you have learned through this sort of like lifetime practice of revising yourself in a world and like a place where revision is not valued as an ethic. How could we value revision in a nation whose entire story is about resisting revision?

I think it's important for people to know that revision might be hard, but clearly worth it to you. So even though it can be excruciatingly painful from time to time, it has some overarching value. What is that in your view?

kiese laymon

tressie mcmillan cottom

So our final question for you, Kiese, is something that that editor said to you that I wanted your opinion on at this stage in your career as you're at the precipice of making another important move, as you have feel confident in your ability to be reflective about your revision process of yourself and your role in the world as an artist.

And that is the editor kept saying to you, you know, you could be a real Black writer. If you would do this, if you would do that, you could be a real Black writer. What does it mean to you today to be a real Black writer? Does it mean anything?

kiese laymon

I mean, it's going to sound like I'm full of myself, but to be Kiese Laymon sort of means you're a real Black writer. You know what I mean? Like I accept myself now. And I'm a lot of things. And I'm terrible at a lot of things. And I'm a fake at a lot of things. But I'm a real Black writer, fam. And I'm so grateful that I can live long enough to say that to you.

Because I know what that means. I'm going to always, always be invested in revision. I'm going to be always, always invested in the voices of our people that were never given space. And I'm always going to be invested in weirdness. And, to me, that's what being a real Black writer means. And that's what I try to do.

tressie mcmillan cottom

You do it brilliantly. And you shine a light for the rest of us to choose how we want to be weird in this world. So thank you for that, Kiese. All right, my brother, we always end the episode - I say we, right? But for temporarily, this is the Tressie show. And like Ezra, we always end the show with three book recommendations. What do you have for us?

kiese laymon

So the books that I would recommend this week are I read Imani Perry's new book, "South to America." Man, it is something I've just been waiting for actually my whole life. It is what we need. Another book is "Shoutin' in the Fire: An American Epistle" by Danté Stewart, incredible young book by this young, young brother who fancies himself a preacher, but also who found God via like a lot of our Black intellectual heroes who often pushed Christianity to the side. It's a remarkable read. And Colin Kaepernick just released his first book, "Abolition for the People," which is a book of essays on abolition and policing edited by Kaepernick. And it's just an incredible book. It's like and a lot of people are like saying they're surprised how incredible it is. But it is. It's a phenomenal book. So those are the three that I would suggest.

tressie mcmillan cottom

Wonderful recommendations. Thank you, Kiese. Thank you.

ezra klein

"The Ezra Klein Show" is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Annie Galvin, fact checked by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

EZRA KLEIN: I'm Ezra Klein, and this is "The Ezra Klein Show."

Hey, it's Ezra. While I'm on paternity leave, we are turning the show over to an all-star team of guest hosts. This week, Tressie McMillan Cottom takes the helm. Tressie is a research professor at UNC Chapel Hill's I-School. She's a contributing writer to New York Times Opinion. She's got a great newsletter you should sign up for. She's author of the National Book Award finalist "Thick: And Other Essays." And she is just one of the most interesting, fun to talk to people I've ever had on the show. So I'm very excited to hear what she does with the mic. Enjoy.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: I love talking to great artists who helped me make sense of the world, especially those who are wrestling with the same problems that vex all of us and who aren't afraid to pour themselves onto the page in the process. Kiese Laymon is the most uncompromising artist I have had the pleasure of knowing. Kiese is author of the essay collection, "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America" and the award-winning memoir "Heavy." His nonfiction tackles race, gender, sports, popular culture, the politics of literary publishing and, above all, his relationship with his home state of Mississippi.

His writing expresses a radical hope that Mississippi, and by extension America, can change for the better. Kiese's prose crackles with wit, resistance and revolution, yes. But it also simmers with wisdom, vulnerability, empathy and even love. Breaking from iconoclastic American novelists like Hemingway and Faulkner, Kiese Laymon is not afraid to love on the page for all of us to see. His style of courageous art takes conviction and a very clear idea of who you are.

In 2020, Kiese did something that shocked the publishing world. He bought back the rights to his first two books for about 10 times the price he was originally paid to write them. Looking back on "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America" and his novel, "Long Division," Kiese realized there were parts of the books he wanted to change. So he made an investment in his own art that, from one angle, might have looked surprising. But it's not so surprising when you consider the way Kiese approaches his entire life, as an act of revision.

When I chose to interview Kiese for the show, I wanted to learn more about how he thinks about the act of revision - of himself, his craft and his voice in a world where gatekeeping often requires minority artists to revise their identities against their will so that they can be legible to mainstream readers. But we also end up discussing so much more than that. It was truly a pleasure to have Kiese on the show.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: In complicated times, which are all times, no matter when you live in your point in history, we've got some complicated times, I look to the people whose voices bring clarity to me, not just about what's going on in the world, as important as that is, but clarity on how I should be thinking about or feeling about, experiencing what's going on in the world. And Kiese, you're always one of my favorite people in the world to think and feel and emote alongside. So I want to talk to you during complicated times. How are you?

Revision required witnessing and testifying. Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every god ever asked of believers." I love that. You elevated revision. You elevated revision to faith, which was, yeah.

KIESE LAYMON: Yeah.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: I mean, it just, yeah, it struck me.

KIESE LAYMON: I thought the Bible folks was going to be mad.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Really?

KIESE LAYMON: I thought my Bible people were going to be mad, but whatever, whatever.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: But they rolled with you, they rolled with you?

KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, because it sounds - you know, if you can make something sound biblical, I think your Bible people will be like, well, that's OK, that's OK, you know?

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Well, yeah, because they think you've read the Bible. And that's all that they want.

KIESE LAYMON: Exactly.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: That's all the Bible people want, for you to have read the Bible.

KIESE LAYMON: That is it.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: So we will get into like that life giving part of revision later. But first, I want to talk a little bit more about this type of revision. Because this gets at the heart of why you got your rights back for the book, which I want to talk about, what the marketplace asks, especially of Black writers. So when you talk about revision that reduces our Black rhetorical abundance, what do you mean by that? And when has this been done to you?

KIESE LAYMON: Hey, I'm going back to second grade, third grade, fourth grade. I was a kid who used "be" in an action verb, you know, be sitting, be walking, be - and I came from a mother who was just like, don't do that, right? But I still did it at school. And nobody ever told me why not to do it. And nobody ever told me that there was any value in it.

I'm talking about a second, third, fourth, fifth grader or like when someone will say like, you know, they took they house away from them. That, to me, sounds - I mean, aurally, like they took they house away from them. One is the repetition of they. That sounds better to me than if I were to say, they took their house away from them. And so my point was not that I didn't want my teachers to tell me what was right or wrong. But my teachers never saw any value in the right way of being that we brought to school.

And so much of that right way was informed by hip-hop real talk, which was informed by blues if you take it all the way back. So I just assumed that like our - my teachers from second, fourth, fifth grade, all the way up into graduate school just were denying a blues ethic. And when you deny Black people in Mississippi a blues ethic, you're denying those Black people.

And so, you know, it can go from all the way to there to when I publish books now. And I can be saying like so-and-so had to go get a switch. And let's say I have an editor that's like, well, I'm going to need you to explain to the rest of the readers what a switch is. Well, I'm not about to break this illusion to describe a switch. Because the people for who are on the first row of my audience, they understand what a switch is.

And they understand that when I - if I break this to go describe what a switch is, they're going to realize that they're not reading something that is like directed especially to them. Do you see what I'm saying? So for me, it was just a matter of like - I mean, it's deeper than this, but on one level, I think it is often teachers/editors not simply not knowing from whence our abundance comes, but not knowing how to value it in any way and just saying, no, that's wrong. I'm not that kind of student.

Like I need you to explain to me more than it's wrong. Like, I want you to tell me there's some value in this, but for now, we want to see you try to communicate with this word, as opposed to misusages of "they" don't have a place in the school. OK, well, you're telling me a big part of me and my family don't have a place in this school. And I just think we need to make it clear. And that's exactly what they were saying, you know?

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: That is. And that is the soul-crushing part of what's necessary for you to do that kind of brave engagement with fear that you talked about earlier on the page. I don't think we get bravery from other people's words. We get the bravery from the words we got from our people. And so if you take that away, it's really hard to be brave. I can't even talk like myself. How are you supposed to be brave on the page?

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Because writing is a very vulnerable position to be in. You always think that another opportunity isn't going to come around.

KIESE LAYMON: That's right.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: I don't know of any writers who feel secure that people are always going to want to hear from you. So I think that vulnerability is built into the industry.

KIESE LAYMON: Yes.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: And that's what gives editors and publishers sort of the upper hand, right? So no, I absolutely get those similar pitches. Like, you know, it would be great if we could get a Tressie book about wokeness. And I'm like, good luck. But, yeah, I think that continues to happen, which is why I think you pushing back on the idea that anything you do publish is an eternal work in progress is really a powerful way, especially -

KIESE LAYMON: It is.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: - I think for minority and people of color and Black writers to think of it as a constant process of revision.

KIESE LAYMON: We have to. I mean, and I understand all the reasons we think, understandably, like if we disappear, we might not appear again, right? Like if we go back into the annals and like just take care of ourselves and don't get edited for a while, I understand people who are like, yo, it took me forever to get here. I'm like 55. I'm not about to - but at the same time, y'all, the work we create is our work. Like our people weren't brought to this nation as labor/technology for us to like let these people tell us when our work is done. Maybe it's done before you think. But I think often it's not done. And I just think we have a responsibility to continually revise when this market tells us not to.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: All right, so one thing you and I have in common, I like to think, as writers, is that we work really hard at being ourselves on the page.

KIESE LAYMON: Yeah.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: And in your ethic of revision, you show us over and over again how hard that work is, how hard it is to go back and change something, to make it more reflective of who you are as you mature. And you have done that brilliantly and impressively with "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America." So you bought back the rights to that book. And you revised, basically, the whole text, Kiese.

You started the new version with an essay that is about the process of revision in its own way, right? Revising America, revising your relationship to America. So listen, why, why do this? Why revise so much of that book? Why show us your work in that way? And does it matter that you did it right now?

KIESE LAYMON: Woo, yeah, I think the why right now is that I just was not sure that I was going to make it. And -

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: You mean make it out of -

KIESE LAYMON: - when I say make it -

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Yeah.

KIESE LAYMON: - out of Covid. You know, I don't know -

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Oh, OK.

KIESE LAYMON: -like we haven't talked explicitly about this, but like when - like I was on book tour when it hit or when they say it hit. And, you know, the people that I knew closest to me that were dying were like my good friends' partners, my students and my cousin. Like those were the first people. And then I was just like, oh, you know, it's that fatalism shit that a lot of us have. I'm like, not only is my Granny done - because I thought my Granny was done, right, immediately.

And I'm like, OK, I might have two or three weeks. And I was just like, yo, if I pass and I let my first two books stay in the hands of someone who I feel like did not respect my talent, I am not worth anything. And so one of the things that drove me to get those rights back was the fact that I didn't think I was going to be alive. And I knew that the books would live longer than me. And whether I live through Covid or not, the books will still be out here in this world longer than me.

And I just wanted them to be out in the world with, you know, with a style and a shape and a content that I could actually get behind, you know? "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America" is an interesting revision because I don't know that I made that book better. But there were just some essays in there I couldn't stand by. Like I couldn't stand by the Kanye essay, couldn't stand by the Michael Jackson joint. And I wanted to take those out. And I'd written some new stuff about Outkast, about the pandemic. I just wanted to put it in there, change the sequence, you know, kind of tell it backwards.

And, more importantly, I wanted my rights to be my rights. You know, we sold like 40,000 copies. I hardly made any money off of it. So I just thought that was foul long division, sold for like $3,00 or $4,000. So I just wanted my books back. I had to sell them - I had to buy them back for $50,000. But in the end of the day, like I just wanted to have a little bit of integrity because I didn't think - I didn't think I was going to make it. I didn't think I was going to make it.

KIESE LAYMON: "I drive by two massive Confederate monuments in Oxford. Black officers are guarding them both. I want to ask the brothers if they are humiliated guarding monuments that commemorate our destruction. When they start answering or radioing for backup, I want to say, oh, one sec, brothers. Then I want to blast the first verse of 'Fuck the Police.' I imagine the brothers parked in the shadows of the armed monuments, banging a beat on their cruisers, and all of us rapping "Fuck the Police" until backup arrives.

When the white officers arrive, I imagine getting all bougie Black professor on them, explaining that white Mississippians cling to the Confederacy not because they lost the Civil War, but because they cheated in a rigged battle against Black Mississippians. Their monuments are memorials of our suffering at the hands of folk who never had to pay, play, live or fight fair.

But they already know that. Every Mississippian, whether they admit it or not, knows that. What they don't know is that 'Fuck the Police' was one of our memorials, one of our most evocative monuments. And every member of NWA had roots in the South. I wanted to play it so badly as I watched that police precinct in Minneapolis burn and when Trump sicced his National Guard on peaceful protesters so he could get a photo Beelzebub would be jealous of.

I want to bump 'Fuck the Police' right now. The existence of the song is proof that even if we could not bring as much material suffering to white folks as they did to us, we could memorialize and channel the spirits of those beaten, killed by nasty cheaters. Mama's greatest worry is that I will be shot out of the sky by these cheaters. She is right. One day I will not get up off of the ground. Mama knows that in my dreams, we soar bulletproof and often, we crash.

In my actual dreams, I run like Ahmaud. I shoot midrange jumpers like George. I heal like Breonna. I rap every lyric to 'Fuck the Police' in a Monte Carlo packed to the brim with them and Mignon and Tim and Henry and David fiending for new ways to love each other.

I fantasize about doing to white folk and their police what they do to us. And more than fantasize, I remember and relish publicly rapping words grandmama could never whisper outside of her house. But there is a way to commemorate our losses and wins without humiliating queer folks and, subsequently, morally debasing those of us who are not queer. Those who we seek to humiliate, we eventually seek to destroy.

And that first verse of 'Fuck the Police' does not fairly memorialize or commemorate the lives of queer folk. I had to stop rapping it two decades ago. I had to stop listening to it in 2015. As absurd as it sounds, the only thing harder than giving up 'Fuck to Police' was giving up lying to people I purported to love, giving up disordered eating and giving up gambling. Queer antagonism, like trans antagonism, like anti-blackness is an addiction broken only by honest reckoning, consistent practice, and the welcoming of radical spirits.

Like most Mississippians, I am an addict. Like most Americans, I am a coward. I wave at Black officers guarding the Confederate monuments. They wave back. Adia Victoria's 'And Then You Die' churns in the background. And I drive myself home. Fuck. Fuck."

You talked to Adia the other day,

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: I did. Yeah, I talked Adia the other day. Talking to her again very soon actually. Adia Victoria is a beautiful modern blues woman is what I call her. I like the idea that blues women are still being made young, which is one reason why I love Adia Victoria, has a wonderful album, "Southern Gothic," which I think of your work as being very much in a conversation with that contemporary, however, Southern Gothic, which I think you captured there, which is the complicity that we all have been reproducing this everyday stuff. Like it's easy to talk about - not easy maybe, but it's easier to talk defund the police than it is to drive by the police and not a nice polite hello, especially when you're standing in the middle of Oxford, Mississippi.

KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, and you know how hard work is to come by. You know how hard work is - this is not an excuse. This is just a look into what we actually, some of us actually do feel, you know?

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Is this something, this revision of yourself of saying, I love this art, like I love NWA. Or for me, it was saying, I had to give up one of my favorite songs by Salt-N-Pepa because I realized there was something in it that I just couldn't resonate with as an adult.

KIESE LAYMON: Which one?

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Well, they've got - they used a pejorative for intelligence in "What a man, what a man, what a mighty good man." And I just can't say it anymore.

KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: I can't say it anymore, right? Even though we know what the art was made in response to, right, theirs being a particular type of Black feminist ethic about Black women being desirable and having the choice of partners. But they built it on pejoratives and slurs that I can't live with.

And in the same way, you have this thing with an NWA song that, yeah, it was serving a particular purpose for us, but was doing it in a way that compromises our love for a broader community. And you being able to do that revision in real time and talk to us about what that looks like and feels like, do you think you've gotten better as an adult, as a big grown-up, as an official grown-up, have you gotten better at holding yourself to task like you do in that passage?

KIESE LAYMON: I'm going to be honest with you, yes. It's so hard to say -

KIESE LAYMON: Good, good.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: - it's so hard to say yes to that. I just don't think that you ask anybody on Earth to do anything that you aren't willing to do. And so I have - you know, you were talking about Kanye. I got a million critiques of Kanye. You talk about this human being Donald Trump and all the people who made Donald Trump.

I got a gazillion critiques of those folks. But at the end of the day, I know that I need to be able to give up something that I do not want to give. Like, I love fuck the police, fam. I love the memory of -

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Oh, the memory. I remember it so clearly the first time - I saw the video for the first time, I heard the song. I also had the images, I saw the video.

KIESE LAYMON: Yes.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Blew my mind.

KIESE LAYMON: Blew my mind.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: It was a moment.

KIESE LAYMON: It was and, you know, like this is where I just think words, we have to remember words are word. And they have histories, but they also are alive. And so like I was baptized into NWA. And, yes, I can be like, well, all of the rape - because they literally rapped about rape - all of the murder, that was over there. But fuck, OK, you can say all that if you want to.

But for me, when I'm asking these white folk down here to divest themselves of the worst of Mississippi, the worst of this nation, the worst of white folk, yes, but then I also have to be willing to divest myself of sometimes the things that are like wholly ableist, like absolutely completely queer and trans antagonist. And like that song, a song that made me feel like I could walk with my head up is also a song that is like steeped in that stuff. So like I'm not trying to do any sort of like - prove to anybody I'm better than anybody by not fucking with that song.

But like I need to not fuck with that song because I don't need more incentive to believe the ideas in that song. And I have plenty of incentives to believe the ideas in that song. That's me. You know what I'm saying? This isn't for somebody else. It's because like I'm already queer antagonistic. I'm already trans antagonistic. I'm already anti-Black. I'm already misogynist.

KIESE LAYMON: Yeah.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Everything you write starts with, listen, I am from this place and this history. But you have also moved from - you graduated from Oberlin. You go to Indiana University for your MFA. You end up in Vassar. You come back to Mississippi. And now you're starting out on in other new place. You're going to Texas, which I just got to say, Texas feels big. I don't know why. I feel like you're moving to another nation when you move to Texas. How did these places shape you and revise how you think?

KIESE LAYMON: Woo. Well, that's a great question. But I'm going to try to be short because I could talk too long about that. You know, my mama was 19 when I'm born, my father is 20. And I'm born on the campus of Jackson State University. So as much as Mississippi shaped me and Forrest, where my grandmama lived, which is a rural community, chicken community, 45 miles - like I grew up on the institution. They go to grad school in Wisconsin, I go with them there, go back and forth with my grandmama.

I'm in school. I go to a high school, I go to another high school, go to another high school. I've never not been in school. Like I've never not - I was born in school. When I finished grad school, I went directly to Vassar. I went to University of Mississippi and I'm supposed to be starting at Rice in January.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Are you expecting the culture of Texas - what do you expect from it?

KIESE LAYMON: I'm kind of trying to avoid that question right now about Texas, fam, because like I'm from Mississippi, you know? And it's very terrifying to move to a place like Mississippi that has one abortion clinic and, you know, the Dobbs case is about to come out. They're trying to take that one out. And then move to a place like Texas, you know, when you leave Mississippi, like we left for Illinois. We left for Milwaukee, you know what I'm saying? We left for Indianapolis. We left for Atlanta. I'm not necessarily sure about what it means to leave Mississippi when it is in the state it is in to go to another place that is trying to outdo Mississippi, you know?

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Oh, yeah, yeah.

KIESE LAYMON: I don't know. But that's what I'm supposed to be going, so we'll see.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: We're going to check on you. We're going to check on you.

KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, I'm going to need that.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: I feel like though you've got the - you have the theory of moral practice and creative practice that you're taking with you that I've got to think has got to be a boon for how you will think about that place though. I might be more worried about how you'll change Texas than maybe how Texas will change you. I think that that's the hope for me.

Therefore, the revision seems right out the door. And what most people want in a revision is a commercial. Like this will make you better. This will - no, what revision is is like the commitment to perpetually assessing work going forward. So there's no done. You're never done.

But I don't even think we can get there because most of us are afraid of what we see when we look backwards. And I am too. But I know that the only way that we can grow backwards and forwards is to like honestly assess the ingredients that we put into life. And that's what I try to do with my work.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: So our final question for you, Kiese, is something that that editor said to you that I wanted your opinion on at this stage in your career as you're at the precipice of making another important move, as you have feel confident in your ability to be reflective about your revision process of yourself and your role in the world as an artist.

And that is the editor kept saying to you, you know, you could be a real Black writer. If you would do this, if you would do that, you could be a real Black writer. What does it mean to you today to be a real Black writer? Does it mean anything?

KIESE LAYMON: I mean, it's going to sound like I'm full of myself, but to be Kiese Laymon sort of means you're a real Black writer. You know what I mean? Like I accept myself now. And I'm a lot of things. And I'm terrible at a lot of things. And I'm a fake at a lot of things. But I'm a real Black writer, fam. And I'm so grateful that I can live long enough to say that to you.

Because I know what that means. I'm going to always, always be invested in revision. I'm going to be always, always invested in the voices of our people that were never given space. And I'm always going to be invested in weirdness. And, to me, that's what being a real Black writer means. And that's what I try to do.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: You do it brilliantly. And you shine a light for the rest of us to choose how we want to be weird in this world. So thank you for that, Kiese. All right, my brother, we always end the episode - I say we, right? But for temporarily, this is the Tressie show. And like Ezra, we always end the show with three book recommendations. What do you have for us?

KIESE LAYMON: So the books that I would recommend this week are I read Imani Perry's new book, "South to America." Man, it is something I've just been waiting for actually my whole life. It is what we need. Another book is "Shoutin' in the Fire: An American Epistle" by Danté Stewart, incredible young book by this young, young brother who fancies himself a preacher, but also who found God via like a lot of our Black intellectual heroes who often pushed Christianity to the side. It's a remarkable read. And Colin Kaepernick just released his first book, "Abolition for the People," which is a book of essays on abolition and policing edited by Kaepernick. And it's just an incredible book. It's like and a lot of people are like saying they're surprised how incredible it is. But it is. It's a phenomenal book. So those are the three that I would suggest.

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Wonderful recommendations. Thank you, Kiese. Thank you.

EZRA KLEIN: "The Ezra Klein Show" is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Annie Galvin, fact checked by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.

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Transcript: Tressie McMillan Cottom Interviews Kiese Laymon for 'The Ezra Klein Show'

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Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today's episode hosted by Tressie McMillan Cottom featuring Kiese Laymon. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

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Social Programs of the Black Panther Party

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Social Programs of the Black Panther Party

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Celebrating the 55th anniversary of the Black Panther Party at Brickhouse Art Gallery in Oak Park, Sacramento with photographs and documentaries whose footage covers social programs and impact the programs had in the 1960's and 70's. First hand oral experiences and memories shared by Sacramento and Oakland chapters that shed light on the positive contributions the Panthers gave to their communities across the nation. Danger of a single story and dominant narratives mark the Black Panthers as violent communists, but the whole story is advocation for human rights denied by systems of oppression; solidarity across all races that mainstream history leaves out.

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"In his monumental floor-to-ceiling installation, Adam Pendleton has created a spatial collage of text, image, and sound—a total work of art for the 21st century."

This was such an interesting full surround-sense exhibit that probes history and monuments and identity in arresting b&w images, video and interviews. I was mostly struck by how accessible the theoretical complications of text and representation are communicated through these pieces to push on the boundaries of what we think museums are/are for. We are definitely adding this to our events list for the winter, so more conversation to come!

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Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? transforms MoMA's Marron Family Atrium into a dynamic arena exploring Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. In his monumental floor-to-ceiling installation, Adam Pendleton has created a spatial collage of text, image, and sound-a total work of art for the 21st century.

Who Is Queen? is anchored by three five-story black scaffold towers that resemble the balloon framing typical of American homes and that serve as supports for paintings, drawings, a textile work, sculptures, moving images, and a sound piece. In the paintings, Pendleton creates layered fields of unresolved text and gestural marks, built up from spray-painted and brushed originals that have been photographed, photocopied, and enlarged for screenprinting. The drawings feature sketches and visual "notes," and, at times, reproductions from the artist's library of books. Pendleton's visual language challenges legibility, continuously writing and overwriting itself.

Pendleton's latest video portrait, So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam screens at 12:30 and 4:30 p.m. daily, alternating with two moving-image works that function as notes on the embattled Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia, and Resurrection City, a 1968 ad-hoc city set up on the national mall in Washington, DC. Resurrection City has played an influential role in Pendleton's wider investigation of alternative structures and social formations. Finally, a sound collage anchored by a reading by the poet Amiri Baraka, a recording by composer Hahn Rowe, and a recording of a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Manhattan is interwoven with musical fragments from a range of composers and musicians. Dialogues organized by Pendleton featuring pairs of artists, writers, and thinkers will be released online monthly, and incorporated into the sound installation, which shifts and changes over the course of the exhibition.

Challenging the traditional role of the museum as a repository for a fixed history, Who Is Queen? collages multiple voices and cultural touch points to generate new relationships between traditionally incommensurable subjects. As the artist states, the work "is not black or white. It articulates the ways in which we simultaneously possess and are possessed by contradictory ideals and ideas."

Download a PDF with the full list of collaborators and contributors for Who Is Queen?.

Organized by Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator, with Danielle A. Jackson, former Curatorial Assistant, and Gee Wesley, Curatorial Assistant, with the support of Veronika Molnar, Intern, Department of Media and Performance.

The audio series for Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? is produced for MoMA by Lizzie Gorfaine, Producer, and Kate Scherer, Manager, with the support of Olivia Rousey, Intern, Performance and Live Programs

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Exhibition. Through Jan 30, 2022. Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? transforms MoMA's Marron Family Atrium into a dynamic arena exploring Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. In his monumental floor-to-ceiling installation, Adam Pendleton has created a spatial collage of text, image, and sound-a total work of art for the 21st century.

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My friend is a co-producer on this new podcast, through Beloved Economies. They interview activists, artists, and thinkers about their hopeful vision for what 2030 could look like. Then, they create short audio skits to paint a picture of that potential future. There are only a couple episodes out now, but I think it offers a really interesting glimpse into what happens when we wander through our dreams and hopes and what those wanderings can bring to others.

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Welcome to The Light Ahead, a fictional podcast that dreams up a 2030 in which the US has an economy that truly works and cares for everyone and helps us imagine how it might be possible to get there. Co-created by next-economy leaders and Hollywood screenwriters, this podcast presents eight unique, fictionalized versions of what our future economy could look and sound like, beyond the limiting definitions and systems we imagine we are trapped by today. Alongside the fictional stories, you'll hear from the creators themselves about what went into imagining these alternate futures and what we begin to do to bring those futures about. The Light Ahead is a co-production of Avalon: Story and Beloved Economies, produced in partnership with FRQNCY Media.

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‎The Light Ahead: Introducing The Light Ahead on Apple Podcasts

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‎Welcome to The Light Ahead, a fictional podcast that dreams up a 2030 in which the US has an economy that truly works and cares for everyone and helps us imagine how it might be possible to get there. Co-created by next-economy leaders and Hollywood screenwriters, this podcast presents eight unique,...

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This was a temporary memorial in a Detroit park from August 2020.

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Belle Isle becomes moving memorial for Detroit’s COVID-19 victims

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All this week, Detroit victims of COVID-19 will be honored on Belle Isle during a drive-through memorial.

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Walking the city and thinking about the way we remember

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Walking the city and thinking about the way we remember

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Arthur Jafa's latest work, AGHDRA is up at the old Gavin Brown gallery on 127th, Wed-Sat, 12-8pm.

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Journal of Embodied Research... works that weave threads between somatic, audiovisual, and textual ways of knowing.

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What aesthetic memorial forms and strategies of engagement best foster the work of Repair? Some old favorites: Hank Willis Thomas, Diana Taylor, and Marianne Hirsch.
Seth

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Michael Arad, Susan Meiselas, Doris Salcedo, Hank Willis Thomas, Mabel O. Wilson, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Introduced by Marianne Hirsch and Diana Taylor, co-directors of the Zip Code Memory Project. Moderated by Carol Becker, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts.

How can the devastating but radically disproportionate losses caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic be memorialized? While acknowledging the social inequities and injustices the pandemic has exposed, might local memories of loss and neglect be transformed into a practice of justice and collective healing? What aesthetic memorial forms and strategies of engagement best foster the work of Repair?

This roundtable will approach the urgency of such challenges in conversations between noted artists who have responded to histories of violence and loss in vastly different geo-political contexts. Their visionary memorial projects have mobilized painful memories, leaving space both for mourning and for imagining potential futures.

Each of these artists will discuss one project, sharing their process and the challenges faced in creating communities of memory.

This will be the first in a series of conversations on "Reparative Memory" in conjunction with Columbia University School of the Art's theme of "Repair" and the " Zip Code Memory Project," based at the Center for the Study of Social Difference.

Co-presented by the Center for the Study of Social Difference; Columbia University School of the Arts; Columbia World Projects; The Forum; The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery; and The Simon H. Rifkind Center for the Humanities & the Arts at the City College of New York.

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Michael Arad, Susan Meiselas, Doris Salcedo, Hank Willis Thomas, Mabel O. Wilson, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Introduced by Marianne Hirsch and Diana Taylor, co-directors of the Zip Code Memory Project. Moderated by Carol Becker, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts.

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relationships btw humans and other than human

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relationships btw humans and other than human

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This podcast episode is incredible. Ezra Klein and Richard Powers (author of The Overstory) have a wide ranging conversation about so many complex ideas about how humans have constructed the world around our own interests and survival - and they debate whether that is actually quite like the patterns of the natural world, which environmentalists tend to defend from human action. They sweep through politics, science, capitalism, religion, the arts - too much to summarize here. This will be 90 minutes well spent if you have the time.

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transcript

Richard Powers on What We Can Learn from Trees

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author asks whether we can reimagine our relationship with the natural world before it's too late.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

I'm Ezra Klein, and this is "The Ezra Klein Show."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Sometimes I finish these conversations, and I feel I've been given a gift. And this is one of them. This is really one of them. Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels, including, famously, "The Overstory," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. I loved "The Overstory." I loved it. I've never walked through a forest the same way again. And a lot of people loved it. When I interviewed him earlier this year and asked for his three books, former President Barack Obama recommended "The Overstory." And he said, quote, "it changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it." Hell of an endorsement.

Powers has a new book out, "Bewilderment." And I think "Overstory" and "Bewilderment" should be understood as a couplet. "The Overstory" is about the world beyond us - the slow, powerful life of the trees and the forests and the way all of that shapes us. You can also call it the outer story. And "Bewilderment," by contrast, is the inner story.

It is about our cognition, our brainwaves, the way we can live in a time of wonders, but a time also of horrors - of climate crisis and mass extinction and poverty that doesn't need to be there and violence - how we can live in that time and see nothing but normalcy, sometimes see nothing but ourselves. It's about the limits of our cognitive empathy and what it would take to change them and what we do to those among us who aren't so limited. It is an enchanting and - my God - it is a devastating book.

And it speaks, as does this conversation we have, to something I've been wrestling with on the show over the past year, and probably before that, too. Look, if you listen, I don't believe in pretending that there are no limits on what our politics will accept. But I also don't believe in pretending that the limits that there are just, that the boundaries of our politics right now trace a compassionate society or chart a wise future. They don't. They don't. Whether your concern is climate or it's poverty or it's animal suffering or it's global health or any of a list we could keep doing, there is just a chasm between what we should do and what we will.

And what makes that even worse is that often, insisting on what we should do, telling people that what they're doing right now is wrong or not enough, that they need to make sacrifice or change, that can lead to tremendous political backlash. It can lead to a shrinking of what we will do. It's maddening. It is maddening, but it points to the central truth that I sometimes think gets forgotten, which is you need to change minds to change politics. You really do. If you want radical change, you can't just impose it.

So how do we change the way we see each other and the world? How do we create a richer, deeper soil for our politics? Unexpectedly to me, that is what "Bewilderment" is all about. It takes seriously something we too often ignore, that we live in a system that is always changing us - that our current technologies, our current culture, our current economic system, the religious systems we have and don't have are rewiring our brains and reshaping our souls and always expanding or contracting the limits of our empathy.

And right now, those systems, I would say, at least in America, are supercharging our impulses for want, for accumulation, for fear. And so we need technologies that push and change us in the other direction, whether it is the literal empathy machine that Powers imagines or the cultural and religious systems that we've seen in the past or something entirely new. But it is this project of change that must succeed if politics is to change radically.

And one thing that is particularly fascinating to me about Powers is that he has been experimenting. He has been experimenting on us with his books, but he's also, in a very profound way, been experimenting on himself by changing the way he lives. And that's where we begin. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Richard Powers, what a pleasure.

richard powers

Oh, the pleasure's all mine. I've been really looking forward to this.

ezra klein

So when I was doing research for this, I found a profile of you in The New York Times in 2003. And in it, you call yourself the science guy. The paper calls you the preeminent literary chronicler of the technological age. And now, you've become the tree guy. You moved from Silicon Valley to the Smoky Mountains. You talk about plant consciousness. What happened, man? How do you tell the story of you over the last few decades?

richard powers

Oh, glory. I vaguely remember that guy back in 2003, and I seem to remember being slightly sardonic with that label. But I guess what's happened is one kind of science continued to evolve in my interest into another until I began to see the kinds of science that have a very different kind of focus than the ones that preoccupied me when I was younger. I think if I were to give this an oversimplification, I was concerned as a younger writer, in my 20s and 30s and 40s, with the human sciences that amplify our ability to control and master and manipulate our situation here and to understand ourselves. And in my 50s and 60s, I've become interested in the humbling sciences, I guess I would say, that point our attention away from ourselves and onto other living things.

ezra klein

I love that idea of the humbling sciences. I'm going to steal that from here on out.

richard powers

Yeah. And you know, amazement and wonder are very close to humility in my own emotional wheel. The more astonishing the world around us becomes, the more we have to share the limelight with these other things that are just mind boggling.

ezra klein

I've heard you discuss a Silicon Valley dinner party back when you lived near Stanford that was a turning point for you. Would you mind telling that story?

richard powers

What I remember from dinner parties in Silicon Valley, honestly, is that you simply couldn't go there - this would have been in the mid 2010s - you simply couldn't go out to dinner with other people in the area without the question of real estate coming up.

ezra klein

That is still true. I'm in San Francisco. That hasn't changed.

richard powers

Only the numbers have changed, Ezra. The basic phenomenon is the same. At the time, I would be rolling my eyes at the stories of the $1.2 million teardowns. I can only imagine what they are now.

ezra klein

Last I looked, the average price, the median price of a home sold in San Francisco is $1.4 million.

richard powers

Extraordinary, the median price. Well, that was, in itself, a little bit rich for my blood. But the other topics of that culture tend to circle back around these sorts of trends, human fascinations, ways of magnifying our throw weight and our ability and removing the last constraints to our desires and, in particular, to eliminate the single greatest enemy of meaning in the culture of the technological sublime that is, itself, such a strong instance of the culture of human separatism and commodity-mediated individualist capitalism- that is to say, the removal of death. And sitting around and listening to people talk seriously about just hanging on a little bit longer until we were able to correct this basic design flaw in life and somehow preserve ourselves in one form or another - biological, if possible, if not in some kind of informational form.

And all of this was happening in the shadow of my growing understanding of the more-than-human world. To live in Silicon Valley is to live just underneath the Santa Cruz Mountains, which themselves carry the scars of a historical relationship with humans in the form of the regenerating Redwood forests. And my increasing fascination with getting up into these mountains and hiking around and seeing these extraordinary, extraordinary creatures - even the ones that are only 100 years old are truly mind blowing. And when you stumble across an 1,100 or 1,200-year-old tree that's as wide as a house and as tall as a football field, it puts a different context on your dinner table conversations with humans who are trying to escape death.

ezra klein

I want to hold on death for a minute. I'm going to come right back to it. But as a note on redwoods, I went to U.C. Santa Cruz for two years. And it is nothing against the wonderful education I got there to say that I've long thought the great gift of that time was I got to spend two years nestled in redwoods. And they don't leave you. There's something different about them. I don't want to say the rest of nature is not remarkable, but there's something about that tree that is majestic. I go back to it as often as I can. They really get in your blood in a different way.

richard powers

So University of Santa Cruz is featured in The Overstory. I hope I didn't slander it too much. I hope it was recognizable to you.

I don't know how any undergraduate gets anything done there with the sea right there.

ezra klein

You don't.

richard powers

And then Henry Cowell redwoods, Big Basin redwoods, just incredible bits of set-aside land. It must just feel like you're in the belly of creation there.

ezra klein

To go back to death, to a lot of people, including, most days, to me, the idea of at least forestalling mortality sounds wondrous. Isn't that what human beings have been fighting towards forever? You had this experience, I understand, shortly after a mortality scare of your own. Why did you have a different reaction to it? Why didn't that fill you with excitement? Why did that instead send you looking for answers or comfort outside of humanity?

richard powers

ezra klein

You moved, in this period, from Silicon Valley area to the Smoky Mountains. How has that move changed you?

richard powers

ezra klein

I've heard you say that it has changed the way you measure a good day. Can you tell me about that?

richard powers

That's true.

I suppose when I was still enthralled to commodity-mediated individualist market-driven human exceptionalism - we need a single word for this, Ezra, if you could come up it.

ezra klein

Isn't it just capitalism? Is the word you're looking for capitalism?

richard powers

Yeah, but it's so loaded. You say that word, and all of a sudden people have all these historical associations. That can get in the way of seeing what's actually there.

ezra klein

That word's going to come up in this conversation. They're going to have to deal with it.

richard powers

All right, that's fine. I'm with you. Yeah, so when I was still pretty much a card-carrying member of that culture, I had this sense that to become a better person and to get ahead and to really make more of myself, I had to be as productive as possible. And that meant waking up every morning and getting 1,000 words that I was proud of. And it's interesting that I would even settle on a quantitative target. That's very typical for that kind of mindset that I'm talking about - 1,000 words and then you're free, and then you can do what you want with the day.

And since moving to the Smokies and since publishing "The Overstory," my days have been entirely inverted. I wake up, I go to the window, and I look outside. Or I step out onto the deck - if I haven't been sleeping on the deck, which I try to do as much as I can in the course of the year - and see what's in the air, gauge the temperature and the humidity and the wind and see what season it is and ask myself, you know, what's happening out there now at 1,700 feet or 4,000 feet or 5,000 feet.

You know, how much has it rained? How high are the rivers going to be? What's in bloom? What's fruiting? What animals are going to be at what elevation? And I just head out. I head out based on what the day has to offer. And to have that come first has really changed not only how I write, but what I've been writing. And I think it really shows in "Bewilderment." It's a totally different kind of book from my previous 12.

And happily, I think, if you do, as Thoreau says, breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruits, live in each season as it passes and resign yourself to the influence of the Earth, if you do that, the work comes. My goodness, I can't really be out for more than two or three miles before my head just fills with associations and ideas and scenes and character sketches. And I usually have to rush back home to keep it all in my head long enough to get it down on paper.

ezra klein

I want to ensure that I don't do you an injustice here because one way of reading this is sciencey, techie fiction writer turns away from science and tech into nature. But that's really not been the nature of these books. It seems to me your relationship with technology and the technologies you're interested in has changed.

"Overstory" has a central character who has a mystical experience with a redwood and then is building a virtual reality world to try to make that legible. We're going to speak about the neurofeedback devices of "Bewildered," but a technological way of changing the way humans think and potentially bringing them into greater empathy with the natural world is central to that book. So how has your relationship with technology changed?

richard powers

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right in what you started out with, being a little bit cautious about that thumbnail sketch of science guy becomes nature guy. I think there is nothing more science inflected than being out in the living world and the more-than-human world and trying to understand what's happening.

And the sciences of dendrology and bryology and ecology, all of these have made startling advances in recent years, and - I hope we get a little chance to come back to this - that have moved our conception of what the living world is from one that's totally dominated by evolution through competition to one that begins to acknowledge just how important cooperation and hybrids of competition and cooperation are for evolution and for ecology, how new and stunning insight into true interdependence among living things, how there is symbiosis everywhere. But I would say, for my journey, the way to characterize this transition is from being fascinated with technologies of mastery and control and what they're doing to us as human beings, how they're changing what the capacities and affordances of humanity are and how we narrate ourselves, to being fascinated with technologies and sciences of interdependence and cooperation, of those sciences that increase our sense of kinship and being one of many, many neighbors.

ezra klein

I want to go into the book. But before we do, I want to make sure we're not too 30,000-foot about the conceptual revolution you just mentioned. So do you want to describe just one study, one finding that you feel helps represent or clarify the way we're starting to see this startling interdependence?

richard powers

Well, let me talk specifically about the work of a scientist who has herself just recently published a book. It's Dr. Suzanne Simard, and the book is "Finding the Mother Tree." Simard has been instrumental in a revolution in our way of thinking about what's happening underground at the root level in a forest. And if you had talked to old-school foresters, or even some foresters still quite active, there would have been this sense that there's nothing particularly interesting happening underground except for competitions for minerals among individual trees and competition for water among individual trees. And the idea for the kinds of experiments that Simard set up would have been almost outside of the concept of these practitioners.

And what Simard was seeing is if you take away one species from a plot of land, you often see degradation and failure to thrive in other species on that same plot of land. So she got to work very rigorously and empirically looking at mycorrhizal connections between the roots of trees and fungal mycelium, the threads of fungus that just fill the soil underground in a forest. And she began to see that the forests were actually wired up in very complex and identifiable ways and that there was an enormous system of resource sharing going on underground, that trees were sharing not only sugars and the hydrocarbons necessary for survival, but also secondary metabolites. And these were being passed back and forth, both symbiotically between the trees and the fungi, but also across the network to other trees so that there were actually trees in wired up, fungally-connected forests where large, dominant, healthy trees were subsidizing, as it were, trees that were injured or not in favorable positions or damaged in some way or just failing to thrive.

And the marvelous thing about the work, which continues to get more sophisticated and continues to turn up newer and newer astonishments, is that there was odd kind of reciprocal interdependence and cooperation across the species barrier, that Douglas firs and birches were actually involved in these sharing back and forth of essential nutrients. And that's a whole new way of looking at forest.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

So going back to something you talked about a few minutes ago, the unbelievable eradication of the old-growth forests across North America and, to some degree, to a large degree, across the entire world, a core theme of the book is the disconnect between the environmental horrors swirling around us and the way we act and live. And climate change is the one here that gets a lot of attention, and for good reason. But in certain ways, I'm more optimistic about our future with climate change, or at least some of our potential futures with climate change, than I am about the mass extinction we've caused and are living through. These species will not come back. These forests maybe one day will grow back, but humanity has created a tremendous die-off.

The main character of the book, Robin, is a neurodivergent young kid, and he takes serious things seriously. And you write of him in this period of crisis he's having that, quote, "the question wasn't why Robin was sliding down again. The question is why the rest of us were staying so insanely sanguine."

richard powers

Yeah.

ezra klein

So why are we?

richard powers

ezra klein

I want to put a pin in the question of whether or not we would consider other human beings sacred because I think that's worth looking at. But let's talk about the role neurodivergence, and the brain, plays in this book. Because I began to think of this book as in relationship to your last book, "The Overstory," which was about the story and the world outside of humanity, operating on a different time scale than humanity. This book seemed, to me, like the inner story. This was very much a book about the way humanity perceives the world around it. And in addition to the main character being neurodivergent, there is a Greta Thunberg-like character who he's inspired by and who is leading a sort of similar movement to the one Greta Thunberg leads in this world. It talks about autism as being a superpower for her.

And you're making the point in different ways throughout the book that it is the minds we think of as unusual, that we would diagnose as having some kind of problem or dysfunction that are, in some cases, are the only ones responding to the moment in the most common sense way it deserves. It is almost everybody else's brain that has been broken. So can you talk a bit about how you're thinking about the mind in this and the relationship between the mind and the world?

richard powers

ezra klein

There's a tremendous amount in there that I want to come at from a number of directions in our conversation, but let's start this part by talking about some of the relationships - conceptual, philosophical relationships we imagine ourselves as having with nature. Under capitalism, you mentioned, there tends to be a view of nature as a resource to be extracted, something you can use to build the world you're creating. You have a quote in the book from Allie, the late wife of Theo and late mother of Robin. She says, in a testimony, the creatures of the state do not belong to us. We hold them in our trust. The first people who lived here knew, all animals are our relatives.

And what struck me about that when I read it is that it seemed to put together two different classic conceptions of humanity's relationship to nature. There's the Western Judeo-Christian idea of dominion over the natural world, holding it in trust, it has been given to us to lead. And then there's also this idea you see in many indigenous cultures, which is that there's a familial relationship with nature, that it is full of our relatives. And I wanted to hear you talk a bit about the idea of putting them together or even if you think this is a reasonable interpretation of what you're doing.

richard powers

Yeah. In human exceptionalism, we may be completely aware of evolutionary continuity. We may understand that we have a literal kinship with the rest of creation, that all life on Earth employs the same genetic code, that there is a very small core of core genes and core proteins that is shared across all the kingdoms and phyla of life. But conceptually, we still have this demented idea that somehow consciousness creates a sanctity and a separation that almost nullifies the continuous elements of evolution and biology that we've come to understand.

Look, I'm 64 years old. I can remember sitting in psychology class as an undergraduate and having my professor declare that no, of course animals don't have emotions because they don't have an internal life. They don't have conscious awareness. And so what looks to you like your dog being extremely happy or being extremely guilty, which dogs do so beautifully, is just your projection, your anthropomorphizing of those other creatures. And this prohibition against anthropomorphism created an artificial gulf between even those animals that are ridiculously near of kin to us, genetically.

And of course, we can combine this with what we were talking about earlier with death. If we see all of evolution as somehow leading up to us, all of human, cultural evolution leading up to neoliberalism and here we are just busily trying to accumulate and make meaning for ourselves, death becomes the enemy. When we enter into or recover this sense of kinship that was absolutely fundamental to so many indigenous cultures everywhere around the world at many, many different points in history, that there is no radical break between us and our kin, that even consciousness is shared, to some degree and to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, then death stops seeming like the enemy and it starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining.

And to go from terror into being and into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social and economic and cultural things. If the experiment is sacred, how can we possibly justify our food systems, for instance? It's only the belief that we share no significant kinds of meditation or emotional life with cows that allow us to run the kind of food system that we run.

ezra klein

I love the line there, if the experiment is sacred. I'm going to have to spend some time thinking about that. But it's interesting to me you brought up death in that answer because the other dominant historical conception of this is the more Eastern ideas, although not only, of course, of reincarnation. And I spend a lot of time reading literature on animal suffering and animal rights because I'm pretty involved in those issues, and I've seen it argued that it is the Western idea of dominion versus the Eastern idea of reincarnation that has created a lot of the modern food system, at least as it relates to animals, because you have to have a somewhat kinder relationship to animals and even plants if you literally think you could be one or someone you loved could be one or you will one day be one, that that also creates a very different way of understanding the world that includes death but is also a little bit to the side of it. And I'm curious if you've reflected on that as a model of thinking about nature.

richard powers

ezra klein

richard powers

ezra klein

What I always think is clarifying about that, and the reason I bring up this question of nature and the natural, is that I think it is important for human beings to recognize there's a lot in our natures. I'm enough of a Buddhist to believe very deeply in dependent arising and the basic emptiness of self. And so I think that the idea that we are as stable as we think either individually or in any given cultural moment is poppycock. But you made a point a minute ago about the relative value we place on life, a human life versus a non-human life. And this is a way in which human beings can stand outside their nature from a certain perspective from talking about accepting nature, the natural world, a mountain lion doesn't place an equal value on the deer's life as on its own. Species try to -

richard powers

It could be complicated.

ezra klein

Well I'd like to hear you complicate it. But certainly my view of it is that species expand until something stops them, and the fundamental thing is that, for human beings, we've often been better at evading some of those limits for a time but that we have to be able to, that we can stand outside and begin to relate our understanding of the world. But you clearly disagree with me on this. So tell me, give me your complications.

richard powers

Not profoundly as or just more semantically. I think the predator-prey relationship is an interdependent relationship. It is a symbiotic relationship of sorts. The predator population that simply expands until it's checked is going to crash and burn. And there is a kind of cultivation and reciprocal behavior between predator and prey that keeps them dependent on each other in both directions. And I don't think, I don't think the models that we've constructed culturally to think about resources apply. I don't - in the absence of an empathy machine like the one in "Bewilderment," I will not presume to say what it feels like to be a mountain lion. So I won't necessarily say that the mountain lion holds its prey sacred or make any great illogical extrapolation of the position that I'm trying to make.

But I do believe that the mountain lion has evolved with all kinds of adaptive advantages to take seriously the sense of the well-being of the animal that it preys upon and to know how that animal lives, and to know when and where that relationship can be tapped. And the fate of the mountain lion depends upon the fate of the prey and that's also built into the evolution of the mountain lion.

ezra klein

I think I probably agree with part of that, and the part I - the place where I'd get off but not in, I think, a profound way is just that I don't know that that is a way an individual mountain lion can think as opposed to an ecosystem evolves into balance. And when we say bring in invasive species, you see things get very out of balance. All of us know much better than me, but I actually am bringing it up to make a bridge to the empathy machine you just mentioned because one of the things I think that we have to take seriously is that we have created technologies to supercharge some parts of our natural impulse, the capitalism I think should be understood as a technology to supercharge the growth impulse, and it creates some wonders out of that and some horrors out of that. But there are lots of technologies like this: religion, which we're going to talk more about. Religion is a technology to discipline, to discipline certain parts of the human impulse. A lot of the book revolves around the decoded neurofeedback machine, which is a very real literalization of a technology, of changing the way we think. So can you talk a bit about that machine and the role it plays in the book?

richard powers

Sure. I base my machine on existing technology. Decoded neurofeedback is a kind of nascent field of exploration. You can read about it; it's been publishing results for a decade. I first came across it in 2013. It involves using fMRI to record the brain activity of a human being who is learning a process, interacting with an object or engaged in a certain emotional state. That neural activity is recorded and stored as a data structure. A second subsequent human being is then also scanned in real time and fed kinds of feedback based on their own internal neural activity as determined by a kind of software analysis of their fMRI data structures.

And they are queued little by little to approximate, to learn how to approximate, the recorded states of the original subject. When I first read about this, I did get a little bit of a revelation. I did feel my skin pucker and think, if pushed far enough, this would be something like a telepathy conduit. It would be a first big step in answering that age-old question of what does it feel like to be something other than we are. And in the book I simply take that basic concept and extend it, juke it up a little bit, blur the line between what the reader might think is possible right now and what they might wonder about, and maybe even introduce possibilities for this empathetic transference that we might see in a few years down the line.

ezra klein

One thing I loved about the role this played in the book is that it's highlighting its inverse. So a reader might look at this and say, wow, wouldn't that be cool if we had a machine that could in real time change how we think and change our neural pathways and change our mental state in a particular direction? But of course, all of society is that machine, and there's this really wonderful scene where Robin and Theo are in an airport. And you've got TVs everywhere playing the news which is to say playing a constant loop of outrage, and disaster, and calamity. And Robbie, who's going through these neural feedback sessions during this period, turns to his dad and says, "Dad, you know how the training's rewiring my brain? This is what is rewiring everybody else." Tell me about that idea.

richard powers

Yeah, Oh glory. Not to keep harping on my age, but when I was Robbie's age, TV was in its early years and radio was maturing. And the America that was made out kids like us was made through those technologies. The sense of - it's comical even to think of, whether there might have been some science fiction writer writing in '67 or '68 or '69 getting a little glimpse of Facebook or Instagram. To my knowledge, nobody even came close.

ezra klein

I think Marshall McLuhan knew it all. I really do. Not exactly what it would look like, but his view and Postman's view that we are creating a digital global nervous system is a way they put it, it was exactly right. A nervous system, it was such the exact right metaphor. And he didn't - it's not that they saw it exactly, but I really love those mid-century media critics because they saw something happening clearer than we see it now. And it is a nervous system. I'm a huge Marshall McLuhan stan.

richard powers

Yeah. Do you know of any fiction folks who were picking up on that in telling dramas that narrated that?

ezra klein

That's a good question, I don't.

richard powers

Yeah. I mean, if it was happening, it was happening in the incredibly fecund and prolific and inventive genre of science fiction, which was by practitioners of literary fiction was considered a kind of poor relation back then in my boyhood. And I think literary fiction has since been repeatedly humbled by all the things that this supposedly inferior genre was putting on the table long before literary fiction ever considered it. So I suspect there may be people out there - McLuhan, his profile was just too high for the fiction writers to have totally ignored that sense of an accreting world nervous system.

ezra klein

richard powers

ezra klein

richard powers

ezra klein

Yeah, I did say that. And what I'm alluding to there is that when people say - I've been thinking in this conversation about the growth movement a little bit, which I have some points of sympathy with and then real points of divergence with. And what I've talked about it before is something I've said is that I think a push against, functionally, materialism and want is an important weight in our society that we need. And when people say it is the way we'll deal with climate change in the three to five year time frame, I become much more skeptical because to the point of things like the technology you have in the book with neural feedback, I do think one of the questions you have to ask is, socially and culturally, how do you move people's minds so you can then move their politics?

And it's that middle space that I think is very undefined. How do you - if Greta Thunberg had started a revivalist religion that was sweeping across the world by the millions, which to some degree she is a bit but not I think in the way I am describing it, that's the kind of thing you need. You're going to need something, it seems to me, outside of politics, that changes humans' sense of themselves more fundamentally. And that takes a minute at the scale of billions.

richard powers

Well, you are correct. And I don't think it's giving away any great reveal in the book to say that a reader who gets far enough into the story probably has this moment of recursive awareness where they, he or she comes to understand that what Robin is doing in this gradual training on the cast of mind of some other person is precisely what they're doing in the act of reading the novel "Bewilderment" - by living this act of active empathy for these two characters, they are undergoing their own kind of neurofeedback. And I do believe that the arts are absolutely instrumental in any kind of cultural transformation unfolding on any scale. I mean, if I had asked you back when you were 20 what the prospects for same-sex marriage in the United States were, what would your answer have been?

ezra klein

My answer would have been that it would have taken somewhat longer than it did, but I would have told you at 20 I thought that would happen. I believe, I think I would have told you that. But I was a young man at U.C. Santa Cruz at 20. So remember that I have my own context for these things.

richard powers

Sure.

ezra klein

When you were 20, it would have looked very different.

richard powers

Oh yeah, it was not a reachable place. Nor was having a Black man as president of the United States a reachable place. And those transformations did happen relatively quickly. The trigger point at which the outsider group became consensual or commonly shared belief. I don't know at what point that happened, but I think it happens slower than people think. And I do believe that the material catastrophes that we've unleashed with regard to the derangement and the diminishment of the systems of the living planet and the climate systems of the planet are going to greatly accelerate this understanding that people have that something more than a little bit of sacrifice but otherwise business-as-usual was going to be required on our part.

But I think if the arts somehow takes up this story of kinship, connectivity, the relocation of meaning outward into a shared process of rehabilitation, what seems like a depressive set of sacrifices to very little end could instead begin to be represented as a kind of joyful assertion of purpose, a kind of leverage of diversity and difference that we've already begun to undertake in so many other cultural sites.

ezra klein

You bring up the arts, and I think people typically do - and I will say, of course, that you are a quite profound practitioner of this. I don't think anybody who reads "The Overstory" ever looks at a forest quite the same way again. But I also want to go back to your idea of the humble sciences or the humbling sciences. I've heard you say before that you've become something of an animist, but I don't get the sense that you mean an animist in the way you've had that in some religious traditions. You seem to me to be something of a scientific animist.

And I'd like to hear you reflect on that, because there are a lot of people like me who yearn for a religion-like force, despite not themselves being personally religious. You can't just will yourself to believe in things, but I've been struck that your path has been simultaneously quite spiritual and scientific. And I think people sometimes note things like scientism is a belief system. But it's not really a constructed one in an intentional way, but I've begun to see people beginning to build out of the humbling sciences a worldview that seems quite spiritual. And as you're somebody who seems to me to have done that and it has changed your life, would you reflect on that a bit?

richard powers

Well, sure. If we turn back to the new forestry again and researchers like Suzanne Simard who were showing the literal interconnectivity across species boundaries and the cooperation of resource sharing between different species in a forest, that is rigorous science, rigorous reproducible science. And it does participate in that central principle of practice, or collection of practices, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish and ego and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction. At the same time, the vision that results the new understanding of what's happening in the forest floor profoundly increases my sense of that system having agency, and having power and subtlety and anima in a way that seems less metaphorical than it did before.

The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms and the evolution of organisms, the more capable it is to feel a kind of spiritual awe. And that certainly makes it easier to have reverence for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species. I don't think those are incommensurable or incompatible ways of knowing the world. In fact, I think to invoke one last time that Buddhist precept of interbeing, I think there is a kind of interbeing between the desire, the true selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment and the desire to have a spiritual affinity and shared fate with the world out there. They're really the same project.

ezra klein

I want to, as we come to a close here, look way out because one of the features of the book is that it does it has these wonderful vignettes of other planets that might exist. It is obsessed with the Fermi paradox. So much of the book is about the possibility of life beyond Earth. Tell me a bit about the role that's playing. Why did you make the possibility of alien life in the way it might look and feel and evolve and act so central in a book about protecting and cherishing life here?

richard powers

ezra klein

Sometimes you know as a podcast host that even if you have more questions you're not going to get a better ending than that one. So I'm going to end this here. We always ask as our final question for three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience.

richard powers

ezra klein

Richard Powers your new book is "Bewildered." It will stay with me for a very long time. And I've so appreciated this conversation. Thank you.

richard powers

Thank you, Ezra.

"The Ezra Klein Show" is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roge Karma and Jeff Geld, fact checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author asks whether we can reimagine our relationship with the natural world before it's too late.

There are certain conversations I fear trying to fit into a description. There's just more to them than I'm going to be able to convey. This is one of them.

Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels, including the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Overstory." If you haven't read it, you should. It'll change you. It changed me. I haven't walked through a forest the same way again. And I'm not alone in that. When I interviewed Barack Obama this year, he recommended "The Overstory," saying, "It changed how I thought about the earth and our place in it."
[You can listen to this episode of "The Ezra Klein Show" on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]
Powers's new book is "Bewilderment." You could think of it as 'The Innerstory': It is about how and whether we see the world we inhabit. It's about the nature and limits of our empathy. It's about refusing to die before we're dead and taking seriously the gifts and responsibilities of being alive. It is about how we change our minds and how we change our societies. It is about how we treat delusion as normal and clarity as lunacy. It is enchanting, and it is devastating.

It is not just books through which Powers has been exploring these ideas. It is also through radical changes he's made to how he lives his life. That's where we start but far from where we end: This conversation touches on mortality, animism, politics, old-growth forests, extraterrestrial life, Buddhism and beyond.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following "The Ezra Klein Show" on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
(A full transcript of the episode is available here.)

Image

Credit... Dean D. Dixon

"The Ezra Klein Show" is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

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Opinion | Richard Powers on What We Can Learn from Trees

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transcript The Pulitzer Prize-winning author asks whether we can reimagine our relationship with the natural world before it's too late. [MUSIC PLAYING] ezra klein I'm Ezra Klein, and this is "The Ezra Klein Show." [MUSIC PLAYING] Sometimes I finish these conversations, and I feel I've been given a gift.

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What have we stopped hiding? @ Studio Museum Harlem (virtual)

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What have we stopped hiding? @ Studio Museum Harlem (virtual)

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I'd love to hear what Curr Lab thinks of this online photography exhibition, with work from teens across Harlem/Upper Manhattan/South Bronx

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Jaden Wilson

Age: 18

School: Law Advocacy and Community Justice

City Location: Manhattan, New York

When my final product is complete, my work is usually colorful and has a soft aesthetic, and it consistently represents positive energy. I always want to capture a positive viewpoint of my environment in that moment, one that can connect with others intellectually and emotionally in a sensational manner. My passion for taking portraits comes from my family, who would consistently take portfolio pictures of one another when I was growing up. I recently began to develop a passion for this type of photography and photography overall. As I take these photographs, I consider whether the viewer can understand the tone of the photo. Is the aesthetic clear enough for the viewer? Is this my best work?

Hearts in Isolation presented work by the fifteen artists in the 2020 cohort of Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History, and Community. During the eight-month program, participants from New York City-area high schools explore the history and techniques of photography. Hearts in Isolation is The Studio Museum in Harlem's first online exhibition.

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What Have We Stopped Hiding? - Expanding the Walls

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When my final product is complete, my work is usually colorful and has a soft aesthetic, and it consistently represents positive energy. I always want to capture a positive viewpoint of my environment in that moment, one that can connect with others intellectually and emotionally in a sensational manner.

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I would love to visit this exhibit at the Wallach Art Gallery

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Wallach Art Gallery | Columbia University

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Other campus monuments featured in this section of the exhibition are William Ordway Partridge's statues of Alexander Hamilton (1907), Thomas Jefferson (1914), and College Dean John Howard van Amringe (1911-22) allowing for an exploration of different memorial modes, strategies of display, and an investigation of changing attitudes, both peaceful and violent, towards the campus monuments and those who they were set up to commemorate.

Twenty years after the attacks on the World Trade Center we find ourselves in the middle of a global public health crisis of unprecedented proportions. At the height of the pandemic in December of 2020, the daily death toll in the United States surpassed for the first time that of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on every single day.

How do we begin to visualize or quantify the enormous loss in human lives and make it palpable? How do we mourn and commemorate those we have lost? Is there an appropriate way to memorialize this moment of individual and collective suffering in the history of our nation, especially in local minority and immigrant communities, which were hardest hit by the pandemic across the country? Do our memorial traditions provide us with appropriate forms of commemoration? Can artists' responses to previous traumatic events such as the First and Second World Wars, the horrors of the Holocaust, or the events of 9/11 provide us with viable models? In order to explore these questions, we reached out to artists and members of our local communities in and beyond Morningside Heights to invite proposals for memorial projects that will be presented in this section of the exhibition. Their responses will offer preliminary insights and possible answers.

Participating artists in this final section of the exhibition include Cathleen Campbell, Delano Dunn, Dianne Smith, Jonathan Calm, and Nyssa Chow.

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Fritz Koenig's Sphere, the Trauma of 9/11, and the Politics of Memory Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and responding to a vibrant popular and academic debate about the role and function of public monuments The Way We Remember: Koenig's Sphere, 9/11 and the Politics of Memory explores three distinct but interrelated themes surrounding the issues of public monuments; memory, trauma, postmemory; and the power of art to represent the past.

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https://massmoca.org/event/glenn-kaino-in-the-light-of-a-shadow/

I experienced this installation this summer at Mass Moca and immediately thought of Black Paint and the Curriculum lab. Would love to go back with folks to experience together and discuss. I know it's a bit far out but totally worth it! Hope to see you all soon, Katie

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MASS MoCA | Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

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Exhibition

On view through September 5, 2022

Glenn Kaino: In the Light of a Shadow is inspired by the connection between protests across the globe, specifically those in response to the tragic events known as "Bloody Sunday" from Selma, Alabama and Derry, Northern Ireland. The exhibition spans the entirety of MASS MoCA's signature football-field sized Building 5 gallery with an immersive installation that explores the power of collective action in forging a more just world.

The installation takes the form of a galaxy inside of which viewers will be immersed and surrounded by moving shadows and evocative soundscape. The theatrical space includes a representation of the Shadow V - a boat that was bombed by Northern Ireland's IRA, killing the British royal Lord Mountbatten - crashing into itself. Surrounding the boat are thousands of rocks, hundreds of which become tiny satellite ships. From these objects floating in space, a complex shadow show plays out before our eyes, placing us in the footsteps of protests past. Also in the main gallery is a circular sculpture made of metal bars, which, when struck in sequence with a baton, play the melody from U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday," transforming a barrier into a plea for violence, protest, and civil rights infractions to end. Alongside the sculpture will play a video that Kaino recorded with Deon Jones, an activist and singer who was brutalized by the police while protesting the murder of George Floyd. Made in collaboration with Larry Fong, Butch Vig, Jon Batiste, and Glenn Kotche, Jones and Kaino turn the classic song into a rallying cry for the present.

Ultimately, Kaino's In the Light of a Shadow is about remembering the past and forging a hopeful path forward.

Accompanying the exhibition will be the first comprehensive catalogue of Kaino's work, titled This Book is a Promise. Edited by exhibition curator Denise Markonish, the book will be published by DelMonico Books in the fall of 2021. Contributors include: magician Mike Caveney; scientists David Gruber and Janna Levin, curators Chus Martinez, and Laura Fried; writers Kimberly Juanita Brown, Amir Ahmadi Arian, and Brian Dooley.

Jon Batiste, Butch Vig Join Deon Jones for Cover of U2's 'Sunday Bloody Sunday', Rolling Stone, August 2020

About the Artist
Glenn Kaino's work spans an extraordinary range of media and creative activity. As a visual artist, he was chosen by the U.S. Department of State to represent the country in the 13th Cairo Biennale and was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the 12th Lyon Biennial, and Prospect.3 in New Orleans. He has had solo exhibitions at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, The Andy Warhol Museum, Performa 09, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Kaino has created various platforms for the production and dissemination of art and culture; he is co-founder of Deep River Gallery, a founding board member of LAXART and The Mistake Room, and is a current board member of Los Angeles' Hammer Museum, Fathomers, and The Music Center. Kaino recently released on Starz the documentary co-directed by Afshin Shahidi, With Drawn Arms, about his work with Olympian Tommie Smith, executive produced by John Legend and Jesse Williams.

The team behind the first project also includes Inny Clemons, Landon J. Thomas, IV, Matthew Selby, Brian Vasquez, and Derek DelGaudio.

Image courtesy of the artist

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Building 5Glenn Kaino: In the Light of a Shadow is inspired by the connection between protests across the globe, specifically those in response to the tragic events known as "Bloody Sunday" from Selma, Alabama and Derry, Northern Ireland. The exhibition spans the entirety of MASS MoCA's signature football-field sized Building 5 gallery with an immersive installation [...]

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I recorded sounds from my front porch. Crickets soloing in front of a chorus of crickets and cicadas. I imagined this being part of a soundtrack for an imagined movie about a band of crickets called Buddy Holly and the Crickets. In that film, the band deals with the consequences of fame and one cricket's idea of the (lone) genius. The rest of the band defines genius as emerging from the chorus (Hartman, 2019). The film is not yet made and, currently, looking for funding. Just kidding. Is the cricket performing a solo? Or, is that the limits of my vantage point? Seth

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Prof. Haeny Yoon created this beautiful site with teachers as a platform for public pedagogy, engaging others with the voices and experiences of teachers reckoning with racial histories and anti-racist teaching.

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We define public pedagogy as opportunities to make the politics and critical pedagogies of teaching and learning available and visible to a larger audience. While teachers have many stakeholders they are held accountable to, we also envision teachers as public intellectuals and engaged citizens.

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Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline at MoMA

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Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline at MoMA

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Listen to an audio tour exploring sites of freedom dreaming in Manhattan. This is a great follow up to our previous Black Paint event exploring the Fighting Dark audio tour presented by Black Gotham Experience.

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Scenes of beauty, life, and love in the midst of unfreedom are the inspiration behind the artist Tourmaline 's Pleasure Gardening walking tour. Organized on the occasion of the 2021 celebration of Juneteenth, the holiday that marks the emancipation of enslaved Black people in the United States, this audio tour of Manhattan brings together real spaces where people dreamed up and then practiced versions of freedom during slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude.

From Salacia and her vision of a counter-monument on Rikers Island to her recent body of photographs, Tourmaline has been captivated by pleasure gardens. In her research, she discovered that in the early 19th century these gardens-sometimes referred to as pleasure grounds or public gardens-arose along the edges of lower Manhattan, established by Black folks as a place where they could gather. While no photographs exist of these gardens, we can imagine them as places where Black people could feel the lushness of the earth or indulge with one another at a time when slavery was still legal.

We invite you to explore these stories in Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline, where you'll hear from the artist and others-including abolitionists, educators, historians, curators, and scholars-who not only cultivate their own pleasure gardens, but maintain those planted by our ancestors.

Through nine short audio stops accompanied by musician and mystic Laraaji's soundscape, this tour visits four sites across New York City. Wherever you are, you can follow along below as the stops are given more context and evocatively imagined through the illustrations of Ebony Flowers. You can also access a transcript of the tour here.

Introducing Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline

Ebony Flowers. Map of Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline walking tour. 2021

Boarding House for Black Sailors, 330 Pearl Street (Part 1)

Also known as the Colored Sailors' Home, the Boarding House for Black Sailors was founded in 1829 by Albro and Mary Lyons, prominent Black abolitionists who owned property throughout Manhattan and used their wealth to create opportunities for other Black people. The Boarding House-originally located on 20 Vandewater Street and intersecting with both Frankfort Street and Pearl Street-was destroyed in 1863. Its approximate location today is 330 Pearl Street.

Listen to Cynthia R. Copeland, public historian and president of the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village, discuss the connections between the Underground Railroad and the Boarding House for Black Sailors.

Boarding House for Black Sailors, 330 Pearl Street (Part 2)

In addition to functioning as a stop along the Underground Railroad and a place where freed Black people could find accommodation at a time of physical and financial exclusion, we might also imagine the Boarding House as a space where Black sailors came together to share laughs and secret glances, and perhaps even sunbathe, feeling the East River's breeze.

Hear from Tourmaline and her former college professor, Robin D. G. Kelley, as they consider some of the ways the Black sailors might have practiced freedom dreaming.

African Society for Mutual Relief, 42 Baxter Street (Part 1)

The African Society for Mutual Relief held its earliest meetings in a schoolhouse located on Rose Street. In 1820, 12 years after its founding, the Society moved to 42 Baxter Street (at that point named Orange Street), a transition aided by a gift of $1,800 from Juliette Noel Toussaint, who was married to one of the city's leading hairdressers in the early 19th century.

"You have to understand that [at that time] $1,800 was a lot of money for an association where members paid 25 cents a year to be members," says Mariame Kaba. "So it was a significant donation. She's a woman, a Black woman who very few people know the name of, but she was incredibly important to the mutual aid of Black New York."

Hear Mariame Kaba, founder of Project NIA, explore the history of the African Society for Mutual Relief.

African Society for Mutual Relief, 42 Baxter Street (Part 2)

The freedom dreams launched by the African Society for Mutual Relief continue to reverberate today, often in spite of-or, in the case of Marsha P. Johnson 's work, in resistance to-the systems of unfreedom that sit at Baxter Street.

Listen to Tourmaline as she reflects on the activism of Marsha P. Johnson at this site.

David Ruggles's Home, 36 Lispenard Street

Edmund V. Gillon. Church Street between Lispenard and Walker Streets. c. 1975. Edmund Vincent Gillon. Museum of the City of New York. 2013.3.1.824

By the time David Ruggles grew involved in New York's abolitionist movement, no Black person-free or otherwise-was safe in the city. On several occasions, emancipated Black residents were kidnapped and sold into slavery. It was in the middle of such persistent danger that Ruggles declared, "In our cause, mere words are nothing-action is everything."

No trace remains of David Ruggles's original home, which was located in the same spot as the brick building on the left-hand side of this photograph. Today the building houses a coffee shop, and only a plaque affixed toward the building's rear acknowledges this history and Ruggles's contributions.

Robin D. G. Kelley, reflecting on Ruggles and the freedom dreams he launched from his home, asks us to reflect on the stories and places that have been lost or forgotten: "What would New York City look like had there been more militant opposition, fighting to hold on to these spaces? How do you defend these spaces? Think about how many historic spaces were destroyed in New York, not yet by dramatic acts of violence, but by state policies of eminent domain, freeway construction, urban renewal-this sort of soft power that's been way more destructive."

Hear writer and activist Mariame Kaba describe the ways David Ruggles fought for the freedom of Black people within and beyond New York City.

Seneca Village, Central Park between West 82nd and West 89th Streets (Part 1)

At a time when New York City's Black residents were blocked from owning land, a Black community nevertheless arose. Spanning from 82nd to 89th streets, in what is now known as Central Park, Seneca Village was home to countless Black families. The community first began in 1825, after Andrew Williams, an African American man who lived downtown, purchased three lots of farmland.

"It does become somewhat of an integrated community," says Cynthia R. Copeland, an educator and public historian. "We did have female landowners in Seneca Village in the 19th century, which was just amazing. And to see people coming from different regions of the country-New Jersey and the Eastern seaboard, Maryland. We had somebody who supposedly came from out West. We had a member who was described as coming from Africa and somebody from Haiti. There's this mixed blend of families that is happening in the community."

Hear from Cynthia R. Copeland on how archaeological research has helped us reimagine Seneca Village.

Seneca Village, Central Park between West 82nd and West 89th Streets (Part 2)

Invoking eminent domain, the government's right to claim private property for public use, Seneca Village was razed to the ground as construction on Central Park began in 1857. Hundreds of people were displaced, and the effects of this forced movement remain difficult to uncover.

Still, the spirit of Seneca Village persists, taking new forms with each person who tends to this history. In Tourmaline's words: "As more and more people learn about the history of Seneca Village and the history of Central Park, people get to have their own relationships and make meaning from that place. This is really a story of our expansive desires, the history of them, and our now, using that [desire] as a launching pad to expand even more."

Listen to Tourmaline's reflections on the ways Seneca Village manifests today.

While no photos of Seneca Village have been confirmed, we know that early illustrations describing the community as a " squatter settlement" are far from accurate. We can begin to reimagine Seneca Village by looking at photographs of Central Park in the midst of construction in 1862, or right before construction began in 1858.

Yet perhaps the most meaningful representations of Seneca Village are those developed from the freedom dreams of artists and caretakers like Ebony Flowers, whose illustration shows us a vision of Seneca Village grounded not in empty space, but in people and community.

Credits
With special thanks to the guests who joined Tourmaline on her tour, including:
Cynthia R. Copeland, President, Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village
Mariame Kaba, Director, Project NIA
Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History, University of California, Los Angeles
Laraaji, musician and mystic
Some Additional Resources and Bibliography
Central Park Conservancy. Discover Seneca Village: Selected Research Topics and Resources. September 2020.

Central Park Conservancy. Seneca Village Site.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Black New Yorkers: 1613-1865. The New York Public Library.

Marie Warsh. " Exploring Northern Central Park: A History Told Through Rocks and Hills." Urban Omnibus, 2015.

Asha Futterman and Mariame Kaba. Radical Black Women of Harlem Walking Tour. Barnard Center for Research on Women.

The Black Gotham Archive.

Columbia University. Seneca Village Project.

MoMA PS1. Homeroom: Black Trans Liberation: Memoriam and Deliverance.

MoMA Audio is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

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Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline | Magazine | MoMA

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Scenes of beauty, life, and love in the midst of unfreedom are the inspiration behind the artist Tourmaline 's Pleasure Gardening walking tour. Organized on the occasion of the 2021 celebration of Juneteenth, the holiday that marks the emancipation of enslaved Black people in the United States, this audio tour of Manhattan brings together real spaces where people dreamed up and then practiced versions of freedom during slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude.

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You can filter by category (ex - education, housing, crime, taxes)

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In late 2017, HuffPost hit the road with a simple mission: to listen to the concerns of people across the country. Hundreds of people told us about the local and personal issues they are confronting in this first half of Donald Trump's presidency. Their words are relevant in this moment, as we head into a critical - and fascinating - midterm election season. Choose a category below and listen to America yourself.

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In late 2017, HuffPost hit the road with a simple mission: to listen to the concerns of people across the country. Hundreds of people told us about the local and personal issues they are confronting in this first half of Donald Trump's presidency.

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Sarah and I had our own private Black Paint event back in March to see the Broken Nature Exhibit at MoMa. Now there's a podcast that looks at how design can tackle some of our environmental challenges. The exhibit is up through Aug 15th

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It turns out it's National Poetry Month

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Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser and Toyo Suyemoto help make sense of challenging times.

I don't write poetry, and until recently, I didn't read it. Poetry is too beautiful, and I'm too self-conscious to try to create it. So when I was approached by a foundation to create an animated video series for National Poetry Month, I immediately thought no.

For the past 12 months, I've overworked myself to avoid any pauses in the day where feelings might creep in. Because how can I make sense of this year? If I try, I'm pretty sure my mind might short-circuit, that smoke will spill out of my ears and the room will smell of burning plastic.

But then I spent some time with these works. They were chosen by the contemporary American poets who lent their voice to the videos, because the verses were helping them puzzle through their feelings about this past year (you can read what they had to say about the poems below). I also started to find the answers in these poems. A poem is a timeless place, an immaterial plot of land where we can gather across generations to breathe and feel, deeply and safely.

Thank goodness for poetry. I might be embarrassed, but at least now my heart has instructions for survival.

What's a line from a poem that has helped you navigate a difficult time, or encapsulates your outlook on life? Let us know in the comments.

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'Democracy' by Langston Hughes

Democracy will not come today, this year, nor ever through compromise and fear. I have as much right as the other fellow has to stand on my two feet, and own the land. I tire so of hearing people say let things take their course, tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. I cannot live on tomorrows bread. Freedom is a strong seed, planted in a great need. I live here too. I want freedom just as you.

Langston Hughes used poetry to call out America's complications and bigotries when many other poets were writing nationalistic jingles. At the same time, his poems were soundtracks for Black American life, infused with jazz and blues and the clarity of protest. That's why Hughes's poems are timeless: They refused to make excuses for America's legacy of oppression, the same legacy we're still grappling with now. - Adrian Matejka

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'Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)' by Muriel Rukeyser

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings, I would be more or less insane. The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories. The news would pour out of various devices, interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices. They would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly, I would get to pen and paper, make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day, I would be reminded of those men and women, brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, we would try to imagine them, try to find each other, to construct peace, to make love, to reconcile waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means to reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, to let go the means, to wake. I lived in the first century of these wars.

What astounds me about Muriel Rukeyser's poem is how it captures both the sense of isolation and deep connection that mark our everyday lives during moments of turmoil. Rukeyser's words sound as if they could have been written in the last year, and in this way, the poem reaches across time and circumstance to remind us that we can endure what seems unendurable. The poem reminds us that even as times of disaster call upon us to reckon with "the limits of ourselves," these times also lead us to forge communal bonds "beyond ourselves." - Deborah Paredez

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'Barracks Home' by Toyo Suyemoto

This is our barracks, squatting on the ground, tar papered shacks partitioned into rooms by sheetrock walls, transmitting every sound of neighbor's gossip with a sweep of brooms. The open door welcomes the refugees, and now, at least, there is no need to roam afar. Here, space enlarges memories beyond the bounds of camp, and this new home. The floor is carpeted with dust, wind-borne dry alkali patterned with insect feet. What peace can such a place as this impart? We can but sense, bewildered and forlorn, that time, disrupted by the war from neat routines, must now adjust within the heart.

I was struck by how Toyo Suyemoto's poems felt so quiet, considering the pain and anger she felt at being incarcerated in Topaz, Utah, during World War II. But her poetry is also very pointed - a careful listener will note that "Barracks Home" is a sonnet. Suyemoto's formal choice is, I think, a dig at the fears that U.S. politicians had about Japanese and Japanese-Americans, that they weren't culturally assimilable.

The sonnet form shows that she has mastered the highest literary traditions that mark the West, but her subject matter reminds us of how she and other Japanese-Americans have now been cast out of this culture into a new, bewildering and utterly hostile environment whose "open door welcomes ... refugees," a place that itself mocks the idea of home, and the promise of America. - Paisley Rekdal

Sindha Agha (@SindhaAgha) is a filmmaker and writer in Los Angeles. She produced the Op-Docs " How to Be Alone" and " Birth Control Your Own Adventure." These videos are part of the "Twenty Ten Twenty-Five" project produced by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (@MellonFnd).

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Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser and Toyo Suyemoto help make sense of challenging times. I don't write poetry, and until recently, I didn't read it. Poetry is too beautiful, and I'm too self-conscious to try to create it. So when I was approached by a foundation to create an animated video series for National Poetry Month, I immediately thought no.

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I pressed a fern and ivy leaf over the winter - the only green things in Morningside Park at that time. The frame became a loom with yarn from the kit, and I wove these leaves in with some dead vines on campus, my pandemic home (... forgot to water those...), and fragments from collaborative projects (the strips of water from a photo of Battery Park, a piece of fabric with text from a Pinar paper).

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I live within walking distance of the corner where my grandfather grew up. I know so little about his past, and he seems to have (intentionally?) forgotten much of his, so it has been really stirring to physically visit a meaningful place for him. I took a photo of the corner to send to my mom the other day, and she said he stared at it for a very long time. He has also been telling me recently how excited he is to know I am in New York, so it seems that the place has awakened something in him too. Using tape, paint, and letters from the stickers, I attempted to reconstruct the corner as he would have known it, based on an old photograph. I pasted the definition for homotype from a random document my roommate had lying around (with permission). The definition is : an organ or part having a structure similar to that of another organ or part. -Rachel

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María’s Great Expedition, by Christina Fernandez

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María’s Great Expedition, by Christina Fernandez

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I was intrigued by the curricular aspects of this photographic art piece, and especially this excerpt from the interview, which is relevant to our ongoing work and our recent "making" sessions:

You are also a teacher. In María’s Great Expedition in particular, how do you find that the roles of artist and educator intersect and/or correspond?

At the time that I created María’s Great Expedition I was not yet a teacher. The teaching would come later. The work attempts to take on the conventions of photographic movements and styles of the time that they are meant to represent, such as Dorothea Lange’s FSA photographic style as the look and inspiration for “1930.” María’s Great Expedition is didactic in the sense that it tells or teaches a story that is rarely or never told in the art museum. It is “educational.” Also understanding photographic history and its technological evolution and its effect on the language of the photograph is integral to teaching. So I could say that the development of María’s Great Expedition during my last year of graduate school was laying the groundwork for how I now teach.

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To Christina Fernandez, her great-grandmother, María Gonzales, is a legend. "She was somebody I was told about.... Somebody to be proud of, someone who had merit-and the reason we were here in 'America.'" After interviewing family members about María and learning more about the political context that led her to the United States, Fernandez brought her relative's story to life through a museum-like display. María's Great Expedition uses maps and texts, as well as photographs, to illustrate the physical patterns of migration and to expose the toll immigration takes on an individual. Each photograph chronicles not only María's experience, but also the changing conventions of modern photography. For this month's New to MoMA, in which we explore a recent addition to the Museum's collection, associate curator of photography Lucy Gallun spoke to Fernandez about her great-grandmother and why migration stories have a particular urgency today.

Lucy Gallun: The various components of María's Great Expedition, and how it is displayed-with maps and texts in English and Spanish accompanying each of the six photographs-shapes how we experience it. Can you talk about this strategy? What display formats were you looking to as examples?

Christina Fernandez: I wanted the presentation to be like a natural history museum display, where there is an abundance of information, texts, maps, charts, etc. I was putting forward María's migration story as that of an explorer, akin to [Juan Rodríguez] Cabrillo or [Antonio de] Ulloa. [Their sea journeys appear on María's map.] I recontextualized her story by positing migration as an exploration or expedition, and that explains the title of the work. The display, with texts on a shelf (with corresponding photos above and a composite map on the left) is important as it provides visual weight to the text, elevating its importance as equal to the photographs. Displayed this way, the work feels more whole. I considered doing an audio component, and making the text like the wall label that accompanies works of art, but in the end, none of this seemed right. The composite map foregrounds the photographs and text, giving the audience a context or point of reference to look at María's journey as an "expedition."

This is a story rarely told in the Museum.

The texts that accompany each photograph are crucial components of the work, providing a context alongside the staging of the portraits and the props within the images themselves. Through narrative, you interweave María's experiences together with political events. What was your process of writing these texts? How were these stories about María's life passed down to you?
María was already a legend in my family. She was somebody I was told about, and being the oldest granddaughter, I was always all ears in family conversations. (I think I know more than the adults ever wanted me to know!) But because of this she was sort of in my head, somebody to be proud of, someone who had merit-and the reason we were here in "America." Her hard work shaped the family work ethic and the desire to achieve both academically and within our chosen careers. I interviewed my grandfather, whose mother she was, as well as my grandmother who became a kind of confidant to María when she lived with my grandparents. (The greatest resource for details about her life was my grandmother.) I also spoke to Natalia, her only daughter, and my mother and aunt. All who knew a little of her story. These interviews not only shaped the text but also the images.

For the social and political contexts, I read a lot. Rudolfo Acuna's Occupied America: A History of Chicanos and Vickie L. Ruiz's portion of Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives were central to this research. Without these texts, I doubt I would have been able to synthesize María's story effectively...or it would have taken a lot longer. The process of reading and absorbing the information and then, as eloquently as possible, incorporating it into María's story, was one I enjoyed very much. It brought her to life for me, and I realized how difficult things had been for her and others like her. The racism, sexism, and elitism she endured, her desire to leave her country of origin and its religion behind, and branch out into the vast unknown (at least, unknown to her) of the Southwest.

You are also a teacher. In María's Great Expedition in particular, how do you find that the roles of artist and educator intersect and/or correspond?

At the time that I created María's Great Expedition I was not yet a teacher. The teaching would come later. The work attempts to take on the conventions of photographic movements and styles of the time that they are meant to represent, such as Dorothea Lange's FSA photographic style as the look and inspiration for "1930." María's Great Expedition is didactic in the sense that it tells or teaches a story that is rarely or never told in the art museum. It is "educational." Also understanding photographic history and its technological evolution and its effect on the language of the photograph is integral to teaching. So I could say that the development of María's Great Expedition during my last year of graduate school was laying the groundwork for how I now teach.
California is the endpoint of María's journey, you yourself live and work in Los Angeles, and the city itself plays a significant role in much of your work. In fact, California audiences will have had more frequent opportunities to see this work than New York audiences, which was certainly on our minds when we pursued it for MoMA's collection. Did you envision how contemporary audiences in California might respond to María's story? What about when the work is viewed in other geographies?
I knew that I was speaking to a specific audience-a Latinx, Southwest audience-at least at the time the work was conceived. I wanted my chosen community to be encouraged and edified by her story. Over the years I have begun to realize that her story goes beyond my family and the geography of the Southwest. I think the recognition of women's strength is something that can never be overdone or overstated. Critically, the work has not been received well for whatever reason, but this has not seemed to impact the interest in the work from audiences or curators. Because of this, I think most people can relate to her migration story. The story needs to be specific enough to be interesting and general enough to appeal to everyone-it's a fine balance. I think the work strikes this balance.
The work prompts us to consider how both the hardships of migration and its possibilities continue to shape future generations. At the Museum, we've benefited from the expertise of Megan Feingold, coordinator in the Department of Photography, who as part of her own scholarship on the work has noted its relevance today. This is true on a wide scale but also on a personal level: By picturing yourself in the guise of María, you convey in a physical way how her experiences had a direct impact on you, her descendant. Why did you choose to take on the role? What was the experience of "playing" this part?
I had to embody her. Originally, I had conceived the piece as a family photograph and text piece with handwritten elements. However, I found out that there were only two existing photographs of María. This speaks to the ubiquity and at the same time rarity of the photographic record of one's life at that time. Who gets photographed? I could not work with just two photos. My grandfather had always told me that I looked like María, and my middle name is also María, so I decided to be her in the photographs.

I was given a small honorarium by the Mexican Museum, who originally commissioned the work through curator Chon Noriega. I decided to use the honorarium to produce the work. It was a collaborative process: favors from friends, borrowing a car, a camera, a kitchen. It was quite an undertaking. At the same time, I recognized I could not completely and accurately reconstruct the different time periods, I didn't really even want to do this. I included anachronisms to let the audience know that this is a reconstruction or "reenactment." By including contemporary elements into the photos, I wanted to convey the idea that this migration story is historical but also still relevant and current.

María did her part in creating people that make a difference. I won't go into details about my grandfather's and mother's activism, but María's life became a kind of foundation for courage and independence within my family that certainly influenced me.

María's Great Expedition is currently on view in MoMA's third-floor galleries.

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Christina Fernandez's María's Great Expedition | Magazine | MoMA

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To Christina Fernandez, her great-grandmother, María Gonzales, is a legend. "She was somebody I was told about.... Somebody to be proud of, someone who had merit-and the reason we were here in 'America.'" After interviewing family members about María and learning more about the political context that led her to the United States, Fernandez brought her relative's story to life through a museum-like display.

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scores for walking - mauriah donegan kraker

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audio scores for walking are gentle ways to say a little hello to body, a hello to the place you are in. these walks are meant to be taken at a slow to medium pace. the duration of each walk is about 45 minutes.

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Anna Deavere Smith performance at Lincoln Center (virtual) on Saturday 4/10

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Anna Deavere Smith performance at Lincoln Center (virtual) on Saturday 4/10

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Written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith, By One Route, and By Another is a staged reading in which Smith explores kindness, hospitality, and hope. Featuring individual portraits of real-life figures, Margaret Mead, Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, Ntozake Shange, Trudy Howell, and Matthieu Ricard, this Lincoln Center commission is newly curated by the artist in response to current events. Live, virtual Q&A session to follow the reading.

Join us April 6-10 for a three-part series with Anna Deavere Smith, including a conversation, keynote talk, and staged reading.
For any questions about the event or Lincoln Center Activate, please contact: [email protected] .
About the Artist:
Anna Deavere Smith is an actress and playwright. She is credited with having developed a new form of theater through which she creates portraits of real people based on interviews, revealing aspects of American identity. In original pieces covering topics as diverse as the school-to-prison pipeline ( Notes from the Field), race-related violence ( Twilight: Los Angeles and  Fires in the Mirror), and health care ( Let Me Down Easy), Smith interviews hundreds of individuals and creates plays that portray diverse communities and world views. Smith is recognizable to television and film audiences from performances in Black-ish, The West Wing, Nurse Jackie, For the People, Philadelphia, The American President and Rachel Getting Married. Her many honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, and the National Humanities Medal bestowed by President Obama. She is also an author and a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. In the 1980s, she was a faculty member with Lincoln Center Institute, the education and research division of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts at the time.

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By One Route, and By Another: A Performance by Anna Deavere Smith · Lincoln Center at Home

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Written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith, By One Route, and By Another is a staged reading in which Smith explores kindness, hospitality, and hope. Featuring individual portraits of real-life figures, Margaret Mead, Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, Ntozake Shange, Trudy Howell, and Matthieu Ricard, this Lincoln Center commission is newly curated by the artist in response to current events.

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March 26-28th!

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BLACK FUTURES Symposium

Join us for our first-ever virtual program: BLACK FUTURES, a free, three-day digital symposium presented by The Underground Museum in partnership with One World. Organized by editors Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, the symposium will consider what it means to be Black and alive right now and will expand on the constellation of offerings and provocations found in BLACK FUTURES. We're coming at you strong with a weekend full of music, meditation, film screenings, and moderated conversations.

In the days leading up to the symposium, you'll receive a follow-up email with the link to the event. In the meantime, take a look at the full program schedule.

The symposium will provide ASL and live captioning on all three days. Additionally, after the event, we will publish full transcripts of all segments as well as select playlists from music sets.
Please note that all We are officially out of care packages! Thank you for the overwhelming response. times are in Pacific Time (PT).

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BLACK FUTURES Symposium Join us for our first-ever virtual program: BLACK FUTURES, a free, three-day digital symposium presented by The Underground Museum in partnership with One World. Organized by editors Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, the symposium will consider what it means to be Black and alive right now and will expand on the constellation of offerings and provocations found in BLACK FUTURES.

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This process of composing music over multiple live streaming platforms was so interesting in light of our earlier conversations on Zoom audio conventions and improv -

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Alarm Will Sound used multiple videoconferencing tools to master the ambiguities of Tyshawn Sorey's "Autoschediasms."

Credit... via Four/Ten Media

Last month, I did something I used to do often before the pandemic: I watched a rehearsal. But this time it wasn't a matter of sitting in a concert hall and watching a group work onstage.

Sixteen instrumentalists from the contemporary music ensemble Alarm Will Sound were scattered across several states and four makeshift home offices and professional studios, working with Tyshawn Sorey on his "Autoschediasms." To synchronize everyone's efforts, each "pod" of musicians was simultaneously logged into two different internet conferencing applications.

One web browser tool, LiveLab, used the rectangular, talking-head format familiar from months of Zoom. But since video conferencing is rife with delays in sound signals, not to mention less than stellar quality, the musicians' microphones were separately fed into a mixing board on the higher-fidelity audio program Jamulus.

Participants muted themselves on LiveLab and played (or asked questions) over Jamulus. Alarm Will Sound's technical team fixed connectivity problems on the fly. It was an ingenious, if occasionally awkward, way of bringing this top-flight ensemble together safely - without sacrificing too much audio quality.

The abbreviations and coded signals on Mr. Sorey's index cards gave shape to a performance realized through improvisational means. Credit... via Alarm Will Sound

Credit... via Alarm Will Sound

Instead, before Mr. Sorey's first downbeat was visible on LiveLab, he could be seen scribbling signs and signals on index cards. "Autoschediasms" (pronounced auto-SKED-ee-AZ-ums) is, in fact, not even a discrete work, but refers to his idiosyncratic process of spontaneous, interdependent group composition. (Pre-pandemic, he used whiteboards to get the instructions across.)

The abbreviations and coded signals on Mr. Sorey's index cards gave shape to a performance realized through improvisational means, yet bounded by the composer's quick-responding ear. Mr. Sorey might show a collection of signals to all four pods, or to just one; while instructing one group to repeat some spontaneous material that he had just heard and liked, he might then direct another group to play contrasting, new material. (Mr. Sorey cites conducting systems pioneered by Butch Morris and Anthony Braxton as influences on his own process.)

I'd seen ensembles work with Mr. Sorey in this manner. But the music he and Alarm Will Sound achieved with its jury-rigged patchwork of tech tools was alternately raucous and peaceable - sometimes suggestive of his small-ensemble work in jazz clubs as a percussionist and bandleader, but always controlled.

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The percussionist Matt Smallcomb played from a studio in New Jersey. Credit... Chihiro Shibayama

Perhaps even too controlled, for Mr. Sorey's taste. During a feedback session between rehearsal takes, Mr. Sorey invited the musicians to "challenge" him. "It's OK to play something super loud, and let something rip, or whatever," he said. "Because I might enjoy it." When they came back for the next take, the "Autoschediasms" sound was even more varied and scorching.

A subsequent filmed 24-minute performance - available on Alarm Will Sound's YouTube account as the latest in the group's Video Chat Variations series - has some clearly discernible dramatic pivots. At the outset, delicate darts from an oboe are laid atop starkly droning strings. Multiphonic effects from clarinet and bass clarinet gradually add to the density. In the seventh minute, spiraling patterns from the piano help foster a turn away from the thick, storm-cloud timbral environment, and toward a newly melodic approach. After a piano cluster chord detonates near the midpoint, there is a brief turn toward jazzlike suavity, including pizzicato bass and some stellar muted trumpet. After a peak of momentum, the final minutes find the group relaxing into more meditative, minimalist moods.

The performance sidelines the group's regular conductor, Alan Pierson. But along with the executive director, Gavin Chuck, Mr. Pierson is the one who helped spearhead the group's technical operation for a time of quarantine. And his interest in improvisation first brought Mr. Sorey into Alarm Will Sound's repertoire last year.

"He's throwing all these signs at people," Mr. Pierson said, "and any time anyone misinterprets a sign, he is on it.

"I was so struck with the brilliance with which Tyshawn gave people ideas," Mr. Pierson said, adding, "He's receiving information as much as he's giving information."

In the ensemble's released version of "Autoschediasms," the low-lit cameras make things seem a bit more melancholy than what I observed during rehearsals; there aren't many smiles visible. But the companionability of the collaborators was also clear, during interviews, after the September rehearsal.

"One thing I really like about Tyshawn's method is he creates a level playing field," Erin Lesser, a flutist, said. "He demands that every player jump in and be bold. So we're all beginners and we're all experts in what we bring. And I love that he doesn't have any preconceived notions, like, 'this person plays jazz' and 'this person is more classical.' He doesn't know any of that, and he doesn't care."

The crisp videography and editing conveys how Mr. Sorey presides over all this activity. It also preserves some mystery, since many of his glyphs and codes run slightly off frame, or are overexposed.

That might be intentional. Mr. Sorey and his music tend to avoid detailed explanations and to foster a sense of exploration. In a brief interview, he described his role in "Autoschediasms" as both "composer and co-composer." He wants the group to take responsibility for the creation of each performance - an ambiguity that can sound almost like a dare to classical music's traditional structures and hierarchies.

"Musicians, sometimes they make a mistake," he said. "When something is done, that's a challenge to me, to make something musical out of it. The question is not how you got there. It's how you get out of it."

Mr. Sorey wants the group to take responsibility for the creation of each performance - an ambiguity that can sound almost like a dare to classical music's traditional structures and hierarchies. Credit... via Alarm Will Sound

It's not that Mr. Sorey is against a more typical assignment of roles or division of labor. Two major orchestras are preparing works of his for livestreamed premieres in November - a violin concerto in Detroit and a cello concerto in Seattle - and he is scheduled to contribute early next year to Opera Philadelphia's digital season. Alarm Will Sound has also been working on a socially distanced studio recording of a fully notated Sorey score, "For George Lewis."

But this cultivation of multiple working methods - for performers as well as listeners - is an integral part of his art. You might approach this latest video release with that in mind. On a first pass, you might watch "Autoschediasms," to appreciate the creativity of Mr. Sorey's conducting, the work of the individual players, as well as the superb technical coordination of Alarm Will Sound's production team. But the second time you press play, you might choose to close your eyes, and just listen.

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17 Players in Five States, Composing Over the Internet

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Alarm Will Sound used multiple videoconferencing tools to master the ambiguities of Tyshawn Sorey's "Autoschediasms." Last month, I did something I used to do often before the pandemic: I watched a rehearsal. But this time it wasn't a matter of sitting in a concert hall and watching a group work onstage.

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Dr. Bob answers questions about the covid vaccine from teens at The Door, a NYC based adolescent health center. The 1-minute video excerpts might be helpful to share with  MS and HS students who have questions.

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The Door's Dr. Bob and Youth Council Members Talk About Vaccines

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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there are many kinds of labs at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

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This website uses cookies as well as similar tools and technologies to understand visitors' experiences. By continuing to use this website, you consent to Columbia University's usage of cookies and similar technologies, in accordance with the Columbia University Website Cookie Notice

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This website uses cookies as well as similar tools and technologies to understand visitors' experiences. By continuing to use this website, you consent to Columbia University's usage of cookies and similar technologies, in accordance with the Columbia University Website Cookie Notice

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This interview raises interesting issues about black collaborations in architecture and the different standards to which they may be held to fix social problems over creating more speculative visions of communities/life/living.

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A new collective of Black architects and artists, formed out of a show now at MoMA, aims to "reclaim the larger civic promise of architecture."

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What's below is a conversation with members of the Black Reconstruction Collective, which came together during the past year and a half, in tandem with an exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art called " Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America." The collective's members are the 10 architects, artists and designers in the exhibition.

The show includes some mind-bending, beautiful work, on view through the end of May. But the collective emerged to serve longer-term, more radical goals.

It taps into a legacy of Black collectives from earlier eras. In 1893, Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass joined to publish " The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition." Seven years later, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and Thomas J. Calloway organized a display of charts and photographs about the African-American experience to counter depictions of Black Americans at the world's fair in Paris.

These were necessary responses to a system of cultural exclusion that, time and again, erased, demeaned and denied Blackness. By the 1960s, in the wake of the Black Power movement, a variety of Black artists' collectives had coalesced, among them Spiral, which included Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden; Amiri Baraka's Black Arts Movement; and AfriCobra, a Chicago-based Black artists' commune.

"We have a responsibility beyond the exhibition, beyond us," is how Amanda Williams, a Chicago-based architect and artist, and one of the members of the Black Reconstruction Collective, summed up the group's thinking.

The MoMA show was organized by Sean Anderson, an associate curator at the museum, and Mabel O. Wilson, an architect, Columbia University professor and author, among much else, of "White by Design," which describes the Modern's failure to display and collect works by Black architects and designers.

"Reconstructions" proceeds from a question: "How do we construct Blackness?" The architects enlisted to answer this question are a multigenerational mix, including some familiar names. Nearly all run small or solo practices.

Their projects occupy rooms at the Modern dedicated to Philip Johnson, the New York power broker, architect and founding director of MoMA's architecture department, who died in 2005, at 98. Members of the collective petitioned the museum to remove Johnson's name from the wall because of his history of racism and Nazi sympathy. The museum declined. "Manifesting Statement," a textile by the collective, temporarily covers the name up.

Other works in the show remap Los Angeles according to Black settlement patterns. They picture a mile-long stretch of Oakland rebuilt according to principles outlined in the Black Panthers' 10 Point Program. They contemplate how Black people might "navigate their way to free space," which can take the form of the open sea or outer space - a project that also recalls Kinloch, Mo. Having thrived for generations as an incorporated Black town, Kinloch ended up a victim of urbicide when authorities in neighboring St. Louis converted town land to build an airport.

All of these projects reimagine architecture from the perspective of Black people, a mission of the collective - and a first for the Modern. Until now, the museum hasn't devoted any exhibition to African-American architects. There is nothing in its permanent collection by major Black architects like Paul Revere Williams, J. Max Bond Jr., Vertner Woodson Tandy or Amaza Lee Meredith. Since 1929, when MoMA opened its doors, it has acquired only two works by Black designers, both since 2016, neither of them strictly architecture: one is Charles Harrison's " View-master (model G) " from 1962, the other a series of photographs by Amanda Williams.

Which is to say, the Modern itself partly necessitated the Black Reconstruction Collective. The group addresses the bigger question: How can Blackness construct America? Four of the members gathered on Zoom the other day to talk about the collective's impetus and goals: Amanda Williams, Emanuel Admassu, J. Yolande Daniels and V. Mitch McEwen. The four were chosen as representatives by the other members: Sekou Cooke, Germane Barnes, Felecia Davis, Mario Gooden, Walter Hood and Olalekan Jeyifous.

The following is an edited, condensed version of the conversation.

The architect Amaza Lee Meredith, who died in 1984.

Michael Kimmelman How did the idea of a collective come up?

Amanda Williams It was partly born from a lack of awareness by MoMA about what it meant to invite Black and (predominantly) solo practitioners to do a show like this. We were each given insufficient stipends to make full-scale, one-to-one objects. The real cost of doing this sort of thing may not mean much to big firms like OMA or Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who've been in MoMA shows. For them it may be the marketing budget on a single competition, I don't know. But this reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of what it took for us to produce work of the caliber that we are capable of. There's often an attitude when Black people enter certain spaces, despite having all the pedigrees and credentials, that we are like high schoolers getting a special chance. So early on, we started talking to each other, asking, "What if we pooled our resources?"

J. Yolande Daniels There was also, I think, an assumption in our discussions with the exhibition advisory board that our projects were supposed to solve social problems, that that's what Black architects do - we do community housing, as if it's still the 1960s. That way of thinking about African-American practitioners doesn't afford us the luxury of doing speculative or other kinds of work, which white architects are automatically afforded.
That wasn't the brief from MoMA, was it - do affordable housing?
Emanuel Admassu No, but whenever you have a group of Black people in a predominantly white institution the idea is that it's our responsibility to fix racism.

Williams Don't worry! We're here now! The word inclusion makes my skin crawl, because in a context like this it implies tolerance: tolerating Black people, tolerating a monolithic idea of Blackness. Instead of inclusion I prefer collectivity, the sharing of things - power, vision, access - which is not the typical mind-set of institutions like MoMA and of people in positions of privilege and power, who tend to be straight, white and male. As Black architects and artists, we realized as we became involved with this show that we had to form a collective whether we liked it or not. Black people in every profession have to place the collective ahead of the individual. Ultimately, we have little choice. But we also realized that we could use the opportunity - that forming a collective could be the project's most radical gesture.

So what are your goals?
Admassu The exhibition is just a passing event. All the research we've done, all the amazing conversations we had about reconstruction, architecture and race with the advisory committee that Mabel and Sean put together - the museum didn't seem to have any agenda going forward. We asked about the possibility of endowing a curatorial position to focus on race and architecture, about whether there are long-term plans to address the history of exclusion. There was no answer. The museum is committed long-term to programs around the environment and sustainability, but when it comes to the last 500 years of colonization and subjugation of Black people, it's a different story.

V. Mitch McEwen That's an understatement. MoMA created an effectively Whites Only architecture archive and department, by design. Engaging with these issues in the context of primarily white institutions can be emotionally draining and rife with conflicts. A number of us are on the boards of various national architecture organizations, whose origins tend to go back to groups of the most privileged architects sharing their European drawing techniques and travel sketches. We've seen from the inside the need for a radical shift in the role that architecture can play in civil society, whether it's around issues like climate change or inequality. We can't afford to keep waiting for the old models to adapt. We need to begin a different kind of work with each other.

Daniels So we spent long hours establishing the collective as a 501(c)(3), an independent nonprofit, to pursue liberation practices, to raise money and provide platforms for other African-American architects, including students. I remember what it felt like when I was a Columbia student 30 years ago, how isolated I felt as a Black woman. Last year, in the course of putting the MoMA show together, the collective organized talks at Columbia, Harvard and M.I.T., and we heard back from Black students who said the talks really helped them deal with their sense of isolation. It was very moving.

You said liberation practices.
Daniels They begin by asking questions like, What is an architecture of reconstruction? Can we imagine an architecture of reparations? What might be the architecture of Black futurity?

Admassu How can we redefine what architecture means?

Daniels Because as constituted, architecture rejects Blackness. Within the field of architecture there are certain terms and theories involving autonomy, critical distance. These terms basically support whiteness by rejecting, or devaluing, all other forms of experience, especially minority experience, because these other experiences are not abstract, they're too subjective. I went to this lecture by Fernando Lara ...
A Brazilian architect and professor at the University of Texas, Austin.
Daniels Right. And he was talking about abstraction and colonialism, how those things are all tied together and, in effect, make up the tool kit of modern architects. Architectural theories involving autonomy and critical distance basically support whiteness by rejecting other forms of experience - the Black experience, the Native American experience - because these other experiences are not abstract, they're too subjective.

McEwen The status quo depends on a backward concept, which is that architecture is expensive, luxurious, elite and (pseudo) avant-garde - whereas I think architecture can be cheap, temporary, flexible.

Admassu I agree with Mitch. Mabel Wilson makes a distinction between buildings and Architecture, because Architecture with a capital A implies an academic infrastructure of discourse and knowledge production tied to Europe, whereas buildings are made all over the world. Part of what our collective wants to do is reclaim the larger, civic promise of architecture.

Williams I've stopped worrying about Architecture with a capital A. We should just be talking about spatial practice. How can Black people move through spaces in ways that are self-determined? Ultimately, we should be designing for freedom in these spaces - not a freedom from, but a freedom to.

McEwen The terminology is complicated. Four years ago I did a workshop in Detroit on reparations, and activists who showed up got very excited when I started talking about building for reparations, because in the lexicon of Black politics, you build when you talk with someone. You say, "I want to build with you." It means I want to engage in politics. I want to build a movement. When I said, no, I meant actually building, folks suddenly seemed deflated, as if talking about the literally built environment negated the rhetoric of empowerment. They said, "We're going to build joy. We're going to build sharing. We're going to build our arts together." I was like, that's great, and can we also start to put some parameters around where and how much we're going to reimagine the built environment? They thought that I was missing the nuance. I think that's on architecture - the sense that architecture is not about building community, that it's about exploiting people like us.

There's a widespread misperception that it's just for rich people, museums, academics, or what's on HGTV.

Admassu Let me add, I'm a Black immigrant who moved to the United States as a teenager from the continent of Africa. You cross the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is basically a planetary scar dividing Africa from the Americas, and to the west you become Black. To the east, you're Yoruba, Amhara or whatever. Part of our goal as a collective is thinking about how these spaces, which are not considered architecture, come to be imbued with meaning because of how Black people occupy them - and in doing so, expand the conversation around Black spatial practices beyond the United States.
Your project for MoMA focuses on Atlanta, Emanuel, and spaces like highways, strip malls and parking lots. Mitch, you conjure up an alternate New Orleans in which a failed 1811 uprising against slave owners had succeeded. You ask a remarkable question: "What architecture would Black people have already invented if we had been truly free for the last 210 years?" So that's the goal of the collective.
McEwen As a discipline, architecture involves lots of speculative work. It allows us to picture what this country might look like, what reparations might look like.

Williams Folks who go to the MoMA show and expect to find the next 10 great Black architects, the next Paul R. Williams or Vertner Tandy, or who think we're going to solve gentrification - or other problems we understand personally and very well but didn't create - they won't find any of that. We need the next Paul Williams. But we also need to create the conditions for change.

Williams To empower architecture as a vehicle for liberation and joy.

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A new collective of Black architects and artists, formed out of a show now at MoMA, aims to "reclaim the larger civic promise of architecture." What's below is a conversation with members of the Black Reconstruction Collective, which came together during the past year and a half, in tandem with an exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art called " Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America."

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Ann Patchett wrote this riveting account of her slow dispersal of the objects of her life.

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I wanted to get rid of my possessions, because possessions stood between me and death.

I started thinking about getting our house in order when Tavia's father died. Tavia, my friend from early childhood (and youth, and middle age, and these years on the downhill slalom), grew up in unit 24-S of the Georgetown condominiums in Nashville. Her father, Kent, had moved there in the seventies, after his divorce, and stayed. Over the years, we had borne witness to every phase of his personal style: Kent as sea captain (navy peacoat, beard, pipe), Kent as the lost child of Studio 54 (purple), Kent as Gordon Gekko (Armani suits, cufflinks, tie bar), Kent as Jane Fonda (tracksuits, matching trainers), Kent as urban cowboy (fifteen pairs of boots, custom-made), and finally, his last iteration, which had, in fact, underlain all previous iterations, Kent as cosmic monk (loose cotton shirts, cotton drawstring pants-he'd put on weight).

Each new stage in his evolution brought a new set of interests: new art, new cooking utensils, new reading material, new bathroom tile. Kent taught drama at a public high school, and, on his schoolteacher's salary, in the years before the Internet, he shopped the world from home-mala prayer beads carved in the shape of miniature human skulls, an assortment of Buddhas to mix in with his wooden statues of saints (Padre Pio in his black cassock, as tall as a five-year-old). He laminated the receipts and letters of authenticity that came with his purchases and filed them away, along with handwritten prayers, in zippered leather pouches.

I grew up in 24-S, in the same way that Tavia grew up in my family's house. We knew the contents of each other's pantries and the efficacy of each other's shampoos. And, though our house was much larger (it was a house, after all), the domain of the Cathcarts-Kent and Tavia and Tavia's older sister, Therese-had a glamour and an exoticism that far exceeded anything most Catholic schoolgirls had seen. Candles were lit at all hours of the day. The walk-in closet in Kent's bedroom had been converted into a shrine for meditation and prayer. A round, footed machine that looked like a plate-size U.F.O. burped out cascades of fog from the kitchen counter. The dining-room chairs were spring green, with backs carved to mimic the signs of the Paris Métro-a flourish of Art Nouveau transplanted to Nashville. Kent had had the seats of those chairs reupholstered in hot-pink patent leather. Tavia and I spent many happy hours of childhood standing between the two giant mirrors (eight by six feet, crowned with gold-tipped pagodas) that faced each other from either end of the tiny living room. We watched ourselves as we fluttered our arms up and down, two swans in an infinity of swans.

After his daughters were grown and gone, Kent amassed an enormous collection of Tibetan singing bowls, which crowded into what had once been Therese's room, each on its own riser, each riser topped with a pouf made of Indian silk. He played them daily, turning sideways to move among them. When Tavia came home from Kentucky to visit, she slept at my house, as there was no longer an inch of space for her in 24-S.

"Can you imagine what he could have done if he'd had money?" I said to her. We were standing beside stacked cases of Gerolsteiner mineral water in Kent's galley kitchen. Despite his chronic lack of space, Kent was a disciple of bulk purchasing. This was in April of 2020, in the early days after his death, and we were sick with missing him. The dresser drawers had not yet been opened; the overburdened shelves in the highest reaches of the closets were undisturbed. Still, Tavia and Therese had already found more than thirty power strips. Always a director, Kent saw every room as a stage. Lighting was just one of his many forms of genius.

Tavia wanted to show me a painting of a Hindu deity riding a white bull, four blue arms reaching out in every direction, that Kent had left me in his will.

"I don't want to seem ungrateful," I said, after careful study. I liked the painting, but either you have a place for that sort of thing or you don't.

Kent's will was remarkably specific: Tavia got the fourteen-inch All-Clad covered sauté pan, Therese got the extensive collection of light bulbs, Tavia got the blue wool blanket, Therese got the midsize dehumidifier. The list went on and on: art, artifacts, household supplies. Since neither Tavia nor Therese had the space for more than a few mementos, they decided to sell most of their inheritance and split the proceeds equally. I added the blue deity to the sale.

"Take something else, then," Tavia said. "He'd want you to have something meaningful."

In the end, I took a blue quartz egg held upright by a silver napkin ring. I took a case of Lance cheese crackers with peanut butter and a gross of Gin Gins ginger candy for the staff at the bookstore I co-own. I claimed six boxes of vegetable broth for myself.

For the rest of the summer, Tavia drove down from Louisville on the weekends to work with her sister on the cleanout. I, too, kept going back to 24-S, both to see my friend and to watch the closing down of a world that had helped shape me. "He made everything magic when he was alive," Therese said sadly one day. "Now it's all just stuff." Friends and acquaintances came before the estate sale, wanting to pick through the bounty. I bought the painting of a floating house that had hung in Tavia's bedroom throughout our childhood, the first painting I ever loved. I bought the green-and-pink dining-room chairs and gave them to my mother. Tavia was hugely relieved to know that they would be in a place where she could still come and sit in them.

The deeper 24-S was excavated, the more it yielded. Unit 24-S became the site of an archeological dig, cordoned off from the rest of the Georgetown condominiums, where the two sisters chipped into the past with little picks.

How had one man acquired so many extension cords, so many batteries and rosary beads?

Holding hands in the parking lot, Tavia and I swore a quiet oath: we would not do this to anyone. We would not leave the contents of our lives for someone else to sort through, because who would that mythical sorter be, anyway? My stepchildren? Her niece? Neither of us had children of our own. Could we assume that our husbands would make order out of what we left behind? According to the actuarial tables, we would outlive them.

Tavia's father died when she and I were fifty-six years old. At any other time, we might have been able to enjoy a few more years of ignoring the fact that we, too, were going to die, but thanks to the pandemic such blithe disregard was out of the question. I put Kent's egg and its silver napkin ring on the windowsill in my office, where it ceased to be blue and took on an inexplicable warm orange glow-Kent's favorite color. Every day I looked at it and thought about all the work to be done.

My friend Rick is a Realtor who lives in my neighborhood. We run into each other most mornings when we're out walking our dogs. He'd been after me for a while to look at a house that was for sale down the street. "Just look," he said. "You're going to love it." I didn't want a different house, but, months after Kent's death, his legacy still nagged. Maybe by moving I could force myself to contend with all the boxed-up stuff in my own closets.

Walking down the street to see a house that we passed every day, my husband, Karl, and I convinced ourselves that this was exactly the change we needed, so we were almost disappointed to find that we didn't like this other house nearly as much as we liked the one we already lived in.

"I wonder if we could just pretend to move," I said to Karl that night over dinner. "Would that be possible? Go through everything we own and then stay where we are?"

I could have said, "I wonder if we could just pretend to die," but that pulled up a different set of images entirely. Could we at least prepare? Wasn't that what Kent had failed to do? To make imagining his own death part of his spiritual practice, to look around 24-S and try to envision the world without him?

Karl had been living in our house for twenty-five years. I'd been there for sixteen-the longest I'd ever lived anywhere, by more than a decade. Ours was a marriage of like-minded neatness. Karl's suit jacket went directly onto a hanger. I wiped down the kitchen counters before going to bed. Our never-ending stream of house guests frequently commented on the tranquillity of our surroundings, and I told them that the secret was not having much stuff.

But we had plenty of stuff. It's a big house, and over time the closets and drawers had filled with things we never touched and, in many cases, had completely forgotten we owned. Karl said that he was game for a deep excavation. He was working from home. I had stopped travelling. If we were ever going to do this, now was the time.

I started in the kitchen, a room that's friendly and overly familiar, sitting on the floor, in order to address the lower cabinets first. The plastic soup containers were easy-I'd held on to too many of those. At some point, I'd bought new bread pans without letting the old ones go. I had four colanders. Cabinet by cabinet, I pulled out the contents, assessed, divided, wiped down, replaced. I filled the laundry basket with the things I didn't want or need and carried those discards to the basement. I made the decision to wait until we'd finished with the entire house before trying to find a place for the things we were getting rid of. This was a lesson I'd picked up from my work: writing must be separate from editing, and if you try to do both at the same time nothing will get done. I would not stop the work at hand in order to imagine who might want the square green serving dish I'd bought fifteen years before and never put on the table.

What I had didn't surprise me half as much as how I felt about it: the unexpected shame that came from owning seven mixing bowls, the guilt over never having made good use of the electric juicer my mother had given me, and, strangest of all, my anthropomorphism of inanimate objects-how would those plastic plates with pictures of chickadees on them feel when they realized they were on their way to the basement? It was as if I'd run my fingers across some unexpected lump in my psyche. Jesus, what was that?

My willingness to idly spin out a narrative for the actual chickadees that pecked at the bricks outside my window was one thing, but where did this quick stab of sympathy for tableware come from? I shook it off, refilled the laundry basket, and headed downstairs, wondering if this was a human condition or some disorder specific to novelists. My ability to animate the people who exist solely in my imagination is a time-honed skill, not unlike a ventriloquist's ability to throw her voice into a sock puppet, a ventriloquist who eventually becomes so good at her job that she can make her hand speak convincingly without the sock, until finally there's just the empty sock singing " O mio babbino caro" from the bottom of the hamper. Of course, it may not be a problem of humans or writers but something specific to me, though I doubt it. If this were my problem alone, more people would be cleaning out their kitchens.

To end Day One on a positive note, I struggled to open a drawer with about thirty-five dish towels crammed inside. They were charming dish towels, many unused, patterned with images of dogs, birds, koala bears, the great state of Tennessee. I decided that ten would be plenty. I washed and folded them all, then took the excess down to the basement. I revelled in the ease with which the drawer now opened and shut.

That was the warmup, the stretch.

The next night, after dinner, I hauled out a ladder in order to confront the upper kitchen cabinets. A dozen etched crystal champagne flutes sat on the very top shelf, so tall I could just barely ease them out. A dozen? I had collected them through my thirties, one at a time. Some I'd bought for myself, others I'd received as gifts, a single glass for my birthday, wrapped in tissue paper, as if I were a bride for an entire decade in which I married no one. Had I imagined that, at some point, twelve people would be in my house wanting champagne?

Everything about the glasses disappointed me: their number, their ridiculous height, the idea of them sitting up there all these years, waiting for me to throw a party. (See, there, I'm doing it again: the glasses were waiting. I had disappointed the glasses by failing to throw a party at which their existence would have been justified.) But it wasn't just the champagne flutes. One shelf down, I found four Waterford brandy snifters behind a fleet of wineglasses. In high school, I had asked my parents for brandy snifters, and I had received them at the rate of one a year. I had also scored six tiny liqueur glasses and a set of white espresso cups that came with saucers the thickness of Communion wafers. The espresso cups were still in their original cardboard box, the corner of which had, at some point, been nibbled away. I had never made a cup of espresso, because I don't actually like espresso.

"Dad changed his look every year for the kiddos," Tavia had told me, "kiddos" being what Kent called his students. "They loved it. They were always waiting to see who he was going to be next."

Who did I think I was going to be next? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Jay Gatsby? Would I drink champagne while standing in a fountain? Would I throw a brandy snifter into the fireplace at the end of an affair? I laid the glasses in the laundry basket, the tall and the small, separating them into layers with a blanket. Downstairs, I set them up on the concrete floor near the hot-water heater, where they made a battalion both pointless and dazzling.

I had miscalculated the tools of adulthood when I was young, or I had miscalculated the kind of adult I would be. I had taken my cues from Edith Wharton novels and Merchant Ivory films. I had taken my cues from my best friend's father.

I had missed the mark on who I would become, but in doing so I had created a record of who I was at the time, a strange kid with strange expectations, because it wasn't just the glasses-I'd bought flatware as well. When I was eight and my sister, Heather, was eleven, we were in a car accident, along with our stepfather. We each received an insurance settlement-five thousand dollars for me and ten thousand for her, because her injuries were easily twice as bad as mine. The money, after the lawyer's cut, was placed in a low-interest trust, which we could access at eighteen. When Heather got her money, I petitioned the court for mine as well. I told the lawyer that the silver market was going up, up, up, and if I had to wait another three and a half years I'd never be able to afford flatware.

The judge gave me the money, maybe because he realized that any fourteen-year-old who referenced the silver market was a kid you wanted to get off your docket. I bought place settings for eight, along with serving pieces, in Gorham's Chantilly. I bought salad forks, which I deemed essential, but held off on cream-soup spoons, which I did not. With the money I had left, I bought five South African Krugerrands-heavy gold coins I kept in the refrigerator of the doll house that was still in my bedroom-then sold them two years later for a neat profit.

"Keep everything you want," I said to Karl. "I don't want you to feel like you have to get rid of things just because I'm doing this."

"I'm doing this, too." He was working through closets of his own.

I found a giant plastic bin of silver trays and silver vases and silver chafing dishes in a hidden cupboard under the kitchen bar. Serving utensils, bowls, a tea service, a chocolate pot. I won't say that I had forgotten them, but the bin hadn't been opened since I'd wrapped the pieces and stored them, maybe fifteen years before. I spread out the contents on the dining-room table. These things were all Karl's and, like my glasses, predated our marriage.

He idly reunited a dish with its lid. "Let's get rid of it," he said.

"Maybe you want to hold on to some of it?"

"Ten years ago, I would have said yes," he said.

I waited for the second half of that sentence to arrive, but nothing came. Karl started to pile the silver back into the bin without a hint of nostalgia. I was worried that he would regret this later and hold it against me. I said as much, and he told me I was nuts. That I was nuts was becoming increasingly evident. Once full, the bin of silver was as heavy as a pirate's chest, and we struggled to get it down to the basement together. He then called Leslie, the nurse at his medical practice, who steers him through his long, hard days with good sense and good cheer, and invited her to come over with her daughter to check out what was available.

I was mercifully able to keep myself from saying, " We were going to wait." Of course this would be Karl's favorite part, the part he would never be able to wait for: he got to give these things away. The first time I met Karl, he tried to give me his car.

An hour later, we were in the basement with Leslie and her daughter. Leslie had come straight from work and was wearing scrubs. Her daughter, Kerrie, also a nurse, was wearing hiking sandals and what appeared to be a hiking dress. She had recently returned from a journey down the Colorado Trail-Denver to Durango-logging five hundred miles alone. She came down with COVID along the way and waited it out in her tent.

"She just got engaged," Leslie told me. Kerrie smiled.

"You're going to need things," Karl said.

Leslie laughed and told us that her daughter could still fit everything she owned in her car.

I believed it. Kerrie was the embodiment of fresh air and sunshine, her only adornment a mass of spectacular curls. Clearly, she had chosen to pursue a completely different model of adulthood. I watched as she took careful steps around the glasses and the cups laid out across the concrete floor. She lifted a single oversized champagne flute and held it up. "You really don't want these?" she asked.

I told her that I didn't want any of it. I didn't tell her that she shouldn't want any of it, either.

She took the champagne flutes. She took the brandy snifters, the decanter. She took the set of demitasse cups, but not the espresso cups. She took the stack of glass plates and the large assortment of mismatched wineglasses that had multiplied like rabbits over the years. Whenever she appeared to have reached her limit, Karl picked up something else and handed it to her. She accepted a few silver serving pieces, the square green serving dish. With every acquisition she asked me again, "Are you sure?"

I went through the motions of reassurance without being especially reassuring. The truth was, I felt oddly sick-not because I was going to miss these things but because somehow I was tricking her. I was passing off my burden to an unsuspecting sprite, and in doing so was perpetuating the myths of adult life that I had so wholeheartedly embraced. As she and her mother tenderly wrapped all those champagne flutes in dish towels, I pictured them tied to her backpack. When they were finished, I helped them carry their load out to the car. There they stood in the light of the late afternoon, thanking me and thanking me, saying they couldn't believe it, so many beautiful things.

I had laid out my burden on the basement floor and Kerrie had borne it away. Or at least a chunk of it. There was still so much of the house to sort.

"Don't feel bad," Karl said, as we watched them back out of the driveway. "If we hadn't given it to her, she would have registered for it."

I did feel bad, but not for very long. The feeling that came to take its place was lightness.

This was the practice: I was starting to get rid of my possessions, at least the useless ones, because possessions stood between me and death. They didn't protect me from death, but they created a barrier in my understanding, like layers of bubble wrap, so that instead of thinking about what was coming and the beauty that was here now I was thinking about the piles of shiny trinkets I'd accumulated. I had begun the journey of digging out.

Later that evening, Karl called his son and daughter-in-law, and they came over to look through the basement stash. After great deliberation, they agreed to take a Pyrex measuring cup and a device for planting bulbs. Karl's daughter came the next morning and took the teacups, the industrial mixer, and every bit of the remaining silver. She was a woman who threw enormous parties for no reason on random Tuesdays. She was thrilled, and I was thrilled for her. It had all changed that fast. Making sure that the right person got the right things was no longer the point. The point was that those things were gone.

Night after night, I opened a closet or a drawer or a cupboard and began again. The laundry room was surprisingly depressing, with that gallon container of Tuff Stuff, a concentrated household cleaner I had bought so many years ago from a Russian kid who was selling it door to door. When he saw that I was about to decline, he unscrewed the cap and took a slug straight from the bottle. "Nontoxic," he said, wiping his mouth with his hand. "You try?" I found half a dozen bottles of insect repellent with expiration dates in the early two-thousands, an inch of petrified Gorilla Glue, the collar and the bowl of a beloved dog long passed. The laundry room was where things went to die.

Every table had a drawer, and every drawer had a story-none of them interesting. I scouted them out room by room and sifted through the manuals and remotes and packets of flower food. I found the burnt-down ends of candles, campaign buttons, nickels, a shocking quantity of pencils, more decks of cards than two people could shuffle through in a lifetime. I gathered together the paper clips, made a ball out of the rubber bands, and threw the rest away.

I never considered getting rid of the things that were beautiful-the brass cage with a mechanical singing bird that I'd given Karl for our anniversary, the painting of the little black dog that hangs in the front hall. Nor was I concerned about the things we used-the green sofa in the living room, the table and chairs. If Karl and I were to disappear tomorrow, someone would want all of that. I wanted all of that. I was no ascetic, though I say that with some regret-I grew up with the Sisters of Mercy and attended twelve years of Catholic school. (Kent, who loved his worldly goods, had studied at the Trappist monastery at Gethsemani in his early years.)

I was aiming for something much smaller than a vow of poverty, and was finding that small thing hard enough. I turned out the lights on the first floor and went upstairs.

The closer I got to the places where I slept and worked, the more complicated my choices became. The sandwich-size ziplock of my grandmother's costume jewelry nearly sank me, all those missing beads and broken clasps. I have no memory of her wearing any of it, but she liked to sort it now and then, and she let my sister and me play with it. Somehow the tangle of cheap necklaces and bracelets and vicious clip-on earrings had managed to follow her all the way to the dementia ward. I scooped it out of the nightstand in her room after she died, not because I wanted it but because I didn't know how to leave it there.

In the end, I decided to let it go, because who in the world would understand its meaning once I was gone? I had my grandmother's heart locket with pictures of my mother and my grandfather inside. I had the ring with the two ovals of green glass that her brother Roy gave her when she graduated from eighth grade. I had her wedding ring, thin as a thread, which I wore on my left hand now.

I found little things that had become important over time for no reason other than that I'd kept them for so long: a small wooden rocking horse that a high-school friend had brought me from Japan; two teeth that had been extracted from my head before I got braces, at thirteen; a smooth green stone that looked like a scarab-I couldn't remember where it had come from. I got rid of them all. I found the two tall Madame Alexander dolls of my youth wrapped up together in a single bag on the highest shelf of the closet in my office. They were what was known as fashion dolls, which meant that they were beautifully dressed and not supposed to be played with, but I had slept with the black-haired one for years. She had neither stockings nor shoes, and her hair was dishevelled, her crinoline wilted. I had buried my whole heart into her. The other doll, a Nordic blonde, was still perfect, down to the ribbons on her straw hat, because I'd never wanted a second doll. I had loved only the black-haired one. I loved her still. The blonde I just admired. I hadn't thought about those dolls from one decade to the next, and still they were there, waiting. Maybe, like the sock in the hamper, they'd been singing all that time.

I could see that even after childhood's long and sticky embrace, followed by more than forty years in a sack, both dolls were resplendent in their beauty, lit from within. I wrote to my friend Sandy, attaching pictures, and asked if her grandchildren would like to know the true friends of my youth. She wrote back immediately to say yes. Yes. Champagne flutes by dolls by teeth, I felt the space opening up around me. Unfortunately, the people closest to me could also feel it opening. Having heard that I was cleaning out, my mother gave me a large box of letters and stories I'd written in school. She'd been quietly saving them, and, even as I balked (I didn't want to see those stories again), my sister, also cleaning out, dropped off a strikingly similar stack of my early work. They had sensed a vacuum in my house and rushed in to fill it.

My sister's friend Megan and her eight-year-old daughter, Charlotte, came to visit as I was nearing the end of my project. Megan and Charlotte were driving a loop from Minneapolis to the Great Smoky Mountains and back, hiking and camping along the way. They were spending the night with my sister, and Heather brought them over to see me. By that point, I had only a little bit of the basement to go.

"I told Charlotte I'd show her your bathroom," Heather said.

"She loves seeing other people's bathrooms," Megan said.

And so we went upstairs, the four of us. As Megan was walking by my office, she stopped. "Oh, Charlotte," she said. "Come look at this. Come see what she has."

The child walked into my office and immediately clapped her hands over her masked mouth to keep from screaming. I switched on the light. She was staring at my typewriter, a cheap electric Brother I used for envelopes and short notes.

" You have a typewriter! " Charlotte started hopping up and down.

"What she really wants is a manual," Megan said. "We've looked at a bunch of them but they never work. Once they get old, the keys stick."

There were two manual typewriters in the closet right behind us. One was my grandmother's little Adler, a Tippa 7 that typed in cursive. She'd used it for everything, so much so that if I were to type a note on it now I'd feel as if I were reading her handwriting. I wasn't giving the Adler away. I also owned a Hermes 3000 that my mother and my stepfather had bought for me when I was in college, the most gorgeous typewriter I could have imagined. I wrote every college paper on it, every story. In graduate school, I typed at my kitchen table in a straight-backed chair that my friend Lucy had bought at the Tuesday-night auction in Iowa City. Draft after draft, I banged away until my back seized, then I would lie flat on the living-room rug for days. A luggage tag was still attached to the Hermes's handle-Piedmont Airlines. I'd brought the typewriter home with me every Christmas, even though it weighed seventeen pounds. Such was my love for that machine that I hadn't been able to imagine being separated from it for an entire holiday vacation. The stories my mother and my sister had returned to me: they were all typed on the Hermes.

My mother and my stepfather, my darling Lucy, college, graduate school, all those stories-they made up the history of that typewriter. It waited on a shelf in the very closet where the dolls had been kept. When I was cleaning out the closet, I didn't consider giving either of the typewriters away, but I don't think I'd used them once since I got my first computer, when I was twenty-three. I took Megan aside. "I've got a manual," I whispered to her.

She looked slightly horrified. "You don't want to give that away."

I told her that I'd sleep on it, that she shouldn't say anything to Charlotte. I told her to come back in the morning.

I didn't need the glasses or the silver, those things that represented who I thought I would become but never did, and I didn't need the dolls, which represented who I had been and no longer was. The typewriter, on the other hand, represented both the person I had wanted to be and the person I am. Finding the typewriter was like finding the axe I'd used to chop the wood to build the house I lived in. It had been my essential tool. After all it had given me, didn't it deserve something better than to sit on a shelf?

(Yes, I accept that this is who I am. I was thinking about what a typewriter deserved for its years of loyal service.)

In any practice, there will be tests. That's why we call it a practice-so we'll be ready to meet our challenges when the time comes. I had loved a typewriter. I had believed that every good sentence I wrote in my youth had come from the typewriter itself. I had neglected that typewriter all the same.

Kent, the cosmic monk, had laminated his prayers. He'd laminated pictures of his daughters, his granddaughter, his dog. He'd laminated good reviews of my novels. After he died, Tavia found two laminated cards. One said:

And the other:

All that
is not Ladder
Falls away

He needed both prayers in order to remember. We had tried the world on for size, Kent and I, and, one way or another, we would figure out how to let it go.

I took the Hermes down from the closet shelf, unsnapped the cover, and typed I love you iloveyou. The keys didn't stick. I looked online to see if replacement ribbons were available.

They were. I watched a video of Tom Hanks, that famous champion of manual typewriters, replacing a ribbon on a Hermes 3000. "No typewriter has ever been made that is better than a Hermes," he said in a salesman's voice.

Well, that was the truth.

That night, while Karl and I were walking the dog, I told him about Charlotte. I told him what I was thinking. "As much as I loved it, it would be wonderful if someone could use it. How many little girls are out there pining for manual typewriters?"

"So give her mine," he said.

I stopped. The dog stopped. "You have a manual typewriter?" There were three manual typewriters in the house?

Karl nodded. "You gave it to me."

I had forgotten. I had given Karl an Olivetti for his birthday when we were first dating, because I was used to dating writers, not doctors. Because I didn't know him then. Because I saw myself as the kind of woman who dated men with manual typewriters. I had bought it new. Twenty-six years later, it was still new.
Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son.
O.K., it wasn't like that. But I had been ready to let the Hermes go, and now I didn't have to let it go. There was another typewriter caught in the thicket.

When I gave the Olivetti to Charlotte the next morning, she thought I'd given her the moon. She had imagined herself as a girl with a typewriter. And now she was. ♦

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I wanted to get rid of my possessions, because possessions stood between me and death. I started thinking about getting our house in order when Tavia's father died. Tavia, my friend from early childhood (and youth, and middle age, and these years on the downhill slalom), grew up in unit 24-S of the Georgetown condominiums in Nashville.

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If you attended the TC talk on

Education & Public Health in the New Administration (2/25, 4pm), let us know what you thought and have a conversation in the comments here

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addressing the agenda: education & public health in the new administration

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addressing the agenda: education & public health in the new administration tickets

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ADDRESSING THE AGENDA: Education & Public Health in the New Administration

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Eventbrite - Office of College Events (tcinvite@tc.columbia.edu) presents ADDRESSING THE AGENDA: Education & Public Health in the New Administration - Thursday, February 25, 2021 - Find event and registration information.

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in preparation for tonight's talk at the New Museum

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Credits

Executive Producer: Eve Moros Ortega. Host: Claire Danes. Director: Stanley Nelson. Producer & Production Manager: Nick Ravich. Editor: Aljernon Tunsil. Art21 Executive Director: Tina Kukielski. Curator: Wesley Miller. Associate Producer: Ian Forster. Structure Consultant: Véronique Bernard. Director of Photography: Keith Walker. Additional Photography: Don Argott, Brian Ashby, Steve Delahoyde, Jeremy Dulac, Damon Hennessey, Sam Henriques, Ben Kolak, Christoph Lerch, Stephan Mazurek, Andrew Miller, Christopher Morrison, Leslie Morrison, Murat Ötünç, Logan Siegel, Stephen Smith, & Jamin Townsley. Assistant Camera: Kyle Adcock, Joe Buhnerkempe, Alex Klein, Ian McAvoy, Sean Prange, & Liz Sung. Sound: Sean Demers, Alex Inglizian, Hayden Jackson, İlkin Kitapçı, Joe Leo, Matt Mayer, John Murphy, Richard K. Pooler, & Grant Tye. Production Assistant: Hamid Bendaas, Emmanuel Camacho, Chad Fisher, Elliot Rosen, Stanley Sievers, Chris Thurston, & Steven Walsh.

Title/Motion Design: Afternoon Inc. Composer: Joel Pickard. Online Editor: Don Wyllie. Re-Recording Mix: Tony Pipitone. Sound Edit: Neil Cedar & Jay Fisher. Artwork Animation: Anita H.M. Yu. Assistant Editor: Maria Habib, Leana Siochi, Christina Stiles, & Bahron Thomas.

Host Introduction | Creative Consultant: Tucker Gates. Director of Photography: Pete Konczal. Second Camera: Jon Cooper. Key Grip: Chris Wiesehahn. Gaffer: Jesse Newton. First Assistant Camera: Sara Boardman & Shane Duckworth. Sound: James Tate. Set Dresser: Jess Coles. Hair: Peter Butler. Makeup: Matin. Production Assistant: Agatha Lewandowski & Melanie McLean. Editor: Ilya Chaiken.

Artworks Courtesy of: Nick Cave; Theaster Gates; Barbara Kasten; Chris Ware; BAM Hamm Archives; Bortolami Gallery; Cranbrook Art Museum; Margaret Jenkins Dance Company; The New Yorker magazine and Condé Nast; James Prinz Photography; Jack Shainman Gallery; Sara Linnie Slocum; Chris Strong Photography; & White Cube. Acquired Photography: Sara Pooley; The Art Channel/Bobbin Productions; & University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach.

Special Thanks: The Art21 Board of Trustees; 900/910 Lake Shore Drive Condominium Association; Michael Aglion; Ellen Hartwell Alderman; Adam Baumgold Gallery; Naomi Beckwith; Biba Bell; Stefania Bortolami; Kate Bowen; Pat Casteel; Chicago Embassy Church; Coachman Antique Mall; Maria J. Coltharp; John Corbett; Department of Theatre & Dance, Wayne State University; Detroit School of Arts; Christina Faist; Bob Faust; Martina Feurstein; Julie Fracker; William Gill; Graham Foundation; Jen Grygiel; Sarah Herda; Jennon Bell Hoffmann; Sheree Hovsepian; Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania; Istanbul Biennial; Nicola Jeffs; Jenette Kahn; Jill Katz; Alex Klein; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Jon Lowe; Sheila Lynch; Mana Contemporary Chicago; Christine Messineo; Laura Mott; Deborah Payne; Bishop Ed Peecher; Lisa Pooler; Rebuild Foundation; Diana Salier; Tim Samuelson; Amy Schachman; Zeynep Seyhun; Keith Shapiro; Alexandra Small; Jacqueline Stewart; Hamza Walker; Clara Ware; Marnie Ware; & Steve Wylie.

Additional Art21 Staff: Maggie Albert; Lindsey Davis; Joe Fusaro; Jessica Hamlin; Jonathan Munar; Bruno Nouril; Pauline Noyes; Kerri Schlottman; & Diane Vivona.

Public Relations: Cultural Counsel. Station Relations: De Shields Associates, Inc. Legal Counsel: Albert Gottesman.

Dedicated To: Susan Sollins, Art21 Founder.

Major underwriting for Season 8 of Art in the Twenty-First Century is provided by National Endowment for the Arts, PBS, Lambent Foundation, Agnes Gund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and The Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

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Theaster Gates first encountered creativity in the music of Black churches on his journey to becoming an urban planner, potter, and artist. Gates creates sculptures out of clay, tar, and renovated buildings, transforming the raw material of the South Side into radically reimagined vessels of opportunity for the community.

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Since we've been thinking so much about public art, I thought I'd share this fun new exhibit that's on Google Arts & Culture. It's called "Blob Opera" Fundamentally, it's entertaining and beautiful to listen to. Digging a bit deeper, it provides access and a visual way to learn more about basic concepts in music theory (chords/notes...) Hope you enjoy! https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/AAHWrq360NcGbw

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If you attended the Theaster Gates talk at the New Museum (2/25, 4pm), let us know what you thought and have a conversation in the comments here

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Theaster Gates in Conversation with Massimiliano Gioni

Cover Image:

Join us for a conversation with artist Theaster Gates in dialogue with Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director of the New Museum.

This is the first program in a series of artist conversations highlighting the practices of artists participating in the New Museum exhibition " Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America. "
This program will be presented via Zoom, register for this online program here.
Accessibility: This program will be live captioned.

Theaster Gates lives and works in Chicago. Gates creates works that engage with space theory and land development, sculpture and performance. Drawing on his interest and training in urban planning and preservation, Gates redeems spaces that have been left behind. Known for his recirculation of art-world capital, Gates creates work that focuses on the possibility of the "life within things." His work contends with the notion of Black space as a formal exercise: one defined by collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of a pragmatist.

In 2010, Gates created the Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit platform for art, cultural development, and neighborhood transformation that supports artists and strengthens communities through free arts programming and innovative cultural amenities on Chicago's South Side.

Gates has exhibited and performed at Tate Liverpool, UK (2020); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2020); Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis (2019); Palais de Tokyo Paris, France (2019); Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany (2018); Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., USA (2017); Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada (2016); Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2013); Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy (2013) and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012). He was the winner of the Artes Mundi 6 prize and a recipient of the Légion d'Honneur in 2017. In 2018, he was awarded the Nasher Prize for Sculpture, and the Urban Land Institute, J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. Gates received the 2020 Crystal Award for his leadership in creating sustainable communities.

Gates is a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts and the Harris School of Public Policy, and is Distinguished Visiting Artist and Director of Artist Initiatives at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College.

Accessibility: we strive to make our programs as accessible as possible. For full accessibility information, including services available by request, please click here.

Sponsors
Lead support for "Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America" is provided by the Ford Foundation. Major support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Agnes Gund.
New Museum Digital Initiatives are generously supported by Hermine and David B. Heller.

Generous ongoing support is provided by the Charlotte and Bill Ford Artist Talks Fund.

Support for Education and Public Engagement programs is provided, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund; and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.

Support of artist participation is provided by Laura Skoler.

Additional support for education and community programs is provided by the American Chai Trust.

A full list of support for "Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America" can be viewed here.

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Theaster Gates in Conversation with Massimiliano Gioni

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Join us for a conversation with artist Theaster Gates in dialogue with Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director of the New Museum. This is the first program in a series of artist conversations highlighting the practices of artists participating in the New Museum exhibition "Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America.

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Caitlin's summer residency for educators in Denver that we were talking about last week.
https://www.iterativespace.org/

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I came across this 'lab' with a brilliant moniker, after seeing their design for a stool made from aluminum cans at MoMA. Very cool work at the intersection of design/tech/ecofutures

"Studio Swine (Super Wide Interdisciplinary New Explorers) is a collective established in 2011 by Azusa Murakami (JP) and Alexander Groves (UK).

Their work straddles between the spheres of sculpture, installations and cinema, blending poetry and research into immersive experiences. The studio adopts an unique approach to each work, drawing on the distinctive resources and vernacular aesthetic of its cultural, historic and economic landscape. Professional training in art and architecture allows the studio to bridge rich and emotional narratives with rigorous spatial awareness."

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digital arts education group in Brooklyn

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Legal Basics: Advice for Healthy Relationships (In Business).
Tuesday, February 23rd at 6:00 PM EST
Suggested donation, no one will be turned away for lack of funds

Want to start a business with a friend? Got a great idea you've been developing with a crew? Collaboration can be one of the most thrilling parts of being creative, but when things go left - it can be messy. Learn the basics of partnerships and collaborations, including best practices for running a business with a partner and common ways to structure collaborative projects. We'll review key points to consider when working with other people to protect yourself, your ideas, and build healthy business relationships.

We are beyond thrilled to announce that Synth Library NYC will be our inaugural 2021 residents! Synth Library NYC aims to be a resource for hands-on access to synthesizers, modular gear, recording equipment, and other electronic musical instruments for people of all experience levels.

They understand that one of the main barriers to learning and using new music technology is the expense of making a full commitment to purchase gear, plus the frustration one can feel when trying to learn in isolation. They want to build a community where individuals can try out new gear, experiment, and learn from one another.

We truly believe in their ultimate vision to help democratize access to music technology - putting the means of production into the hands of those currently under-represented in these fields.

The Latest
Assistant Director, Salome Asega in KILLSCREEN
Salome speaks about cultivating an ecosystem of art and technology.

POWRPLNT x Hyperlink press SANCTUARY

As the pandemic continues, our institutions fail us, and the rampant racism and police violence against Black Americans continue, we are dedicated to providing for our community and beyond. We collect and provide PPE, food, water and WIFI to protesters and neighbors. The mutual aid effort started as a collaboration between POWRPLNT & Hyperlink Press in May 2020 to meet an urgent need as protests were met by a city wide curfew. We have distributed $5,000 of PPE kits and resources to our community. We now have 24 volunteers tending to the space, if you're interested in collaborating please email DIGITAL@POWRPLNT.ORG or visit us at 562 Evergreen, Brooklyn, NY, 11221.

learn with us

POWRPLNT offers sliding scale courses from emerging artists on everything from Livestream 101 to thinking about Systems Design for teens and adults alike. We support folks looking to build community and skill-share. All classes are offered via Zoom.
Check out our calendar of upcoming events!
Open Call: Teaching Artists

If you are an artist with a digital or technology-based practice and are passionate about bringing access to quality technology education to all, we encourage you to apply to teach a workshop with POWRPLNT!

Become A Member
POWRPLNT relies on the generous support of donors and volunteers to keep our community computer lab open and our workshops running.

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Legal Basics: Advice for Healthy Relationships (In Business).Tuesday, February 23rd at 6:00 PM EST Suggested donation, no one will be turned away for lack of funds Want to start a business with a friend? Got a great idea you've been developing with a crew?

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(currently closed) - the MoMA Creativity Lab is doing some interesting stuff, I'll keep an eye out for their post-pandemic return! While a much of it looks like traditional art ed activities (also valuable!) in a shiny space, some of the activities to foster participatory experiences with art and ideas, and interdisciplinary connections between art/technology/science (fr example, the involving the Brooklyn-based digital arts org POWRPLNT, I'll link in a separate post) are exciting.  I think there are synergies with our Black Paint events - especially in the The People's Studio: Collective Imagination project that ran through March 2020.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5130

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This is an interesting presentation and is the kind of lab work that I think a curriculum lab could aspire to - creating space for creation in collaboration with others, looking across disciplines, including but not limited to the arts to broaden and deepen our ideas. I heard a subtle misgiving for science and technology in our lab talk today, although I'm still trying to understand what that is about. I hope we do not shy away from technologies that might be used to also enhance and deepen our imaginations and the emergence of new ideas and meanings, as these brilliant thinkers do. They do not seem compromised by that interest at all.

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forest sounds from all over the world

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tree.fm - Tune Into Forests From Around The World

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Ecuador, Yasuni National Park At Night recorded by Jasmine Black.

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the black paint of science education?

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Founded in 2008, Guerilla Science is on a mission to revolutionise how people connect with science through transformative experiences. We believe in a world in which everyone feels that science belongs to them and where science is celebrated as an intrinsic part of human culture.

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Introducing our brand new podcast Guerilla Science Presents... FIND OUT MORE What We Do Guerilla Science works with clients across the corporate, cultural and public sectors. Our services include: More Consultancy We help organisations find fresh, delightfully unexpected solutions to help them connect with key audiences in meaningful ways.

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I mentioned this documentary, "Social Dilemma" in lab and the TC Peace Education Network is hosting a free "virtual movie night" on Monday, February 8th at 7:30 p.m. EST. Each attendee will receive a $5 gift card to purchase snacks! Register using link.

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I did a doubletake and thought this must be MASClab related, but it's a completely unrelated set of podcasters and academics. all fall during our Curr Lab time, but maybe we could go to one together if there's interest?

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podcasting toward social change: sound-based pedagogy & scholarship series

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podcasting toward social change: sound-based pedagogy & scholarship series tickets

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Podcasting Toward Social Change: Sound-Based Pedagogy & Scholarship Series

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Eventbrite - Podcasting Toward Social Change presents Podcasting Toward Social Change: Sound-Based Pedagogy & Scholarship Series - Thursday, March 4, 2021 - Find event and ticket information.

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We've talked so much about the pandemic, here's the first attempt at a syllabus that I've come across.

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Disease has never been merely a biological phenomenon. Instead, all diseases-including COVID-19-are deeply social phenomena: in their origins, in their spread, in their impacts, and in the responses they engender among populations. Disease can also run into and catalyze larger historical currents, as the anger coming to a boil in the past weeks has shown us.

Yet more often than not, such a social, holistic view is rarely found in the public discourse around a disease. Instead, ever since the "bacteriological revolution," almost a century and a half ago, we have found ourselves prisoners of a rigid set of formulaic scripts, which constrain our ability to understand, respond to, and prevent disease. We have silenced the voices of those who sought better health for all through social justice and universal economic opportunity. We have entrusted exclusive authority over health to the specialized knowledge, laboratories, and institutions of scientific medicine. And we have not reflected on the underlying assumptions embedded in the terms and institutions we use to mediate disease.

Such narrowness has had real consequences. But the current moment has renewed and forced reflection. At some point in early 2020, COVID-19 ceased being a distant rumor or something that those in Western countries could banish as just a SARS-like "Eastern thing" (itself a byproduct of selective memory, given SARS's impact on Toronto). Rather, COVID-19 suddenly became an all-consuming fact of life around the world, with anxious people casting about frantically for protection, advice, or reassurance.

These people turned, of course, to doctors, hospitals, and public-health authorities. But to a surprising and frankly disorienting extent, they also turned to historians. Scholars accustomed to being politely ignored or used mostly to provide narrative background music now found themselves earnestly beseeched for words of wisdom that would help us make sense of this profound upheaval. Geographic variation in 1918 flu death rates, the successes and failures of vaccination campaigns, and the lessons to be extracted from HIV/AIDS, among other episodes, suddenly became objects of public fascination.

We are three historians of public health who focus on different time periods and geographic areas. We have constructed this syllabus to provide a range of voices and perspectives that give context not just to COVID-19 but also to the medical, scientific, cultural, political, and economic structures that shape this and other pandemics. They are structures that, beyond biology alone, are often what make pandemics selectively-and unequally-deadly.

We designed this syllabus as a challenge to status quo thinking on disease. We did so with the knowledge that it would be perfectly possible to create a dozen such credible and entirely different reading lists. This particular syllabus is anchored by four goals:

Our first goal is to scrutinize narratives of technoscientific salvation. Common public celebratory stories of illness-plague, yellow fever, cholera, influenza, smallpox, and, yes, COVID-19-have been produced within power structures that often serve entrenched interests, in particular notions of universal, technological interventions and Western biomedicine as "saviors" that can ignore the politics of context. By circumscribing "public health" as a narrow domain that occurs outside larger societal currents, this status quo script has limited our ability to think bigger in our responses to all manner of health threats, everything from "ordinary" chronic diseases to terrifying pandemics like COVID-19.

Shedding light on an equally troubling narrative-a self-celebratory triumphalism that often colors accounts of public-health victories-is our second goal. This syllabus certainly catalogs some big wins of the public-health enterprise when it comes to infectious-disease control. But it also shows that "public health" is deeply rooted in xenophobic and racist ideology, which blamed disease outbreaks on contamination by foreigners or racialized outsiders; in theological beliefs, which punished moral transgression with divine retribution in the form of illness and death; and in a Victorian perspective, which views the world through the class-inflected lens of medical mandarins. Public health was rooted in a colonizing enterprise and tied to the deeply unequal operations of global capital. These priorities were affirmed, validated, and sustained through public-health research institutions, tropical-medicine laboratories, and interventions in colonized societies that segregated and contained locals; limited medical cures and therapies to saving lives in the military; offered sanitary cordons to a ruling elite; and focused on trying to keep "productive" labor in plantations and factories healthy to serve the interests of imperial trade. Put another way, public health has been the contingent story both of progress and of exclusion and stigma. And its victories have often only been partial, built on the backs of the marginalized and leaving many people behind.

Exclusion and inclusion point to a third goal: worldliness. Much of the English-language writing on COVID-19 has been provincial. One mark of that is obvious: such writings' accelerated appearance once COVID-19 reached American shores. We have tried hard here to avoid a "West and the Rest" approach, while not ignoring the outsize importance of the United States and Western Europe in shaping-for better or for worse-the public-health agenda. Ultimately, COVID-19 underscores that a health injury to one country is a health injury to all. A reading list should reflect that.

The syllabus's last purpose is rooted in who we are. As faculty in the Health & Societies major at the University of Pennsylvania and in the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, we teach students who aspire to all kinds of careers and approach health from a number of disciplinary angles. We've included bits of our own work here, so that you can get a sense of the different ways we approach things, warts and all.

Our syllabus is underpinned by a strong belief that the long view effectively equips readers to leave with a sober understanding of public health's many limitations but also a sense of positive and liberatory alternatives. Besides bringing to greater awareness what much of society-including even some public-health professionals-would rather forget, history also, in the words of historian Christopher Hamlin, allows one "to go back to the beginning, to recover possibility in the past," and "to open our eyes to the possibilities we confront in the present." Last but not least, we acknowledge that a great deal of public-health history writing still needs to uncover and pay attention to themes and issues of intersectionality of power relating to race, ethnicity, class, and gender. May these readings serve as an initial step to open up further debate on both everyday and systemic injustices relating to disease risks and access to health as these have been exposed and exacerbated by COVID-19.

The overwhelming majority of readings here are thus by historians and about the past, though the syllabus is dotted with cross-disciplinary selections, too. Our hope is that this list-like any good course-is merely a starting point, one that spurs readers to embark on their own lines of inquiry. To that end, we want to acknowledge and embrace other efforts toward that goal, like the #CoronavirusSyllabus spearheaded by Alondra Nelson, which spans a wider disciplinary scope and covers a larger gamut of questions, and thank Dr. Nelson for her support of this effort.

We proceed in three parts. The first three weeks provide the reader with a vocabulary and heuristics for parsing pandemics and the underlying social determinants and inequities that determine their decidedly nonrandom course. The next six weeks examine public health and infectious-disease control in a number of cross-national contexts and time periods, highlighting indisputable triumphs-and noting the asterisks that must be placed next to them. The final two weeks come full circle, moving away from case studies and into two sets of readings that consider uncertain paths forward, both for public health generally and COVID-19 specifically.

Week One

The Rhetoric of Contagion and -demics

"Disease" is an elusive entity. It is not simply a less than optimum physiological state. The reality is obviously a good deal more complex; disease is at once a biological event, a generation-specific repertoire of verbal constructs reflecting medicine's intellectual and institutional history, an occasion of and potential legitimation for public policy, an aspect of social role and individual-intrapsychic-identity, a sanction for cultural values, and a structuring element in doctor and patient interactions. In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it.

-Charles E. Rosenberg (1992)

Bob Crawford and Ben Sawyer, "The Outbreak Narrative with Priscilla Wald," The Road to Now (podcast), April 6, 2020

Charles E. Rosenberg, "Explaining Epidemics" and "Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History," in Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 1992)

Week Two

Inequality and the Patterning of Disease

Bruce G. Link and Jo Phelan, "Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease," in "Forty Years of Medical Sociology: The State of the Art and Directions for the Future," edited by Mary L. Fennell, extra issue, Journal of Health and Social Behavior (1995)

James Colgrove, "The McKeown Thesis: A Historical Controversy and Its Enduring Influence," American Journal of Public Health, vol. 92, no. 5 (2002)

Simon Szreter, "Rethinking McKeown: The Relationship between Public Health and Social Change," American Journal of Public Health, vol. 92, no. 5 (2002)

Allan Mitchell, "An Inexact Science: The Statistics of Tuberculosis in Late Nineteenth-Century France," Social History of Medicine, vol. 3, no. 3 (1990)

David S. Barnes, "The Rise or Fall of Tuberculosis in Belle-Epoque France: A Reply to Allan Mitchell," Social History of Medicine, vol. 5, no. 2 (1992)

Week Three

The Impact of "Germ Theory" in Cross-National Context

Nancy Tomes, "The Making of a Germ Panic, Then and Now," American Journal of Public Health, vol. 90, no. 2 (2000)

Mary P. Sutphen, "Not What but Where: Bubonic Plague and the Reception of Germ Theories in Hong Kong and Calcutta, 1894-1897," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 52, no. 1 (1997)

Michael Worboys, introduction to Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Maynard W. Swanson, "The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909," Journal of African History, vol. 18, no. 3 (1977)

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, "Plague Politics and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896-1914," in Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, edited by Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge University Press, 1992)

Week Four

Prior Governmental Responses to Epidemics

Technical solutions for disease control have a variety of complex social implications.

-Evelyn Hammonds (1999)

Isaac Chotiner, "How Governments Respond to Pandemics Like the Coronavirus" (interview with Richard J. Evans on 1892 cholera epidemic in Hamburg), New Yorker, March 18, 2020

Howard Markel, Harvey B. Lipman, J. Alexander Navarro, et al., "Nonpharmaceutical Interventions Implemented by US Cities During the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic," JAMA, vol. 298, no. 6 (2007)

Steven Burg, "Wisconsin and the Great Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918," Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 84, no. 1 (2000)

Mridula Ramanna, "Coping with the Influenza Pandemic: The Bombay Experience," in The Spanish Influenza Epidemic of 1918: New Perspectives, edited by Howard Phillips and David Killingray (Routledge, 2003)

Katherine A Mason, "Reflecting on SARS, 17 Years and Two Flu-Like Epidemics Later," Somatosphere, March 16, 2020

Week Five

Eradication (I)-Victory over Pathogens

Donald Henderson, "Smallpox Eradication: A Cold War Victory," World Health Forum, vol. 19 (1998)

Smallpox oral histories, Global Health Chronicles, created by the David J. Sencer CDC Museum at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship

Sanjoy Bhattacharya, "Reflections on the Eradication of Smallpox," Lancet, vol. 375, no. 9726 (2010)

Week Six

Eradication (II)-The Underside of Triumph

Sanjoy Bhattacharya and Rajib Dasgupta, "Smallpox and Polio Eradication in India: Comparative Histories and Lessons for Contemporary Policy," Ciência e Saúde Coletiva, vol. 16, no. 2 (2011)

Paul Greenough, "Intimidation, Coercion, and Resistance in the Final Stages of the South Asian Smallpox Eradication Campaign, 1973-1975," Social Science and Medicine, vol. 41, no. 5 (1995)

Christian W. McMillen and Niels Brimnes, "Medical Modernization and Medical Nationalism: Resistance to Mass Tuberculosis Vaccination in Postcolonial India, 1948-1955," Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 52, no. 1 (2010)

Anne-Emanuelle Birn, "Small(pox) Success?," Ciência e Saúde Coletiva, vol. 16, no. 2 (2011)

Week Seven

Racism, Xenophobia, and the Rhetoric of Blame

Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793: And a Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications (1794)

Rana Asali Hogarth, "The Myth of Innate Racial Differences between White and Black People's Bodies: Lessons From the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania," American Journal of Public Health, vol. 109, no. 10 (2019)

Alan M. Kraut, "Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Pandemic," Public Health Reports, vol. 125, suppl. 3 (2010)

Natalia Molina, "Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization Mexican Immigration and US Public Health Practices in the 20th Century," American Journal of Public Health, vol. 101, no. 6 (2011)

Samuel Roberts, "'Where our Melanotic Citizens Predominate': Locating African Americans and Finding the 'Lung Block' in Tuberculosis Research in Baltimore, Maryland, 1880-1920," in CrossRoutes, the Meanings of "Race" for the 21st Century, edited by Paola Boi and Sabine Broeck (Transaction, 2003)

Nayan Shah, "Cleansing Motherhood: Hygiene and the Culture of Domesticity in San Francisco's Chinatown, 1875-1900," in Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities, edited by Antoinette Burton (Routledge, 1999)

Week Eight

The Lessons of HIV/AIDS (I)-From Stigmatization and Death Sentence to Chronic Disease

Undoubtedly, the lack of action, from the general public on down to the president, was and is directly tied to the conception of AIDS as a disease of white gay men, black and Latino/a drug users, and other marginal people engaged in "immoral behavior."

-Cathy Cohen (1999)

National Institutes of Health, episode of the Medicine for the Layman series on AIDS, featuring an interview with Anthony Fauci (1984)

John Iliffe, "Origins" and "Containment," in The African AIDS Epidemic: A History (Ohio University Press, 2005)

Steven Epstein, "The Construction of Lay Expertise: AIDS Activism and the Forging of Credibility in the Reform of Clinical Trials," Science, Technology, and Human Values, vol. 20, no. 4 (1995)

ACT UP Oral History Project, coordinated by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman

Paul Farmer, "From Haiti to Rwanda: AIDS and Accusations," in Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader, edited by Haun Saussy (University of California Press, 2010)

David Ho, interview for "The Age of AIDS," Frontline, PBS (transcript drawn from four interviews conducted in New York and China in April and June 2005, and March 2006)

Week Nine

The Lessons of HIV/AIDS (II)-Progress on Whose Backs? Who Got Left Behind?

Emily Bass, "How to Survive a Footnote: AIDS Activism in the 'After' Years," n+1, no. 23 (2015)

Randall M. Packard and Paul Epstein, "Epidemiologists, Social Scientists, and the Structure of Medical Research on AIDS in Africa," Social Science and Medicine, vol. 33, no. 7 (1991)

Julie Livingston, "AIDS as Chronic Illness: Epidemiological Transition and Health Care in South-Eastern Botswana," African Journal of AIDS Research, vol. 3 no. 1 (2009)

Robert E. Fullilove, "Did Mass Incarceration Cause the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in the US?" TEDMED Day CUMC video, July 6, 2013

Gretchen Gavett, "Timeline: 30 Years of HIV/AIDS in Black America," Frontline, PBS, July 10, 2012

Week Ten

"Public Health"-Where From and Where Next?

Public health belongs to social justice quite as much as to civil engineering or epidemiology. It is inescapably, not incidentally, a matter of political philosophy in the grandest and broadest sense.

-Christopher Hamlin (1998)

Christopher Hamlin, "Could You Starve to Death in England in 1839? The Chadwick-Farr Controversy and the Loss of the 'Social' in Public Health," American Journal of Public Health, vol. 85, no. 6 (1995)

Anne-Emmanuelle-Birn, "Gates's Grandest Challenge: Transcending Technology as Public Health Ideology," Lancet, vol. 366, no. 9484 (2005)

David S. Barnes, "Historical Perspectives on the Etiology of Tuberculosis," Microbes and Infection, vol. 2, no. 4 (2000)

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, "The Return of Epidemics and the Politics of Global-Local Health," American Journal of Public Health, vol. 101, no. 6 (2011)

Evelyn Hammonds and Susan Reverby, "Toward a Historically Informed Analysis of Racial Health Disparities Since 1619," Amerian Journal of Public Health, vol. 109, no. 10 (2019)

Week Eleven

COVID-19 and the Path Forward

Alex de Waal, "New Pathogen, Old Politics," Boston Review, April 3, 2020

Andrew Liu, "'Chinese Virus,' World Market," n+1, March 20, 2020

Aruna Roy and Saba Kohli Davé, "Analysing Kerala's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: When People and Governments Come Together," Economic and Political Weekly, May 2, 2020

Merlin Chowkwanyun and Adolph L. Reed Jr. "Racial Health Disparities and Covid-19: Caution and Context," New England Journal of Medicine, May 6, 2020

Thomas Levenson, "The Term Wuhan Virus Treats COVID-19 as a Chinese Scourge-and Ignores an Ugly History," The Atlantic, March 11, 2020

This article was commissioned by Caitlin Zaloom.

Featured image: Francisco Goya, Cartloads to the Cemetery (1812-15). Wikimedia Commons

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Disease has never been merely a biological phenomenon. Instead, all diseases-including COVID-19-are deeply social phenomena: in their origins, in their spread, in their impacts, and in the responses they engender among populations. Disease can also run into and catalyze larger historical currents, as the anger coming to a boil in the past weeks has shown us.

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A new podcast from Duke Univ Press that offers multiple perspectives on topics of interest. The first topic is the Internet.

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Public Books's new podcast, Public Books 101, turns a scholarly eye to a world worth studying. In each miniseries, world-class scholars and writers join our host to examine a single topic from many angles, opening a window into the conversations that experts are having with one another about the urgent issues and problems facing us today.

Season 1 takes on the internet: the vast digital environment that has changed the way we live, work, and form communities. The technology that allows us to conduct more of our lives online brings with it, among other concerns, unprecedented data-mining and increased surveillance.

Where did the internet come from? And how might we work to fix its flaws? In this five-part series, we'll cover how the internet was built, whose interests it was built to serve, and what it is doing to individuals, societies, and cultures.

Listen to the trailer

Podcast episodes

1. Origins of the Internet (with Charlton McIlwain and Fred Turner)

2. Individuals Online (with Amanda Hess and Jenny Odell)

3. Societies Online (with Alice E. Marwick and Siva Vaidhyanathan)

4. Cultures Online (with Lauren Michele Jackson and Richard Jean So)

5. Silicon Valley and Beyond (with Meredith Broussard and Margaret O'Mara)

Listen and subscribe

Public Books 101 is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts. Subscribe to our feeds to be notified when new episodes publish.

Host

Season 1 is hosted by Annie Galvin, the associate editor of Public Books and a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow. Annie holds a PhD in English from the University of Virginia and has published on literature, visual culture, and popular music in both scholarly and public-facing outlets.

Teaching & Discussing the Internet

We hope that listeners will take the podcast conversations as a spur for further thought and discussion. In that spirit, we have created an accompanying resource for teachers, scholars, and curious users who wish to learn more about the internet's impact on our world. Check out " Reading Resources: The Internet " for a reading list curated by our guests and discussion questions related to each podcast episode.

episode 1:

origins of the internet

Where did the internet come from? Who gets left out of dominant stories about its origins? And what can history teach us about how to make the internet better?

Our guests

Listen to the episode
View a transcript of the episode here.
Episode notes

In our first episode, two leading scholars of internet history delve into the stories you might not have heard about where the technology came from. Yes, DARPA and IBM played formative roles, but what about back-to-the-land hippies in the 1960s, or a sprawling network of African American engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts who helped develop and popularize the web? And how did major decisions about the early internet's design and usage lead to some of its problems today?

Mentioned in this episode

Further reading

Charlton recommends:

Fred recommends:

episode 2:

Individuals Online

What exactly are we doing when we're spending time online? Who profits from our presence there? And how has being on the internet changed the experience of being human?

Our guests

Listen to the episode
View a transcript of the episode here.
Episode notes

Two high-profile writers who cover internet culture meditate on the experience of being a person in the internet age. Social media has presented new phenomena-such as "doom-scrolling" on Twitter or visiting pop-up Instagram "experiences"-for human minds and spirits to contend with. We examine how the attention economy monetizes our time spent online, and Amanda and Jenny consider ways of using the internet that offer spiritual sustenance rather than dread.

Mentioned in this episode

Further reading

Amanda recommends:

Jenny recommends:

Episode 3:

Societies online

What kind of social space are we inhabiting when we're online? How do practices like data collection, data brokering, and surveillance underwrite the "free" services we enjoy? And who gets hit hardest by the privacy violations that are becoming increasingly commonplace?

Our guests

Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press, 2012).

Alice E. Marwick is an associate professor of communication and the principle researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, which she cofounded, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale University Press, 2013) and a coeditor of The SAGE Handbook of Social Media (Sage, 2019).

Listen to the episodes

This episode was recorded in two parts. Part one, about Facebook and democracy, features Siva Vaidhyanathan. You can listen and subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts.

Part two, about privacy and power, features Alice E. Marwick. Listen here:

View a transcript of the episode here.

Episode notes

In this two-part inquiry into what the internet is doing to societies, two leading scholars who study online media take a critical look at both the affordances and dangers of large platforms like Facebook, Google, and Reddit. In part one, Siva Vaidhyanathan breaks down the global power of Facebook: what it provides in a positive sense, but also how exactly it makes money off of its users, and how its design and business model pose a serious threat to democracy. Siva shares some ideas about what would need to change for Facebook to serve its users-and societies-better.

And in part two, Alice Marwick breaks down what actually happens when companies collect and sell the data that users feed them, why it often feels as though smartphones are listening to us, and what we need to know about how privacy violations impact people differently based on gender, race, and socioeconomic status. Finally, she explains what mainstream discussions of online "misinformation" get wrong, and what she has found based on her extensive research into the darkest corners of Reddit, 4Chan, and other extremist platforms.

Mentioned in this episode

Siva's book Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018)

The 2016 electoral-college results

The Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969 and the Clean Water Act of 1972

Siva's writing for The Guardian

Siva's "Public Thinker" interview in Public Books

Scholars:

Alice's essay in Public Books, "Open Markets, Open Projects: Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness"

Alice's extensive research into many topics related to the internet, including:

Alice's article "How Your Data Are Being Deeply Mined," New York Review of Books (2014)

Alice's article "Scandal or Sex Crime? Gendered Privacy and the Celebrity Nude Photo Leaks," Ethics and Information Technology (2017)

Alice's article, coauthored with Mary Madden, Michele Gilman, and Karen Levy, "Privacy, Poverty and Big Data: A Matrix of Vulnerabilities for Poor Americans," Washington University Law Review (2017)

Alice's whitepaper, coauthored with Rebecca Lewis, "Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online," Data & Society (2017)

Acxiom, a third-party data broker

New York City's CompStat program (criminal-justice information system)

The GDPR, the EU's data-protection law

The Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988

Further reading

Siva recommends:

Alice recommends:

Episode 4:

Cultures Online

What new cultural forms are developing in the vast universe of the internet? How can observers and scholars keep up with the accelerated pace of human creativity online? And how do racial aesthetics, money, and power play out in internet cultures?

Our guests

Listen to the Episode

View a transcript of the episode here.

Episode notes

Two influential scholars of digital culture explore the significance of internet-native forms like memes, viral videos, and fan-fiction websites as cultural artifacts. They consider what happens when people are given a place where anyone can say (almost) anything at any time. Lauren and Richard think critically about the assumption that the internet is making culture more democratic-in other words, easier to produce and to access-given that age-old practices like cultural appropriation continue to thrive online.

Mentioned in this episode

Lauren's book White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation (Beacon, 2019)

Richard's book Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia University Press, forthcoming)

Internet platforms:

Internet forms or objects:

Richard's article, coauthored with Edwin Roland, "Race and Distant Reading," PMLA, vol. 135, no. 1 (2020).

Internet creators:

Scholars and writers:

Doreen St. Felix on Kayla Newman and "eyebrows on fleek"

Joshua Lumpkin Green, "Digital Blackface: The Repackaging of the Black Masculine Image" (masters thesis, Miami University, 2006).

On the hoax hashtag #EndFathersDay

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1895)

Further reading

Lauren recommends:

Richard recommends:

José Van Dijk, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are (Dey Street, 2017).

Jonathan Sterne, "Thinking the Internet: Cultural Studies Versus the Millennium," in Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net, edited by Steve Jones (Sage, 1999), pp. 257-83.

Episode 5:

Silicon Valley and Beyond

How did Silicon Valley become such a historically and globally significant hub of technological innovation? What-and who-gets left out of the stories people tell about Silicon Valley? What are the limits of technology, and how can we create more equitable technologies for the future?

Our Guests

Listen to the Episode

View a transcript of the episode here.

Episode notes

A historian and a data journalist explore the history and influence of Silicon Valley: how it came to be such an ascendent hub of technological innovation, and the limits of what the technologies produced there can do. Meredith and Margaret consider what is distinctly American about the history of Silicon Valley, how popular myths about Silicon Valley square up with reality, and why it's important for people to recognize that technology cannot solve all human problems.

Mentioned in this episode

Further reading and Viewing

Meredith recommends:

Margaret recommends:

Credits

Public Books 101 is produced by Annie Galvin, with production assistance from Jess Engebretson, and edited by Jess Engebretson and Annie Galvin. Our theme music was composed by Jack Hamilton. Special thanks to Kelley Deane McKinney, Michelle Wilson, and the staff of Public Books for their support for this project.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons-Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0).

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Public Books's new podcast, Public Books 101, turns a scholarly eye to a world worth studying. In each miniseries, world-class scholars and writers join our host to examine a single topic from many angles, opening a window into the conversations that experts are having with one another about the urgent issues and problems facing us today.

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I'll be talking about curriculum and the curriculum lab with some very cool neuroscience researchers at the Zuckerman Institute on Tuesday. It is open to the public so feel free to come and to share. I will do my best to situate the "future of learning and education" in the deeper conversations about curricular knowledge and practice that we have in lab meetings.

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What do we teach? Who gets to decide? How do we use brain science to inform those choices? As educators and parents face new challenges and are presented with new technology, it is essential that we find ways to incorporate research into how we learn and remember into curriculum and education design.

In this virtual Stavros Niarchos Foundation Brain Insight Lecture Series event, we will hear two 15-minute talks from experts from Columbia University whose work covers different aspects of learning and education. Dr. Jacqueline Simmons , Senior Lecturer and Vice Chair, Department of Curriculum & Teaching at Teachers College, will discuss how we decide what is considered knowledge worth knowing, and how to think about teaching and learning in order to guide more effective curriculum design. Dr. Lila Davachi , Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, will discuss the neuroscience of learning, and how both stability and changes in context can affect what we learn and how we retain it.

Following the two talks, Dr. Katie Insel , postdoctoral researcher in the Learning Lab at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, will then moderate a discussion, addressing topics such as how we can translate science into curriculum and validate the tools we use to teach and measure learning. Audience questions are welcomed, either submitted during registration or live during the event.

Registration is required.

Drs. Simmons and Davachi welcome your questions!
Please submit them via the registration link no later than Friday, February 5, 2021.

This event will also be live streamed.

For more information about this event, please contact the Zuckerman Institute at
This talk is part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Brain Insight Lecture series, offered free to the public to enhance understanding of the biology of the mind and the complexity of human behavior. The lectures are hosted by Columbia's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

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What do we teach? Who gets to decide? How do we use brain science to inform those choices? As educators and parents face new challenges and are presented with new technology, it is essential that we find ways to incorporate research into how we learn and remember into curriculum and education design.

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A teacher and students talk back to pandemic "learning loss."

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A teacher and students talk back to pandemic "learning loss."

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Here are articles that question the commonsense of learning loss.

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The new question of the week is:
There's a lot of talk about students suffering "learning loss" because of the pandemic-what does that mean, and how concerned should we be?
The phrase "learning loss" is everywhere in articles and discussions about COVID's impact on education.

Many of us teachers, however, have concerns about how that phrase is being interpreted by policymakers now and what the responses to that interpretation could look like in the fall.

In this series, two educators share much more sophisticated and precise commentaries than I did.

Not a 'quantity over quality' approach
Neema Avashia is an 8th grade civics teacher in the Boston public schools, where she has taught for the last 18 years. She was a 2013 Educator of the Year in the city of Boston:
If our educational response to the pandemic is more of the same tired approaches that we were already trying before the pandemic-pages of standards, longer school days, more and more and more assessment-it will fail, just as it was failing prior to the pandemic. We have an opportunity to think and plan differently in this moment-to build a system that is responsive to the needs of the students it purports to serve. Doing so requires that we begin by listening to those young people and amplifying what they say they need, as opposed to what we as adults think they need.

The phrase "learning loss" is everywhere. Uttered by governors at press conferences as a rationale for reopening schools. Emailed out by consultants who offer "ground-breaking solutions" to addressing it. Batted back and forth in heated debates on Twitter between those who are wringing their hands over it and those who say, "Kids are surviving a pandemic, not losing learning." And every time I hear another adult use the phrase, I wonder: Is learning loss the most pressing concern on my students' minds? Or are there other losses that hit harder?

Here's the truth that too many adults who don't directly work with young people refuse to acknowledge: When our youths are frightened, disconnected, grieving, or anxious, they aren't learning. Their brains aren't taking in our lessons, or holding on to the Common Core standards. Their amygdalas are in charge, and adults just sound like Charlie Brown's teacher. If we are going to address the academic loss that may have occurred during the pandemic, then we also need to fully understand the other kinds of loss our young people have experienced and have plans in place to support them through those losses.

As a veteran teacher in the Boston public schools, one important lesson I've learned from my students is that everything I plan with them goes much better than anything I plan without them. In the context of pandemic schooling, this has proven particularly true. No adult alive right now fully understands what it means to be a student in school at this moment. What's worse is that the people in charge of making policy decisions are so far removed from the experience of pandemic schooling that their decisions don't even seem to reflect the lived realities of young people.

Since the spring, I've created opportunities at least twice a month for restorative-justice circles during class where students have space to share how they are feeling, how school is going, and what they want adults to know in that moment. Each time we have one of these circles, I leave with 10 new ideas for how I can be a better educator to my students and how our school can adjust its practices to better support their well-being and their learning.

I decided recently to have my students respond directly to this notion of learning loss. To see if it weighs on them in the same ways that it does for adults and to see how the solutions adults are proposing (extended school days and years, use of standardized testing to assess loss, academic intervention courses, etc.) land with young people. I created a circle with three questions:

During the pandemic, what are things that you feel like you've lost?

During the pandemic, what are the ways that you have seen yourself grow or learn new things?

Many adults in education right now are very focused on the idea of "learning loss." They think that kids are falling behind academically during the pandemic. What do you want those adults to know about you and your experience during the pandemic?

I invited multiple circle-keepers to attend our Zoom class and broke students into small groups where they could have time and space to reflect deeply on these questions. I promised my students that I would share their ideas with the wider world, so that their thoughts could inform the policy conversation. The quotes below are directly pulled from the Google form that students completed to prepare for our circle.
Students reflect on their pandemic losses: I lost my ability to be happy. Staying in the house is not for me. Basketball really helped my depression, and I can' t play it now. I've lost a lot of interest in my friends. I stick to myself. I lost family, I lost myself and what hurts me more is that I lost everyone who said they were going to be there for me. I lost time I could have been enjoying my childhood. I have less motivation for school. I've lost myself.
Students reflect on their pandemic gains and growth:
I used to feel like I didn't want to do school anymore, and because of the pandemic I had to think to myself that's not the path I want to go down. So I started changing and completing more work and focusing on myself instead of other people. I'm starting to have more confidence in myself. I am better at managing my time and my school work. I I feel more well-rested. I am better at speaking out a little more. I learned more about my people and I learned more about what people did to Black people then and now. I also learned to respect people's identity and try to find out my own. I also learned to love myself and to see who are my actual friends. I haven't learned anything from school to be so honest because online school stresses me out so much. Out of school I learned that you have to forgive everyone and love who's near especially in times like this. Students respond to adult ideas about "learning loss": I think they are wrong because we have improved our grades and we try to do as much work as possible, also we learn more things from home because we are more focused. This pandemic is already very stressful for students and giving us more work won't help. Also, it's very risky, since kids can bring back the virus and family members might not have the healthcare they need. MY GRADES ARE BETTER now. Stop tryna change things because you are uncomfortable. Thank you. I want them to know that some kids may be struggling, but some are having less of a problem with remote learning than others because every person has different experiences with things. They have many opinions but they're not the ones who wake up and get on Zoom everyday. Implications
One of my students said it best when she said, "Adults' intentions might be good, but their solutions are really lacking." From listening to my students, three themes emerged that I have not yet heard discussed in depth in the policy conversations around post-pandemic schooling:

1. Post-pandemic schooling needs to focus on relationships. Students described losing connections to their friends, their teachers, and most painfully, to themselves. In our return to in-person schooling, rebuilding connection needs to be the priority. This will require smaller classes, better teacher-student ratios, and increased presence in schools of adults who both want to, and know how to, support students with re-establishing connections.

2. Post-pandemic schooling needs to prioritize mental health and wellness. There is no question that the pandemic has impacted student mental health. The question is whether simply putting students back into the classroom is going to address their struggles. And the answer to that question is a resounding no. Students with mental-health struggles often didn't have adequate support in our schools prepandemic. Over 430,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, and American schoolchildren will carry that grief with them when they come to school each day. We need to see a significant infusion of resources into mental-health services for young people, both in schools and out of them: into staffing and programming such that every student who needs support has access to it. This is something that has never existed in equitable ways across school districts in America, so the funding and planning should have begun months ago.

3. Postpandemic schooling needs to take a less-is-more approach. The adult anxiety around "learning loss" is completely tied to the "quantity over quality" approach to curriculum and standards that plagues our education system. One of the best moves we made as a school community this year was to change our schedule so that students only take three long classes at a time and alternate between "deeper learning" modules. This has supported students in managing their work, in focusing on core concepts, and in creating multiple opportunities for fresh starts for students who are overwhelmed or struggling. Students don't want to go back to a six-period day, and neither do I. We need to re-evaluate our approach to standards, deeply consider what is essential vs. what is extraneous, and encourage schools to build schedules, structures, and curriculum units that support deeper learning, rather than superficial coverage.

Let's not return to our previous ways of educating students. We have an opportunity to think and plan differently in this moment. To build a system that is responsive to the needs of the students it purports to serve. A first step in doing so is to listen to our students.

Thanks to Neema for her contribution!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.
Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email (The RSS feed for this blog, and for all Ed Week articles, has been changed by the new redesign-new ones won't be available until February). And if you missed any of the highlights from the first nine years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below. I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column.

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Students Respond to Adults' Fixation on 'Learning Loss' (Opinion)

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The new question of the week is: There's a lot of talk about students suffering "learning loss" because of the pandemic-what does that mean, and how concerned should we be? The phrase "learning loss" is everywhere in articles and discussions about COVID's impact on education.

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this is the training module for trauma informed instruction  that I mentioned in lab. Initially I wasn't into it, but in the end i spent an hour finishing the module and enjoyed it because I became interested in the story of the student who was going through something, and it felt very "gamified" and engaging to be in the role of the teacher and try different scenarios to support the student. I definitely felt that I learned and reinforced some strategies for building trust with students.

One critique is that it does seem to reward a "correct" path. I usually picked the right response so I didn't experience any parts of the story where the relationship between the teacher and student fractured in any way. I'm looking forward to hearing what others think. Maybe others will hate this! Let me know how you react.

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"purpose of education" talk hits the mainstream

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"purpose of education" talk hits the mainstream

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Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America and Teach for All is calling on the new education secretary to have a "purpose of education" dialogue. Let's get ready to have this cornerstone of curriculum theorizing coopted the way "equity" was.  I can only imagine how she and her corporate sponsors are going to capitalize on this.

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As we enter a new chapter in our nation's history with a new administration at the helm, we'll have the chance to reconsider our priorities. One of the most important of these should be to engage in a collective discussion-nationally and in local communities-about what we're working toward in education. We need to rethink our very purpose.

As we consider how to tackle the deep polarization of our nation, its systemic injustices, a fast-degrading environment, and growing economic inequality, we need to remember the maxim that what we foster in classrooms today is what we'll have in the world tomorrow.

There is much discussion about how education can "build back better" after the pandemic. We must resist the temptation to tinker around the edges and instead embrace a larger vision.

That is to say, educators, students, parents, employers, policymakers, and civic leaders across all sectors must come together to consider our collective future and what we want it to look like. What are our values and aspirations? What are our challenges and opportunities? And what characteristics must we develop in our young people if we're going to achieve our vision of the future? The answers to these questions should frame what we do next.

I write this having spent the last decade building Teach For All, a global network of independent partner organizations similar to Teach For America, in 59 countries around the world. In 2015, there was a loud call from CEOs and staff members across these organizations to define the vision Teach For All was working toward through our collective efforts. We took stock of the significant challenges in the path toward peace, inclusiveness, and sustainability-and concluded that we must dedicate ourselves to developing students' leadership so they are able to navigate a changing world and solve these increasingly complex problems. We came together around a vision that all children should have the education, support, and opportunity to shape a better future for themselves and all of us.

This evolution has had huge implications for our work. It has meant that we have had to do a lot more than catch students up within our current education systems. Across diverse communities from Armenia, to Peru, to Uganda, to Pakistan, our network partners have worked collaboratively with community stakeholders to consider the local values, aspirations, challenges, and opportunities to determine what student outcomes were most important in these different contexts.

And then we have had to rethink how to accomplish these holistic outcomes. As our vision of success moved beyond simply catching students up, we're working on changing our teacher-development frameworks, for example, that were originally based on studying the teachers most successful in closing those academic achievement gaps. We conducted new studies to understand the mindsets and actions of teachers who foster students' agency, social and political awareness, critical thinking and problem-solving skills, mindsets, and values.

It's been hard to work with educators across the world who are focusing on developing these holistic student outcomes necessary to reshape their societies while knowing that in my own country, we seemed to be oriented far more narrowly-as evidenced by the decision of the former administration's U.S. Department of Education to opt out of the first-ever assessment of global competence in 2018 by the Program for International Student Assessment.

Most know PISA as a survey that provides comparative data on 15-year-olds' performance in reading, mathematics, and science to inform education policy discussions at home and abroad. Its new global competence test aims to go further by ascertaining students' readiness to build a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world. The test looks at whether students can think critically about local and global issues, understand and appreciate multiple cultural perspectives, are prepared to interact respectfully across lines of cultural difference, and take action to make a positive difference. Of the 79 economies participating in PISA in 2018, 66 took part in the global competence portion of the assessment.

The United States' decision not to participate is particularly concerning given the inequities raging within our country-which demand the engagement of citizens who can work across lines of difference, understand the full complexity of the nation's history, and have the agency to solve serious problems facing our communities.

The PISA results reflect that the efforts that some countries have made toward global competence have paid off. For example, Colombia, which I've come to know through our network organization Enseña por Colombia, scored higher on the global competence assessment than their performance in reading, math, and science would predict. As a country seeking to overcome decades of civil strife, Colombian policymakers and educators put issues of social cohesion at the center of rebuilding their school system, and it's encouraging that this has yielded positive results. We could take a lesson from their example, among others.

The new American education secretary could lead the charge in fostering dialogue about our local and national education goals. If he does, he could prove to be among President Joe Biden's most important appointments-one who could help unite the country and give us a fighting chance to revitalize our democracy and contribute to a peaceful, sustainable world.

He could put together a national commission of diverse leaders to consider what's been at work when our country has been at its best, as well as our challenges and our aspirations. This group would reimagine the purpose of education by developing a vision for the future for our country and a vision for what our young people need to know and be able to do to realize it. The commission should inspire and inform similar processes communities across the country.

Meanwhile, the secretary could call upon mayors, school district leaders, students, parents, community organizers, and civic leaders to steer local efforts that would consider these same questions. The federal department of education could build a network of these local leaders so they could share their learning.

As we work to move our country forward, there will be calls to rethink our political processes, strengthen our civic institutions, and address the pitfalls of our social-media landscape. Let's not forget that as educators, we have the most central role to play in shaping the future.

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My Hope for the New Education Secretary's Agenda (Opinion)

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As we enter a new chapter in our nation's history with a new administration at the helm, we'll have the chance to reconsider our priorities. One of the most important of these should be to engage in a collective discussion-nationally and in local communities-about what we're working toward in education.

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some neat curricular projects here, bringing together emotions, imagination, and complexity

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Daily adventures in a better tomorrow

project_website_1 https://climatemuseumuk.org/

project_website_2 https://aboutbridgetmckenzie.wordpress.com/

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project_website_title_2 About Bridget Mckenzie

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project_leader Bridget McKenzie, Founding Director

project_headline The little museum that could

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Most people's concept of what a museum is needs updating. In response to the challenges of COVID, the digitisation of culture and a desire to connect and engage as widely as possible, the museum is breaking free of its own walls.

Take the Climate Museum UK ; free from ties to a physical building, this creative collective runs a mobile and digital museum to stimulate and record responses to the climate and ecological emergency. The museum uses art, objects, ideas, games and books to activate people and help them to play, make, think and talk about the Earth crisis and to open their imaginations to possible futures.

It was founded by creative curator Bridget Mckenzie (pictured below) out of a desire to combine a former career leading digital and learning programmes at major UK cultural institutions, including the Tate and the British Library, with her personal and family commitments to the environmental movement.

" I was doing a lot of projects to bring these two strands of my life together outside of my normal work - running mostly unfunded local creative ecology projects - but it all felt a bit lonely and unresolved", says Bridget. To address that, she went on the Creative Climate Leadership course, run by creative climate community, Julie's Bicycle , after which she decided to set up an organisation "to enable the creation of a regenerative culture, using the arts".

Initially Bridget imagined a training and development organisation, but after meeting Miranda Massie , the director of the Climate Museum in New York , she realised she wanted to create something with similar ambitions, and in 2018 the Climate Museum UK was born.

"I didn't want to squirrel away privately" Bridget continues, "so I put it out there and ran a series of prototyping workshops - and we're still evolving, but are getting to an agreed notion of what it is we're doing".

Bridget aspires to help people understand how to expand the range of responses to the Earth crisis and the great potential of cultural, educational and science organisations to enable a transition in people's attitudes and behaviours. However, funding limitations and funder focus on traditional heritage or cultural topics can constrain that potential - as can fear: "denial and fear can prevent institutions from engaging with the issue, because it's too difficult," Bridget adds.

Having a physical building can also constrain the discussions: "If you've got a building and people raise the question of the environment, it's incredibly hard to get beyond the questions of how do we recycle coffee cups and how do we reduce our energy?" she explains. Climate Museum UK, meanwhile, as a distributed network of practitioners working with found objects and recycled materials has had a very light footprint from the outset.

One area of focus is to help local museums restore their relevance to their communities: whether that's documenting the climate movement or exploring community energy transition. "We are a museum, but we are also acting as a provocateur, a demonstrator and a helper", Bridget adds. "We want to get funding to work with local partner museums to help them to develop tools, trails and resources that can put an eco-lens on their collections."

The Museum is collaborating with local government partners too. They're working with the London borough of Lewisham - which will be 'Borough of Culture 2022' with a specific focus on climate action - to host creative climate conversations in the local community.

The Climate Museum UK team are also doing deep work with complexity, moving the debate beyond the binary question of whether engaging people with the climate crisis needs more space for education or for imagination - in particular given the failures of attempts to engage wide audiences through factual information alone.

"The challenge is hugely multi-dimensional. We have to work at the spiritual (in the most secular sense of the word) and emotional level."

"We need to work practically and physically - get out there in the soil and do projects where people are building, designing and testing things", Bridget tells us. "Then the imagination is a force throughout that, which is what we call being possitopian : expanding the range of your imagination to the fullest range of possibilities, from the very worst to the very best, most kind, loving, flourishing way that we can live together."

Other projects include exploring the potential for digital commons collections. "Essentially, if you think of cultural collections as data, then how can you put an ecological lens on digital collections, and also enable end users to find what they need." One innovation is to see activists as a user group for digital collections - a fitting approach for an organisation that won an Activist Museum Award 2019/20 .

In her work as co-founder of growing global community of arts and culture champions, Culture Declares Emergency , Bridget is pursuing how the letter 'R' for 'Regenerative' could be added into the much used acronym STEAM - changing it to STREAM. Ideas include a festival of regenerative arts that would use data to explore what is happening with the damage to, and then the repair, of places: "It would be about art healing places. It's a new take on outdoor arts, and how they can be really rooted in caring for places", she explains.

On top of this programme of activities are regular talks and workshops for different audiences including schools, cultural and educational institutions. Through curation and play with objects, Climate Museum UK is inspiring conversations and charting a new path for how culture can help us respond to the Earth crisis.

AtlasAction: Climate Museum UK invites you to start new conversations about climate and ecology - and open yourself up to a 'possitopian' viewpoint, taking a wider view of what our future could be. Get in touch or sign up to the newsletter to find out more.

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This project has been selected as part of CultureFutures, a storytelling project that maps creative and cultural projects with a social mission - and the artists, collectives and entrepreneurs behind them.

partner

United Kingdom (London)

Most people's concept of what a museum is needs updating. In response to the challenges of COVID, the digitisation of culture and a desire to connect and engage as widely as possible, the museum is breaking free of its own walls.

Take the Climate Museum UK ; free from ties to a physical building, this creative collective runs a mobile and digital museum to stimulate and record responses to the climate and ecological emergency. The museum uses art, objects, ideas, games and books to activate people and help them to play, make, think and talk about the Earth crisis and to open their imaginations to possible futures.

It was founded by creative curator Bridget Mckenzie (pictured below) out of a desire to combine a former career leading digital and learning programmes at major UK cultural institutions, including the Tate and the British Library, with her personal and family commitments to the environmental movement.

" I was doing a lot of projects to bring these two strands of my life together outside of my normal work - running mostly unfunded local creative ecology projects - but it all felt a bit lonely and unresolved", says Bridget. To address that, she went on the Creative Climate Leadership course, run by creative climate community, Julie's Bicycle , after which she decided to set up an organisation "to enable the creation of a regenerative culture, using the arts".

Initially Bridget imagined a training and development organisation, but after meeting Miranda Massie , the director of the Climate Museum in New York , she realised she wanted to create something with similar ambitions, and in 2018 the Climate Museum UK was born.

"I didn't want to squirrel away privately" Bridget continues, "so I put it out there and ran a series of prototyping workshops - and we're still evolving, but are getting to an agreed notion of what it is we're doing".

Bridget aspires to help people understand how to expand the range of responses to the Earth crisis and the great potential of cultural, educational and science organisations to enable a transition in people's attitudes and behaviours. However, funding limitations and funder focus on traditional heritage or cultural topics can constrain that potential - as can fear: "denial and fear can prevent institutions from engaging with the issue, because it's too difficult," Bridget adds.

Having a physical building can also constrain the discussions: "If you've got a building and people raise the question of the environment, it's incredibly hard to get beyond the questions of how do we recycle coffee cups and how do we reduce our energy?" she explains. Climate Museum UK, meanwhile, as a distributed network of practitioners working with found objects and recycled materials has had a very light footprint from the outset.

One area of focus is to help local museums restore their relevance to their communities: whether that's documenting the climate movement or exploring community energy transition. "We are a museum, but we are also acting as a provocateur, a demonstrator and a helper", Bridget adds. "We want to get funding to work with local partner museums to help them to develop tools, trails and resources that can put an eco-lens on their collections."

The Museum is collaborating with local government partners too. They're working with the London borough of Lewisham - which will be 'Borough of Culture 2022' with a specific focus on climate action - to host creative climate conversations in the local community.

The Climate Museum UK team are also doing deep work with complexity, moving the debate beyond the binary question of whether engaging people with the climate crisis needs more space for education or for imagination - in particular given the failures of attempts to engage wide audiences through factual information alone.

"The challenge is hugely multi-dimensional. We have to work at the spiritual (in the most secular sense of the word) and emotional level."

"We need to work practically and physically - get out there in the soil and do projects where people are building, designing and testing things", Bridget tells us. "Then the imagination is a force throughout that, which is what we call being possitopian : expanding the range of your imagination to the fullest range of possibilities, from the very worst to the very best, most kind, loving, flourishing way that we can live together."

Other projects include exploring the potential for digital commons collections. "Essentially, if you think of cultural collections as data, then how can you put an ecological lens on digital collections, and also enable end users to find what they need." One innovation is to see activists as a user group for digital collections - a fitting approach for an organisation that won an Activist Museum Award 2019/20 .

In her work as co-founder of growing global community of arts and culture champions, Culture Declares Emergency , Bridget is pursuing how the letter 'R' for 'Regenerative' could be added into the much used acronym STEAM - changing it to STREAM. Ideas include a festival of regenerative arts that would use data to explore what is happening with the damage to, and then the repair, of places: "It would be about art healing places. It's a new take on outdoor arts, and how they can be really rooted in caring for places", she explains.

On top of this programme of activities are regular talks and workshops for different audiences including schools, cultural and educational institutions. Through curation and play with objects, Climate Museum UK is inspiring conversations and charting a new path for how culture can help us respond to the Earth crisis.

AtlasAction: Climate Museum UK invites you to start new conversations about climate and ecology - and open yourself up to a 'possitopian' viewpoint, taking a wider view of what our future could be. Get in touch or sign up to the newsletter to find out more.

Written by

Cathy Runciman, Co-founder, Atlas of the Future

Project leader

Bridget McKenzie, Founding Director

Tags: Art, Awareness raising, Biodiversity, Climate, Climate change, Community, Education, Intergenerational, Regeneration, Storytelling, Sustainability, Workshop.

Partners

This project has been selected as part of CultureFutures, a storytelling project that maps creative and cultural projects with a social mission - and the artists, collectives and entrepreneurs behind them.

Support the Atlas

We want the Atlas of the Future media platform and our event to be available to everybody, everywhere for free - always. Fancy helping us spread stories of hope and optimism to create a better tomorrow? For those able, we'd be grateful for any donation.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter

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The little museum that could | Atlas of the Future

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perhaps this could help us think about counterfactual histories and parallel presents for education.
here's the parent site- https://fashionfictions.org/

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A while ago someone shared with me this architecture design firm--has interesting examples of different approaches to classroom spaces.

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Giving children options in how they learn

Standardized education doesn't work. Every person, every child has different needs. Some learn better by listening, others by watching or doing. Some children are fascinated by nature and others by computers. Without personalizing education for each child, it's near impossible to help each one develop to their greatest possible potential. To demonstrate to K-12 schools how a learning environment can assist in personalizing education, we partnered with Denver Public Schools and with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation developed the Imaginarium Classroom prototype.

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Standardized education doesn't work. Every person, every child has different needs. Some learn better by listening, others by watching or doing. Some children are fascinated by nature and others by computers. Without personalizing education for each child, it's near impossible to help each one develop to their greatest possible potential.

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going back to a convo in the Lab chat after Black Paint's field trip to PS1

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A recently renovated classroom in my school

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A recently renovated classroom in my school

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telling about curriculum is different than experiencing the curriculum one is telling about

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telling about curriculum is different than experiencing the curriculum one is telling about

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I wanted to hold on to this idea from today

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What does it mean to have your learning interrupted? What other learning takes place in the meantime?

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Tatyana Fazlalizadeh published an update to her 2018 "I am mourning" series, to include "I miss...", and the losses of the pandemic

Here's the series from her webpage, below, and an update on her instagram today, with some public responses (that I couldn't quite get to link properly through padlet, you can find it over @tlynnfaz though)  https://www.instagram.com/p/CKMID0mJuXJ/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

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In Mourning is a multimedia project about grief and mourning from the perspective of Black people.

Shirt and Interviews
I created a shirt in 2018 that read "In Mourning", inspired by photographs from 1968 of students at Ohio University on a National Day of Mourning after MLK was assassinated.

Now, I'm interviewing individual Black people about their experiences with grief. I give the individuals the shirts for free as a public assertion that we are in mourning. It often feels cruel that we must live our daily lives - performing at work, at school, running errands - when are constantly subjected to the death of Black people at the hands of racist systems and people. This shirt is a way of wearing our grief, allowing it to speak for us while we move throughout the world. My conversations with the participants in this project are a way to understand and reflect back to the public the heavy emotions that we often carry.

While the shirt and and interviews are specifically for Black people, the interactive public art pieces are for the public at large.

Engagement Public Art
Including but also reaching beyond the very specific grief that Black people hold, is the collective grief the public at large is experiencing in this time of COVID-19. So many are suffering from the loss of loved ones, loss of security, intimacy, closeness, and the loss of our lives as we once knew them. I wanted to create a public space for us to be able to express our grief, to mourn, in hopes that the act of sharing provides some sense of solace and collective understanding and healing. Passersby are invited to write their own responses to the prompts "I am mourning ____" and "I am grieving _____".

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In Mourning is a multimedia project about grief and mourning from the perspective of Black people. Shirt and Interviews I created a shirt in 2018 that read "In Mourning", inspired by photographs from 1968 of students at Ohio University on a National Day of Mourning after MLK was assassinated.

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We briefly talked about children knowing more then adults give them credit for. This podcast on npr touches on this topic and shared stories from adults who remembered how adult efforts to hide the truth left them somewhat scarred. In that regard, confusion was not awesome. I found it to be entirely tone deaf to the range of backgrounds and experiences, as if we can tell children who live in violence that no harm will come to them.

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subscribe to Up First podcast

subscribe to Up First podcast

When the headlines are terrifying, how can parents make sure kids get the facts without traumatizing them? Whether it's a school shooting, a global pandemic or an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, child development experts have some advice. In this bonus episode brought to you by NPR's Life Kit, hosts Anya Kamenetz and Cory Turner have answers.

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BONUS: What To Tell Kids When The News Is Scary : Up First

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When the headlines are terrifying, how can parents make sure kids get the facts without traumatizing them? Whether it's a school shooting, a global pandemic or an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, child development experts have some advice. In this bonus episode brought to you by NPR's Life Kit, hosts Anya Kamenetz and Cory Turner have answers.

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"a website intervention reflecting on collective care in pandemic time(s)"

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"a website intervention reflecting on collective care in pandemic time(s)"

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this touches on some themes that have been circulating here - collective care, what a body can do,, 'returning to normal'
I wonder how this is working or what's meant by an "intervention". How might it help us thinking curricularly about those themes?

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How to experience this commission

To experience Phases and the In-Betweens, scroll down on this web page throughout the month beginning Wednesday, January 13, and check back as the moon shifts in its cycle on January 20 and 28 and February 4 and 11.

This artwork includes animation, text, and a video with sound.

To unmute the video's audio track on desktop, adjust the volume meter in the video's play bar. On your phone, turn the audio on by using the volume keys.

For a transcript of the audio track, a poem by danilo machado, and an audio image description of the animated frame, download the two files below.

PDF transcript of the audio track (opens in a new window)
Audio file with image description (opens in a new window)

An animated GIF with a cosmic background sprinkled with light stars fills the view of the webpage window. Each of the four corners of the window contains a smaller, square animated loop. On the top left corner is a purple-tinted time lapse of an empty twin-sized bed with crumpled sheets. To the left of the bed is another bed, barely visible on the edge of the frame, and to the right of the bed is a nightstand with a glowing lamp. The sheets are drawn in pencil and shift through different amorphous shapes, made and unmade. The Chinese character 地 (dì) fades in on top in bold and yellow, meaning earth or ground. A poem to the right in yellow serif font and reads from left to right, lines arranged like steps: sheets crumpled like paper / new moon / first phase. At the top right corner of the GIF is a new moon in indigo glowing on a yellow background. Below the moon is a poem that cascades down: otherwise / obscured / indirect / look / fire / work / pain / highest. Bottom right corner is an animated dark blue figure on a red background with thin drawn lines of lilac and yellow bursting out of its heart center like a firework. The bottom left corner is a steadily pulsing circle gradient with red hues on lime background, signifying highest pain. Between the firework figure and the pulsing circle is a poem cascading: outward sparklers / burn the earth / many bright stars. Above the red pulsing gradient and below the bed is a poem that reads: bed / frame / sheets / like / billboard / like / felix / spirit. In the center of the background GIF is an embedded looped video shifting through different scenes signifying bureaucratic, medical, and environmental views of the Covid pandemic in New York City along with medical imagery from the Brothers Sick.

About this commission

Phases and the In-Betweens is a collaborative digital artwork by Brothers Sick (Ezra and Noah Benus), Yo-Yo Lin, and danilo machado that disrupts the usual vertical, linear flow of The Shed's website. The combination of an animated frame, a video at its center, and accompanying texts that appear both in the animation and as accessible alt-text proposes new hierarchies, ways of reading, and reflections on the notions and networks of collective care during the COVID-19 pandemic from a disability-artistry perspective. Starting with the new moon on January 13, the work will transform throughout the month according to the phases of the lunar cycle as a way to reflect on (and criticize) the "phases of reopening" as set up by governmental agencies as part of the so-called "return to normal."

The piece's video is composed of photos and footage from the Benus's personal archive documenting their medical files, facilities where ongoing medical treatments take place, and moments from their rare outings in Brooklyn and the Bronx during the pandemic. These images are layered with indexed maps and data correlated to the pandemic's impact on the city. Poetic image descriptions written by machado and animations created by Lin-which draw inspiration from elemental and celestial charts for navigating time and cycles of pain, along with guidance from the Tao Te Ching-frame the video on the web page.

Critically engaging with New York State's reopening plan of arbitrary, constructed phases set in contrast to cycles found in nature, the artists aim to showcase the heightened anxiety of experiencing the "outside" world in a predominantly medicalized way during the pandemic as the public world has shifted radically between shutdowns and Black Lives Matter protests. Through the frameworks of disabled/crip time, sick time, and pandemic time, the piece takes a look at the disablement further imposed on communities who identify as sick/ill/disabled during a pandemic and how we might better account collectively for the well-being of one another.

Creative Team

Thank you to our partners

The creation of new work at The Shed is generously supported by the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Commissioning Fund and the Shed Commissioners.

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Brothers Sick, Yo-Yo Lin, and danilo machado - The Shed

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How to experience this commission To experience Phases and the In-Betweens, scroll down on this web page throughout the month beginning Wednesday, January 13, and check back as the moon shifts in its cycle on January 20 and 28 and February 4 and 11. This artwork includes animation, text, and a video with sound.

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I'm always intrigued by how CUP designs curricula so intuitively and clearly for a wide audience. They seem to reflect many of the conversations we have in curriculum lab, but without some of our complicated language that can get in the way of simplicity. I wonder if our theorizing sometimes gets in the way of communicating. Or maybe i'm being too hard on us?

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CUP provides professional development opportunities for educators interested in incorporating project-based and place-based learning into their classrooms. Teacher Trainings are led by CUP staff with experience producing educational programs that demystify how the city works and foster increased civic engagement.

Teacher Trainings vary in length, and can be developed to meet the needs of your school or classroom. Educators will learn how to use the city as a teaching tool, how to use design to break down the city's complex systems, and how to connect their curricula to neighborhood issues. CUP has provided trainings for high school teachers in all subjects, as well as teaching artists, administrators, afterschool educators, and graduate students in education programs.

Past Teacher Trainings have included:

Neighborhood Futures: Teachers learn how to find a site in their community and work with students to identify a variety of potential users and stakeholders. What would different groups want out of this space? Teachers then learn specific design activities they can use to help their students imagine futures for the space from the perspective of various stakeholders. These activities spark conversations about who gets to change places, who benefits from those changes, and students' hopes and dreams for their neighborhood.

Mapping: Teachers participate in a series of mapping activities that they can use with students to investigate their neighborhoods. Teachers learn how to use the built environment as a teaching tool, as well as techniques to investigate the social, physical, and political aspects of a neighborhood.

Project-based learning: Educators learn about CUP's unique educational approach by participating in hands-on projects. Teachers learn how to frame questions for project-based curricula, how to use design to break down complex information, and how to frame collaborative design projects with their students.

If you are a teacher, a school administrator, or part of an institution interested in hiring CUP for a professional development session, email us at info (at) welcometocup.org

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CUP provides professional development opportunities for educators interested in incorporating project-based and place-based learning into their classrooms. Teacher Trainings are led by CUP staff with experience producing educational programs that demystify how the city works and foster increased civic engagement. Teacher Trainings vary in length, and can be developed to meet the needs of your school or classroom.

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This article and haunting pictures make me think about how memories of ourselves and our ancestors shape the curriculum we enact through the objects and practices of our every day lives.

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Photographs by Terry Adkins
This article was published online on December 12, 2020.
What you are looking at is the afterlife of memories.

Memory jugs were funerary objects found in the South on the graves of African Americans through the mid‑20th century. These small stoneware vessels were adorned with fragments-broken china, glass shards-and items beloved by the departed. The ritual is said to have its origins in Central Africa's Bakongo culture. It was brought here by enslaved people and continued by their descendants, mainly sharecroppers.

The artist Terry Adkins (1953-2014) had seen one such vessel in his grandmother's home, in Upperville, Virginia, as a young boy, which fueled his fascination. He collected hundreds of memory jugs from the mid-1990s until his death, and began taking X‑rays of them while he was a professor of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania. This quartet of images is featured in a forthcoming exhibition at New York's New Museum, titled " Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America," a show conceived by the late curator Okwui Enwezor.

Estate of Terry Adkins / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Lévy Gorvy

Adkins's X-rays transform the jugs into heavenly bodies, encouraging contemplation. The images feel intimate, ethereal, and futuristic. The stories of the lives of ordinary African Americans and their forebears are often distilled into a sweeping narrative-invisible, monolithic masses questing for dignity and recognition of their citizenship or humanity. But if the historical record tends to overlook the simple moments of pleasure and joy in the lives of these men and women, Adkins brings them to the forefront. A hobby-horse toy, a pewter spoon, a mother-of-pearl hair comb, a pocket watch, buttons from a well-loved calico dress or coat, charm necklaces and shells, crosses and lace-photographed in this manner, the items take on a sacred quality. Adkins's work uplifts the ordinary, asking viewers to make "modern memories," as his widow, Merele Williams-Adkins, told me.

These images resonate in a year overflowing with eulogies for hundreds of thousands of American dead, disproportionately Black, at a time when public mourning is itself deadly and, all the while, Americans wrestle with the country's past and future.
This article appears in the January/February 2021 print edition with the headline "How to Remember a Life."

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Photographs by Terry Adkins This article was published online on December 12, 2020. What you are looking at is the afterlife of memories. Memory jugs were funerary objects found in the South on the graves of African Americans through the mid‑20th century. These small stoneware vessels were adorned with fragments-broken china, glass shards-and items beloved by the departed.

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This site from UC Santa Cruz might be a good companion to our visit to Marking Time at PS1, with a "Visualizing Abolition" series that continues in 2021

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Hank Willis Thomas, If the Leader Only Knew, 2014

Barring Freedom highlights the role of the arts in cultivating critical engagements with issues of prisons, policing, and justice in the United States. At the center of Barring Freedom is an contemporary art exhibition and a participatory public art project emphasizing the different strategies artists use to bring into sight the social, racial, and economic workings of the nation's criminal justice system. Related online artist talks and discussions on the theme of Visualizing Abolition feature artists, scholars, and activists who share a commitment to imagining alternatives to the injustices. This website documents and archives the exhibition, public art project, and events, while also providing digital tools and study guides to further explore issues of art and justice.READ MORE...

HISTORIES & STRUCTURES

CARCERAL VISUALITY

FROM THE INSIDE OUT

ABOLITION FUTURES

Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent. With artist talks, film screenings and discussions, the series intends to challenge how mass incarceration, the racist brutalities of policing, and the biases of the court have been normalized within the social landscape and political vision of America-and to imagine a world beyond these unjust systems. Event information is below, and the archived videos will be posted as they become available.

Institute of the Arts and Sciences ■ University of California, Santa Cruz 1156 High Street ■ Santa Cruz, CA 95064 ■ ias.ucsc.edu

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Barring Freedom highlights the role of the arts in cultivating critical engagements with issues of prisons, policing, and justice in the United States. At the center of Barring Freedom is an contemporary art exhibition and a participatory public art project emphasizing the different strategies artists use to bring into sight the social, racial, and economic workings of the nation's criminal justice system.

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Sara Hendren's book and thinking has guided me through expanding my ideas of curriculum, the pitfalls of retrofitting and the ways multi-directional flexibility support us all in learning and growing, especially centering disabled people.

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What Can a Body Do? is a fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all.

In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it-from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture- Sara Hendren, in What Can a Body Do?, invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body's stunning capacity for adaptation-rather than a rigid insistence on "normalcy"-look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain?

By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

Follow the discussion online using #WhatCanABodyDo and follow us @NAFellows.

, @ablerism
2018 Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow, New America
Author, What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World

Forest Young, @ten_ten
Global Principal, Wolff Olins

Please support our bookselling partner Solid State Books by purchasing a copy of What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World through this link. Thirty percent of each sale goes directly to support Solid State and independent bookstores across the country.

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[ONLINE] - Sara Hendren, What Can a Body Do?

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What Can a Body Do? is a fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all.

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Image

The restaurant critic Tejal Rao recently created a "personal smell museum" of her life in Los Angeles, cataloging the aromas she encountered in her home and her office, the scent of vanilla she detected when driving past a commercial bakery. I asked her why she thought a smell museum was such a vital way to document her life.

"Every time you notice a smell - fresh bread, your best friend's house, a wet dog, garlic frying in butter - it means volatile particles in the air have entered your body and, just for a moment, become a part of you," she said."There is no sense more intimate, or more complex, which is why recalling your own personal smell memories can be so precise, vivid and even emotional. Your recollections might be one day, or several decades old, but that smell was once a part of you."

We asked New York Times readers what smells they would archive in their own smell museums, what scents are so alive for them that they have become part of them. Here's what they told us. - MELISSA KIRSCH

- Magdalen Livesey, 76, Wilton, Conn. - Maureen Bradford, 53, Stevensville, Mich.

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The restaurant critic Tejal Rao recently created a "personal smell museum" of her life in Los Angeles, cataloging the aromas she encountered in her home and her office, the scent of vanilla she detected when driving past a commercial bakery. I asked her why she thought a smell museum was such a vital way to document her life.

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What can we find in silence? What role (if any) does meditation play in our curriculum at this particular time as a teacher/student?

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by Darrin Thornton
Assistant Director, Penn State School of Music
Professor of Music Education

I am a Black man born and raised here in America. Growing up on the edge of the civil rights movement I witnessed the turmoil of growth from a very front row seat if not from within the mix as a guinea pig of psycho-social theory to practice in public policy.

I think of intersections when I consider the two pandemics of Covid-19 and Systemic Racism, particularly in America. The confluence of these two pandemics provides a pointed illustration of what long-standing systemically racist policy can lead to ultimately - disproportionate loss of life and socio-political unrest.

I am moved deeply by sound and spend a great deal of time exploring how musical sound affects our human condition. The craft of ultimately expressing something outside of myself provides deep meaning and fulfillment. Part of that craft requires the ability to listen deeply and critically, and to discern my particular role in the sound creation in any given moment. Listening plays such a large role in that process.

Balance is a concept common to most art forms. There are moments of musical sound that involve the absence of sound. This void without sound is a powerful space between moments of sound. We consider how we entered the silence as musicians. During the "rest" we consider the character and purpose of the sounds we will make when we re-enter the sound tapestry.

This concept of silence is a lens through which I have made sense of this moment in time where these two pandemics have collided - in quarantine, physically-distanced. It is difficult and honestly painful to describe how it feels to witness and be an active participant in these moments.

The Traumatizing Sounds of Silence. With Covid-19, there is a historical understanding that people have been pushing against racist policies that hinder access and equity. This is especially true for health care and the ancillary spaces that enhance the conditions of "bad health". When risk factors for Covid-19 are viewed demographically, those bodies that resemble my own are most "at-risk". As if the Covid-19 virus is targeting me and those like me most. The numbers are telling the story in ways that are undeniable.

These racist policies are so embedded within our nation's fabric that it requires excavation to uncover and unpack them. It may be hard to see for people who are not as directly affected by the oppressive ramifications of these policies and practices. Nonetheless, they are still there. They have been there for a long time. People have used their voices, and their votes, and their actions to express these concerns for years - yet the policies persist.

If you are the targeted demographic, over time the persistence of these policies that oppress you disproportionately erodes your sense of belonging. You begin to feel your voice doesn't matter. That often leads to silence as you stop using your voice feeling it won't be heard so what is the point. It feels like you are pushing against a tidal wave of counter story that floods the scene in high gloss white lights. You and your concerns are erased. A colorblind filter is then applied that drowns you out despite the historical and ongoing evidence of your oppression.

Choked out voices via the oppressive strictures "on our neck" do make it hard to breathe let alone speak. Then to have the common trope tossed in your face - why didn't you say something? Or, be in situations within white spaces where you the oppressed are to "report wrongdoing" in order to start the process of exploring said wrongdoing. That is a lot to ask of someone within the cycle of oppression who finds it hard to breathe. They aren't even being seen, and certainly aren't being heard.

These pandemics collide in ways that illustrate this phenomenon nicely. Racist policies affecting black bodies disproportionately at the intersections is an all too familiar theme. This theme runs through most aspects of our society when we are willing to look, listen, and hear.

I am further disheartened when those like me are not-seen, not-heard, silenced, erased and dismissed because the underlying issues are so hard to see and prove; or even harder for some to deal with once they are seen. Why does it take a medical pandemic to show the racial disparity? Especially with many witnessed accounts reported by those experiencing the oppression for hundreds of years in American history.

Those who have the option to not see, not hear, not act are the very ones with the power to enact the changes we all need. However, not until things reach pandemic levels, or until the accounts can be witnessed in living color, do the issues causing the racial pandemics become visible.

Silence during this collision of pandemics actively upholds the racist strictures that pin many bodies down making it hard to breathe. Being erased from a space you call home is dehumanizing. The fact that it continues to happen, and some opt to be mute creates traumatizing sounds of silence.

The Healing Sounds of Silence. The silence resulting from the lack of anti-racist action in both pandemics is felt very strongly. Yet, this moment in time provides a chance to heal as we take it all in.

Anti-racist battle fatigue, the anger and frustrations of discovering Whiteness, the attempts to reach out, the questions regarding what can be done, the outrage for the growing list of names and captured videos, the #hashtag expressions, the media coverage and spin, the newfound spaces allowing expression and asking for perspective - a lot to take in, process and hear.

Meanwhile, black bodies are dying in the same fashion every day. Those bodies not caught on camera, and the body count of those MOST "at-risk" by Covid-19. It is a lot to take in, process and hear.

We have entered into moments of silence as we have been forced into quarantine and social distance. That distance has its effect on us as we consider how interconnected we are as humans - this unnatural distance accentuates that reality.

Like in music, this pause in the ongoing sound provides an opportunity for us to consider how we have entered this silence and how we will emerge from this silence when we begin to engage together more fully again. The degree we are active during this silence gives me hope in ways I have not felt hope in some time. These sounds of silence are a healing balm.

Though I don't have answers, I do have hope that humankind will find ways to ACT from each of our individual positionalities to make real changes that lead to healthy outcomes for all of us.

How am I coping? When asked that question I point to the goodness and kindness I do feel surrounding this moment in time. I point to those who are becoming more aware, and to those who are struggling yet reaching out to do all they can to be well.

I count my many blessings for the privileges I am afforded and endeavor to do my part to erase racism and to assist those most affected by Covid-19. I pray and am mindful of my surroundings and my particular place within these spaces. I listen, music is a comfort for me always but especially during these times.

The meanings within musical expression have always moved me deepest. I have leaned into musical expressions and shared those when possible. I've been reading and revisiting great expressions of Black people both from the past and the present.

I've been engaging with those who have questions and concerns and wish to know how they can help. Not engaging with answers as much as holding space to walk with people through these phases of awakening as they walk with me through phases of pain, healing, and further awakening.

Sharing and learning all at once in this process of making sense and meaning from this particular moment in history is healing. I consider how we will emerge from this "grand pause". I remember the swirling sounds that existed before the pause and imagine the sounds that will return as we re-enter what is to come.

I grew up hearing Lift Every Voice and Sing. It was first written as a poem and later set to music. I encourage you to read the lyrics of the poem/song and consider the relevance and meaning of those words today: NAACP | NAACP History: Lift Every Voice and Sing and offer one of my favorite arrangements for orchestra and choir arranged by Roland Carter.

During this time of Covid-19 and heightened awareness of Systemic Racism, I have reflected on the many position statements and our Nation's history. I have landed on these three take-away C's as a hopeful way toward healing:

Call - call out racism and break down the policies that bind us to its ugliness,

Claim - claim our individual role in the racist structure (own it),

Commit - commit to ACTION, doing our part to break the silence with purpose.

It is my hope that enacting these three C's will provide pathways for ALL of us to erase and silence systemic racism.

The strength of our nation is the degree to which we can Lift Every Voice - and Sing - Together!

Resources that have caused me great comfort and deep reflection during this time:
Music:

Inspired by the death of Eric Garner and in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives, India.Arie presents BREATHE. India sings this song to grieve those we have lost while powerfully affirming life. The song was co-written and co-produced by India.Arie and Aaron Lindsey.

Lift Every Voice and Sing - James Weldon Johnson arr. Orchestral Winds

History and original lyrics: NAACP | NAACP History: Lift Every Voice and Sing

A month ago, we decided to record Lift Every Voice and Sing to inspire young black musicians who don't often see representation of themselves in orchestral music. Instead, here we are again mourning senseless loss of lives and fighting for justice. This recording is for every protester, every freedom fighter, everyone who needs to be lifted up and to honor George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the numerous others whose lives have been stolen by police violence.

Seven Last Words of the Unarmed - Joel Thompson
On March 31, 2019, the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra (TSO) partnered with the Morehouse College Glee Club and Florida A&M University Concert Choir for this powerful performance of Joel Thompson's "Seven Last Words of the Unarmed." Dr. David Morrow of Morehouse College conducts this piece that laments the untimely deaths of 7 unarmed black men. Following the performance is a panel discussion about the work, led by Leon County (FL) Sheriff Walt McNeil, which includes composer Joel Thompson and two TSO board members-Byron Greene and Patrick Slevin.
Word: Spoken and Written
Always Clean the Light - Dr. Bertice Berry

Analysis: George Floyd, Coronavirus and Inequality Stealing Black Lives
This analysis was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity:
Brene Brown with Austin Channing Brown: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness Brené with Ibram X. Kendi on How to Be an Antiracist
Sterling K. Brown - Speaks on the Pandemic
"Did this live, and wasn't gonna post. A friend convinced me otherwise. So here it is.#irunwithmaud ..."
What I Want To Tell White Professors When They Ask, "How I'm Doing Today?" Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They're Okay - Chances Are They're Not This piece has been reprinted with accompanying images on the National Association for Music Education website: https://nafme.org/sounds-silence/

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The Sounds of Silence - Contributed by Darrin Thornton

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by Darrin Thornton Assistant Director, Penn State School of Music Professor of Music Education I am a Black man born and raised here in America. Growing up on the edge of the civil rights movement I witnessed the turmoil of growth from a very front row seat if not from within the mix as a guinea pig of psycho-social theory to practice in public policy.

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"Let's Talk: A socially distant community conversation" at Socrates Sculpture Park

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"Let's Talk: A socially distant community conversation" at Socrates Sculpture Park

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Visitors post and comment on responses to questions framed around the Monuments Now exhibit at Socrates Sculpture Park

two questions include:
"Have you changed your mind recently?"
"What is the purpose of discomfort?"

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About

July - October, 2020

As part of the ' MONUMENTS NOW' exhibition, Socrates' Lead Educator Douglas Paulson has designed a program, "Let's Talk," to facilitate safely socially-distant conversations exploring monuments, current events, speculations about the future, and all things in between.

For several hours every day (weather permitting), Doug will be stationed at the Park's unmistakable mirrored entry kiosk - ' Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear' by School Studio - to record visitors' thoughts on questions left by previous visitors. Each participant is also invited to leave a question for the next visitor to answer.

A summary of every interaction is then displayed on one of the conversation boards spread throughout the Park - inspiring future visitors to participate. As the number of responses grow, the conversation boards become layered with divergent and parallel ideas that may help others consider new perspectives.

To contribute to "Let's Talk," you can visit the Park and talk to Doug in-person (mask required); follow and contribute to the conversation on Instagram by tagging @socratespark and using # LetsTalkAtSocrates; or by emailing Doug at dp@socratessculpturepark.org with the subject line "Let's Talk".

Support

"Let's Talk" and all free education at Socrates is made possible with generous support from ConEdison.

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"Let's Talk:" A Socially-Distant Community Conversation | Socrates Sculpture Park

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July - October, 2020 As part of the ' MONUMENTS NOW' exhibition, Socrates' Lead Educator Douglas Paulson has designed a program, "Let's Talk," to facilitate safely socially-distant conversations exploring monuments, current events, speculations about the future, and all things in between.

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Over the weekend, I watched November, a short film, at the Shed (virtually - trailer available at https://theshed.org/program/162-november ). It has lingered with me, and I became curious about the additional resources curated for the longer live play, Help, as sort of curricular complements to the production/film.

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In July of 2019 the New York Times published an essay I wrote entitled in the print version, "Brief Conversations with White Men," and online, "I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked." The piece received 2,197 comments. I also received over 200 email correspondences from people I didn't know. Surprisingly, I was suddenly in conversation with hundreds of white men and a number of Black women. Though I wasn't able to respond to each person individually Help became a way to use theater to continue the conversation.

Help is a play in which the Narrator inhabits the category of the Black woman in order to be in dialogue with the category of the white man. As the playwright, I was interested in exploring with various publics our power structure, comprised primarily of white men, that ultimately determines all civic possibility. A 2014 survey, for example, found that white men comprise 31 percent of the US population. Yet, since the Supreme Court's inception in 1789, 95 percent of justices have been white men. In today's 116th US Congress (the most diverse in our history), 62 percent of its members are white men. According to Fortune magazine, 7 in 10 senior executives are white men, who also account for 72 percent of corporate leadership at Fortune 500 companies.

The text spoken by white men in the piece was primarily culled from responses to the Times article; public statements by men in the government and public life; and interviews conducted with white men by civil rights activist and theologian Ruby Sales, or documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow, or myself. Where the men's lines were excerpted from interviews, no autobiographical details were included from correspondence. This is a play holding loosely the categories of white man and Black woman. The various white men do not hold any single identity throughout the play, but speak with the many voices and positions expressed in response to the original article.

Help builds on the desire to create a shared reality. One in which there is agreement not in how to respond but in what we see is happening. If it's raining, can we all agree it is raining? How we respond to the rain varies, but can we agree the rain is coming down? Can we live in relation to each other within a shared knowing?

The genius analysis, language, and work of Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Lauren Berlant, Frank Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, and Christina Sharpe is foundational to Help. As Ruby Sales has said, "I want a theology that begins to deepen people's understanding about their capacity to live fully human lives and to touch the goodness inside of them, rather than call upon them-the part of themselves that's not relational. Because there's nothing wrong with being European American; that's not the problem. It's how you actualize that history and how you actualize that reality."

Theater has always asked us to step into the shoes of another. And Help does beautifully and incisively affirm and articulate what it is to wear a Black woman's shoes. But Claudia Rankine asks us to take it one giant step further. Her writing is also intended to invite the white audience to examine their own shoes. Race is a lie, but the categories that skin color places us in are not. The shoes we wear are present at each moment of our interaction with the world. The violent history of whiteness has always been allowed to be neutral when its legacy and present function is anything but.

Let's look down so we can look up.

As part of the ongoing conversation of Help, The Shed invited three contributors-a documentary filmmaker, a poet, and an activist and theologian-to respond to Rankine's work investigating whiteness and race, as well as the themes and further questions proposed by the play.

Judith Butler and George Yancy, "What's Wrong With 'All Lives Matter'?" The New York Times, January 12, 2015.

Robin DiAngelo, "Why It's So Hard To Talk To White People About Racism" Huffington Post, April 13, 2015.

Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness As Property," Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1709 - 91.

Saidiya Hartman, "Venus In Two Acts," Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1 - 14.

Peggy MacIntosh, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible" Peace and Freedom Magazine (July / August 1989): 10-12.

Elizabeth Martinez, "What Is White Supremacy?" Published by Catalyst Project.

Fred Moten, "Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in The Flesh)" South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 737 - 80.

Emma Okoro, "Blackness and beauty. We need a radical new paradigm for thinking about blackness that recognises beauty's potential to save lives," Aeon, October 10, 2019.

Claudia Rankine, "I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked." The New York Times, July 17, 2019.

Thomas Rodger, "The History of White People": What It Means To Be White," Salon, March 23, 2010.

Ed Simon, "How 'White People' Were Invented By A Playwright In 1613," Aeon, September 12, 2017.

Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64 - 81.

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Age of Colorblindness (Revised edition) (New York: The New Press, 2020).

Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2017).

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy - Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (California: Ak Press, 2017).

Chris Crass, Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013).

Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (London: Allen Lane, 2019).

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1989).

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of A Different Color: European Immigrants and The Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Fred Moten, Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

Dorothy Roberts, Fatal invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in The Twenty-First Century (New York: The New Press, 2012).

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2018).

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: on Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

Shannon Sullivan, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism (New York: SUNY Press, 2014).

Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2011).

Whiteness Project is an interactive investigation into how Americans who identify as white, or partially white, understand and experience their race.

The Human Genome Project was the international research effort to determine the DNA sequence of the entire human genome.

Race, The Power of Illusions is the online companion to California Newsreel 's three-part documentary about race in society, science, and history.

NPR Ted Talks: The Consequences of Racism explores the ways racism impacts our lives, from education, to health, to safety.

Scene on Radio: Seeing White investigates where the notion of whiteness comes from, what it means, and what it is for.

Allies for Racial Equity is an antiracist movement of white Unitarian Universalists working to understand whiteness and privilege, unlearn and challenge white supremacy, and confront racism in ways that are accountable to communities of color.

Catalyst Project is a center for political education and movement building committed to anti-racist work with mostly white sections of left / radical social movements.

The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) is a national and international collective of anti-racist, multicultural community organizers and educators dedicated to building an effective movement for social transformation.

Training for Change, White People Confronting Racism Workshop is for white people who want to challenge the racism around them-and in their own heads and hearts-and who are searching for a way to strengthen their work for racial justice.

Race Forward is a nonprofit organization that catalyzes movement building for racial justice. In partnership with communities, organizations, and sectors, we build strategies to advance racial justice in our policies, institutions, and culture.

The Racial Imaginary Institute is a collaborative organization committed to the activation of interdisciplinary work and a democratized exploration of race in our lives.

Interaction Institute For Social Change works with people and systems to build collaborative capacity in individuals, organizations, and networks working for social justice and racial equity.

Showing up For Racial Justice (SURJ) is a national network of groups and individuals working to undermine white supremacy and to work toward racial justice. Through community organizing, mobilizing, and education, SURJ moves white people to act as part of a multi-racial majority for justice with passion and accountability.

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In July of 2019 the New York Times published an essay I wrote entitled in the print version, "Brief Conversations with White Men," and online, "I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked." The piece received 2,197 comments. I also received over 200 email correspondences from people I didn't know.

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Enjoyed this talk. Klein talked about building a movement "towards an infrastructure of care" 

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Enjoyed this talk. Klein talked about building a movement "towards an infrastructure of care" 

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From curriculum lab convo, 11/5
-How do we know when to care?
-What role does fear play in coming to care / making someone care about something?
-What do we gain by caring? / What is our stake in caring?

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What does it sound like where you are?

Readers sent us recordings of the birds and breezes, traffic jams and hollering neighbors the dogs barking and kids cavorting that comprise their daily sonic geography.

Tap the unmute icon to experience with sound.

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What does it sound like where you are? Readers sent us recordings of the birds and breezes, traffic jams and hollering neighbors the dogs barking and kids cavorting that comprise their daily sonic geography. Tap the unmute icon to experience with sound.

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Turntables (from the Amazon Original Movie "All In: The Fight for Democracy")

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A sociological playlist from Jack Halberstam

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A sociological playlist from Jack Halberstam

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Struck by the repetition

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Woman screams as Donald Trump is sworn in as President

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"Notice how nostalgia moves through a grocery store"....reflecting on old and new practices, habits and sustenance, the ways this moment might have changed our relationships with some of those things...

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i've been listening to the new Purity Ring album since it came out but this last part of the song Stardew (min: 2:57) has been especially evocative for me.
The lyrics: " i know it seems far, but just be where you are"