But it looked like Kwame who said, we already got arts in Harlem. You're not bringing anything here. But Dr. Alibola was one of those also. We were in 65, they had already found it, we didn't see before we got there. So there's a whole history of Harlem going on before the black art started there. So Dr. Alibola. First of all, let me just say I'm really honored to be here in this extremely important dialogue. Today, there's so many things going on that many of us are confused. We're confused about what our role is going to be going forward, especially with political climate as it is. It was mentioned earlier, the fact that the youth have another perspective about what victory maybe could be. So it is important, in my view, that we create as many institutions as possible. The Young Lords was an institution, wasn't just a group of people coming together. The African Marjahs organization, the Caribbean Cultural Center is an institution. And in Korea, the WACI is an institution. National Conference of Artists is an institution. In that context then, it becomes very, very clear that in order to compete, to really make an impact, one must have people around them and must create an institution that can stand up to the assaults that we face every day on our culture, on our intelligence and who we are. I'm just going to, it's very difficult to talk about the three institutions that I helped co-found in the context of just showing my work, but I will try to do that. This is a piece that I created in 1969, and it's based on the Shang Go image. Now, Shang Go, for those of you who do not know, within the Yoruba culture of West Africa, is the deity of the God of thunder and lightning of power, of force. And one of the things that was important to me and to the way you see artists, particularly, as Danny was talking about, is to recreate the image of traditional African deities. Why? Because we could not live in antiquity, we had to live and create that force today. So what I personally went after was how do I take these traditional deities, these forces, these powerful forces of nature, and turn them into something contemporary? So this is my attempt at that. I also realized, and this is called Eshu, in space. Now Eshu, again, I'm using the Yoruba references because the Yoruba movement began in full force in the 60s with Baba, a surgeon, who was from Detroit, Michigan, and went to Cuba and was initiated into the traditional culture, came back to New York, and decided that it was important to bring this force, this new light, into a contemporary reality and thus created the Yoruba template of the United States and began to issue African names. We began to don the clothing, we began to recognize the traditional deities, and thus we made a tremendous, powerful impact on American culture and world culture, ultimately. This is a portion of the piece I call The Manifestation, and again, in the center is a symbol of atomic energy. And during the 60s, and even up to today, there's a certain amount of energy within the African diaspora community. And it is very often not recognized as what it is because it is so much traffic, it's so much noise, so much graffiti in the air that we fail to recognize that there are some powerful forces that continue to this day, and it is embedded in many of our institutions, such as the Caribbean Cultural Center, such as the way you see it, such as the National Conference Artist, such as the alumni of the Young Lords. Those things are still in existence today. I wanted to be very clear that these things are still going on today. And as Felipe was saying, the elders who we, some of us are, are given the task of making sure that these institutional norms, in our view, continue. So that our youth, as they are learning the ropes, quote unquote, will have a basis upon which to conduct themselves going forward toward victory. It is important also, today especially, to understand that art without direction is part of the European and American aesthetic. I am not criticizing, I love abstract art, you can see some of those elements in my work. However, it is critical that within that context that there is a strong presence of art that has meaning, that art has direction, that art is instructive towards the upliftment of the consciousness, both aesthetically and politically of the viewers. And thus, this is called burden of injustice. And what I've done here is using an African imagery that was on the door of one of the temples and reinterpreted the whole Christ mythology of Christ bearing the cross. And so this is an African version of that phenomenon. So as we go forward, this is a piece called Dada Soul War. There is a mental war that goes on throughout the world, but specifically here, let's address America. Television, up until maybe 15, 20 years ago, the imagery that you saw on television, where any people of color was a terrible assault on our mentality and our imagery. How we looked to ourselves. We were servers, doting, we were not the geniuses, the scientists, the powerhouses that we are. But this is a tradition that was put upon us ever since slavery. And it's a technique, of course, if you're gonna dominate somebody, they need to grade their whole personality, their whole culture. So this is by a cartoon, for lack of a better word, on the whole idea of the white, racist, American assault on the consciousness of African, Asian people. One of the important things for me, and for us, was, and Valerie is one of my mentors as well, is public art. This piece here, which I call Unison, was on the corner of 135th Street in St. Nicholas Avenue Hall. It was across the street from my high school. It was the passageway after city college. And it was a main thoroughfare. Millions of people saw this image as they would be driving by, walking by, strolling by over the 12 year period it was up on that wall. Public art is immensely important and always has been. But the idea of seeing what we recognize in this world through our eyes is taken for granted. But the images that are emblazoned into your consciousness, whether it's in movies, whether it's in painting, but especially in public art, is critical to our survival and our mental health going forward. So that was called Unison. This is a piece called Emerging Spirit. Again, the spirit of taking the African tradition and contemporizing it. This of course, if you look at it closely, there's the image of a piece I call Access to Energy. And going forward again, this is a reinterpretation of the traditional art of... So I'm gonna conclude by just saying that going forward, my message to the youth is keep your faith. Study, study your history. Study what these great pioneers that are part of this conference has done and continue to do and support your community. Thank you everybody. Our next presenter is Jack Chen. Jack is founder of the basement workshop, but he also teaches here in Gallatin and he's a colleague in Gallatin actually. And also a few months ago he did a conference in his very room on eugenics, which was just dealing with the notion of race in the United States and Europe too. Jack. First of all, I just wanna say that I'm not a co-founder of basement workshop, I'm a co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in America, but I was lucky enough to come in 1975 to be a part of the basement workshop and people prior to me were really funding. I wanted to tell you about this work. There's a Chinese sociologist who arrived in the halls of the University of Chicago, School of Sociology, the founding school of social scientist in this country in the 1930s and 1940s. And his name was Fei Xiaotong. And while he was wandering the halls of that university, while he was engaging with people like Robert Park, who was talking about the race relations cycle. And in some ways, a part, Robert Parks was very much a part of the, both the founding of the social sciences in this country, also very much continuing somewhat unwittingly, even though he worked with many important black scholars, also continuing the tradition of scientific racism that has existed in this country that continues to exist in the universities and in the institutions that were a part of it. And what Fei Xiaotong noticed was that he thought this is a land without ghosts, a land without ghosts, because he was talking about the fascination of this country had of Superman. Of Superman always fighting for the American way and he was an alien, he was an outsider after all. He wasn't of this earth. He was somehow an alien coming in and helping to fight the American way and helping to push progress along and not thinking about the past, not engage with living with the past. And Fei Xiaotong in some ways was wrong because this was the same time that the eugenics movement was happening. This was the same time in which forced sterilization was going on. This is the same time in which the national origins quota had been enacted which further compounded the racism that already existed in this country saying that even Jews and even Italians were not good enough to come into this country. This is the same time that the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect so that even him, a Chinese scholar, wasn't aware of the fact that Chinese were being excluded at this moment. There were these ghosts wandering around the hallways of the University of Chicago campus that he was not seeing and he was not aware of. So I think the challenge that we have, I mean I'm trying to reimagine a history of New York City and a history of this place that also honors those unresolved, unrequited pasts and stories and spirits that we have to acknowledge together. And it's not strictly, of course, about Chinatown. It's not strictly about the Lower East Side. It's about the compounding of our experiences. So I want to, on the one hand honor the experience of basement workshop when I came to New York to 75 and was privileged to be a part of this amazing energy that was happening in the city at that time and it was happening exactly at the point in which New York City was going bankrupt. And there's something important about that because it's not about the wealth of the buildings and the amount of money that's being made in the careers that of course we need money to survive. It was about the energy of the city that in which things are wide open and there's a possibility to do things that was the true wealth I think that was being generated at that time. In some ways it's the reason why so many of us were able to benefit from that. So basement workshop was part of the whole network of organizations in the Lower East Side. It was never strictly about Chinatown but at the same time it was about Chinatown and it was about China. It was about the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was about people coming out of the Japanese American concentration camps and coming to New York City. It was about people growing up in laundries and starting to discover the fact that there were such things as Chinese Exclusion Laws and beginning to understand the context in which these laws happened in relationship to the Puerto Ricans and the blacks and the Jews and the Italians and all the other people in the Lower East Side in a moment in which people were talking to each other and trying to compare notes. Not so much within the institutions but really within the emergent organizations. I guess I want to kind of highlight a key issue. I think it's yes, bricks and mortar are important but also bricks and mortar are extensive and it's in many ways to me the key issue is how do we think of ourselves as organizers and organizers of places of spaces of time and place of trying to bring back moments of time and place that we have been in some ways not taught and not had a chance to learn about. How can we bring back these connections that we know are there across different places in different times, different parts of the city in a way that can begin to make sense to the collective and collaborative stories and the challenges that we are facing ahead together. So that it's really not so much a question of being afraid of those ghosts, being afraid of our ancestors coming back and grabbing us and bring us into the graves themselves. It's learning how to live with the ghosts, how to honor them but also how to really understand what they went through and how to generation after generation be thinking of ourselves as part of the continuum. And not so much as individuals who are then now making it but somehow being a part of that ongoing flow in which we can try to do the right thing. Not so much because it's part of our job but because it's part of what we have to do because our parents and our grandparents know better and they will tell us when we're not doing the right thing. Not so much as a career but as a way to continue to honor the memories that they were part of. And I just, in that vein I guess I want to mention and I'll wrap up right after this, that there's a moment right now in which we have a chance in some ways to bring together a lot of our stories when the journey of the Hokulea from the Polynesian Voyaging Society which left Hawaii last year, is arriving in New York in June of this summer. Now the Hokulea is an amazing project in which Polynesian peoples had mastered the large, vast expanse of oceans that Peli Haofa caused the Sea of Islands in which they were in a simple up-rigger canoe able to go from island to island to figure out how to avoid the dangerous croppings of rock just underneath the surface of the water. And they were able to figure this out by basically basic navigation, by watching the skies, by watching the waters, by watching the wave formations. And they created these beautiful maps, especially in the Marshall Islands in which simple sticks and tied together with shells were the maps in which they used to wave on it, how to get through these vast waters. They now have recovered. There's only one person in the 1960s who knew how to do this, but now there are multiple generations who have come together and are sailing around the world. They're finally arriving in New York, in June. Now, it seems to me, and I'm very much familiar with the Tuber Wampum campaign that has been going on for, of course, centuries, but most recently, just the past couple years. And I'm hoping that the Tuber Wampum in which native peoples, and originally with the Dutch agreement, would go along sailing side by side, that that understanding has to be part of what we all embrace and assist on. But the Tuber Wampum and the canoe paddling down the Hudson River from upstate New York, down to New York State, down to the tip of Manhattan Island is something that, in which I'm hoping, physically but also symbolically, we can embrace as really the founding moment of our collective histories. So, I want to make sure, I'll share with Marta, but also with Kathy, the information about that event. But it's also a chance in some ways for us to reclaim a wayfinding and a context for the history that includes all of this. Thank you, Jack. Our next discussion will be Valerie Maynard. It's really interesting. When we went to the black arts, Valerie was already making art that was political. She was working with Liberator Magazine, and then later on she becomes the curator of the studio program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which was being transformed by our discussion later, Ed Spriggs, from a studio program into a real museum. So, again, Valerie Maynard. All the people that came before, I wake up every morning now and say, wow, I woke up. The other thing that I've always been very contemplative, always thinking, I grew up here in Harlem. I spent my Saturdays walking from Harlem to the end of Manhattan, walking in any building that interested me. Where I got this idea, I don't know. I was never stopped because they always thought I was some maid's daughter. I finally realized years later, that would be any kind of gallery, any kind of bookbinder, anything at all. So my experience of being here was very crucial to who stands before me now. Not good at talking, groups of people, one to one, or pretty good. I noticed a lot of things in those walks. The walks became bicycles. I'd get up in the middle of the night and ride around Manhattan, and then go back to bed and get up and go to work. Then became a motor schooler, and this would be in the early 50s. And then I realized that the only way that I could communicate would be through art. I was always an artist. I grew up with my parents and my grandparents around the corner with five uncles.  And I also grew up in Apples Senior Baptist Church. So activism and consciousness about the world and in Harlem was voted in that place. And also gave me a wider view of the world. Very quiet, but very athletic.  Still more than anything, reading has always been my best friend. First thing, last thing, meditation. That's all I tell you about me, my beginning. I've worked with at least, I would say, 3,000 young people in my life. I've meant it many. They've saved me and I've saved quite a lot. I've adopted many, many, many young people from everywhere. Most of them are grandparents now because I'm still here. A lot of good people in this room that I've known a long time. Such a pleasure to see you all. You're showing us the work. That painting, there's a series called their mini-series, but this is the Statue of Liberty series. And these were painted on brown paper with house paint and house brush. That's where you paint a house viewers. And this is a grandmother. And if you look very closely, there's a young person being there. You can go on and on and on and help. This is the series of murals on 120th Street, Lexington Avenue subway. And this is my gift to Harlem and home. I had entered many, many competitions last summer. And often people would meet me later and say, you know you won that, but they didn't want to give it to you. So I was determined to get one here. This will be my second public for the Harlem. This is also, this one is called Katrina. And they're kind of lights so you can't see all the levels of it, but at the bottom there's a man drowning and somebody helping him. And up there you see the mother was all two babies, one pointed away behind my shoulder, one being held. And go on, it's about maybe 10 feet. This one also, this is in the same series of Statue of Liberty, which we now know was a black woman first. And the French sculptor was made to change that. This is also in that series, also on brown paper. I grew up ironing paper bags to go on. So I'm quite familiar with that paper. This is part of the New York Partite series, 250 paintings. And they talk about what we've been talking about up on the morning, what we're experiencing now, and what we'll be doing in the future, depending on our souls, our spirits and our community. This is one of the stairwells in the subway. There are two of them. There are 12 murals in all, then Venetian glass. And I call this the gate waits in the future. I have titles for them, but I don't have to write them down. But it's what inspires them. This piece is in Boston. It's 20 feet high, it's in Statue of Steel. And it's an homage to a warrior, someone who grew up in Boston. And it'll show up again. This is one of the Tower of Cards. It's in Ceramic, and this is about maybe four feet. This one is in Jersey. Doomfool in the Jersey. These figures are 10 feet high. And I forget how long it is, but maybe 30 feet long. And they kind of zigzag. So when you come up on the front, you just see one figure, but as you pass it, you see two of them. This one is in Baltimore, where I was born. And they are nine by 12 feet, and they're called Black Walnut. And they were called the 1908. This one is eight feet, and this is part of the no-part, part-time series. And there are two, this is the largest one. And only one has a title, which I think might show up right after this. Otherwise, this is called no-part time. This is part of the Terror and Being Terrorized series, which I have been working with, with Captain Hanfield, and my good friend, the writer, Alexis DeVall. We've done a couple of residencies, working on this, and working with people, and talking about it. This is for the homeless in the neighborhood that live in Baltimore and hasn't died yet. But it's being the best of house or shelter. And I wanted it to be simple. This is part of, you have to look hard to see the face in here. This is for the Terror and Terrorized paintings also. Another one is at the same series. Another one, yet another one. Antonio was a kind of, I'm not technology, this is a photograph by Dan also. I call these women the courts. They're very short in between. There are so many images, and of course, that's us, ancestrally, and now, and in the future, close up with them. Still close up. These are all women in this part. There's a geometric part, because before they redid the studios, the ancestors, that's why they are colorless, with colors going in between them. This is also still the courts as far as I'm concerned. The voices that are always behind us, with us, and the voices that are with us in front of us and behind us. I don't know whether you'll be able to hear this. Atow, who used to be the art director at Black Enterprise. When I have conversations with him, every so often I'm saying something and he runs and does a quick little video. So this was just a few days ago. I'll let you listen to it, I hope you can hear it. Can you get it to move over? Another sound. Well, I'll talk about that. Good morning, and thank you for inviting me. Our next presenter, who we'll be somebody you're not already familiar with, be Diane Fair. Thank you. Again, it's just so wonderful to be in the presence of the people here. Some people I know, some people I've known, for a very long time, but it's really great to be able to be here with them. I'm really humbled and honored. So folks from other communities that have faced so much struggle as well. I came to New York, I'm a filmmaker. I came to New York straight from Osage Nation because I had a scholarship to go to school. And I think one of the things that first struck me about being here was besides where are the Indians? That was actually my first question. But the second one was that I saw ordinary people doing extraordinary things. And I think Jack, he mentioned that. And there was a different kind of an energy that, well, maybe the city might have been going bankrupt. The real richness was in the people. And that you could, if ordinary people could do extraordinary things, I believe that native people could do that as well. So I was part of what is called the New York Movement and Contemporary Native Arts. New York had been a crossroads for a very long time before contact. Our people would come here and gather at Battery Park. Folks from Maine came down and earthquake people from upstate and from even as far over as the Ohio Valley to trade information and ideas and goods. So it had actually been a crossroads long before non-native people arrived here. Anyway, emerging out of civil rights and social justice for a while, our people had to, we were really in a dual situation because on one hand people were liberated by civil rights and social justice movements. But native people had to struggle another generation longer because our people were still forced to go to the government-run boarding schools and the purpose of the schools were to really to de-Indianize people. So it was a dual struggle for a while. But nonetheless, when our people came here, one thing, as I said, there was something called, there is something called the New York Movement and Contemporary Native Arts. Native Contemporary Native American Theater was founded in New York. This is an early picture of some folks that had from the Native American Theater ensemble. And the young gentleman on his knees down here to the left, Honeg Igama, is widely considered his kawah. He's in Delaware and he's widely considered the father of contemporary Native Theater because as in all of our cultures we all have traditional storytelling, which is where all theater begins. But contemporary Native Theater was actually started by Honeg with the Native American Theater Ensemble.  The late Charlie Hill, which I mentioned, he was a comedian, there's Charlie on the top row on the left. He was a well-known Native American comedian, comedian he called himself. And I think I'm trying to see, yes, down there in the middle, in front of the fellow that's on the ground where we see his bare feet here. Right above him is Helen Mirren. He's a young woman and she's traveling with Peter Brooke and these folks from England that were going around the world. So that's kind of a vintage photo. It will be in a new book that we're publishing called No Reservation, The New York Movement in Contemporary Native Arts, which documents the history where we received a fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts to document this history although it's heavily visual. It also, as I said, Contemporary Native Theater in film also started here in New York as well. These are the three ladies of Spider Woman Theater, the Miguel sisters. There's Miriel on the bottom and her two older sisters, Gloria and Lisa. Lisa is also one of the elders that I mentioned that had walked already. And these three women started Spider Woman Theater. They're widely recognized as the mothers of Contemporary Native Theater. And Lisa has walked, but the two other sisters are still going. And Spider Woman is now the longest-running, continuously running feminist theater in existence anywhere. So, and they're here in New York. I think it's important to note that New York was also important because it was the first time for Native people that we could express ourself without it being controlled by the government. The Santa Fe School of Arts was another, it is another deeply important movement in the arts, Native arts, however, so much of that was still being controlled by the government. So, the New York movement was a truly liberated movement. So, and we see how much more fruitful it was because of that. I think that another thing to say about the New York movement was because one of the things that characterized it was is the diversity. The diversity of Native nations, the diversity of disciplines, and the diversity of styles in which people were comfortable working. While other artists in other groups sometimes, especially in the mainstream, European-American mainstream, people formed isms, which always seemed to us like they were looking for tribes, for sense of belonging, a sense of commonality with other people, but the Native people had come from very much that structure, the First Nations people. So, we felt liberated and people just did all kinds of things. It was diversity was one of the main characteristics of that. This is Lloyd Alksandine Lumby. He's also one of the people that I mentioned for the honoring. Lloyd was a Lumby Indian who came from North Carolina, and he was getting his master's at Columbia. And he's widely considered the individual who introduced contemporary Native art to the art world here in New York. He was, like a lot of the early people, he was a visionary in that he sensed that that people can have ideas and can have information that somebody has to be listening on the other side. Okay, if nobody's listening, then it makes things pretty tough, if not impossible. And he was one of the people, like Kanae, like other artists in the movement, who seized the moment because they realized that somebody was listening and this is equally important that they would not be listening forever. That we as non-white people were something new, they didn't know about us, they wanted to know about us. But as always, the impulse to colonize is gonna take over and people are gonna try to take over and co-opt it and reinterpret it and change it and redefine it. But these people seized the moment and spoke up and these events actually happened and made it a part of history where it emerged about of our communities and how we felt about ourselves. He convinced Brian Odorey, who was then the editor of Art in America, to write, dedicate a whole issue to Native art in 1972, where he wrote a seminal article called 23 Indian Artists. Okay, and this was the first time that Native artists as modernists were introduced to the art world because traditional Native art had directly influenced the evolution of American abstract expressionism and that those artists, Jackson Pollock, Rothko, other people went and visited the reservations, the nations, and were directly influenced by the traditional, just as over in Europe, people like Picasso were influenced by traditional African art. This modernism all over the world was directly influenced by our traditional societies, people like Kandinsky looked to the East, Jack, to be inspired. So the evolution of modernism in art and contemporary art has its roots in traditional design aesthetic and from all the indigenous peoples and the peoples of color and ethnicity all over the world. Anyway, Lloyd's article was the first time and it was also the first time that a person, a Native person spoke up and wrote from a scholarly point of view about what was happening. So this was deeply important. He then founded a gallery which he called American Art because he said, if not us, then who? So he was determined that we'd be seen as that way and so he started the American Art Gallery here in New York where he first started showing Native modernism and then he went on to be, after a while he closed that gallery and went on to be the first curator of the gallery at the American Indian Community House which is the Indian Social Service, long time Indian Social Service Agency here in New York. In fact, he was a curator there twice and he was the patriarch of a number of Native curators here in New York. Again, this is indigenous people being without the government's control and being able to express themselves in a way which is relative to the times in which they're living in and who they really are. So he's a really important person and I think that my time is up here, right? It's been a pleasure to talk to you and I hope I have opened your hearts in some way. Thank you. Our next discussant will be Elizabeth Yampierre. One of the, it always feels like coming home when I come to anything that's done by the Caribbean Cultural Center. So gracias, Martha and Melody, you guys on my heart. I am from the Climate Justice Movement. I run Uprose, which is Brooklyn's oldest community-based organization and I started doing, hey, Uprose. I started doing environmental justice work in 1996, mostly because our people have asthma and have a respiratory disease and a lot of the decisions that are made to site environmental burdens in place in communities of color. And last year, if you could flip, last year we led, we were part of the leadership to organize the largest climate march in the world. We had 400,000 people show up. We called it the People's Climate March. How many people here came to that? Anybody? Okay, so if you came to that, you understand why climate change is the issue of our day. We have been working really hard and in silos. We have historically worked on issues like employment, social services, housing, all of that. And we've always thought about the environment as something outside and other or luxury. Thinking about trees is something that people with privilege can think about, but not really as essential to us who are working two or three jobs, coming home and trying to make a living. We don't have time for that. Unfortunately, because we are the people who are the embodiment of historical trauma, the descendants of colonization and slavery, and climate change is gonna affect our people more than any other, it has become our issue. Because decisions made by other folks that we were not involved in are going to impact the people least responsible, the ones who have not contributed to climate change. And it's going to affect us. So we, when we started organizing for the People's Climate March, decided that the front line was going to have to be led by young people of color. That was a fight. It was a fight that I was personally responsible for. A lot of people wanted to be at the front. They wanted baby carriages. They wanted all kinds of folks at the front. For me, personally, I felt that young people of color, whenever the media sees them and there was paparazzi there, lines and lines of media covering this, this was seen all over the world, that they had to see people of color in positions of leadership and of power, particularly young people that the camera loves to feature on young people when they're doing the perp walk, but they don't like featuring them when they're in a position of power. So it wasn't, it was difficult because I didn't respect process, because people said, well, you decide, I was like, yeah, I'm gonna decide. And so people would call me, they tweeted, they texted, and I said, no one would have any conversation about this. This is the way it's gonna go down. And so, and I was part of a coalition of people working to do this collectively, but I felt that deeply that young people of color had to be in the front.  And I say, yeah, that's what's up. So these sunflowers, these are our young people making the sunflowers that are, bros the organizations into generational. We believe that leadership is not something that can be postponed, that you exercise it with accountability and that it's our responsibility to facilitate and lead a youth engagement and to make sure that young people know their history and that they know that there's a system of accountability. They are now growing up in a celebrity culture where they think leadership is being a boss, but leadership really comes with a lot of responsibility. But if they have to postpone that, our communities are in trouble because climate change is here.  The fact that it is warm is not a good thing. It means that apples will fall off the trees, that agriculture will be affected, that there won't be water, that there will be all kinds of things that are directly related to the fact that climate change is here. That is not good. By 2042 and with a majority, it will also be the same time that climate change will have fully had its way with us and it's gonna happen at a time when all of these disasters like Katrina and Sandy will be happening out of regular basis. The sunflowers also represent a flower that feeds the earth, provides food, cleanses the environment, and as a daughter of Ocho, I knew what I was doing. I wanted the sunflower in the front. But that's not the only reason. At the time, Detroit was being denied water. The black people in Detroit were being told that water was gonna be privatized and that they had to pay for their own water.  So when Uprills was provided with an opportunity to have funding to do an art build, we chose the sunflowers in solidarity with the city of Detroit and we wanted them to lead and the sunflowers became iconic for the climate justice movement. So you could keep going through the pictures because I'm not an artist, but I also know that art worked for the people's climate march and taking the local narrative and blowing it up and making it huge, that it would be really hard to go into our communities and get our communities to mobilize for this, although this was also the largest environmental justice march in the history of the world. There were 45,000 people of color who marched as part of the frontline. We called ourselves the frontline of crisis and the forefront of the solutions. And we call ourselves the forefront of the solutions because there is nothing more sustainable than a poor person. People of color have always had to recycle, reuse and repurpose. And remember when I was talking about this, that climate change didn't start just the other day and environmental justice didn't start 20 years ago like people would like to write about. It really started with the extraction, not just the fossil fuel, but the extraction of our labor. It started in the slave cabins. It started when people were colonized, when our people from generation to generation have had the worst food, the worst healthcare, the worst employment, stress, year after year, generation after generation, which makes this particularly susceptible to disease, which is why climate change is our issue. It is the intersection of racial justice, of racism and climate change. And you didn't, if there was ever a place, if you don't understand it, if it doesn't come home to you, then you have to just Google Katrina. Katrina is where it showed up. Katrina is the model and the example of all of the historical isms of the historical trauma and how climate change affects the community. These extreme weather events are going to happen more and more. California is burning, the war in Syria started because of water. So if we look at who is going to be affected, it's going to be the global south. And so regardless of what you do, and you can go to the next picture, I'm sorry. I'm not as good at this as everybody else.  And so it is important that you understand how this shows up in our community and why we need to exercise leadership. Climate justice is not like climate change and it's not like anything else. Climate justice isn't just about the disparate impact of these issues on our communities. It's also about leadership. And it's about this idea that we speak for ourselves and that we are not going to be the passive recipients of somebody else's agenda. That we lead, that we set the agenda. One of the hardest things and one of the things that I often get tweeted about is that I say that the biggest obstacle to addressing climate change is privilege. And that unless people learn how to work with each other and unless people check their privilege, that our communities are the ones that are going to be most impacted. So through Sandy, what we found was the development of what we call the DIC, the Disaster Industrial Complex, where people just helicoptered into our communities with these ideas about how you create an adaptation of resilience. The truth is that our communities know how to do that. We knew how to do things before we became American because to become American is to be addicted to consumption culture and to throw things away. And so we now have to reclaim our traditions. We have to reclaim the traditions that come from the places that we came from once because that is going to redefine who we are as a nation. Everything that we're doing here affects people all over the world. And so with the People's Climate March, we met with the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance. We met with people from Indian country. These folks are going through the same things. In Africa, the Nigerians and the Delta region, the water is polluted. People have disease. They're dying because of corporations that are making those decisions here in the United States. So it's a lot. And he's waving his hand. And I know it's a lot to talk about in 10 minutes, but I really want to thank you. It's been an honor to be part of this panel. That's it. I would like to invite our panel member to come in. Kwame Elizabeth, we all come up front. We're going to take some questions. Maybe have some answers. Ali Molan, is Philippe still here? I just want to make an announcement, too. There's a lost book. It's called The Underground Railroad in New York by Eric Foner. And could you please turn it over to the desk and when we come in, because someone has lost the book and I'm sure they need it for some other project they're working on, too. So we're going to take questions and answers. I hope we will have some answers to the questions. So the question, we all have microphones up front, too. So we'd like to answer. Yes, sir? More than a question was, we forgot to make an announcement. We're not taking statements. We're only taking questions. Oh. Well, it's something that my brother, Ali Mola, said about abstraction. And it's kind of an extension of what the other panelists, Amarillo, the founder of Amarindo, mentioned. It's about this notion of abstraction that Ali Mola assigns to an influence, which is really all of that is laboring that somebody decided to put on the arts, minimalism, surrealism, that actually astro-sizes a lot of people from these major art movements. It's something that was created, basically, to facilitate the study of what, quote unquote. And your question is? No, what it is is that when they took, after Picasso started doing these stylized figures, everybody thought he was a genius, which he was. And then they took photos of his studio and there were all these African figures there. And people realized that this abstraction didn't come from his pure genius, but it came because he was accumulating these figures and they were influencing him. And I think the stylization that came out of his African exposure is really what inevitably led to abstraction, which is the simplification of everything. The same way when in the third of the 19th century, all these ceramics were coming. And the question is, does all these Japanese prints were coming in? And then what I'm saying is that we tend to forget that a lot of this creativity is universal, it's different cultures clashing. And somehow somebody has decided that it all falls on the one label. And I just like to clarify that. Thank you, thank you. Antonio, could you go in the separate also? Yeah, if we go back to that period of where you see and the arrival of Baraka in Harlem. First I think it should be noted that he arrived there because he had been invited by Project Uplift of Harvey. So there was a very diverse community, very diverse arts community, multiple leadership of Ken Clark. But I'm also curious, there was a real relationship between the Harlem arts community at that time and the kind of university environment that Michele's bookstore and Frederick Douglass bookstore provided, with a real absence of an African presence in universities in New York. That both Michele's bookstore and Frederick Douglass bookstore served as a university setting. You could go in at any time. And any of the panelists who have some recollections of those two bookstores and the intellectual and artistic environment that was around them, I'd love to hear some comment. You bet, LaRoy. And there was another bookstore. I'm sorry, used to my name. There was Liberation Bookstore. You bet, LaRoy, and it was one more on Seven Batmills in the Shambur. Who was that? She passed about maybe 10 years ago. Liberation on 36? No, not Liberation. She's still here. A better one is still alive. No, no, no. One is Liberty House, which was Yvette and Liberation, whom she's passed away with. Okay, I just wanted to add those, but somebody else can comment on how important they were to us. Immensely important. It was, you used the right term. It was a university. It was our university. And it also was a rallying point and a gathering point for people of like mind who were leading the struggle and for people who wanted to learn so they came there. So it was immensely important. And that was replaced, of course, by this huge state office building, which is a story in itself. Yes. I guess I'm next, since they gave me the mic. Well, hi, good morning, good afternoon.  Am I, hey, animal. I'm Ms. Bola. Hey, my question to all of you, given that you have such expertise and such knowledge, can you give some words of encouragement or empowerment to the future? To how are we gonna sustain ourselves if we're young and we're old? Doesn't matter. As people of color, people of the world, what are your words of encouragement or some insight that you may have in terms of moving forward so that we can once again kind of come together and to develop networks that can empower and to develop more growth within the art community and the global community as well. Thank you. You know, when people talk about young people, they always say that they're at risk. That's the language that's used. And we never say that. We say young people are at potential.  So we really are strong and we really are powerful, but I know that we own that. We really believe everything that we hear. And I think that for us to be able to sustain, we're gonna have to work at the intersection of all of these issues and we're gonna have to learn how to build just relationships and engage in self-transformation. We're gonna have to build those kinds of relationships because climate change is demanding that. There's gonna be less available, less resources, more people, more taxing on infrastructure. So there's gonna be a lot that is coming that people are unprepared for. And our survivability really depends on those relationships with each other and working in a way that is really intergenerational. Where learning is happening across the table and we're not competing, but we're learning how to complement each other and how to share the skills and the resources. This is a nation that pits generations against each other and a nation that really, where competition is what drives us. And if we really embrace and own traditions, grounded in African and indigenous culture, we would be very different and we would be stronger in our ability to survive, I think. I want to add something to that because I think it unites all of us in this room. The Canadian First Nation Woman, Sylvia McAdam, started something a few years ago called Idle No More. And that's a slogan that's been, that has moved with great fury through Indian country. And I think that that's the first step, Idle No More, okay? Because the threat of all these things that are being discussed is continuous.  But I think another thing that unites all of us that we can all demand justice for is that is, and unifies us, is the doctrine of discovery. That's what all of these laws, that's what all of this injustice goes back to that one starting point, the doctrine of discovery, which holds that people of color, non-white people are either less than human or not human at all. And so therefore, other people have the right to do what they will with them and what they will with the earth and the creation to divide their lands and do what they will with that land. And all of these laws and all of this discussion goes back to that. It's hidden, it's always going on in the background. It's in the constitution. Every time a good law gets passed, it's overturning something like that. And I wonder what it would be like in a world where all of the people that have been hurt by all of that unified and said, no more, Idle No More, the doctrine of discovery must be acknowledged universally and repealed so that we can have a just society for every one year. The brother who made the point about Picasso, it really relates to the foundational issues that we're all struggling with, which is how we've been classified. How we've been classified and turned into particular groups that actually we don't necessarily recognize. In terms of the 60s and 70s movements, we saw things as interconnected, but since then, I think we've lost ability to quite name it and write those histories and understand them in ways that are more complex. And I guess the key question for me is that in terms of the future, is that we're perceived to be separate and somehow clannish. Chinatown was never about because Chinese only want to be with Chinese, that's why Chinatown formed. Chinatown existed because of the exclusion laws. And that's what created Chinatown and the racism that created that as an isolated Jim Crow type episode. So I think the real issue for me is that we're not supposed to be talking to each other. We're not supposed to be intermingled. And it's really in the intermingling that we're actually dangerous. So to me, that's where the future is. We have to continue to intermingle, talk to each other, share and create our own systems of classification and knowledge. The imperative that we continue to destroy and dissect these myths that are out here. First place is tremendous progress being made by people. If you look at history as to where we were and where we are today, there's been quantum leaps. Now there's a lot of work to still be done. The another myth is that our young people are so behind. Our young people, many of them are in leadership positions and are growing. So we have to understand that the media will continue to try and feed us this misinformation about how youth are so behind, how they're not aware and they're not conscious. And that is bullshit, excuse the language. I'm gonna pass it on to a young person. Let him speak. Are we doing questions? Cause I can't tell what's going on behind the pillow. Oh, I think there's somebody who had a question. Oh, are we ready for a question? Cause I can't tell the pillow. You can't see in this place. I just quickly want to say that this idea of being too inspired means that there's a lack of inspiration somewhere. Or that people are living a life that is uninspired. And I find that lots of people, my generation, and younger than me are living very inspired lives. And so our jobs, you know, and so this continuity, right, is to think about what it is that we're offering. What are we putting on the table? What are we supporting in that particular process to keep that growing? And that's what I try to do, you know, with my work and my life. That's what I've learned from Gwendolyn. That's a Valerie continues to inspire me and this continual conversation and dialogue is essential to the creation of the kind of world that we say that we want to live in. That's all I have to say. And one of the things that needs to be done is that we have to have more of this type of thing. I don't know what I'm talking about. One of the things I think that needs to be done is we have more of that. I mean, the same organization as I was also, you know, on a foreign basis or what type of basis, you know, so that we can, you know, learn more about what others are doing. And of course, it's in a way even more powerful. When you first said, I don't know more, it sounded like you said, I don't know more. So I was saying what was happening here. Yeah, we can't idle anymore. We have to talk with each other, learn more from each other, plan more, and just like how the movement, most recent movement after all of its killings and whatnot, we have to be active, proactive. And I know that was a good session there. Oh, yeah, that was good, and going into the wind. Now we got to connect and reconnect with others and that's a way to make power by growing these organizations and working together as well. Yes, I want to add a little bit of human seriousness. At the same time, I make up sayings and people say, how are you? I say, oh, I'm walking on my tightrope. Just trying not to drop a stick. So I'm getting there to you all to remember the tightrope started without getting, and it's always there, so just get on. To the woman who said the Statue of Liberty is black. Sorry, sister, can you step up and out so we can see you and engage this community? Because we can't see you behind the pole, like you can't see us. I can't see you. Well, there you go. Is this good? Beautiful to see you. So to the woman who said the Statue of Liberty is black, I thank you for that, because just three nights ago, I was at the news school and I was talking to a German youth. They were doing democracy, some strange lecture on democracy about, it wasn't really political, but it was about democracy in Africa, Germany, Italy, all these places. And so I was talking to this youth and the conversation went, there's a question, don't worry, the conversation went, Dr. Martin Luther King was a Republican. And he was like, I can't believe that. No, it's just not true, that's just not true. And all of these things went on and on and on and on. But he was German and he liked me, I know how the Germans are, so he liked me for different reasons, so he was talking to me, but he didn't believe anything I said, which he had really no reason to, because I... Could we get to the question? Yeah, well, I'm getting to the question.  No, this. But it wasn't until I got to the French and I said to him, you know how the French are, the Statue of Liberty is a black woman. And I said to him, she has chains on her feet. And there's only one group that came into Morocco with chains on their feet. He said, yes, yes, that's true, that's true, yes, yes.  So he got out his phone and I said, Google Statue of Liberty chains on her feet, just like that, type that in. And click on images and he saw it. And when he saw it, it validated our whole conversation through the evening. The youth is used to a lot of drunken rhetoric with you. And with me. And just a lot of drunken rhetoric. So they, you know, have you ever seen the image? My question is, have you ever seen the image of the chains on the feet? Thank you for your question. Has anybody seen the image of the statue? Did you ask me to move? Yes. Get to the fact and get to the look. That's what they want to see. They're moving a little quick. The hand moved around the country I think was the last place when the sculptor, the French sculptor, began making the statue of Liberty. He used his wife's head instead of the black head that was on there and he was commanded to change it. And that's how we got the statue of Liberty's head. That's his wife's head. Not the black woman's head that was on there. The sculptor traveled this country before he created the peace and he saw us. And that's how she became a black statue of Liberty. Danny. Hello, Rashida. I want to thank you, my sister, and everybody and NYU and Danny. I want to thank all of you for what you did. This is a really, really important. And I do hope that the video mechanism will be in effect because I think this is something that should be really broadly shared. So I'm first of all asking you to make a commitment to make this available. It's really important what's going on here. And I think just the people who are on the panel, for those of you who don't know them, this is really history. And we are witnessing a tremendous coming together, Valerie and Kwame and Ade Mola. I mean, they're kind of my generation. So we really share a lot. Having said that, Philippe made a point that I was hoping he would have stayed here so that we could really try to flesh out as many of you could respond as you wish. But you remember at the very end when he was trying to make the connection between what he was loosely calling a disconnect about how the things that we experienced in the early days in the 60s and the sense of victory and how that doesn't seem to be a part of the experience of the younger people because otherwise he was making that connection that for us it was struggle, it was victory and it was continuity. But somehow now everything is very formulaic, somehow based in struggle, but no idea or concept, imaginative or whatever of victory and what victory could be, what it would look like. And once you got victory, what would you do with it? I'm just wondering if you, because you're all pushing towards that point, if you could, as many as wish, speak to that because I agree with that. When we were doing things, we connected struggle but we also connected victory. So thank you again for what you've done and if you could respond. I would like to respond because I disagree with Philippe and I wish he would have stayed. I think that we at our organization have sent four Latinos of African ancestry, young Latinos to Antarctica and South Pole. All of our young people get into first year colleges. Our young people are working on just transitions, not just in New York but all over the country in Detroit and LA and the Southwest. They're really involved and if anybody just watched Black Lives Matter, they know that young people can make the connections to what is happening now and what happened 30 or 40 years ago. And that our young people really are connected. They politicize all of our organizations, talk about the young lords and the Black Panthers and they take them back so we can bring them forward so that there's context in their struggle. Young people invented the language of microaggressions. That wasn't my generation or their generation. That's their language. They're basically naming the kind of abuse that happens on a cellular level. They have an entire language about it. They use hip hop, they use spoken word, they use art. Young people are not only politicized but they are leading and they have to be allowed to lead without us getting in the way because Black Lives Matter changed everything. They have people running for office that now have no choice but to deal with that and to talk about it. They know the names of these young people that have lost their lives to police brutality. And so I think that people aren't just organizing but policy is being passed, that there is transformation and that in an intergenerational construct we would respect the fact that sometimes we have to do that dance where we step back and let them step up and that together we're gonna be okay but they are the children of the children. They are the children of the descendants of the civil rights movement and they are doing stuff that you can all be proud of. I do not believe that they're disconnected. Are there people disconnected? They're always going to be. But is there a Black consciousness? Is there a consciousness that is grounded in rights and injustice? I think there is. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, I just wanted to comment too. A question please, not a comment, a question please. Oh, a question. Just to a visible bit but other people, on this climate change stuff and the carbon dioxide, I just heard someone who said that the sea level is just going up very slowly and not accelerating and it's really not a problem. So are we being brought up by British imperialism to give up our electricity, to give up our food, to give up our children and to be genocided by the so-called CO2, it's just wonderful. So my question is do the other people on this panel really believe we should give up electricity for a climate change computer model? People want to move away from fossil fuel extraction from destroying Mother Earth and their alternatives and I don't engage deniers, so I'll stop right there. All right, I want to just, one second please. Listen, I want, this is my generation, Rashid and all of us work from that age. We have to be very careful that we do not continue to perpetuate this myth that there's that disconnection. I think you just articulated it very clearly. Simple as this, the next generation are moving on in their own way, the Black Lives Matter is one example of that, so we have to be careful now that we do not continue to perpetuate that myth. It is a myth, just like, if I was to tell my mother, well, you're not in sync, she did what she could do to the pastor or to me, I did what I could do to the pastor or to my children, my grandchildren. So the young people are on target, many of them. The media will have us believe that the youth are the ones that you see being handcuffed or stuck in jail, that is not the total picture that I use, so I just don't want us to continue perpetuating the myth at their place. Who supported the election of Barack Obama for two terms, really strong in terms of addressing the kinds of problems that persist.  What am I going to do every day to dismiss that? I'm not. I think there is, I'm saying there is unity, there's been progress. I've been lucky to witness it, I'm your generation. The people that led this influenced me. All I want to say is, I want to say, are the young people multi-culturally, multi-ethically, internationally engaged in this movement? Yes. Yes. Yes. So yes, and also, I have a question from someone at home, her name is Wesson Stevens. She wants to know, one, so we talked earlier about whether or not the children are being left behind. She wanted for you to elaborate on that. What does it mean to say that our children are not behind? And she also wants to know, does Black Lives Matter represent all the youth? That's a question from the students of the web also. So people are hearing this every fall. I think that will be the last question, this question. Can I say one thing, it's an illusion that it's a disconnect. It is impossible. It can never be possible. We come, the time we come, we pass the baton, and we go on. All you have to do is run as fast as you can and pass. And that's what we will do. And that's what we will always be doing. Just for one second to my questions, please. Yes. We must remember what Ella Baker said. It's not just passing the baton. It's being there with them, saying, how can I help? We'll be called on to speak, they said. I'm sorry. I kind of just couldn't have the mic. OK, I wanted to ask a question about how can we ask? Because right here, this is multi-ethnic, intersectional gathering and intergenerational. I want to know, how more can we utilize new media to create these spaces that the powers that be are stalking us physically from creating these spaces. So I wanted to ask you all, how can we utilize new media to, as everyone is saying, spearhead or keep the continuation going? You mean social media? Yeah. Yeah, social media is a tremendously strong, it's a powerful organizing tool. And UPROS organizes the largest gathering of young people of color and climate change in the United States. And when we tweet and when we send out our eBlast, they reach more than 100,000 young people of color. We are tweeting, Facebooking, histogramming, periscoping, using all of those tools because those tools are affordable and accessible. And it makes it possible to take a message and deliver it and bring it home. And so we're trying to counter popular culture, that celebrity-driven culture by delivering a social justice message. And using that as an organizing tool, it's a very powerful one. So we do it and I don't know how people move without it now. I mean, that's really how Black Lives Matter went viral. And that's how it became huge. It was through using social media. To piggyback on what she was saying, it's one of the reasons why we're live streaming on how we're on TV right now, that this footage will be archived, it'll be there forever. When this is over, you can go back and engage with it. The young leaders are here, somebody was tweeting. But I think in addition to that, there's also the realization around technology that those platforms are owned by larger corporations and entities that don't always look at our best interests. And so the next level of that will be as media activists, how do we create our own platforms that we control and access to information so it's not limited or it's truncating up to some particular way. And also, to use it to reimagine some of the things that happen within the Black Arts Movement in terms of the global connectivity that have happened amongst people and individuals. And using that to make sure that it's happening globally as well so we're not continuing this cycle of operating in isolation. That's one of the most important things we can do is come together and utilizing that internet and social media. As I often say, if Marcus Garvey could do what he did with a mime graph machine, think of what we could do with social media. That's what we'd be happy to have another question. But before we go on, I just wanted to mention that the woman who asked the question, Janet, she's also the one who put our slideshow together. So I want to thank her for her work today. So as a young artist myself, I always find a problem with representation in mainstream media. And I was wondering, because you're all artists and activists in your own right, how do you fight against, how do you have ways to fight for your representation in the mainstream? Because then I feel like it's very hard to fight against the system sometimes. That's not a cliché, but yes. That's, yeah. I don't know what I can say is the way it's stood. When I find a technology to be dehumanizing, you are absent and separated by this thing. And so that human magnetism of being in that same room, talking to Antonio, whoever I speak to in these times. I don't have a TV and I try, I will not go on Facebook and I don't have time. And not only because I don't have time, I think it's separating us, even though all this is going very quickly, we're not in control of it as Antonio just said. And that is a very, very serious, very, very serious condition. When you ask somebody how to get where you're going, and we who have traveled all over in different languages without Googling anything, found that we were going biblically with the beam and so on. And I mean everywhere, whether you're in Portugal or whatever, you can communicate whether you speak the language or not, you will never know that. And so you give away half of your power by using this thing or addressing it like it should tell you what to do and how to do it. That means your brain will not be growing. All of those wonderful things that it does all by itself because you're not allowing it, you're giving it away. Every car I get in, somebody's moving how they get there. That's so crazy to me. That's all I have to say. I just want to say something. I just want to say something. So to that I think it's important why we're here today. Part of how you do create opportunity to have a voice equal opportunity is you do institution building in your own communities like Marta and I did so that there are always alternative spaces where people can come and share and present and create. They're very, very valuable. We have to have that so that you're creating an alternative space that is real, not just one that's on the web. That's great for outreach. But you have to come together and be with one another as well. Yeah, absolutely. Listen, we have to operate. We have to operate on two fronts. The two distinct fronts that we must continue to push and develop is as Valerie said, don't lose that human touch. So these kinds of things, be very aware that you have to continue to touch people and hug people and talk to people in person. On the other hand, we cannot turn back the road to progress. I mean, the media is here and it's not going to be turned back just like automobile when we were riding horses. People complaining about the automobile and it's going to change the world. But listen, the beat goes on. So we always have to operate on these two fronts. The human, which is immensely important. We cannot afford to lose that. But at the same point, progress is progress and you cannot turn back the tide of progress. Thank you, I have to caution our panelists also. We don't want compound questions. We don't want compound answers either, so this is good. Can I get your questions so we can close? We have to get out. How you doing, Danny? Very, very briefly, for the artists on the panel and the educators on the panel, can you just very, very briefly, if you do share with us something you're currently working on right now? Thank you. I'm working on continuing to build institutions. The Dwyer Cultural Center is located in Harlem. We spoke about that film for the young lords. We just screamed out. No compound answers, no compound answers. Okay, anyway, I'm building institutions. That's what I'm working on. I'm doing so much right now. I'm just looking all over the place. But I am intent on really focusing on the African diaspora men. I'm continuing to grow the work with we are here in South Africa as well as in New York around identity masculinity and gender-based violence. No compound answers. I'm busy trying to get all the work done in one place. That's been quite a job. And I'm still working on it. And I'm busy also connecting with Antonio, all the young people I know, and everything, talking with them, seeing them, being them with them. That's what I'm doing. Well, I know this one is working. I'm currently working on the archives and planning several book projects that have accurate information that is very much needed because so many things out there have so many errors in it for people who came in in the middle of an end and are not even accurate information. So we're going to set a book project based on the archive of 57 years worth of truth. Thank you. Building the Climate Justice Center, which is New York's first block-to-block organizing effort to address climate change because the path to climate justice is local. I'm in production for my second feature film, Heartstays, which is a Native woman's story, a narrative project. And also, we are starting with Emma Miranda to conserve the legacy of our history so that the New York Movement, so that this important history will not be lost. I'm trying to think of ourselves as being 10, 20, 30 years ahead and to create wearable technologies in which we can then have the enlivened, interlinked stories of our communities so that as you're walking around New York City, it's for the residents who live in our communities but also who have lived in our communities so you can walk around and begin to understand and link up with those other moments that we've been talking about here, but also with many of the stories that have been told. I'd like to thank all of our panelists. Are we gonna take a break for lunch? So please come back at 1.20, sorry, 1.20. 1.20.