Conversations with Contemporary Artists: Julie Mehretu

good evening thank you for uh your patience again uh my name is michael brooks and we are the founder of contemporary modern garden and it's a joy to be in our galleries tonight uh i wanted to introduce the program from what the museum is evening just to give you a sense of how glorious this exhibition here at the high museum is uh tonight's program is part of our conversations with contemporary artists series which is supported by the jane f and clayton f jackson conversations with contemporary artists endowment the exhibition we're discussing is julie marito which was organized by the los angeles county museum of art and the whitney museum of american art major support for the exhibition is provided by the ford foundation and the andy warhol foundation for the visual arts the exhibition is made possible here in atlanta by our premier exhibition sponsors delta airlines incorporated and our exhibition series sponsor northside hospital as well as premier exhibition series supporters the antenori foundation sarah and jim kennedy louise sands and jerome griot and wish foundation as well as benefactor exhibition series sports supporters hancock's chambers foundation and robin and hilton howell as well as our other generous supporters i'd also like to thank the members of the high museum who are in attendance this evening your support is invaluable and fuels our mission without you we can't do what we do here at the museum and if you're not yet a member or if you need to renew please visit high.org at the end of this program and get your membership to the museum we'll save time at the end of the program for questions uh so if you do have a question please type it into the chat room here in zoom and we'll select the questions from there tonight we're privileged to be joined by julie maratu christine mike kim and rejeco hockley kim is curator of contemporary art at the los angeles county museum of art before her appointment at lacma in 2009 she was associate curator at the studio museum in harlem at lacma kim has organized numerous exhibitions including isaac julian play time in 2019 and james turrell's retrospective which won best monographic museum exhibition nationally from the u.s chapter of the international association of our critics she's also recently the co-curator of the 12th guangzhou biennial in south korea which i had the pleasure of seeing at studio museum in harlem kim's exhibitions included black belt in 2003 which was the museum's first exhibition to present work by asian diasporic artists on the topic of cross-cultural and racial solidarity she also organized the now legendary exhibitions freestyle and frequency with student museum director thelma golden as well as flo which she curated in 2008 kim's also the founding member of gyopo an la based coalition of diasporic korean cultural producers and our professionals generating cultural political and professional exchange through community um and through which they interrogate discourses in art criticism media and politics next regecco huckley has been associa assistant curator of the whitney museum of american art since 2017 where she has curated exhibitions such as toyin oji arutola to wander determined with melinda lang and an incomplete history of protest selections from the whitney's collection from 1940 to 2017 hockley began her career at the studio museum in harlem where she was a curatorial assistant and was mentored by christine in 2012 she joined the brooklyn museum as assistant curator where she co-curated with catherine morris an exhibition titled we wanted a revolution black radical women 1965 to 85 which examined the political social cultural and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second wave feminism and it was the first exhibition to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color distinct from the primarily white middle class mainstream uh feminist movement finally julie maratu who emigrated as a child at the age of seven to the us with her family from ethiopia first arriving in the southeast here in alabama but quickly moving on to the midwest where she grew up in east lansing michigan now based in harlem merit2 is venerated for her paintings often monumental in scale as well as drawings and prints that refer to the history of art architecture and ideas while also addressing the most immediate conditions of contemporaneity including migration revolution climate change global capitalism and technology her work has been included in some of the most important international exhibitions including the venice biennale uh in 2019 last year documenta 13 from 2012 the sharjah biennial prospect one uh in our neck of the woods in new orleans in 2008. the whitney biennial the carnegie international the istanbul biennial in 2003 and the busan biennale in busan south korea and that's just a few of the exhibitions additionally her list of honors include the prestigious national medal of arts which was awarded by secretary of state john kerry in 2015 the barnett and annalee newman award the berlin prize and the macarthur prize and i would be remiss not to mention that she was named last month by time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world 2020. so to throw that in there because how many billions of people are there on the planet i mean man so um with that i'm going to share my screen bear with me one moment and um just we'll go into the exhibition via powerpoint and uh for those of you watching our exhibition opens to the public on the 24th which is the saturday closes at the end of january uh of next year and is in our cousins uh special exhibition galleries in the wheeling pavilion and uh the exhibition is organized chronologically so we're going to kind of loosely go according to chronology here and i'll run through a few slides that describe the first gallery so to open our conversation um again uh this exhibition is a mid-career retrospective but it also relates to the general notion of determining one's positionality in a world that seems to be coming apart at the seams so a a big question to throw out to the three of you was was this idea of positionality part of the conceptual framework of the exhibition from the start or did it gain a sense of urgency as the exhibition was developed you're starting with the big questions michael i know i know first of all thank you michael for for the introduction um i think i speak for all three of us when we say it's such an honor to have the show at the high museum of art and i'll also say um there was so much interest among incredible museums um in north america to take the show and it was very um deliberate and considered that of the the venues that it came to an addition to the co-organizers lacma and the whitney of course the high because you have this extraordinary painting um one of the forum obama paintings as well as being such a center for black history and culture and the walker where the show will travel to after the whitney in the fall of 2021 julie grew up in the midwest all four of these cities have high immigrant populations and we wanted to make sure that the exhibition traveled and was accessible to as many people as possible and not just in los angeles and new york so um thank you michael thank you rand suffolk high museum and people of atlanta for hosting this exhibition um as far as positionality goes i mean i think that there's always an interesting positionality in julie's work but maybe the part that i'll just start with to kind of launch the conversation is um the uh the sort of origins of this exhibition and i'll speak anecdotally um is you know julie came out to los angeles with her family in 20 2012 2013 she just finished the mogama paintings that were featured at um at documentary that year and the james terrell retrospective um of which you spoke in the introduction michael was up and we went through that exhibition very very slowly and carefully and the way that i had done this was that each installation of course these are immersive light installations had a label and it had a recommended amount of time to be in that installation and it wasn't to force people but it was really because it takes a certain amount of time for the retina to respond to the light and for the kind of optical effects to take place and really um the the kind of two things of this work to remember in relation to kind of where julie and i got to starting to talk about the show was one um kind of perception as the medium right how we perceive painting our perceived space as the viewer um and for her as the artist and then also like this the thinness of light or the thickness of existence of experience of perceiving of beholding um a work of art and in that sense the question immediately came in relation to painting of kind of how do we behold painting in this way how do we hold it physically spatially temporally and how does one hang a show especially the scale um at which julie's works often are um to be sort of enveloped in one of these paintings and then to what would it kind of look like feel like be like to then have an entire arc of you know in the show i think it's nearly 75 works of art um and what does kind of what is that relationship or the potential of that relationship with the viewer and so i guess you know to just sort of move into that question of positionality i start there as thinking um from the very beginning about the the viewer in the world that he or she or they may be in um within landscape within a museum space within approaching painting um as something that of course you know maybe julie can talk about in the work itself but um but is hugely important in the practice and the experience of the work yeah i think that's a really important point um i also just want to take one quick second although christine said thank you for us to just thank you again for this opportunity and for making sure that during this kind of time the show still is moving forward and being exhibited at the high so i'm very grateful to that to both um the entire team there thank you all um also just to add that there are a lot of curators only get to do so many shows in their career and time and it takes an immense amount of work christina and i have been working together maybe six years rue and i came on um in the middle of the game and in in the middle of it and has been putting a lot of energy into this so i just want to give a lot of my gratitude to that amount of time and consideration and the depth of scholarship you both did with the work i appreciate that's immense honor for any artist just to add to what you're saying about positionality but also about experience time-based experiential kind of issue with painting i think right now more than ever painting is um we we consume so many images in a d on a daily level like within the aspect of the way everything is so mediated especially um in terms of social media and the quickness at which images are are scrolled through and we under we make sense of the world and where we are and who we are through these meet very digitally mediated experiences um that happen very quickly where and painting is a very slow experience it's a time-based experience it takes um it and this is what i was really moved by with the twelve show is that you in order to fully get the the piece you had to actually spend a certain amount of time in there for your eyes and free retina to get used to it it's the same thing with a painting you can look at a painting for a minute or two but that doesn't mean you really have the experience of the painting the the painting evolves and shifts and moves and interacts with the body very differently and this doesn't necessarily is not limited to abstract painting you can think about rembrandt's night watchmen and have that experience where the actual three-dimensionality of that painting comes into gear and you all of a sudden notice um the shadow reaching over the other soldier's crotch in a way that you would never have noticed at first that that happens over time and over the experience of really sitting and being with that painting and experiencing what happens in your what happens to the eye and what happens in the retina so i think like um that's a really key part of how we thought about this show and how i and but also how i approach painting and thinking around painting and making painting and especially with the magamas that was a really important part for how i was i was trying to really think of these paintings as not um some kind of narrative or prescriptive kind of image but uh that one but really this experiential type of of of experience or you know it's kind of redundant but you know what i mean like it becomes this the experience of seeing the painting is the moving experience and that's a time-based experience and with mogama magama is uh you describe as a cycle and and there are several bodies of work that are described as cycles that suggests to me also the idea of movement uh not only uh well in his traditional historical pain in the movement of a narrative but uh in your work uh movement uh bodily but also mentally intellectually through the space from one to the next and so on and i think that's an interesting way to think about uh painting as a sort of a collective activity in terms of you know your surroundings and being immersed into a painting well i love that idea of a collective activity and i think that um i think of the approach toward painting and into painting um kind for me and the so from those early drawings you showed to these more complex works of the early not spots and then the works that come later but these paintings um which were far part of my first show at the walker in 2003 and my first show at a gallery in new york at the project in 2001 come from this this idea of this immersive experience that's the reason the paintings are so large in scale and that the body has to have this kind of one body has one experience of the image but you only can look at one part of the painting at a time and other people have very different experiences to those paintings and a different kind of palimpsest gets made through your experience of looking and through one's experience of looking but i love the notion of the collective and i think that part of the reason that i use so many archival images in the way that i do and and think around the idea of social space and the architecture is kind of a metaphoric way of of signifying that type of space social political space is that um that is uh some form of a collective knowledge it's also in for it also informed by an intuitive kind of um i think of intuition as kind of operating in the same place of this kind of collective congregation of resistance if you were like this space where there's an access to something else and a form of interconnectedness that is that is fundamental to particular types of experiences that we have so i i really think that that these paintings just in the way that you experience them but in the materiality of what they're made from is from this kind of collective and communal experience reject would you like to add anything before we move to the next guy i mean i'm just listening quite rapt actually julie just keep talking what i just realized something also like maybe the three of us also being immigrants and being in these spaces you know and having immigrant and mixed you know families and sort of consistently our own positionalities being sort of confronted with these spaces to be both outside of and within simultaneously um the kind of shifting of having a focus in one area not being able to i mean just as it's not kind of physiologically possible to kind of exist in these places yet being constantly within peripheral vision yeah absolutely and i mean i was thinking when i when i first heard kind of this when you started off my goal from talking about kind of the current moment that we're in and of course the current moment that we're in is extremely fraught and extremely unique in many ways but it's also of a piece and of a continuum with many many many moments and i think something that you know i remember kind of first seeing julie's work in in in the early aughts and first learning kind of about some of the similar similarities in our biography i was born in zimbabwe my mother was from zimbabwe came to the u.s as a young child my father's english as christine said we have shared kind of all three of us shared experiences in some ways but i remember in the early odds seeing the paintings and being really like wow this is a person and i had didn't know julie at all i was a i was a fan from afar um i wasn't like in school but this is a person who kind of understands the givens of a person like me that you might be have been born somewhere in a certain culture that you might grow up in a different culture that there's not necessarily like conflicts between those things but it's also not like a perfect belonging either and that there is like this third thing that comes and maybe a fourth and a fifth and a sixth thing um and the ways in which you interact at school with your friends might be different from how you interact with your cousins from your parents from your grandparents just because you kind of have all these different modalities that are encompassed within you and it's not necessarily a place of conflict or a place of dissonance it's a place of kind of abundance in some ways and i think that is something that i felt i felt very seen by in some ways by julie's work right by kind of my own interactions with this person who i was like oh wow same same same um and then to produce this really incredible really ambitious really kind of no holds barred work out of that experience that's simultaneously very personal and specific but also extremely kind of cross applicable across cultures across experiences across the specificities of one's individual life and history kind of simultaneously so yeah when i think of positionality that is something that i have long kind of loved about julia's work and really felt kind of the embrace of it and then i think i'm sorry julie please no i was just to add to that i think that's actually core to why also the paintings insist on abstraction and stay in abstraction even when there are really clear quotations and reference reference to the to many parts of the built in and um the world around us so but this kind of the the kind of multi-dimensional multi-perspectival um dynamic of the paintings and of the way that they're made and the kind of massive amount of information that gets layered and folded into the paintings is actually to kind of play with kind of even concepts around positionality and to be able to even challenge and interrogate some of that some of the pre-preconceived notions of of where an experience starts and how an experiment how's one understands and knows a space or a time or or or net or historic narrative so all of this gets kind of folded in on itself and i think that's in addition to the scale that's really part of the intention i think with the the earlier work especially but also on the insistence and abstraction in general and and and and going back to something we were discussing this morning um ideas of like edward gleeson and this idea that we clamor for the right to opacity for everybody that i think that um thinking around what the the the possibilities and abstraction and its ill eligibility in a way is part of the kind of space for invention and space for liberation which i think is really crucial to anyone trying to practice and anyone trying to understand themselves in the world and how they how they engage with anything else so these this work is made from that place like any artist trying to figure out who one is i think it also relates them to you know julie you often talk about neologisms and the kind of development of of language you know by putting words together to invent new language in relation to visual languages and abstractioning or invention of visual languages and in the exhibition michael where you have installed those four works on paper i think from 2004 2005 on the reverse side of a freestanding wall um and of course there's a relationship there and these are so great because they they almost are like oh excuse me um a type of like legend or a key of the marks themselves so for example you know back to this kind of immigrant history you know julie your relationship with umar might be similar to my relationship with korean in terms of spoken language yet i understand everything when i'm in the room right and i can draw out these words that i recognize and yet i assemble them in my brain perhaps differently from a native speaker i mean actually i am a native speaker but my second language took over but but you know this way in which you compose or you understand you extract certain keys and clues of certain words and put together and in that sense in the practice of doing that um putting language back out there in julie's case you know these marks that get repeated in different places over you know that she comes back to later but that really start with the early drawings um as a way to kind of invent new new words through painting through abstraction right much of what you've just discussed uh also has something to do with the more philosophical notion of time uh perhaps related to psycho geographies but uh the idea that in the past contains innumerable possible futures right and that the uh in the future uh there's is the future contains always already your past one's past and so there's that sort of compression of time that that i think one can sense in the work i think it's something that you talk about in the catalog but um it is something that when you spend time with the paintings especially when you get into this gallery here we're looking at black city on the left and seven acts of mercy on the right um that that time that the compression of time becomes even more pronounced for me anyway sorry michael are we we're not seeing the uh there we go ah you have the image on the screen yeah yeah i mean and in terms of the compression of time something else that i think about is connects back to some of the kind of technical elements of the work the way you actually make the especially your paintings julie thinking about that kind of importance of layers and the importance of building up a surface um and kind of the way in which i think so much of like you know when you see it in on a screen of course you can't quite tell or you can't tell at all you can just tell that there is you know kind of something behind but something else which is itself just an idea around perspective but when you're in front of them you can see like the translucency the kind of layers that have been laid down over and over and over again and of course for me that's such a perfect analogy to thinking about kind of archaeology thinking about kind of the way in which we excavate quite literally our history the layers of the past to kind of reveal the ways that people lived in the past the things that we don't know about our precursors and our our predecessors excuse me um but yeah i'm i'm always so curious julia about how if i if i can ask julia question michael you'd like please please about kind of how you came just how did you develop that kind of mode of working um both in a kind of conceptually but also even i'm so interested in something even like the technical aspect of it it's so laborious it's so kind of idiosyncratic and unique to you um so i think like you know i just finished reading toni morrison's immersion and um it's so it's this book where she goes back right and she's writing the 17th century early time of this of when when the country wasn't even the former country as of yet you know still kind of colonial space that was trying to negotiate who what it and what it could be and and all of every every at every character in this novel is um is is her mining how how this how this really complicated contradiction contradictory kind of reality came to be which and the kind of immense violence that and created what we are in this country how that came to be but it was this amazing an amazing amount of mining of narrative i mean i think my understanding is some of the in order to really understand even just the landscape or what animals were here at that time as opposed to animals that came later she had to change part of a narrative from writing about a wild boar to writing about a bear um and so this this came through this kind of her really intense mining of you know ship manifest logs to um to like the actual geological landscape at that time and the plants that were indigenous to this place and i think what the reason that i'm bringing that up is i think that it's this it's this constant effort we do to try and make sense of our moment is by trying to get look backward to like um to try and contextualize and understand this and i think my work came from that place just in terms of trying to make sense of myself as an artist coming from um my background um having been raised and where where in the different places have been raised with parents who are building this very who are these futurists kind of modernists you know in the real sense of the word as a montezorian as africanists as futurists in terms of building and participating in the construction of this other future that they were trying to build that was completely co-opted and devolved into a type of um uh you know dystopic kind of reality and i think we're still again that's really what happened in this country too in the la in this time of my lifetime and i think we're really feeling that um today especially with the supreme court nomination but also just in terms of the the bigger picture of what what we're feeling in terms of uncertainty in this vertiginous time we're in and i think like so i guess what i'm trying to say is that this that mining and that sense of trying to make sense of something and trying to put contextualized time and contextualized space that was core to like trying to make paintings and trying to figure out so if it started with one mark and then they became hundreds of marks they became layered and once on top of one another they developed their own histories their own narrative their own sense of place they interacted in this world that was constructed and it was embedded no there is no part of the built world that is not embedded with a certain kind of social political desire and and into it and and form of like um tech technology and all of that is kind of forming is is part of this historic um background of the the the current context that we're in and as violent or as kind of um utopian in its desires and all of that i think kind of has always been the the for the ground that i interrogate in terms of and trying like mine to make and to try and negotiate this moment or who i am at this time and so i think abstraction allowed for a place to think about possible alternate futures where entropy had could what could be a state where something else was still possible where despite every effort of extinguishing or the effort to extinguish one and and and dehumanize one that that there's this kind of constant insistence on being and constant insistence on invention and so where does that space how do we find that space how do we mine that space how do we mine the break or or move into the break to invent new dimensions and i think like that's the space that i'm interested in that's a space that keeps pushing me to try and invent new images or paint new paintings from that with that kind of desire from this communal idea of experience into something else like possible futures so your work has taken you to many cities obviously in exhibitions but also you've worked in berlin i bring berlin up because we're looking right now at berliner pleza and the gallery behind me um and and that is a place that is so regular with uh you know memories and of the recent past but also ancient past as well but uh more more recently the cold war right and and those uh reminders of uh a violent past connected with um ideas about uh perhaps the the military industrial complex which is something you were thinking about in the earlier painting i was showing black city uh how does being in another place where you are a stranger you are a visitor a tourist affect how you experience that in relation to what you just said well for me it was um i think we always you get perspective on yourself and and um you know this was the first time i actually lived in berlin was in 2007. um we were in like the depth of the depths of the iraq war at that time uh things were this was before the election of barack obama um president obama and um this was at a time where we were really fl flailing in this in this conflict and um its illegality was made very apparent to everybody and so being in germany where the narrative um that i had from um being raised here and and how i understood the the first war world war the second world war and the kind of realities of germany between those wars and then the cold war and how and and what happened to this space and how you experience this city you have these preconceptions of of what germany is and what and and who germans are in a way and then you experience this city that has been where every scar is apparent every uh it's a suitored city it's completely tying together from like the the massive amounts of bombing but the amount of violence that's there i mean you can go to deportation camps and extermination camps right outside of berlin and as well as in the middle of the city you have the holocaust memorial you have the the markings of where the wall was you have corners of many many corners of every plot that were bombed and you see the new construction versus the old construction and the old homes that were built at the turn of the century these are all buildings that are drawn into here that were most of them were bombed and destroyed but this was an image of postcards of all of these very important kind of corners and plazas in berlin um that were built around the same time and it was a form of like an idea of early early pre-modern kind of i mean but this early modern kind of desire of what what what what could what what could what could be in berlin and i was interested in the kind of the painting is um there's a reflection kind of of every drawing every photograph that was um traced and drawn into the painting is reversed it's drawn also upside down and so you have this very kind of subliminal almost um different kind of experience like a mirage that you're feeling when you're in front of the pain it's again a very vertiginous experience because the way that the lines move you actually have a an optical kind of illusion where space actually seems to fold in and out of itself as you move through the painting all of this was coming from me trying to digest and understand being in berlin but actually to understand the contradictions inherent in being in this city that actually was similar to like you could think of new york city that did not want to go into the direction that this country went into but yet many were complicit in where that country went and in the atrocities committed by where that country went and i felt as an american in germany how complicit and and and how do we take responsibility for this horrific war and the thousands hundreds of thousands of deaths and the destruction that we were causing you know illegally essentially in the global context and how do you take responsibility for that even if it wasn't of your making but but but by being a citizen of that context and so to me those that type of perspective that type of lens become that's one of the really most interesting things about experiencing elsewhere and mean elsewhere is how did how that also changes how you understand yourself and um notions of what you you know take for granted or how or preconceptions you have that are way more complicated but i think it's just really about getting to know the world and yourself in it you know there's also that that um physicality it gets carried into not just the you know the upside down the depiction of the compounding i mean we talked about that with epigraph damascus and how there's just so much in there but also in terms of the layers and having marks that are embedded that are fossilized that are kind of frozen inside of the canvas and in other cases marks that get erased but whether they're essentially erased or invisibilized or that they're kind of rendered opaque and not visible through the layers that that doesn't mean they're not there that that's kind of always within the the compositional matter of identity of a city of a person of a civilization totally and that these images are both receding and emerging at the same time uh like memory to me reminds me of one of the thin cities in invisible cities which is described as a spider web and the citizens understand that that it's uh it's not going to last that there's a moment when a new a new web a new city will have to take its place now you mentioned epigraph damascus uh oh well in my slide uh show here we have mogama the cycle perhaps um we can spend some time talking about montgomery would you like to continue with uh epigraph damascus no we can we can yeah i think this is a good um place in between yeah good because it is uh um essentially a conflation of all these sites around the world beginning with uh tahrir square during the revolution in egypt that gave birth to what we call the arab spring but also conflating multiple sites around the world across time across decades sites of revolution social upheaval sites that are incredibly important in terms of change and change of borders change uh in terms of displacement um and of course we are uh so proud to to have a second uh painting i'm looking at it right now in front of me it's amazing um but this seems to me uh this cycle uh the culmination uh in your work julie of the exploration of this compression of space and time um in terms of histories and revolution as they're re-amplified in the present as as we're living through them again now uh would that be is this sort of the the culmination of that exploration in your work the culmination of the exploration through architecture yeah i think they're coming to the end of that i think that the marks um at the time i don't know that i mean i still made several paintings using architectural language after this um specifically cairo um 2013 after the morsi was the second revolution if you will or the second coup depending on your perspective but the the the mogama paintings were um i'm i was working on another painting invisible line which is also in the show um before i started these and i was working on that during the square during the during the revolution entire square and during the north african and arab spring of uh 2011 and the kind of revolutions that became um contagious and took you know you saw them light up all over the world um including here at zakati park but these these um the so my interest was after i after i was invited to be in documenta um i was just i was i wanted to deal with this the square the kind of the idea of the square as a pl as the plaza i had made a lot of paintings that actually suggested this and i think the the monumental horizontal paintings that are all in the show all have like the central idea or suggestion of like congregation and this square and the kind of public arena of that space but the way that the square was being actualized and used during this time this place of public protest and um nasa rabat wrote this the architectural historian wrote this wonderful piece in art form called circling the square and what he did in this is he talked about the kind of historic intention of every single building around the square and how they become from these various different backgrounds and different intentions whether when and how they were built whether it was um the kind of uh modernist kind of post-war neo brutalist building to like um early bozar type of um uh architecture to mom look architecture all of this kind of islamic architecture all this form that informed and and and he goes really in depth into each building but i was super fascinated with this idea that that each of these buildings are built you know with this intention and with his desires i spoke all architecture has this embedded in it it's impossible to deny that and that each of these squares each of these public squares each of these sites that have become activated in this almost repeat social action that in as in certain ways as prescriptive and as as as um as as as gets co-opted and in much the same ways over time like so you'll see these intense revolutions intense uprisings happening i mean you see it right now in lagos nigeria um and and the amazing protests that are taking place there and and at the same time things shift big changes can happen countries can break down and fall apart because of these types of protests or what we saw happen in sudan what we saw happen in egypt over time is the type of complete co-option or what happened in addis ababa in ethiopia from during my childhood and i think my because of my past and because of that history i was super interested in in that liminal space of the square and that and that breaking point when when one too many crimes has occurred that causes like what we're experiencing right now in nigeria that causes the kind of mass protest against police brutality it was also what caused the protest to to spark in egypt at that time and i think like um and what has caused the massive numbers of uprisings and protests we saw all through the summer here um uh and i think that that that's been a condition of our time like it's been it's the reason my family the revolution took place and we left it was a green revolution in iran i mean there's all of this these histories and these precedents of this kind of but there's this continual kind of reversal to that form of collective action as a as a people and so my interest was how do you study each of these squares if certain ones like tandem and squares stuck out the zocalo in mexico city stand out if certain squares are scenes of mass executions at the same time as scenes of this form of uprising and possibility i wanted to kind of interrogate that and also the various forms of architecture and narratives and desire embedded in what the city was and what as a collective who those people were in trying to reflect this other desire in that infrastructure how did the the marx challenge that and become something else and all of that were core to like why i was investigating and trying to make these paintings but what happened i think in the making of these paintings and the time-based experientiality the kind of erasure and the marks and the different kinds of figurations and little parts of bodies that started to appear i think that the drawing became more and more primary in a way that that this it started to really like leave the app the kind of structure of the architecture and almost surpass it become something else and they didn't fully hear i think they were still limited to the to the architectural drawing because when you see a scale of a window that scales a mark there's just no way around that and um i wanted i think it was after these that i really and after painting cairo that i really moved on to the invisible line paintings and then working on this print yeah so these you know these these um the two smaller paintings um the being higher paintings and then the invisible sun paintings um the the gray ones which i made seven i think they're um those come after the mogamas and and they're really this exploration of the marks and the kind of uh indeterminate gray space the rate the space of erasure that you see kind of as a haze in the mogamis but they become much more substantial in these paintings and these paintings and the later work i think are during that those moments are made during those moments of co-option during the failures of those revolutions during the atrocious civil war that broke out in syria during the kind of um hideous kind of incapability of the rest of the world during the attack on libya this is the context that we were that these paintings were made in and um and also like i think a lot of like um challenges you know the kind of upcoming form energy into the next election i mean this these paintings were finished 2014-15 and we were moving into the end of the obama um years and and you know some of the failures of that administration or capabilities on the international stage or some of the kind of losses or some of the um and and some of the kind of difficulties like the kind of impossibilities his administration faced in this country i think there's also time i'm talking about sorry christine not that that's what the paintings are about but that's the social context in which they were being made and i think that um it's always important to look at the the dates of these paintings and really think about kind of what's happening in the world not as as these are you know depictions of them but in terms of you know we talked about before about kind of you know scrolling through images news feeds social media feeds etc and all kind of that makes their way into our consciousness and specific to them obama paintings you know sort of the one of the things that i see is alongside the how do i put this the kind of evolution around the conversation around power based on mogama which is the the name of these government administrative buildings on terrier square that have um as i understand it have really changed meaning from um being a symbol of african liberation to then in the you know 80s and 90s to being about government corruption and bureaucracy and then again this symbol you know uh the the revel not one but two revolutions in uh 2010 2012 kind of symbol of of revolution again and that those sort of shifts that happen in the same in relation to the same architecture in the same place but simultaneously if you look at these two works on the freestanding wall being higher one being higher two which you did in 2013 and in many ways was a res well not a response but you were going through hurricane sandy um and you made these um in harlem thus a different scale from the works that you had in the studio that you were not able to go into but if you look closely at the images of the body there and the extraordinary kind of movement and gesture um and almost like not a depiction of the body but almost an imprint of the body and i think of klein i think of david hammond's but michael if you go back to the mobama i think this is a great image of that but if you go back to the mugama the one in the heist collection which is the second one correct and you look at the upper portion of that canvas this is done in 2012 you see an emergence of a kind of ghost of a figure in that upper part which then kind of then sandy happens then you're back in new york you know then then these more singular kind of single figures on on the being higher canvases happen so that there's this architectural spatial you know political and then and then the implication of the body in that sort of moment in that transition 2012 2013 into 2014. i think it's really what what really allowed that to happen was the kind of turning away from the architectural drawing the the the the reason i think the architectural drawing became so became a limit at first it was this kind of liberatory thing that could create and compress and collect time at in space if you will but but it and it always gave the idea of this like big system and and and and far perspective as well as kind of being immersed in something but it you always had a sense of um this kind of distance from the image because of the scale of the architectural drawing when the architecture disappeared the marks could become as it could become a monstrous in a particular way or can become um physical or or suggestive of like the body or beyond and and i think that that was that it was interesting how the architecture eventually and i think the mogamas being the largest it was in the experience of making those paintings that the limit was really realized at least i felt that in that and i think and i just tell you all that like it was really important from the beginning to reunite the movements they were shown four of them together in documenta and then um in london at white cube and then they dispersed and went into different museum collections but really you know for all the reasons that you're saying and you know those of you who haven't seen the show yet when you see them this kind of extraordinary moment both within the practice and then within the world and to kind of be immersed in the space of these four panels is quite an extraordinary experience maybe once in a lifetime or maybe fourth time in a lifetime yes once in a lifetime over four moments right but i was also just going to say that i think that the thing about architecture and especially kind of architectural drawings is that they there's like an interesting relationship to to bodies and to people because of course architecture is made for us to be in but it also kind of you know we've all been in buildings where you're like wow did this architect like actually think a person was ever gonna like be in here because it doesn't really think that seem like they actually consider the real needs of actual flesh and blood humans and so i think there's it's an interesting like you know is it a conceptual exercise or at what point does it go from that to being something that has to really house humans and be kind of workable and so i do think that what you say is really interesting julie about like kind of what the magama's reaching the kind of zenith of that and it kind of pushing you almost out into back out kind of cyclically back to the body and back to yourself in some ways in part perhaps because of sandy and because of the limitations placed on you by by that moment but you know what do you have you have your hands you have your own kind of scale of your own body and you have the canvas and i feel like the being higher paintings are so interesting because yeah like the hammond's body prints like keith klein other things we might think of they are really scaled when you stand in front of them they're scaled you know to your to an average height you know to an average height of a person and i think the hints of of fingers of kind of fingerprints of we know we don't know exactly but we we can sense that it's has this kind of different sort of connection which then in the works that follow i think that just more and more is um plays out more and more and you know remember in the end julie we were we had talked about this early on in working on this on the checklist and we came back to them later they kind of fell off the checklist because you know the editing process can be pretty brutal with as many works as julie makes and then we put them back in and it really kind of you know we had this moment where we looked at it um and ru you probably remember this also and it made so much sense to have these different from the other ones but it really kind of connected things in a way that felt um that felt so and i don't want to say resolve because i think all of these in some way have a resolve but also just open up to new questions and new yeah i really think of this this kind of 2010 11 12 so like it's like a hinge moment you know i think it's like there's connections to the past kind of decade of work and then there's connections kind of to right up to right now which is a good segue to the next gallery yeah i'm sorry yeah sure and i think it just to add to that i think that um part of that also comes from the experience of starting to work on the survey with christine um because we started it around that time and yeah it was actually in this process of looking back through the work and and understanding like how certain things were really investigated and pushed in the work and what wasn't and how and what are the spaces like somehow i don't think it was really planned but i think now that i have this bit different perspective i can see that there was almost this imperative to have to like push certain certain aspects in the work that i really wanted to investigate that i think were limited and i found and i realized those limits in this kind of backward gaze if you will yeah that's such an interesting yeah i mean i think the experience of putting together a show like this for as a curator is a really incredible experience but it's also like oh like interested let me see what you've been doing but it's for you it's like i made that let me think about the person that i was that i made that and let me think about the person i am now and the person i will be and want to be i think it's such an interesting kind of it must be a really kind of interesting but also kind of like scary kind of like you know very highly instructive and i think what yeah what we really insisted on and i think it was great that both of you all of you supported this is that this last room that we're in now um would be able to we would save space for unrealized works and that's not common in surveys but i think i really um wanted that and i think it's really important a lot of a lot of surveys that you see the you usually have just a couple works if there are any current works and i think to really create a space and there was a big space in all of these venues created for the for the works made it right at the end that weren't even we waited we kept spaces in the catalog for them to be photographed they really had not been shown before being in in los angeles i think that's like um something that we really always thought about but i was always thinking about in the making of these works so if i was working on the invisible suns while we were started to work i was working on those other projects and each of those pushing them even more to this and so i don't feel like the last room of paintings in this show is a ending of the show in any way but it feels like i mean this show that's about to open in mary goodman gallery is a continuation of some of that some of that cycle or some of that period of work and so it's this kind of open open or portal into this other possibilities and and to me that that was um how looking back in through the work offered this place for that for that invention of that kind of new portal if you will and i think um you know michael something that you really were able to do in the design of the exhibition at the high was when you came to la you really uh kind of recognized um and spent time with the kind of the elliptical how do i put this like in every place that you stood in the exhibition at lacma you could get these different sight lines of of what's to come and what you've come out of so and we did that because we wanted to create a type of space of kind of hovering um that happened at different tempos so for example where the early cycle of dispersion renegade delirium and um the title of the third one uh in that for the the first renegade retropistics retrofits exactly the crystal bridges painting we nicknamed that room the vortex um it was you know it was a box and it was the doorway was a slight angle so you can't kind of constantly felt this this rotational movement in there um and then when you were outside of the box you know you could see things like for example the orange in conjured parts ferguson um or the orange and hynini and when you pivoted and looked at the early work you see that in apropos um so while at a glance a viewer may think okay the recent works you know explosions of you know highly saturated color airbrush spray painting loose gesture liberation graphic marks silk screening and then you look at the early works and you might think you know tight lines mapping you know stratified layers smaller scale um but really in creating a design and you're able to do that using your own architecture um both renzo piano buildings ours and yours but you know in and the whitney and the whitney too but this kind of ability to have a circularity um at the same time as a linearity and and and trying to have these moments where you know sort of like the being higher bodies where there is a kind of hovering and not quite being in in one space you know at one time absolutely i found myself in your exhibition in los angeles christine always looking back it reminds me of the painting in the exhibition you know looking back to a bright new future in a way there's always this kind of redoubling and looking back to look forward which i'm really happy that we're able to to achieve in in our plan uh which is well the work is glorious and your exhibition was absolutely glorious as well so i'm glad that we could do it justice here but the the last gallery is you think uh when you get into this space where i'm standing and before the mogana cycle you think this is like the uh the climax of the show but in fact when you go to the the in this penultimate gallery when you go to the last gallery it's actually uh even greater climax i think uh because it is a new beginning it's like uh closing the circle in a way where we didn't talk about this uh in terms of the earlier work but the idea of radical abstraction in the early 20th century and how that was important in julie's work and how in this new abstract work the idea of a radical abstraction closes that circle in a way where i think really beautifully we um we want to take some questions sorry to break it off uh uh so abruptly but i wanted to also just talk about one other aspect of the exhibition which you won't see in the exhibition but you can see it when you go to our museum shop and buy the catalog that is the catalog and i have some images of the catalog and the organization of the exhibition was such that the los angeles county museum of art took care of the logistics of the exhibition and the whit museum uh produced the catalog so um rejeco can may i turn it over to you to talk about uh how the catalog not only documented the exhibition but added substantially to it yeah of course um so yes the of course it kind of goes without saying that an exhibition of this type a retrospective mid-career 25 years of work would have a catalog um but i think what doesn't always happen is that you get to have the opportunity to kind of do the catalog julie had many books that had been done by galleries and other institutions but she had not really had this like big kind of overarching encyclopedic resource to be used kind of for future generations of scholars book so that was i think something that we really wanted this to be we really wanted it to become a definitive kind of you know piece of her practice moving forward something that would be a resource for her as well as obviously for our institutions but as well for people in posterity moving forward so um we kind of knew we wanted it to be scholarly we wanted it to be really beautiful we wanted it to be illuminating as to julie's practice the things that go into it whether that be her kind of things she's inspired by art history political events um social events her peers you know her kind of own history of course her own kind of self reflecting on her own practice etc so yeah we put together this really amazing book with a really incredible um table of contents including um an almost annotated bibliography chronolog chronology that christine wrote looking at four different kind of sections of over time of julie's career so the page that we're looking at right now the spread we're looking at um accompanies one of those sections and so the way we thought of this was um those of us who have the great privilege to spend time with julie um and to talk to her know that she reads she looks she's always got a reference she's always talking about this song this album have you read this have you seen this did you read this article and there's so much that goes into these paintings that i think people often aren't fully aware of so we this was an opportunity to pull out some of those references um these are kind of end papers but we can go back to the to the kind of the this one yeah the tiled one just because i think just to even look at this i think gives you there's four different spreads like this all with different images but we have david hammond's we have the clip club we have um read my lips we have you know lola flash um we have just above midtown gallery um this bridge called my back we have expo 67 velasquez all these really incredible references that are all kind of there we have of course freestyle the cover of the catalog that um is impossible to find at this point if you have a copy of freestyle hold on to it um that's definitely 300 on amazon i yep you're kidding me i gave it to a student and they oh i lent it i lent it to a student you should i mean chalk it up that you're you're welcome that's what the student yeah that's the correct response um but yeah i mean i think it's such an incredible insight into julie's practice and into the things she's interested in um so this is one important aspect of the catalog we also of course had kind of we commissioned essays from um fred moten from adriana campbell from i wrote an essay from um leslie jones um at lacma who works specifically in the printmaking um department of curatorial department spoke about kind of julie's practice as a printmaker um i'm trying matthew hale who is both a writer and an artist as well as a friend of julie so we kind of had this really interesting mix of um people who knew julie and could speak to kind of of course the work but also there was kind of a personal connection and then people who maybe like andreana who just is an art historian kind of a young art historian who we thought could do really incredible work by comparing julie's work to other abstract painters of her generation um dogma wubbshed is another person who um wrote about julie's work in relation to ethiopian modernism he is ethiopian and so we also were able to pull out some of the threads there that perhaps had not really been adequately explored thinking about not just julie's biography in terms of historical events but also kind of this art historical um lineage that she is a part of um that you know that we had not adequately explored so all in all i think i mean i'm very proud of the book and i know i hope and i mean i think we're all very proud of this book and really see it as more than exceeding kind of the dreams that we had for it um really beautifully designed um really like painstakingly designed i would say so if you see any typos please don't tell us just to add to that something that um not many people know which is that someone who's been hugely influential to all three of us who we lost um recently as oakwood the thinker curator writer who's done documenta venice fionale i mean you name it um and before he passed away he was one of the the catalog writers for this catalog and unfortunately um there wasn't enough time but what he was working on was a piece on the violence of the colonial sublime and specific to how eon 1 and 2 which are the commission works at sf moma that hang in the lower lobby which are extraordinary um compositions that take uh images from color from i mean just so many different histories around hudson river school thinking about westward expansionism um manifest destiny and in all this this beauty and i'm specific to also um the bay area and images and histories from counter culture etc um but these it really extraordinary beautiful canvases the inherent kind of violence in in the history of this country in in westford expansion in in in landscape painting as we know it in this country coming out of europe and um and the reason why i bring that up and sort of reveal that is because i think that these these spreads as well as the you know the end pages and the front pages of of the catalog which hopefully you'll all have a chance to see if you haven't already um kind of depicts these these constant collisions and contradictions and paradoxes of images that are you know kind of zoomed in close up extracted civil rights you know cut covers of art journal journals political posters and the way that they kind of come into our consciousness um and they are from histories that are that are troubled that are violent that are beautiful that are you know kind of extend the range of how we would describe any images um in in the world today and i think that that really comes through i think it's one of the reasons why it's the new york times you know best catalogs of 2019 um is in addition and that's such a difficult thing how do you design that i mean they're the essays and commissioning the essays and who's writing about this and who can write about this in such a thoughtful way which all of the writers did but then in his design um to be able to convey this and this just one of the spreads um was so powerful and such a such a pleasure and a joy to work on together absolutely it's funny uh it reminded me when i first got it my hands on it of oakley's a short century catalog because of its density and the amount of scholarship and information that uh added to that incredible exhibition i think we we're gonna we're going to go into some questions now and i have to apologize in advance because i haven't taken questions via zoom before so i'm gonna maybe need a second to figure it out so one bear with me one side okay thank you so much for uh bearing with me question um how would you describe your process i think this is a question for julie how would you describe your process of deciding on which experiences you want to express on these vast canvases for example how do you know which landscapes colors or shapes from your mind's eye you wish to arrange and combine in the piece well i think that that first the first issue is that there is no i don't think um i don't work in a way that could wish for any of it um if i could have wished to be a particular type of artist i think would be a very if the work would materialize very differently i never thought i would be making the drawings i was making in the 90s and i didn't think that i'd be working with architectural language and learning how to draw with a ruler i never thought that i would ever do that so i think that um the the work and the conceptual kind of drive behind how you start to approach working and thinking it demands and asks for certain kinds of ways of trying to uh visualize and imagine something and i think it's through that process that you experiment and investigate um things and and through those investigations new images kind of come to to be and so none of these paintings none of them have a preconceived idea of what they're going to look like other than a kind of conceptual type of information so if i want to first it was just learning architectural language and trying to collapse two thousand years of history or six thousand years of history into an image how do you do that if you if by how can you do that by layering these different forms of of built the built environment on one another tracing them onto one another and compressing space and time in that way two investigating the stadium or investigating the military industrial complex or berliner plots and these erased spaces or the ruins the contemporary ruins in baghdad and dabascus and um aleppo and and and and actually looking at that um looking at the landscape when i was working on the howell paintings for the san francisco um for the murals in san francisco that came to me from the from the actual opportunity of these two walls in this cavernous build lobby where these two walls were facing one another it almost like billboards are almost like these vistas but if you if you really experience the west and you live in and you hike in california or you've experienced the national parks you are climbing from vista to vista looking across canyons at one another that made me think just intuitively of the american landscape painting and how american landscape painting was so indebted to this kind of project um happened at the same time as the emancipation project it happened at the same time as the kind of like genocidal project of the greatest expansion project and the nationalization the creation of national parks so this idea of creating this pristine environment out of like the the creation of genocide all of these contradictions kind of happening at the same time as the expansionist colonial project of the american expan you know uh push west and manifest destiny in that embedded in that so all of those like layers of contradict those became those helped me think of what images to go to and so by thinking about those ideas i started to then move to selecting particular paintings that felt really appropriate in that way um a church painting a beer stop painting of the national parks being able to embed that then with contemporary race riots that were taking place after extra initial killings of people of color in this country and this kind of re-resurgence of this form of like violence that we were actually being able to witness because of cell phones and so this kind of this layering of space and time and so those images the ones that haunted me the most i guess are the ones that come to me the most of the images that i would layer into those paintings and all of that information kind of informs what something will be or how it will look and it's an experiment i mean it's not you know i can look at all these images of fires and one will be especially haunting and i will and when it's blurred and i look at that it can it's something else can emerge from that experience and i think that's how those decisions are made um but i mean over 25 years each of those decisions has evolved in really different ways but it's always this investigation and this interrogation and this experiment and and it's the trying to imagine something else trying to trying to invent something else from within all of that that that kind of in the end dictates what what you end up doing i guess wonderful uh we have a question for all three of you um from an atlanta based artist uh ruth do so how might each of the curators and julie connect to the aesthetics of renzo piano in form or ideology considering the exhibition will be shown in three buildings by piano well i wasn't at the pie news and you guys the team there was amazing but i do know i did notice that there aren't external windows in this space which every other single lorenzo piano space i've worked with has had windows and screens and or skylights that have to be covered and shadows and lines thrown everywhere and it's renzo piano's way of drawing in the exhibition space and kind of claiming the exhibition space in this other way and i think the high museum and the manila museum are two in two places where i haven't witnessed that where the light actually works really well and both those institutions but i do think that at a certain point after renzo piano starts to make more and more um art museums there became this kind of like interesting kind of challenge and um dialogue but also like kind of this this effort at like making almost really drawing all over the world all over the space so these are renzo piano drawings by light and shadow through everything master of light takes over the space with that colonizes it so activist architecture my fourth runs a piano space because i also showed in one in boutique at the boutin foundation they're definitely a challenge yeah i mean i think it's interesting i had not put together actually that the high was also a renzo piano building um until we were talking earlier um but it's interesting when thinking about lacma versus the whitney one of the things that you know the whitney has a lot of or the new whitney i should say the downtown whitney um has so much kind of flexibility in the galleries um we can kind of create kind of bespoke spaces in a lot of ways um and it was so interesting to kind of lachma it's it's a renzo building but it's a renzo building in la which means earthquakes which means very specific kind of limitations and restrictions around what you can do in the galleries because of the needs for safety and how of course how expensive that becomes so it's kind of and of course yeah the incredible skylights but you know like what doesn't love light paintings [Laughter] you know both from this like activist you know drawing in with light but also from of a conservation point of view so it's it's like this interesting like we love to have the light we love to have the windows open at the whitney but it's also this constant battle with the light to get the light levels low enough that our colleagues in conservation are like and the people who own the paintings of course the lender so they're not going to just totally freak out that we're not taking care of their paintings but but you also want the light so it's kind of this push and pull which i think is is uh yes across the buildings that renzo does you see this push and pull i do think that there i i will say also that the the the building and the highs actually i've actually drawn that before in um because it has this spiral kind of generator dynamic that happens with the circular part of the building that and so the aerial views of that like taurando buildings have this very particular structure that i was interested in um but i do think that um that the conversation between um actually um taking that space conceptually is a very different conversation and i don't think it's uh we can get into it here but i really i love the scalloped ceiling that you have and i think that works really well and one of the challenges that we had and you know julia i love that you what did you say that that these shadows that are created from these skylights become kind of his drawing or this kind of you know implementation of something you know no artistic a ceiling that's glass that has a slight kind of um you know kind of arced barn like top but then on top of it this what do you call it like a razor roof so there is some control of light but the light really came down from the top and it felt like a third floor of a building we don't think of los angeles as a vertical city very much a horizontal one but there was very much a lid and so the scale of some of the paintings um i think the tallest painting is 15 feet high either venice hakka and riot and the mobamas and um and so you know this is probably boring and tedious a lot of people out there but lighting is so important right so when you have all this extra light coming from the top and you're trying to light it trying to light the lower registers of the painting more yet then you have bodies of the viewers then you know potentially casting shadows on the work it becomes this incredible challenge so i'll just leave you with this when we photographed the show because of the the light moving of course of the sun it was like we had a 20-minute window when the light was perfect and it was in the afternoon and we didn't have the you know the lines kind of going over the painting but definitely something where those you know although the paintings and the artwork is fixed you know the light moves and so there was a definitely a temporality to sing the show totally everyone uh i'm sorry go ahead michael no please julie i'm sorry no i was just i just noticed on the chat an interesting question that just popped up around the series oh you see it i don't oh there it is yeah i'll read it my question is about magama julia 11 your discussion of the square as a three-dimensional social space and its relationship to revolution but also of course its dual valence as a fundamental aspect of planar abstraction do you see abstraction as necessary to revolutionary art i wonder with this in mind if red square and the russian revolution as well as the trajectory of russian abstraction via malevich and constructivism are embedded into the magama canvases or other works how do you uh how do you understand your notion of stress of abstraction to the history of of abstract painting i like the layeredness of the question and i and i think that um with my earlier work in terms of the kind of representation of space as this kind of geometric flattening geometric space um you see that i can use just as a guide for how we understand that you look at think of an airport map when you look at a map on the back of an airplane catalog to tell you how to negotiate an airport it's usually like a geometric space and it and it marks numbers as to where the gates are but it's this very abstract idea of space and idea of how we negotiate that those same geometric spaces and that same kind of geometric kind of mark thing comes from i think and i think of these kinds of paintings that you're talking about whether it's um the constructivist paintings and and malevich and and the russian abstractionists at that moment the futurists and how they were thinking about that but i actually think that uh that uh so i think that abstraction offered at a moment this kind of desire for a particular kind of utopian desire in in how one could envision and kind of build a world and one i just want to say when i was in moscow and i went to see the the work in those museums and i was amazed by how much that aesthetic and how much that intentionality of that work was co-opted right completely co-opted to the point where you have mass industry using that language right now and that's always what happens to visual language or what always happens to these kind of efforts and these endeavors and and so i think when you ask the question about abstraction as being um how how fundamental is abstraction to revolutionary art or i i don't want to kind of uh define or delineate what revolutionary work can be but i definitely think abstraction is revolutionary in that abstraction because of its illegal illegibility because of its kind of experiential dynamic because of its referential aspect to how many forms of history and and cultural language it calls from uh that and and and because of its um uh unbeing able to def be defined in a way it just offers different types of portals and in and and possibilities and it offers this form of libertarian space libertarian space that i think is crucial to like any type of revolutionary gesture so in that sense i think abstraction is really furtive for that work i don't think it's i ca i would hesitate to call anything necessary because i actually think the minute one says that it's a limit or uh creates a kind of uh a boundary around what or or some kind of like requirements as to what revolutionary can be and i think actually the the the constant like emancipation of that concept is important and the constant kind of capability of the kind of revealing of that like um you know fred moton talks about the constant kind of becoming of the fugitive or the kind the constant kind of uh freedom or allowing uh revealing of the fugitive is is kind of the is is always what is important so i think that and necessary and that's what should be venerated and that should be like that uh that doesn't that works against any concepts of what should be necessary and what are requirements for that wonderful um i can't say anything uh that could ever be as interesting as what you just said so and given the fact that we are at the end of our time i'd just like to thank uh julie you reject christine for your incredible observations and uh knowledge and ideas that you brought to this presentation tonight thank you so much this exhibition uh is on view uh for the next day tomorrow it's uh on view for members it's done view today for members and will open to the public on saturday october 24th so uh please start coming tomorrow morning and for those of you who are watching who live in fulton county remember we're an early voting site here at the high museum so come vote early and then you get to get to see this exhibition it's a twofer you can't beat it so from all of us at the high museum to all of you uh thank you so much and have a good evening thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you

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Length: 84min 56sec (5096 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020